Amos Vogel: "I was born into a middle-class family, Jewish on both sides. My father was a lawyer and my mother was an educator and psychologist. She worked with Alfred Adler very closely."

Amos Vogelbaum (1930)

and the Analysis of the Ego

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

and is embalmed in a mausoleum on the Kremlin wall.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The collected community college lectures of the doctor and psychotherapist.

Alfred Adler examining a child

Burning of the Palace of Justice.

July revolt with 92 people killed and hundreds injured

Amos Vogel: "At age seven or so, I got a Magic Lantern, complete with color slides–just like Ingmar Bergman. I was entranced. Later (I must have been ten or eleven) my father bought me a home movie projector, 9.5mm. It came from France. It was handcranked, not motorized. With that projector came not only the ability to make and show home movies – my father filmed family trips and so on – but also the possibility of buying films available in 9.5mm: Krazy Kat and Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chase, Chaplin. I enjoyed running the comedies backward as well – the magic of transforming, subverting reality"

Jan van Musschenbroek's magic lantern projecting a monster.

 Beginning of the world economic crisis.

Unemployed men marching (Toronto 1929)

and Its Discontents"

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The largest municipal building in Red Vienna is opened.

Karl Marx Hof in Vienna

and founds SEXPOL in Berlin

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

of Fascism"

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Oppositional mass media subjected to censorship.


The Good Press (1847)

Basil Wright's film is shown at the Urania Filmclub. Amos Vogel: "Wright’s Song of Ceylon [1934] was also tremendously important to me."

Filmstill from Song of Ceylon

Armed struggle against the Austro-Fascist State. Amos Vogel: "Of course the most important event was the civil war in Austria in 1934. I was thirteen years old at that time. I was very much effected by that event. It was a very dramatic experience for me to see because they were using cannons and other kinds of military weapons against the workers of Vienna. I saw the damage that was brought about in the city and also found out about the many people who got killed. At that time there were also circulating illegal newspapers and magazines already brought out by the Socialists and Left-wingers who already at that time had been declared to be illegal by Dolfuss. That, for the first time, brought me face to face with the fact that there is more than just the happy middle-class-family life. That there is something bigger, called society." (Humer 2001)

Civil War 1934

Amos Vogel: "On one of my birthdays my father took me to a bookstore, a very well-known bookstore in Vienna. The bookstore owner took us into a locked back room that was full of that (forbidden left-wing) literature, and I was allowed to pick out and buy twelve books 'for twelve months'."

Foto: Wolfgang Suschitzky

from the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library

Amos Vogel becomes a member of the Jewish Youth Federation: "During my last three years in Vienna, I had become involved with a Socialist-Zionist youth group, boys and girls who wanted to go to a kibbutz in Israel – though it wasn’t Israel then. We wanted to build a communal settlement where nobody would own land or private property, and all the income would be shared, a real participatory democracy. Part of that group’s ideology called for a binational state, an Arab-Jewish state. It was not to be a Jewish state. I was very happy about that."

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library

The film by Basil Wright and Harry Watt is shown at the Urania Filmclub. Amos Vogel: "One film I remember specifically and very strongly is Night Mail [1936], the collaboration of Harry Watt, Basil Wright and, on the sound, W.H. Auden, Cavalcanti, and Benjamin Britten. The whole notion of documentary became important to me because of that film. And simultaneously I realized that this was really a poetic film, and I was amazed that such a boring subject – the workings of the British mail system – could be made interesting."

Film Poster by Pat Keely

Amos Vogel: "I was very much aware of two other things at that time in relation to politics. One was the question of the Soviet Union and the other one was Hitler-Germany. The interesting thing is that already at age thirteen – and I know it was at age thirteen because I have certain documents, certain things I wrote and read at the time – I was already against Stalin and I considered as complete fakes the so-called 'show trials' in the Soviet Union against the former leadership of the Communist revolution in the Soviet Union. I was an anti-Stalinist who at the same time considered himself to be a radical socialist."

