Word: hfa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Newcomers to HFA "get really confused," claimed the woman selling tickets at a recent showing. "They don't understand that we don't sell popcorn... You can tell that they only go to Loews." For the savvy cineast, however, the archive is a "real resource, the woman insisted. "A lot o times we'll show things that won't get shown anywhere else...
...HFA ethos--equal parts intellectual snobbery and earnest aesthetic evangelism--is personified by Vlada K. Petric, senior VES lecturer and curator of the archive. Petric, a white-haired man with watery blue eyes and a broad, stubborn face, works in a small office plastered with magazine clippings and film stills. He pontificates passionately in heavily accented English, and does not permit interruptions. Petric draws a distinction between "cinema," which he calls "a means of artistic expression," and "artsy films"--"Schindler's List" or "Remains of the Day," for example--which have "nothing to do with art." Then of course, there...
Petric admitted that HFA caters to a limited clientele. But, he said proudly, "I prefer to have a film that will help someone understand art, with only five people [in the audience], than a full house showing "Remains of the Day." He bristled at the suggestion that HFA films are "weird." "That's not weird; that's avant-garde," he sniffed. Petric has no patience for philistines who scorn film studies. "They are stupid," he says flatly. "If someone is still taking this issue, I would say he's undeveloped uncultured, primitive...
...HFA audiences are mainly VES students, "people who are really interested in film," and denizens of the "art scene," according to the ticket-seller. At the core of the HFA audience, however, is a handful of hard-core cinema junkies," a standard crowd," the woman said...
...such junkies lingered outside the theater door after last Saturday's screening of "Kanal," a black-and-white film in Polish depicting the harrowing deaths of resistance fighters in the Warsaw sewers. They sombrely flipped through an HFA bulletin, unconsciously echoing the scene in "Annie Hall" where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton emerge psychically downtrodden from a five-hour Holocaust documentary. "I think this reflects our own psychically that we would watch this film on a Saturday afternoon instead of going to a bar," said Joshua D. Jones. Why did he come? "I'm obsessed with World...