Offscreen Notes
Amos Vogel: April 18, 1921-April 24, 2012
Austrian born film critic, writer, teacher, programmer Amos Vogel passed away in his Greenwich Village apartment in New York City, where he lived since the 1940s, at the age of 91. Vogel’s idiosyncratic book Film as a Subversive Art (with one of the greatest film book coves ever, pictured above) in a way helped shape my own eventual interest in the more bizarre and esoteric aspects of cinema, and the appreciation of a border less notion of cinema where art house, politics, sex, horror and neurosis lived together happily. In a way, Vogel’s understanding of the myriad psycho-sexual, socio-political links between all form of cinema, avant-garde and popular, foreshadowed what is more commonly known now as ‘psychotronic’ cinema or ‘trash cinema’ or ‘paracinema.’ Vogel was instrumental, along with Jonas Mekas and Film Culture, of promoting the avant-garde and experimental cinema as founder and programmer (along with his wife Marcia) of the repertory house Cinema 16 from 1947 to 1963. “After the demise of Cinema 16, Vogel founded the Lincoln Center Film Department and was co-founder of the New York Film Festival, of which he became the first director where he programmed until 1968” ( Paul Cronin, The Sticking Place).