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library

Invasion of the Wehrmacht, start of transports to concentration camps. Amos Vogel: "We were stuck in Vienna for six months. That is a period in my life I shall never forget. It is something that cannot be fully comprehended. What is not understood by most people is the difference between one person or a hundred-thousand people saying to you, “I don’t like you, get out of here, we hate you.” There is a difference between that and when the state says it. The state says it! That is very important. That is something that most people don’t understand clearly, in my opinion. All of a sudden there was a government that said, “You people are enemies of the German people. You are dirt, you are poison, you should be exterminated.” The result of that, when it is done publicly, is to encourage all the people who were already anti-Semites to go further. They could really go to direct attacks on Jews and they would not be put into jail for it. Anti-Semitism was part of the official policy, official power of the state. From that moment on we Jews who lived in Vienna, were outlaws." (Humer 2001)

Vienna, SS raid on Jewish community. March 1938

After the "Annexation", Jews were forced to leave the schools. Amos Vogel: "My parents enrolled me in the Piaristen Gymnasium because they considered it to be the best gymnasium in Vienna. I probably hated it from the first day I got there and then I spent the next seven years in that school. This school was situated on the grounds of a former monastery and many of the professors were priests or former priests at the time when they were teaching me. And I found it to be a very totalitarian.  I hate to use that word but it was really true about many of the teachers and many of the situations I was confronted by there." (Humer 2001)

Stigmatization by the Constraint to the Jewish Star (bildarchivaustria)

Amos Vogel: "So one day, at lunch time, my father is not back, he does not come home. He did not telephone us, he did not say, 'I am not coming for lunch, I am busy,' or something like that, he just didn’t come home. As the afternoon wore on we got more and more upset. In Vienna at that time people would disappear. They just disappeared and sometimes you found out only later – if at all – what had happened to them. They had been taken to a concentration camp or other times you did not even find out what happened to them. Maybe you found out six months later, or never. That was the reality of the situation. In the evening my father walked in. I remember he was chalk-white in the face and told us that as he walked to court a truck came by with SA-men in it and they saw him and immediately they noticed that he wasn’t wearing a swastika. Now, my father did not look Jewish, if one dares to use this terrible term, but they put him on the truck and they took him to a barracks and forced him to wash the floors there. They gave him a pail and a broom and, under their constant supervision, he had to wash the floors all day long. Needless to say my father did not usually wash floors. It was not even the fact that they made him do it but the fact that at that moment during the day he knew that his life was in balance, in danger. He did not know how this was going to turn out. They could even kill him or they could take him to Dachau, to the concentration camp, which happened to any number of people in my immediate environment, or at the end of the day they could send him home. They could say, “O.K., now you have finished, go home.” And that’s what happened in this case. We were very lucky." (Humer 2001)

Forced to clean sidewalks (DÖW)

Amos Vogel: "To Palestine, as it was called then. But this was still under British mandate or colony, almost no Jews were allowed in, but at a certain point the British had an arrangement which was called Youth Immigration - Youth Alijah, they called it - which meant they allowed a certain limited number of young Jews, ages fifteen to seventeen to get into the country. So, all of a sudden my entire group became part of that. As far as I remember, Hitler had already come to Vienna, as a matter of fact, and it was clear that 150 people from our club, all at once, would go to Israel as part of the Youth Alijah. All of a sudden it turns out I'm three month too old. They all went, or most of them went, including my girlfriend, and I couldn't go."

The first Youth Alijah Group reaches Palestine in 1937

Amos Vogel: "In the fall of 1938, six months after Hitler took over Austria. I’ll never forget what I experienced during those six months. I was very lucky to be able to leave. If I had waited, undoubtedly I would be dead by now. It was very traumatic and has stayed with me all my life."

Anti-Semitic Riots Vienna 1938 (bildarchivaustria)

Amos Vogel: "All of a sudden, in the middle of this trip, begins the Munich crisis about Czechoslovakia. Hitler made a very scary, intimidating speech, which was broadcast by all the loudspeakers and radios on this boat so that wherever we went we would hear it. We could not get away from the screaming. He blamed the Jews for everything and threatened war unless his demands on Czechoslovakia were met. And don’t forget, that all the other people, who were sitting with us in first class at those tables, were also Jewish emigrants. So here were all these scared, shaken Jews, sitting with the German crew standing all around them, serving them, and, while the next dish was being served, Hitler was threatening the entire world with war and attacking the Jews for being at the bottom of it all. We were absolutely convinced that they would throw us over board. That’s how we saw it. We never thought we would get to Cuba alive because the reaction among the crew would be so strong, Those god-damned Jews, they sit and we feed them! It really was absolutely one of the most bizarre, frightening things that ever happened to me" (Humer 2001)

