While Mekas was totally committed to the new, Andrew Sarris was the first regular movie reviewer who consistently and programmatically put current movies in their film-historical context. (Closest was the erstwhile actor/ performance artist/filmmaker Amy Taubin, who wrote for the Voice from the mid-1980s through 2001, mixing polemical reviews with advocacy reportage.) But traces of his mania remain. Mekas left the Voice, along with another avant-garde proto-blogger, Jill Johnston, in the paper's first great "normalization," following its 1974 purchase by New York magazine mogul Clay Felker. My business is to get excited about it, to bring it to your attention. "It is not my business to tell you what it's about. (Also, film criticism: in its firsthand account of the underground film scene, "Movie Journal" was a blog avant la lettre.) He didn't just report on underground movies, he was a tireless advocate who organized distribution co-ops, film series, and cinematheques. I wanted an education-and the Voice movie pages provided that.Īn impoverished poet, 16mm film diarist, and little magazine editor, Mekas was not as interested in reviewing movies as in remaking cinema. I didn't buy the Voice (which, for many years, maintained economic parity with two other local necessities, a subway token and a slice of pizza) to confirm my taste. Between them, back in the day, these guys knew everything that was happening, movie-wise, in New York. Mekas's Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema and Sarris's The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 are classic books, but writing is the least of it. "And it may be that the movies you discover then set your taste forever." It will be years before the collected writings of Mekas and Sarris are enshrined between the Library of America's glossy black covers-although, in his native Lithuania, the former is a celebrated poet. "The French call adolescence the 'age of film-going,'" I would write in that same Village Voice some twenty years later. And how utterly essential were the Village Voice listings and the excitements of Messrs. How unbelievably lucky to have revival dumps like the Bleecker Street, the New Yorker, and the Thalia - not to mention the 42nd Street grind houses and the Museum of Modern Art. How fortunate, for a young cineaste, to grow up in central Queens in the mid-1960s with high schools so overcrowded the Board of Ed instituted triple sessions and a senior like the TM finished classes by noon and had the rest of the day to take the number 7 train to the city and go to the movies. The paper ran many interesting things, to be sure, but (for the TM) the must-reads were Jonas Mekas's "Movie Journal" and Andrew Sarris's "Films in Focus." Not exactly trekking to the one-room schoolhouse six miles across the tundra but a schlep nonetheless for the Teenage Me to find the one newsstand in Flushing (and later, Binghamton, New York) that carried the Village Voice.
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