Film Forum

A festival of over 50 movies, including films by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Joan Micklin Silver, King Vidor, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lois Weber, Hal Ashby, Elia Kazan, Sergio Leone, Shirley Clarke, John Huston, D.W. Griffith, William Wyler, Leon Ichaso, Robert Wise, Raoul Walsh, Jules Dassin, Preston Sturges, Sean Baker, and many others.

The series spans over 100 years of American moviemaking, from silents made by D.W. Griffith, Raoul Walsh and pioneering woman director Lois Weber in the teens and comedies by Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd in the 1920s, up through movies by Coppola, Scorsese and Sergio Leone, and more recently by Ronald Bronstein and Sean Baker.

Says Film Forum Repertory Artistic Director Bruce Goldstein, producer and curator of the festival, “In the silent and early talkie eras, Hollywood churned out cinematic fantasies about the super-rich, but there were also many movies set in New York’s so-called tenement districts, particularly the Lower East Side of Manhattan, once the most densely populated place on earth. That and other neighborhoods, like Harlem, East Harlem and parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, also had an avid moviegoing population – in the 1930s and 40s, the Lower East Side alone had over 30 movie theaters, from fleapits to palaces – so people were seeing versions of their own lives reflected onscreen. The same neighborhoods would show up in later movies, but with New York’s changing population represented. ”

Says Annie Polland, president of the Tenement Museum, “Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, famously wrote to his readers, ‘Under your tenement roofs is real life—the very stuff of which the greatest books are written.’ In 1900, 75% of Manhattanites lived in a tenement—a shared experience for decades of New Yorkers and their descendants. Every day the Tenement Museum shares the stories of those tenement dwellers – immigrant, migrant and refugee families – by taking people into their recreated homes. The Film Forum series shows these real life dramas through film, letting you time travel through the tenements, from the Yiddish-speaking sweatshop in UNCLE MOSES, to a young Irish American girl’s awakening in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, to Martin Scorsese’s portrait of his parents in ITALIANAMERICAN, to more recent tenement life, as seen through the eyes of Latino, Chinese, Iranian, and other New Yorkers.”

Ms. Polland will be among the festival’s many special guests, who will also include: Cathy Scorsese, granddaughter of Catherine and Charles Scorsese, subjects of her father Martin Scorsese’s ITALIANAMERICAN; Peter McCrea, son of Joel McCrea, star of William Wyler’s DEAD END; Manuel Arce, producer and co-writer of the late Cuban American filmmaker Leon Ichaso’s EL SUPER, and the director’s sister, CNN en Español commentator Mari Rodriguez Ichaso; Michael Townsend Wright, friend of famed Jewish vaudevillian Joe Smith (of the team of “Smith & Dale”), who began his career in 1898 on the Lower East Side; NYU professor Perri Klass, author of a New Yorker essay on Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Elena Rossi Snook, Film Specialist and Collection Manager for the New York Public Library; legendary TV news personality Kaity Tong, who in the early 1980s became the first Asian American anchor on local NYC news; and 24-year-old artist and filmmaker Aicha Cherif, born in Guinea, whose short film HEAT vividly captures the immigrant community of a Lower East Side housing project. Additional guests to be announced.

Valentine’s Day (February 14) will be celebrated with love stories set in tenement neighborhoods: the romantic comedies RAFTER ROMANCE, starring Ginger Rogers; Raoul Walsh’s ME AND MY GAL, starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, followed by a special presentation by Bruce Goldstein, originally created for the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood; Buster Keaton’s THE CAMERAMAN; and Preston Sturges’ CHRISTMAS IN JULY – with the day topped off by the original, multi-Oscar-winning 1961 version of the Leonard Bernstein/Jerome Robbins musical WEST SIDE STORY.

Fourteen of the silent films in the festival will feature live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner, Film Forum’s longtime silent film accompanist and a veteran film and stage actor in both English and Yiddish productions. Mr. Sterner and fellow Yiddish-speaking actors/performers Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson (who appear as the shtetl couple in the prologue of the Coen Brothers’ A SERIOUS MAN), along with Shane Baker (a renowned Yiddish actor raised Episcopalian in Kansas City) will perform acts of Yiddish vaudeville following the screening of the silent HIS PEOPLE on February 22. 

Film Forum and the Tenement Museum will offer reciprocal discounts for the organizations' members and series attendees. Discounts apply to the Museum’s daily walking tours, spanning over a century of immigrant, migrant and refugee families. In addition, the Museum will offer the “Love at the Tenement” tour (February 8), highlighting courtship and marriage traditions, and the “Crime at the Tenement” tour (February 13) to complement some of the festival’s themes.

Founded in 1988, The Tenement Museum welcomes visitors into the homes of immigrant, migrant, and refugee families, sharing their stories in order to inspire connection between past and present and to build a more inclusive and expansive American society. The Museum is experienced through educator-led tours of recreated family apartments of German, Irish, Black, Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Chinese families who lived in New York's tenements from the 1860s through the 1980s.

Presented in association with the Tenement Museum. 




Select titles presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film and The Robert Jolin Osborne Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.

Trailer

Films in this Series