Ship of the Hamburg-America Line

Amos Vogel: "You have to understand that Cuba was something like the other side of the moon to us. We had no idea we only vaguely knew that it was somewhere near America but we did not know anything about it, so it was literally like saying we are going to the moon for six months." (Humer 2001)

Watching sports games during the Jewisch Children's Summer Project in Cuba (JDC Archives)

Amos Vogel: "I was able to get a scholarship at an agricultural school in Georgia, one of the National Youth Administration colleges that had been started under Roosevelt to bring college level education to the sons and daughters of farmers, primarily in the Southern states, though some of the people who came from Europe were also let in. So I found myself in Haversham College in Georgia, for two years. A very strange introduction to America. I had left a country in which the park benches said, 'Jews and dogs should not sit here.' Here I saw drinking fountains that said, 'For whites only.' Later, I moved to the University of Georgia, and took agriculture plus general courses in civics, history, whatever. And after that, I worked for two years on farms in New Jersey."

Amos Vogel in the NYA Work Program (1939)

Amos Vogel encounters racial segregation in the southern states: "I had a girlfriend in the youth movement I belonged to and we were very much in love. We would try to be together whenever we could. There was a portion of Donaukanal, the tributary of the Danube that runs through Vienna, where there were benches along the river. You could sit there and have a good time with each other. You could look at the river. It was very romantic. I remember distinctly how we, on one particular day, walked over to our favorite bench, and there was a sign on it that said ‘Dogs and Jews are not allowed to sit here.’ I cannot reproduce the emotion we felt when we saw that sign. Soon after I came to the United States I lived for two years in Georgia. I was given a scholarship from one of the Jewish Rescue committees. I wanted to study agriculture in order to prepare myself for going to what was than Palestine and is now Israel. That was my idea at that time. I remember the absolute horror I experienced when I went down to Georgia where there was a system of apartheid with blacks completely separated from whites. I went to a moviehouse and remember signs saying ‘This Waterfountain Is For Whites Only’ and the other water-fountain – which was smaller and dirtier - had a sign that said ‘For Blacks Only.’ It was a very important lesson for me. I realised that this business of fascism and discrimination against other human beings is not limited simply to Germans, that they are not the only people who are capable of it. Until that moment I thought, maybe that is something that is limited to ‘over there,’ but all of a sudden it became, in my mind, an international problem." (Humer 2001)

Drinking fountain on the Halifax County Courthouse in April 1938

Attack of the German Wehrmacht on Poland.

Warsaw September 1939

 in exile in London.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library

in exile in Mexico.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel decides to stay in the USA: "But at the same time I was becoming I more and more uncomfortable with Zionism. I read more and more about the actual situation in Israel/Palestine and finally came to the conclusion that I could no longer consider myself a Zionist. I felt that we were committing a huge injustice against the Arabs. The Arabs were the victims, the Jews were the aggressors. One of history’s great victims, namely the Jews, were suddenly victimizing another people. So much to my sadness I decided that I did not want to go to Palestine, and decided to stay in the United States." (Humer 2001)

Landing of Jewish emigrants in Palestine (1948)

Amos Vogel attends New York New School: "I came back from Georgia, the story with Israel had come to an end. I was going to stay here and the first thing I did was to obtain a scholarship at the newly established New School for Social Research. That was a new college in New York consisting of refugee scholars. I entered their school of politics and, after working during the day, would go to school at night. I was one of their first graduates. I got a Bachelor of Arts in politics and economics. My modest intention was to make the world a better place." (Humer 2001)

New School Course Catalog

Amos Vogel is a constant reader of the NYT: "I would read The New York Times daily - which I still do, but I'm very disappointed in that paper - with the help of a dictionary. Every single word I didn't know I looked up in the dictionary, wrote it in a little book, studied the little book, and tried to speak as much as possible with other people."

New York Times 22.6.1941: Germany attacks Soviet Union

Amos Vogel: "I went to school at night, worked during the day at all kinds of odd jobs. You cannot possibly imagine what kind of jobs I worked on, because I had no skills and agricultural skills are not going to help in New York City!"

New York in the 1940's

Declaration of war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 8.12.1941

 at the New School for Social Research.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The largest  act of armed resistance by Jews in Europe against the National Socialists.

Suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amos Vogel is granted US citizenship: "I became an American citizen in 1944, admiring the country’s good qualities and democratic traditions and grateful for the opportunities it offered me, but an uneasy, unresolved dichotomy continues to possess me, so that I feel myself both as an European as well as an American, still bound to German culture and civilization as well as to the American one, a citizen of both or of neither, perhaps a citizen of the world."

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The Red Army liberates the prisoners from the concentration camp.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Surrender of the Wehrmacht.

Jewgeni Chaldej, Berlin 2.5.1945

Amos Vogel: "On our wedding night, we were at the Hotel St. Moritz and that was the night we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. How much more timely can you get, right? So, every time we have a wedding anniversary, they are having a ceremony at Hiroshima. And so we are children of the Atomic Age..."

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel: "The morning after our wedding night, I walked down to the hotel newsstand and saw this great big headline: NEW TYPE OF BOMB DROPPED OVER HIROSHIMA -so it's easy to remember the date of our wedding! Bad jokes have been made about that, believe me."

shows her films in the Provincetown Playhouse. Amos Vogel: "Maya Deren is an enormously important person, who died very young. Anyway, this person had rented the Provincetown Playhouse… Two-hundred seats. She had rented it, shown her films there, and we went to see them. We were very impressed with the films, they were very successful. She put ads in a couple of papers, showed the films, did program notes. All right. So, at a certain point I said to Marcia, "Listen. You know what I think maybe we could do? Why don't we rent this place for two nights. I'll go to various distributors and try to find some films I think might make up a good program, and we'll show a program of a selection of shorts." This was the basic idea: if I'm interested in seeing such films, in a city of seven million people, there must be other people like that."

Maya Deren (1917-1961)

Against Gandhi's will, two states are founded - India and Pakistan.

Independence of India

The opening of the film club with the motto: Films you cannot see elsewhere. Amos Vogel: "Provincetown Playhouse had two hundred seats. We announced showings for six o’clock and eight o’clock one evening. It was a huge, smashing, immediate success. We had to repeat this first program for sixteen evenings! With two showings per evening! My naive, but logical supposition was immediately proven correct. I have no doubt that if I had chosen other films, I would have done just as well, so long as they made for a well-rounded program. This idea worked, not because of my excellence as a programmer or anything like that, but because historical circumstances allowed Cinema 16 to fulfill a real social need."

Cinema 16 becomes a Film Society for the Adult Moviegoer to bypass censorship. Amos Vogel: "I'm a total foe and enemy of censorship in all ist forms and shapes, forever, today. Any kind of censorship. So, I wasn't going to cooperate with these bastards. As far as I was concerned, they were bastards, because they were telling me what I was allowed to look at and what I was not allowed to look at. So, I didn't like that."

Mahatma Gandhi is shot by a fanatical Hindu.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Salt Satyagraha Dandi March 1930

Foundation of an independent distribution company for avant-garde films. Amos Vogel: "I had never in my life wanted to own prints of film. I know many people who are avid collectors of films and whose apartments are filled with film. I've never had that desire."

Foundation of the State of Israel.

Foundation of the State

to more than 2.000 members. Archie Winston: "Vogel's programs achieve a scatter-gun coverage that stimulates approval and criticism in wholesale quantities."

Declaration of membership by Susan Sontag

The first pamphlet of Cinema 16 is dedicated to the film Rashomon.

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

publishes "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema". Start of the Nouvelle Vague

François Truffaut

The democratically elected government of Guatemala is violently overthrown.

Guatemala City 1954

Amos Vogel: "Commercial cinema aims to entertain; the film club aims to promote understanding of film and new experiments within the medium. Commercial cinema avoids controversy, the film club welcomes it."

Film Society Department by Amos Vogel, in: FILM CULTURE Vol. 1, No. 3. May/June 1955
 

Bus boycott of Montgomery.

20 December 1956: Montgomery Bus Boycott Prevails

 publishes "Howl"

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

shows The Man Who Knew too Much as a preview in Cinema 16. Amos Vogel: "Oh, Hitchcock. Of course, that's the only time I heard of any public appearance of Hitchock's for a general audience, in New York. I've never heard of that before. That was very cute, because when I went to see him about it, as a possibility, he immediately agreed. He was quite a character, as we all know. He said, 'You know what I want to do? I want to bring one reel of my new film, which hasn't been released'. The Man Who Knew Too Much was a remake of another film he had made many years earlier. He said, 'I want to bring that, show it and then have questions, etc.' So, he came and brought with him the entire film – even before it was released!"

