Public Theater

There was another Public theatre on second avenue and fourth street in the thirties that occasionally showed movies.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1967 Oedipus Rex didn’t have its New York commercial first run and American premiere until 1984 here at the Public. Fabiano Canosa often dug up unseen important films such as THIS ONE.

This is where the original Japanese language version (no Raymond Burr) of Godzilla was shown in 1981 as part of a “Summer in Japan” series of Toho films. I believe this was one of only a handful of venues for this film (original language, unedited version, 1954, GOJIRA) until Rialto’s distribution of it ca. 2004-2005.

The “Invisible Cinema” is mentioned in this week’s Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section:

Isolation Cinema
By Joshua Glenn | July 3, 2005

So you’d like to beat the heat this summer by going to the movies, but can’t stand rubbing elbows with yakking popcorn-munchers? Avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka felt the same way 35 years ago, so he designed and built the Invisible Cinema: a movie theater with peripheral blinders between the seats intended to eliminate distraction from either side. Did it work out? According to an oral history of the Invisible Cinema by cineaste Sky Sitney that appears in the current issue of Grey Room, a quarterly of art and politics published in Cambridge by the MIT Press, yes and no.

In 1969, Kubelka joined with Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney (Sky’s father), and other filmmakers and critics in founding Anthology Film Archives, a museum of experimentalist film in downtown Manhattan. They leased a cinema on Lafayette Street and covered the walls, ceiling, and Kubelka-designed seats with black velvet. In addition to the barriers between seats, latecomers weren’t permitted to enter the theater. Confirming that the seat design cut down on chatter, Brakhage tells Sitney that ‘'people really had a sense of drifting in a black space, a black box, and black ahead of you, nothing visible except the screen."

Another Brakhage memory, however, may explain why the experiment wasn’t repeated after the archives moved to a new location in 1974: ‘'There was a nervousness about it. The minute they tell me I can’t pee, for example, I suddenly have the sensation that I have to. If you get up and leave, you can’t get back in. So there you are, parted between the vision you are seeing and bodily functions. Quite a strain, I thought, in that sense."

There is a new director running the Public complex and I wonder if film will make a comeback. I believe it was George Wolfe who pulled the plug on the cinema and he’s now history so…

Yes, I myself did. I remember seeing Rossellini’s “Francesco, giullare di Dio” there as well as Marcel Hanoun’s “Une simple histoire” and Dziga Vertov’s “Three Songs of Lenin.” Awesome place!
No popcorn. Whispering was anathema.

When the Anthology Film Archives had its showings at this theatre, the theatre itself was known as the “The Invisible Cinema,” according to this article on the origins of Anthology. Here is a photo of that theatre interior with the all-black, side-partitioned seating to avoid distractions and enable total concentration on the movie. When this became the Public/Little Theatre regular seating was substituted.

The cinema at the Public Theater was a great little place to go. I had been there a few times between probably 1989 to somewhere in the early 90s. By that time they didn’t have the unique seats that I have seen written about here. I remember seeing Godard’s ‘Pierrot le fou’ with Jean-Paul Belmondo there as well as a great little series called ‘Photographers That Make Film’ or something like that. I remember seeing the film that photographer Danny Lyon made called ‘Born to Film’ which was a really interesting black & white experimental sort-of documentary about his family. There were others in that series that I saw but can’t recall. The one I really wanted to see was the one made by Robert Mapplethorpe, but I missed it I think because I had to work late or some aggravating reason like that. I never saw it advertised to be screened again since then.

There was also a series that had something to do with commemorating Malcolm X that I can’t exactly remember, but I do remember that part of it was a screening of a documentary about The Nation of Islam from the 1950s that was originally broadcast on television, and hosted by a young Mike Wallace (of ‘60 Minutes) called 'The Hate That Hate Produced’. Really interesting.

And finally, I saw the two Scorcese documenataries, ‘Italian American’ and ‘American Boy’, that just (thank god!!) were screened again at the Film Forum a month or so ago. I must have seen these at The Public in 1990-91(?), and never saw them after that. I know ‘Italian American’ was, and maybe still is available on VHS/DVD, but ‘American Boy’ is a rare one. And both are SO amazing. Thanks to Film Forum for having the good sense to get them back out there again. Just goes to show, when those rare ones show anywhere now…you have to go and see them, because you may not for ten-or-so more years.

I remember being a regular at the Public Theatre/Little Theatre or whatever you want to call it. I also remember being a member. I remember about the best thing they did was a massive, if not complete, King Vidor retrospective back in ‘94. I remember being pissed because I went to see “Duel in the Sun” at the bigger Newman Theatre and they showed it in the smaller Little Theatre. I also caught the British Television series “The Singing Detective” here. Many other memories, a brief Barbet Schroeder retro and I caught “Children of Paradise” for the first time here. They also screened a new print of Ford’s “The Searchers” in the Newman Theatre.

I think Wolfe pulled the plug on the movies because the royalties from “A Chorus Line” dried up and they had to scale things back from the days when Joe Papp was flush with cash.

I also didn’t know Fabiano Canosa was still affliated with Anthology. I had heard he left AFA with some acrimony.

Meanwhile, on the parking lot just north of the Public complex was a parking lot in Astor Plaza that Cooper Union owns and they are constructing an apartment complex on the site (what else?), but when Cooper Union announced plans for the site they specifically mentioned they wanted to build a movie theatre complex in the basement/ground floor. I don’t know if those plans will still fly given that Landmark has moved into the general area on Houston Street. Anyone know?

I always remember the big block ads in the Village Voice calling it “Film at the Public”

If you ask a New Yorker about the Little Theatre, she may say, oh, you mean the one on 44th Street next to Sardi’s, now called the Helen Hayes? That’s what I’d say, anyway.

I have no problems with calling it Little Theatre, since that was the designation used to refer to it within the larger complex, although that was NOT its name. No New York theatre was known as “Little Theatre.” If you asked someone in New York where they had seen a movie, and they said “Little Theatre,” that would be a puzzling response indeed. If they said “The Public Theatre,” you would know what they were talking about. Some special film programs, incidentally, took place not at the “Little Theatre” but at a larger one in the complex. None of this would be an issue if ALL the auditoriums were film venues and “The Public Theatre” meant “The Public Cinema.” But because live theatre is predominant, it seems we have to somehow separate the cinema portion for a site called Cinema Treasures.

Should the Museum of Modern Art auditoriums be listed as Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres I & II?

The Little Theatre at the Public had a steep stadium-style rake long before that became the thing in multiplex movie-houses.