Why We Sit in the Dark: A Personal Atlas of NYC Film Subcultures

April 24, 2025

Intro

I’ve wandered from Light Industry to BAM, from rooftop screenings in Bushwick to avant-garde symposia at Anthology. Most crowds never mix—but I was always there, a glue figure, projectionist, witness, archive.

There was a stretch of time when I was a raging alcoholic with a broken heart and a big checkbook. Film wasn’t just something I watched—it was a way I survived. I showed up half-drunk, fully devoted. I watched until I forgot why I was watching. I paid for strangers, left halfway through masterpieces, cried during trailers, and debated until the projector clicked off.

Cinema was the only thing still holding light for me. So I stayed close to it.

1. Spectacle Theater (Williamsburg)

Type: Punk, VHS, underground ephemera
Scene: Jean Rollin retrospectives and anime oddities, 10 people max, folding chairs
Memory: Once saw a 16mm porn spoof of Solaris with live noise music. No one clapped. We all just nodded.
What they drink: $3 bodega wine
Dress code: Faded Ts, tote bags with unreadable logos

2. Anthology Film Archives (East Village)

Type: Avant-garde, no apologies
Scene: Elder experimentalists, students of Brakhage, drifting thinkers
Memory: Guy in front of me whispered “this is why we still believe in light” during a Hollis Frampton screening.
What they read: Obscure theory zines from the 1970s
Soundtrack: Silence, until the projector clicks

3. Metrograph (Lower East Side)

Type: Highbrow meets Instagram aesthetic
Scene: Softcore cinephiles, designer coats, curated cocktails
Memory: Saw L’Avventura while a fashion week panel let out next door—felt like Antonioni was eavesdropping on the future
Vibe: Film school meets Soho House

4. IFC + Film Forum

Type: Canon cinephiles
Scene: Directors with notebooks, old couples who’ve seen The Conformist 19 times
Memory: Watched La Jetée in silence while someone cried behind me. Turned out it was the projectionist’s partner—it was their anniversary.

5. The Forums (Online + Obscure)

Type: Obsessive, evangelical cinephiles
Scene: Screenshots from OOP DVDs, uploaded .rar files of lost VHS dubs, 40-comment debates on whether a shot is a reference to Pasolini or a happy accident
Memory: Someone once uploaded a Super8 doc about Alphabet City punk squats that never screened publicly—only four people commented. One of them was the director’s niece.
What they trade: FTP logins, Mega links, hand-burned discs at screening parties
Energy: Archaeology meets séance

6. KGB Bar (East Village)

Type: Literary underground meets film cryptology
Scene: Projectionists, filmmakers, programmers, weirdos
Memory: Sean Price Williams said a 1982 Polish TV movie changed how he shoots. Michael Bilandic talked about shooting Jobe’z World like it was a lost porno noir.
Vibe: Intellectual dive bar séance
Function: Oral tradition transmission point

7. Basement Screenings (Location: Confidential)

Type: Secret, invitation-only art house rituals
Scene: Folding chairs, flickering bulbs, 16mm projectors and whispered passwords
Memory: Someone screened a scratched print of Possession (1981). People cried. No one said anything when it ended. You could feel the dust hanging in the silence.
What they screened: Obscure Czech cinema, early Cronenberg, unreleased shorts, hand-labeled reels
Vibe: Celluloid séance, cultural speakeasy
Function: Initiation site for real heads

8. The Roxy Projectionist (Tribeca / Floating)

Type: Gatekeeper of taste, silent oracle of the booth
Scene: Post-screening cigarette, arguing Fassbinder vs. Petzold outside Spectacle
Memory: He said no one under 40 had truly understood Berlin cinema. I said Yella was a ghost story. He paused. Then nodded. “Okay. That’s fair.”
Vibe: Cinema as duel, discourse as intimacy
Function: Mutual recognition among those who live for the frame

9. Seward Park Library Basement (Lower East Side)

Type: Public-access cinema portal, free for those who know
Scene: A few metal chairs, a library cart, and a projector older than the patrons
Memory: I saw Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast down there once. The walls felt like they were absorbing the dream. A child asked if the Beast was real. An old man said, “He is in this room.”
What they show: French surrealism, silent films, foreign classics, sometimes taped from TCM
Vibe: Accidental sacred space
Function: Communal dreaming, hidden archive

11. Caffè Reggio to IFC (Greenwich Village, Christmas Eve)

Type: Scene of real-life heartbreak folding into cinema
Scene: I waited at Caffè Reggio, two cappuccinos on the table. She was in Berlin. I asked her to meet me there. She never came. I couldn’t sit in the cafe much longer—it felt like I was holding grief in a frame.
Memory: I checked the listings. IFC was playing It’s a Wonderful Life at 9:30. I walked there through the cold. Sat in the dark. A family sat up to my left. Other stragglers dotted the seats. The tears came hard and didn’t stop. I didn’t care. The theater was the only place I could let myself break.
Vibe: Heartbreak ritualized through cinema
Function: Sanctuary of feeling, where fiction holds space for what life can’t contain

