IN CINEMA
Book Launch + Screening!
My Affair with Art House Cinema | NOBODY’S BUSINESS
Saturday, September 21st at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
Presented with Columbia University Press
Celebrate with us the release of Phillip Lopate’s My Affair with Art House Cinema!
Phillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes. In an essayist’s sinuous prose style, Lopate captures the formal mastery, artistic imagination, and emotional intensity of art house essentials like Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as works by contemporary filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christian Petzold, Paolo Sorrentino, and Jafar Panahi. Essays explore Chantal Akerman’s rigorous honesty, Ingmar Bergman’s intimacy, Abbas Kiarostami’s playfulness, Kenji Mizoguchi’s visual style, and Frederick Wiseman’s vision of the human condition. Above all, this book showcases Lopate’s passionate advocacy for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.
The evening will feature a screening of Alan Berliner’s NOBODY’S BUSINESS (1996, 60 min.), a poignant portrait-of-sorts of the filmmaker’s reclusive father (a reluctant documentary subject). What emerges is a cinematic biography that finds both humor and pathos in the swirl of conflicts and affections that bind father and son. In Lopate’s essay on Berliner, included in My Affair with Art House Cinema, he writes of the filmmaker: “I know no one working in personal films today who brings so dramatically alive the intense and ambivalent love within families. His technical mastery of the relation between sound and image is consistently employed in the service of psychological truths.”
Phillip Lopate and Alan Berliner will join us for a post-screening discussion about both the book and film! Copies of My Affair with Art House Cinema will be available for purchase.
PHILLIP LOPATE is the author of many acclaimed books, including the essay collections Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body and the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of Summer. He is the editor of several anthologies of essays. Lopate taught for many years in the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts.
ALAN BERLINER’s uncanny ability to combine experimental cinema, artistic purpose, and popular appeal in compelling film essays has made him one of America’s most acclaimed independent filmmakers. The New York Times has described Berliner’s work as “powerful, compelling and bittersweet... full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures... Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform Life.” Berliner’s experimental documentary films, Letter to the Editor (2019), First Cousin Once Removed (2013), Wide Awake (2006), The Sweetest Sound (2001), Nobody’s Business (1996), Intimate Stranger (1991), and The Family Album (1986), have been broadcast all over the world, and received awards, prizes, and retrospectives at many major international film festivals. All of his films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
