Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the

preservation Preservation may refer to: Heritage and conservation * Preservation (library and archival science), activities aimed at prolonging the life of a record while making as few changes as possible * ''Preservation'' (magazine), published by the Nat ...

study Study or studies may refer to: General * Education ** Higher education * Clinical trial * Experiment * Observational study * Research * Study skills, abilities and approaches applied to learning Other * Study (art), a drawing or series of ...

, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on

independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s * Independe ...

, experimental, and avant-garde cinema."About/Overview"
''Anthology Film Archives'' website. The film archive and theater is located at 32 Second Avenue on the southeast corner of East 2nd Street, in a

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

historic district in the East Village neighborhood of

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

History

Anthology Film Archives evolved from roots and visions that date from the early 1960s, when Lithuanian artist Jonas Mekas, the founder and director of the Film-makers’ Cinematheque, a showcase for avant-garde films, dreamed of establishing a permanent home where the growing number of new independent and avant-garde films could be shown on a regular basis. This dream became a reality in 1969 when

Jerome Hill James Jerome Hill II (March 2, 1905 – November 21, 1972) was an American filmmaker and artist known for his award-winning documentary and experimental films. Career Hill was the child of railroad executive Louis W. Hill. He was educated at Y ...

, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Mekas drew up plans to create a museum dedicated to the vision of the art of cinema as guided by the

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretica ...

sensibility. A Film Selection committee – James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Kubelka, Mekas, and Sitney – was formed to establish a definitive collection of films (The Essential Cinema Repertory) and to determine the structure of the new institution."About/History"
''Anthology Film Archives'' website. Anthology opened on November 30, 1970, at Joseph Papp's Public Theater with Jerome Hill as its sponsor. After Hill's death in 1974, Anthology relocated to 80 Wooster Street in

SoHo Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was deve ...

. Pressed by the need for more adequate space, it acquired its present home, a former

municipal A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality'' may also mean the ...

courthouse, in 1979. Under the guidance of the architects Raimund Abraham and Kevin Bone and at a cost of $1,450,000, the building was adapted to house two motion picture theaters, a reference library, a

film preservation Film preservation, or film restoration, describes a series of ongoing efforts among film historians, archivists, museums, cinematheques, and non-profit organizations to rescue decaying film stock and preserve the images they contain. In the wid ...

department, offices, and a gallery, opening to the public on October 12, 1988. In 1998, New York University film students began NewFilmmakers, which became a popular weekly series having screened many thousands of documentary, short, and feature films.

Programs and collections

Anthology Film Archives screens nearly 1,000 public programs annually; features weekly in-person appearances by artists with their work; and publishes historical and scholarly books and catalogs. Anthology maintains an invaluable collection of approximately 20,000 films and 5,000 videotapes and preserves 25-35 films each year with more than 900 titles preserved to date. Anthology's research library holds the world's largest collection of paper materials documenting the history of American and international film and video as art, and is accessed weekly by students, scholars, researchers, writers, artists, and curators.

Notable artists represented in the collection

* Vito Acconci * Peggy Ahwesh *

Kenneth Anger Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer, February 3, 1927) is an American underground experimental filmmaker, actor, and author. Working exclusively in short films, he has produced almost 40 works since 1937, nine of which have been grouped ...

* Bruce Baillie * Ericka Beckman *

Jordan Belson Jordan Belson (June 6, 1926 – September 6, 2011) was an American artist and abstract cinematic filmmaker who created nonobjective, often spiritually oriented, abstract films spanning six decades. Biography Belson was born in Chicago, Illinoi ...

Wallace Berman Wallace "Wally" Berman (February 18, 1926 – February 18, 1976) was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in the history of post-war California art. Personal life and education Wallace Berman ...

Edward Bland Edward Osmund Bland (July 25, 1926–March 14, 2013) was an American composer and musical director. Biography Bland was born on the South Side of Chicago to Althea and Edward Bland. His father was a postal worker but also a self-taught lite ...

Lizzie Borden Lizzie Andrew Borden (July 19, 1860 – June 1, 1927) was an American woman tried and acquitted of the August 4, 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. No one else was charged in the murders, and despite ost ...

* Stan Brakhage * Robert Breer * James Broughton * Rudy Burckhardt * Mary Ellen Bute * Shirley Clarke * Bruce Conner * Tony Conrad * Joseph Cornell * Storm de Hirsch *

Manuel De Landa Manuel DeLanda (born 1952) is a Mexico, Mexican-United States, American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York, New York, New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture a ...

* Maya Deren * Robert Downey, Sr. * Ed Emshwiller *

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...

Hollis Frampton Hollis William Frampton, Jr. (March 11, 1936 – March 30, 1984) was an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer, theoretician, and pioneer of digital art. He was best known for his innovative and non-linear structural films that defin ...

* Robert Frank * Ernie Gehr *

Bette Gordon Bette Gordon (born June 22, 1950) is an American filmmaker and professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is best known for her films ''Variety'' (1983) and ''Handsome Harry'' (2009) both of which received critical acclaim in North ...

* Dwinell Grant *

Alexander Hammid Alexandr Hackenschmied, born Alexander Siegfried George Hackenschmied, known later as Alexander Hammid (17 December 1907, Linz – 26 July 2004, New York City) was a Czech-American photographer, film director, cinematographer and film edit ...

