FILM-MAKERS’ COOPERATIVE GETS NEW HOME FOR $1 A YEAR
After months of uncertainty, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, whose future was threatened early this year when it received an order of eviction from the a city-owned building in TriBeCa, has found a new home, reports the New York Times’s Larry Rohter. The group, which archives, distributes, and restores experimental and avant-garde movies, has signed a five-year lease with the real estate developer Charles S. Cohen that calls for the organization to pay a symbolic rent of one dollar a year.
“It’s amazing,” said Jonas Mekas, a filmmaker and one of the cooperative’s founders, “and amazing that there are still people like Cohen in this world.” The new quarters, which the group hopes to occupy by Labor Day, are at 475 Park Avenue South, on the northeast corner of Thirty-second Street. The sixth-floor site will offer nearly four times as much space as the co-op’s current location at the Clocktower Building, where it is paying about one dollar a square foot for approximately nine hundred square feet.
“It’s a beautiful and more accessible space,” said M. M. Serra, the film group’s executive director. “We’ll have offices and archives, and our films, some of which are one of a kind, will be in air-conditioning specifically designed to protect them, which we don’t have where we are now.”
As part of the move, a fifteen-seat theater is also being built at the Thirty-second Street location, “for the use of scholars and others who want to do research” into the approximately five thousand films that the cooperative has in its archives. Tentatively, it is to be named the Charles Theater, a double homage, to Cohen and to the old Charles Theater in the East Village, one of the first places in New York to show experimental films. Cohen, the president and chief executive of Cohen Brothers Realty, is known as a film aficionado. He is the author of a book of movie trivia, won a Kodak Movie Award for a comedy short he wrote and directed, and was an executive producer of Frozen River.
“I was in a position to help, and I thought that I should,” Cohen said. “They are a wonderful group doing important work, and there is no other place to go and see this kind of thing. They needed a storage space for their archives, and this meets their needs.”
