The Force Behind Film Forum

A room without books is like a body without a soul, and the same is true of a city without an independent cinema. If New York has survived the rise of VHS and DVD and streaming—and this is no Luddite’s lament, for these are all great things, but the life of a city depends on people finding cause to leave their homes once in a while, if only to bump elbows in the dark—it must be due, in some measure, to Karen Cooper, the longtime director of Film Forum. Cooper started running the movie theatre in 1972, when it was a collection of fifty folding chairs in a shabby loft on West Eighty-eighth Street. She kept running it until the end of June, when she retired from what is now a four-screen cinema on West Houston Street. Many art-house cinemas have come and gone in that time, but Film Forum has thrived. It is one of those New York places which inspires passionate feelings. “It is the movies,” the filmmaker Phil Morrison told me.

If you ask moviegoers what they love about the place, they’ll talk about the excellence of the programming—the time that they saw “Hoop Dreams,” which the theatre booked before it had distribution, or the Sunday-morning children’s screenings that have exposed their kids to Hitchcock and Mae West—and also the excellence of the popcorn, which is widely believed to be the best in the city. They’ll mention their favorite seat, two rows back from the red column—no, against the left wall, behind the seat with the John Belushi plaque. They’ll recall Lou Reed posing in front of the screen before the lights went down, or Patti Smith bringing her guitar to the theatre during the run of Steven Sebring’s documentary about her, or Cornel West sitting in the lobby, chatting with two old ladies. What they are getting at is the mix of the hallowed and the haimish that gives Film Forum its personality, its je ne sais quoi. For fifty-one years, the quoi has been Cooper.

Cooper is seventy-four and less than five feet tall. She has a strong voice and pesky feet; in her office on King Street, around the corner from the theatre, she keeps a supply of Austrian wool slippers that she buys when she’s at the International Documentary Film Festival, in Amsterdam. “I never know if I should tell people the good news, the bad news, or the truth,” she said, by way of greeting, when I visited her there in June. The view, too, was of feet. Film Forum’s offices occupy the bottom two floors of a brownstone that was purchased in 2007, Cooper told me, by “an exceedingly generous” board member. For years, she had a big space upstairs, but she had recently ceded it to her successor, Sonya Chung, and moved to a little one below street level. “I just washed the sidewalk before you came,” Cooper said, gesturing at the wet pavement out the window. “Somebody once called me similar to a fifteenth-arrondissement concierge, and now I’ve become one.”

On the floor was a pile of books, written by former heads of artistic institutions, that Cooper, who was preparing to write her own memoir, was consulting for tips on “what not to do.” The bulletin board behind her desk was dominated by a poster for “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo,” a documentary directed by Jessica Oreck and released at Film Forum in 2009. “This is a marvellous film about how Japanese people are very involved with—obsessed with—the aesthetics, the environmental issues, all the things that surround insects,” Cooper said. “They have insect pets. They go out a certain night of the year and check out the fireflies. There are scenes with a father and his young son visiting a pet store and deciding what kind of beetle to get.”

The film sounded terrific. Most films sound terrific when Cooper describes them. “I’m like the Henry James of the press release,” Cooper told me. “I had an English teacher who said, ‘This reads like book-jacket copy,’ about something I wrote. And I thought, Great! I’ll never starve.”

I suggested, a little selfishly, that it might be a good idea to reprogram “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo.”

“No, no, we don’t do that,” Cooper said. “It’s against the rules. We do premières”—a film’s first American commercial release—“and occasionally, occasionally, after a certain number of decades, they can morph into being classics.” Classics are the province of Bruce Goldstein, whom Cooper hired in 1986 to show work in repertory. For decades, Cooper alone was in charge of choosing the new. Since 1996, she has done it with Mike Maggiore, Film Forum’s artistic director, and now with Chung, too; the three meet every Monday to discuss the films they’ve seen during the previous week. (Cooper, who is staying on in an advisory capacity for two years, will keep her selection seat.) “Karen is going to be blunt about her take,” Maggiore told me. “She’s such a straight shooter,” the director Kelly Reichardt, who has had a number of movies premièred by Cooper, said. Chung considers Cooper’s frankness to be an ethical asset. “You always know where you stand with Karen,” she told me.

In her office, Cooper had prepared a stack of DVDs of films that she had premièred, and for which she had particular affection. “These are mostly hits, but there are also misses, and, I have to tell you, I love the misses, probably more than I love the hits,” she said. The hits included “Crumb,” Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary about the cartoonist R. Crumb and his supremely troubled family; “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s 2009 Palme d’Or winner about evil deeds in a German town on the eve of the First World War; and “Son of Saul,” the Polish director László Nemes’s portrait of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2016. “I have a tendency toward the dark,” Cooper observed. “We now serve beer and wine. Makes it a little easier.”

She flipped to a DVD of “Oblivion,” a documentary about street children in Lima by the Peruvian-born Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann. “O.K., this was not a hit,” Cooper said. “But it’s an example of a brilliant, obscure documentary by a woman who should be a household name and obviously is not.” Cooper had premièred half a dozen films by Honigmann. “She should be as famous as Spielberg,” she told me. “But documentary filmmakers don’t get that kind of attention.”

We moved to a small table in the hallway, where a skeleton in a surgical mask was propped on a couple of movie-theatre seats. Cooper began to page through old Film Forum calendars, an archive of her frequently prescient taste. Here was “Paris Is Burning,” by Jennie Livingston, and “Daughters of the Dust,” by Julie Dash, and “Two Friends,” Jane Campion’s first feature, and an assortment of early Werner Herzog shorts (“Some of the greatest films I ever played”). Here, too, was “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” by Chantal Akerman, which was named the greatest film of all time in the British Film Institute’s latest Sight and Sound poll. Cooper premièred it in 1983, seven years after it was shown in Europe; no one else in New York had been interested in giving it a proper run.

“Chantal was a groundbreaking artist,” Cooper said. “It’s tragic that she died so early. But would I call it the No. 1 film ever made?” She made an equivocal noise. “I don’t know about that.”

Cooper’s mandate has been to follow her own taste, whether it bends toward the popular or the obscure. But how did she know that she had taste to begin with?

“I didn’t,” she said.

As a kid growing up in Queens, she loved dance. At Smith, she studied literature. “I was probably more interested in Martha Graham and Harold Pinter than I was in Alfred Hitchcock,” she told me.

But she graduated, in 1970, into a recession. “I came back to New York, and I wrote to all of these magazines—you know, nobody sent e-mails, you had to actually sit down and write a letter—‘I want a job, I can edit, I can proofread.’ And the only one who wrote back was a teeny film magazine that no longer exists”—Filmmakers Newsletter. This proved to be a lucky break. Cooper was asked to write a monthly column on independent film in New York. “Of course, in 1971, ‘independent film’ was not an expression anyone used very much,” she said. “But I did visit Film Forum, which existed along with a few other independent-film programs at MOMA, the Whitney, and Millennium Film Workshop.” Cooper found that she liked the place. It had screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. Coffee was served. The audience was made up of students, intellectuals, radicals, and working people of various stripes. “As grimy as it was, it felt welcoming,” she said. “I felt that I could be there without being, you know, a member of Warhol’s coterie.”