How Amos Vogel changed American film culture

Few film books get a blurb from both an iconoclastic auteur and Variety magazine. “I have gone through the intense garden of your book with the inducement of a fruit longtime forbidden,” Luis Buñuel, a Spanish surrealist director, wrote of Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art”. Hollywood’s industry publication proclaimed the book “the stuff of revolution”. Published in 1974, Vogel’s volume is a rigorous catalogue of rule-breaking, mind-expanding and sometimes outright censored works of cinema. Stanley Kubrick once said: “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” “Film as a Subversive Art” explored the medium’s outer limits.

Born in Vienna in 1921 to a Jewish family, Vogel fled Austria for America in 1938. After studying in Georgia and the New School for Social Research in New York, he turned his attention to showing movies that piqued his interest and, with his wife, in 1947 set up Cinema 16, a “film society for the adult moviegoer”. Vogel soon established himself as one of the most important curators of cinema in the 20th century and one of its essential thinkers. Cinema 16 became the defining American film society of the post-war era. It helped promulgate the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima and Agnès Varda. Though the club championed “films you cannot see elsewhere”, popular works were not verboten: Alfred Hitchcock presented a preview of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1956.