Yesterday, I read that New Yorker Films, a major distributor of independent films for 43 years, has shut down:
http://www.indiewire.com/article/end_of_the_road_for_new_yorker_films_legendary_distributor_of_difficult_cin/
What does this mean to people who aren’t film snobs? It’s hard to say. As their name might imply, New Yorker Films seemed to handle the kinds of movies seldom seen outside big cities. I was amused by the vintage quote from founder Dan Talbot about the demographic for his company’s films: “They’re meant for a small, elite audience. … This is an audience that generally knows at least one foreign language, that has done a certain amount of traveling, that is probably interested in wine and foreign cars and that is fed up with all the junk that comes out of the West Coast.” That’s a very baby-boomerish, “Annie Hall”-era definition of cool, which for better or worse got overthrown once the slackers came of age.
I had to go online to find out which titles New Yorker Films actually distributed theatrically. I think the only ones I’ve heard of AND seen are “Chan Is Missing”, a dull but probably-cool-for-its-time early-80s indie film, and Werner Herzog’s acclaimed “Aguirre: The Wrath of God”, a sort of 16th-century “Apocalypse Now” about Spanish conquistadors, played by German actors speaking German. In the 2000′s they became the US distributors of some older French films I’d seen as a student: “Pickpocket”, “A Man Escaped” and “La Jetee”. To judge by their IMDB listing, they mainly handled foreign films and documentaries.
On a not-unrelated note, another Indiewire article talks about the difficulty that independent films are now having in finding a commercial life beyond the film festival circuit:
http://www.indiewire.com/article/fest_shuffle_what_does_it_mean/
I guess the lesson to all of this is that indie filmmakers are on their own now and have to make their own grassroots efforts to find an audience – there’s not really an alternative or arthouse “scene” of like-minded people to support their work.