12. Firehouse DCTV – The Body Politic (Walker Street, Rain)

Type: Documentary screening turned civic revelation
Scene: A powerful film about Baltimore’s mayor fighting gun violence. A surprise Q&A guest was announced—and it was him, the mayor himself, Brandon Scott. The room gasped. The filmmakers spoke with urgency and care.
Memory: I shared with them that I work with teens in Harlem—kids surrounded by the same pressures. The film hit me deep. Afterwards, I stepped outside onto Walker Street. It was raining. I stood under the awning, figuring out where to go next. To my left: the mayor, alone for a moment. I wanted to say it all—how much it meant, how rare it is for a leader to show up. But I just watched the rain for a second. Then I walked away.
Vibe: Civic intimacy, missed connection with meaning
Function: Reminder that impact doesn’t always need words—presence is its own kind of dialogue

13. Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater (Spectacle Theater)

Type: Handicam New York odyssey by way of Florida weirdness
Scene: Shot by a group of friends from Florida, it felt like a film made for no one and everyone—pure, raw, emotionally scrappy. I saw it at Spectacle Theater with my roommate Zack, an animator from Florida who’d tag along to screenings. During the Q&A, the crew spoke like they weren’t just promoting a film—they were preserving their youth, their friendship, their version of New York.
Memory: Afterward we wandered through Williamsburg and ended up at East River Bar. It was a Tuesday night. And there they were—the whole film crew. Justin (probably) was filming the bar on the same MiniDV camcorder. Turns out Zack knew some of their mutual friends. We laughed, talked, the whole night felt like we’d stumbled into the bonus scene of the movie we just watched.
Vibe: Collaborative joy, blurry boundaries between film and life
Function: Reminder that cinema isn’t always projection—it’s participation

On Q&As and the Shape of Cinema

That night helped me realize something: the process is always taking shape. A film doesn’t stop when the credits roll—it lingers, reshapes, continues in the way people talk, gather, remember. The Q&A isn’t just for questions. It’s the moment when the gap between cinema and reality narrows. Where the people behind the film emerge blinking into the light, and the audience realizes they’ve been part of the frame all along.

Sometimes the film follows you into the bar. Sometimes you realize you never really left it.

14. Metrograph(Lower East Side, Ongoing)

Type: Cathedral of curated nostalgia and cinema-as-aesthetic
Scene: People in beautiful coats quoting Rivette. People who say “35mm” like it’s a spell. Fashion week interns beside 80-year-old programmers. Everyone smells like sandalwood or Criterion.

But for me—Metrograph was mostly about 90s Taiwanese cinema.

Memory: Vive L’Amour, The River, Goodbye, Dragon Inn—films where rain falls like silence, and silence feels like heartbreak. Tsai Ming-liang’s portraits of cities in existential pause.
Feeling: Urban malaise reimagined as magical realism. L’ennui stretched into something holy. If you take it all with a grain of salt, loneliness becomes a comedy.
Contrast: Wong Kar-wai does it differently—romance remembered rather than lived. Lovers in impossible timing, neon light, and dubbed Western pop songs echoing through narrow flats.
Vibe: Tender disconnection, liminal beauty
Function: A place to disappear into longing, to be seen in the blur of lovers who never quite meet

On Stillness and LaughterThere was a time—when I was angrier, more protective—where I found myself frustrated by all the laughing at Metrograph. Not joyful laughter, but nervous laughter. The kind that slips out when something is unfamiliar, slow, or quietly aching.

I know now it’s not my place to police how people react to art. But there are some films—Tsai Ming-liang’s, especially—that don’t ask to be reacted to. They ask to be sat with. Endured. Lived inside. They’re not punchlines—they’re silences. They’re not confusion—they’re offerings.

Some art is meant to be experienced like weather. And sometimes, that experience is best held in the dark, with nothing but the screen and your breath.

Metrograph and the Ghosts of the Stage

Metrograph is just steps away from the old Bowery, once the cradle of vaudeville, Yiddish theater, and Broadway’s earliest murmurings. Across the street, an abandoned opera house stares back at the theater like a faded reflection in a dressing room mirror. To sit inside Metrograph is to sit in a threshold space—between past and present, spectacle and stillness, entertainment and ritual.

This idea comes alive in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn—a film that haunts Metrograph’s spirit like a whisper. The theater in that film is falling apart. It’s mostly empty. The ghosts of past audiences and former actors drift through its dim corridors, watching each other as much as the screen. It’s a meditation on what cinema used to be—a place to gather, to disappear, to endure.

Even Nick Pinkerton, a KGB Bar regular and fixture of the NYC cinephile circuit, wrote essays on this film—copies of which were for sale in Metrograph’s lobby. You could buy one before watching Goodbye, Dragon Inn and feel like you were stepping into the essay as it unfolded in real time.

And there’s another Tsai film—What Time Is It There?—where a watch seller remains in Taipei while a woman departs for Paris. Their timelines drift, intersect, and echo. The film moves like water and stares like a ghost. In it, the screen is never just a screen. It’s a window, a border, a memory. Just like Metrograph.

Outro: Why This Matters

These places hold memory like film holds light. Even if most people didn’t notice… I was there. And it meant something.