Amos Vogel and Subversive Cinema, with Richard Peña, Tom Waibel, and Edo Choi

This year marks the centenary of Amos Vogel, a programmer, writer, and educator very dear to Film Comment—he was one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, and an abiding influence on New York’s film culture with his legendary Cinema 16 film society. In addition to his many contributions to the pages of Film Comment over the decades, Amos is also widely known for his classic book Film as a Subversive Art, an encyclopedic analysis of underground, avant-garde, and otherwise uncategorizable cinema. The 58th NYFF launched a celebration of Amos’s legacy which has since continued with tribute programs across repertory cinemas in the city and a brand-new edition of Film as a Subversive Art by Film Desk Books. At Film Comment, we’re continuing this celebration with our own week of Vogelmania. To kick things off, editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited a panel of Vogel experts—Richard Peña, the former Director of the New York Film Festival; Tom Waibel, Custodian of the Amos Vogel Library at the Austrian Film Museum; and Edo Choi, the Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image. The conversation reckons with Amos’s ideals of cinema as a space for dialogue, communal contemplation, and political subversion. Be sure to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter to read this week’s special edition, dedicated to the extraordinary work and life of Amos Vogel: https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/