Capital New York

Most film festivals can be summed up as a party, a marketplace, or a platter of cultural fruit and vegetables. Ebertfest, now 14 years old, is a love-in.

Chaz Ebert presides over the film screenings the way my mother used to usher people into her kitchen and fix them a heaping plate. Chaz’s famous husband Roger selects the films they show with an emphasis on love and understanding. The characters in Ebertfest films are motivated by love, hobbled by obstacles to understanding. When they fight their way through problems to find some kind of clarity, blindingly beautiful things happen.

One of Roger Ebert’s good friends, the maverick Australian filmmaker Paul Cox, said at a Q&A at the festival, which took place last week, “Our eyes need caressing as much as anything else.”

He was talking about the blunt, all-business visual flow of contemporary mainstream cinema, where every moment is sold hard and fast. The characters who attend Ebertfest learn that they don’t have to enter the theater bracing for a beating or a hustle. They’re home.

At Ebertfest, where no one mutters about the color of your ticket and the ‘Times’ doesn’t rule | by Steven Boone | Capital New York

liquidnight:

“There are roughly three New Yorks.

There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable.

Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.

Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

— E.B. White, Here is New York

[photo via All Things Amazing, photographer unknown]

Required reading, always. 

(via skibinskipedia)