By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
New Times: Hoberman on VVoice Film at 50
Marking its 50th anniversary in the same week the Village Voice stable (including LA Weekly) is set to be acquired by the New Times alt-weekly conglom if the Justice Dept. approves, J. Hoberman chronicles his long love for the Greenwich Village weekly’s film section. Hoberman recalls how the Teenage Jim was taken with Jonas Mekas’ “Movie Journal” and Andrew Sarris’ “Films in Focus,” but he writes that the attendant fortune in the mid-1960s was ”to have revival dumps like the Bleecker Street, the New Yorker, and the Thalia—not to mention the 42nd Street grind houses and the Museum of Modern Art…”
“The French call adolescence the ‘age of film-going,’ ” I would write in that same Village Voice some 20 years later. “And it may be that the movies you discover then set your taste forever.” It will be many eons before the collected writings of Mekas and Sarris are enshrined between the Library of America’s glossy black covers…” Hoberman recalls the careers of Mekas and Sarris, as well as later writers like Amy Taubin, Michael Atkinson, Georgia Brown, Stuart Byron, Katherine Dieckmann, Terry Curtis Fox, Tad Gallagher, Dennis Lim, William Paul, B. Ruby Rich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, P. Adams Sitney, Elliott Stein, Jessica Winter, Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, and Carrie Rickey for the Voice’s five decades of Voice-iness. “It was precisely because the Voice was so site specific, so committed to film culture as it was being made and experienced in New York City, that its coverage not only engaged the Teenage Me but cineastes all over the country and even the world. There’s been an erosion of space and an imposition of format, but I’d like to believe that this readership is still there and that the commitment remains.”