Re: Film-Makersı Cooperative new home

From: Marie Losier (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jun 10 2009 - 15:01:33 PDT


BRavo!!! this is great great news!
AMities
MARie
On Jun 9, 2009, at 5:19 AM, ev petrol wrote:

> YAHOO!!!!!
> ps1 bite the dust ...
> congratulations all round lads!!!
>
> www.moiratierney.net
>
> --- On Thu, 5/28/09, Adam Hyman <email suppressed> wrote:
>
> From: Adam Hyman <email suppressed>
> Subject: Film-Makersı Cooperative new home
> To: email suppressed
> Date: Thursday, May 28, 2009, 12:38 PM
>
> Today's NY Times:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/movies/28film.html?_r=2
>
> Avant-Garde Film Group Gets New Home, Cheap
>
> The Film-Makersı Cooperativeıs new home will include space designed to
> protect its archives.
>
> By LARRY ROHTER
> Published: May 27, 2009
>
> After months of uncertainty, the Film-Makersı Cooperative, whose
> future was
> threatened early this year when it received an order of eviction
> from a
> city-owned building in TriBeCa, has found a new home, and on terms
> that are
> likely to make it the envy of other arts organizations and tenants
> across
> the city.
>
> The group, which archives, distributes and restores experimental and
> avant-garde movies, has signed a five-year lease with the real estate
> developer Charles S. Cohen that calls for the organization to pay a
> symbolic
> rent of $1 a year.
>
> ³Itıs amazing,² said Jonas Mekas, a filmmaker and one of the
> cooperativeıs
> founders, ³and amazing that there are still people like Cohen in this
> world.²
>
> The new quarters, which the group hopes to occupy by Labor Day, are
> at 475
> Park Avenue South, on the northeast corner of 32nd Street. The sixth-
> floor
> site will offer nearly four times as much space as the co-opıs current
> location at the Clocktower Building, where it is paying about $1 a
> square
> foot for approximately 900 square feet.
>
> ³Itıs a beautiful and more accessible space,² said M. M. Serra, the
> film
> groupıs executive director. ³Weıll have offices and archives, and
> our films,
> some of which are one of a kind, will be in air-conditioning
> specifically
> designed to protect them, which we donıt have where we are now.²
>
> As part of the move, a 15-seat theater is also being built at the 32nd
> Street location, ³for the use of scholars and others who want to do
> research² into the approximately 5,000 films that the cooperative
> has in its
> archives, in formats ranging from 8 millimeter to video, Mr. Mekas
> said.
> Tentatively, it is to be named the Charles Theater, a double homage,
> to Mr.
> Cohen and to the old Charles Theater in the East Village, one of the
> first
> places in New York to show experimental films.
>
> Mr. Cohen, the president and chief executive of Cohen Brothers
> Realty, is
> known as a film aficionado. He is the author of a book of movie
> trivia, won
> a Kodak Movie Award for a comedy short he wrote and directed, and
> was an
> executive producer of ³Frozen River,² the feature-length film starring
> Melissa Leo that was released last year and earned two Oscar
> nominations.
>
> ³I was in a position to help, and I thought that I should,² Mr.
> Cohen said.
> ³They are a wonderful group doing important work, and there is no
> other
> place to go and see this kind of thing. They needed a storage space
> for
> their archives, and this meets their needs.²
>
> Founded in 1962, the Film-Makersı Cooperative has since the start of
> the
> decade occupied space controlled by the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art
> Center,
> another bulwark of the cityıs avant-garde artistic establishment.
> But late
> last year, P.S. 1 decided to give up the site and turn it over to
> Alanna
> Heiss, its founder and former executive director, so that she could
> use the
> location as a base for her latest project, an Internet radio station
> called
> Art International Radio.
>
> Before that, the Film-Makersı Cooperative operated for many years
> out of an
> office on Lexington Avenue at 31st Street, which it had to leave in
> 2000
> because of redevelopment there. So returning to the same
> neighborhood on
> such favorable terms ³in a way brings things full circle,² Mr. Mekas
> said.
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
>

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.