New Yorker Films Closes Shop After 43 Years

http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/

Very sad.

blerg.

that stinks.

This is pretty tragic.

I haven't seen any in-depth b.g. on it yet -- the art-cineplex Dan Talbot owns in Manhattan isn't closing...

a roundup - this is disressing:

It’s worth remembering that, unlike book publishers, whose wares are widely distributed to libraries (it’s bitterly sad when a publisher goes out of business, but the back catalogue is already out there), film distributors hold the prints of the movies they own rights to; those which are out on home video have a second life, but the 35mm prints are, as of now, locked up, and revival houses wanting to screen them are simply out of luck.

http://blog.spout.com/2009/02/24/rip-new-yorker-films-today-in-film-bloggery-022409/

(i had no memory of Talbot selling the company in '02)

http://parallax-view.org/2009/02/23/dvd-for-the-week-remembering-new-yorker-films-1965-2009/

not sure if this did them in, but putting out shoddy DVDs can't have helped. given their catalog they could've been a serious competitor to criterion, but new yorker films is shorthand for bad transfer. for instance, I would've bought their DVD of godard's weekend if they hadn't done a PAL-to-NTSC transfer with crappy sound from a rough negative.

I have to imagine the odds are good that someone will pick up their catalog?

I think the only DVDs of theirs I've seen recently are teh Sembene films, and they look to my (non-imagephile) eyes about as they have in theaters. But I think it's very possible his films would never had commercial life in America if not for New Yorker.

David Schwartz of the Amer Museum of the Moving Image (this descrip of circa 1980 film rental OTM):

My first film programming stint started in 1979, running the International Film Series at Purchase College. Like many programmers, I had a love-hate relationship with New Yorker. (Loved the films, hated the idea that you were at the mercy of the film booker who set the price, and you had to hope that the last college that showed the film didn't scratch up the 16mm print too badly.) When the new catalogue arrived, I’d flip through the front pages, to see the new releases. Each new film was given a full page, a densely written and enticing description, and the ominous words "Rental: Apply." This meant that the film was going to be too expensive, and you’d have to figure out whether you could drain $600 from the student senate film budget to show The Marriage of Maria Braun.

To balance out the luxury shopping, you’d flip to the backlist in the back pages, scouring for cinematic bargains among a very high-level B-list: Alea, Dos Santos, Makavejev. How about a Gorin instead of a Godard? And you'd rely on the New Yorker stamp of approval; before the advent of home video, you couldn't see many of the films until you had rented them....

The illusory promise of the digital age is that all great movies will be preserved and made accessible. The collapse of New Yorker Films is bracing proof that film collections, even the ones made of classics, are ephemeral. We can only hope that the New Yorker library will remain intact, that it won’t be dispersed, or worse, that many of the titles won't disappear from the marketplace. As great as the individual titles are, the New Yorker Films library is greater than the sum of its parts. And it is a testament to one person's taste and judgement about which films would not just sell tickets but enrich our lives. Thank you, Dan Talbot.

i ran a screening society in university but i showed everything on laserdisc :/

The illusory promise of the digital age is that all great movies will be preserved and made accessible.

I don't think it's illusory that the digital age will make SOME great movies MORE accessible.

well, that's very different (see the MI Source piece I posted on ILF).