* Hilary Harris *

J. Hoberman James Lewis Hoberman (born March 14, 1949) is an American film critic, journalist, author and academic. He began working at '' The Village Voice'' in the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the newspaper's senior film critic ...

* Peter Hutton *

Ken Jacobs Ken Jacobs (born May 25, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American experimental filmmaker. His style often involves the use of found footage which he edits and manipulates. He has also directed films using his own footage. Ken Jacobs directe ...

* Joan Jonas * Larry Jordan * Marjorie Keller * Peter Kubelka *

George Kuchar George Kuchar (August 31, 1942 – September 6, 2011) was an American underground film director and video artist, known for his "low-fi" aesthetic. Early life and career Kuchar trained as a commercial artist at the School of Industrial Art, now kn ...

* Mike Kuchar * Frank Kuenstler * George Landow * Fernand Léger *

Alfred Leslie Alfred Leslie (born October 29, 1927) is an American artist and filmmaker. He first achieved success as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but changed course in the early 1960s and became a painter of realistic figurative paintings. Biography ...

Helen Levitt Helen Levitt (August 31, 1913 – March 29, 2009) was an American photographer and cinematographer. She was particularly noted for her street photography around New York City. David Levi Strauss described her as "the most celebrated and leas ...

* Len Lye * Danny Lyon *

Willard Maas Willard Maas (June 24, 1906 – January 2, 1971) was an American experimental filmmaker and poet. Personal life and career Maas was born in Lindsay, California and graduated from State Teachers College at San Jose. He came to New York in the 193 ...

* George Maciunas * Gregory Markopoulos * Jim McBride * Taylor Mead * Jonas Mekas * Marie Menken * Robert Nelson * Nam June Paik *

Sidney Peterson Sidney Peterson (November 15, 1905, Oakland, California – April 24, 2000, New York City) was an American writer, artist, and avant-garde filmmaker. He attended UC Berkeley, worked as a newspaper reporter in Monterey, and spent time as a practici ...

* Luther Price * Ron Rice * Hans Richter * Lionel Rogosin *

Barbara Rubin Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film ''Christmas on Earth''. Life and career Barbara Rubin grew up in the Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens, ...

Carolee Schneemann Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019) was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and ...

Paul Sharits Paul Jeffrey Sharits (February 7, 1943, Denver, Colorado—July 8, 1993, Buffalo, New York) was a visual artist, best known for his work in experimental, or avant-garde filmmaking, particularly what became known as the structural film movement, a ...

* Harry Smith * Jack Smith * Michael Snow * Warren Sonbert * Frank Stauffacher *

Amy Taubin Amy Taubin (born September 10, 1938) is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British ''Sight & Sound'' and the American ''Film Comment''. She has also written regularly for '' The ...

Stan Vanderbeek Stan VanDerBeek (January 6, 1927 – September 19, 1984) was an American experimental filmmaker known for his collage works. Life VanDerBeek studied art and architecture at Manhattan's Cooper Union before transferring to Black Mountain Colleg ...

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...

* Joyce Weiland * Jud Yalkut

The building

Manhattan Third District Magistrate's Courthouse and Jail, aka New Essex Market Courthouse, at 32 Second Avenue (aka 43-45 East 2nd Street), opened on April 30, 1919. The three-story brick and terra cotta building was designed in the

Renaissance Revival style Renaissance Revival architecture (sometimes referred to as "Neo-Renaissance") is a group of 19th century architectural revival styles which were neither Greek Revival nor Gothic Revival but which instead drew inspiration from a wide range o ...

by Alfred Hopkins, author of a book on prison construction. The design replaced a more ambitious 1913 plan for a 14-story municipal tower.Betts, Mary Beth (ed.) (October 9, 2012)
''East Village/Lower East Side Historic District Designation Report''
(New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission). One of the most notorious gang murders in a neighborhood then notorious for its gangs occurred outside the courthouse doors on August 28, 1923, when "Kid Dropper" was assassinated by gunman

Louis Cohen Louis Cohen (Born Louis Kushner ''alias'' “Louis Kerzner” January 1, 1904 – January 28, 1939) was a New York mobster who murdered labor racketeer "Kid Dropper" Nathan Kaplan and was an associate of labor racketeer Louis "Lepke" Buchalte ...

. The court relocated after February 1946, and the building became a youth center for the Police Athletic League. After 1948, the building was known as the Lower Manhattan Magistrate's Courthouse. The building lies within the

East Village/Lower East Side Historic District __NOTOC__ The East Village/Lower East Side Historic District in Lower Manhattan, New York City was created by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on October 9, 2012.Brazee, Christopher D., et al"East Village/Lower East Side Histo ...

, designated by the

New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is the New York City agency charged with administering the city's Landmarks Preservation Law. The LPC is responsible for protecting New York City's architecturally, historically, and cu ...

in 2012.

In popular culture

In the 2004 film '' Spider-Man 2'', the Anthology Film Archives building was used as the exterior of Doctor Octopus' laboratory.

References

External links

Official websiteComplete list of films in the Essential Cinema Repertory
{{Authority control Film archives in the United States Experimental film Culture of Manhattan 1970 establishments in New York City Cinemas and movie theaters in Manhattan Repertory cinemas Arts organizations based in New York City East Village, Manhattan Jonas Mekas