Alfred Hitchcock and Amos Vogel

Amos Vogel engages in the montage of Arthur Fellig's film.

Weegee: Summer on the Lower East Side. 1937, printed ca. 1983 (MetMuseum)

The bourgeois-democratic uprising is suppressed by the invasion of Soviet occupation troops.

Budapest, 24.10.1956

 publishes "Film as Art"

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

in a prison in the U.S.

Annotiertes Exemplar in der Amos Vogel Library

Fidel Castro's revolutionary 26th of July Movement triumphs over military dictatorship.

Cuba 1959

Amos Vogel visits the V. West-German Short Film Festival: "I started going back to Germany to film festivals. I was put on juries of film festivals in Germany, started to get to know film people, young people in Germany. I could never make peace with my generation in Germany, because I suspect them of having been Nazis even if they don't admit it. But, I am very friendly with the young generation. You know, I don't believe in the genetic guilt of the Germans, so I feel the young generation really not connected anymore with the Nazis."

Cinema 16 screenings of John Cassavetes' Shadows and Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy. Amos Vogel: "Finally, it must be clearly started that these films are an open affront to the kind of realistic, well-ordered, 19th century movies we are accustomed to see; instead of transposing literary values into a visual medium and thereby bastardizing them, they aim at the creation of a truly filmic reality; instead of traveling horizontally to a well-scrubbed happy end, they dig down vertically into one single experience, they explore atmosphere, they examine a moment in time."

Amos Vogel organizes the Festival of International Prize Winners from Germany in Cinema 16.

Cinema 16 in the Needle Auditorium

"Nobody intends to build a wall," GDR State Council Chairman Walter Ulbricht assured two months before the start of construction.

Wall Building

Amos Vogel: "The more I stir up the audience, the happier I am."

Village Voice, 30.8.1976

Amos Vogel: "In Germany there was a wonderful festival there, called the Oberhausen Film Festival, which was very important historically because it was at that festival that all the young German directors got together to declare in a manifesto, "Papa's Kino ist Tot." They startet the new German cinema, with Schloendorff and Herzog and Wim Wenders and all the other guys. They got together at that festival. Anyway, I was the American representative there for something like seven years. Every year I went there, brought them new films, American films, and became a juror at the festival."

After 8 years of bloody liberation struggle, Algeria declares its independence from France.

Filmstill: Battaglia di Algeri (1965)

Amos Vogel: "The financial issue became a major issue and we finally were forced to start a fund drive. I believe, in retrospect, as I look at it, that the two things that were wrong with it were that (a) it was done too late and (b) I couldn't expect the members to really give us the money we needed in order to continue. I had to also be able to get some money from rich people, individuals, and I was never good at that, I never knew how to do it, I never did it, and that was a big failing."

Amos Vogel 1962

A children's book by Amos Vogel and Maurice Sendak: Poor little Lori. All he wants is to go see Times Square, but somehow he is thwarted every step of the way.

After 16 years and with more than 7.000 members Cinema 16 is finished. Amos Vogel: "Cinema 16 grew from 200 members to 7.000. Seven thousand members in New York, which made us the largest film society in the United States […] What really amazes me, in retrospect, is that this project ran for sixteen years without any outside support, dependent one hundred percent on membership fees."

Cinema 16: Documents towards a History of the Film Society Part I

Martin Luther King delivers his speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Luis Buñuel delivers the opening film of the First New York Film Festival. Amos Vogel: "That was one of the daring things we did, our own private joke, and that was quite cute. We had deliberately chosen a film by Buñuel called The Exterminating Angel as the first film, the opening night of the first Festival. I don't know if you've seen that film, but that film has a lot to do with a bunch of bourgeoisie in a room - or maybe it's an apartment, I don't know what, a mansion? - where they find out suddenly that all the doors are blocked and they can't get out. The whole film is a critique of the bourgeoisie. They can't get out, etc., and you can imagine what Buñuel did with that situation… What was very wonderful was that at the end of the film, when people were going to leave the theatre, there was an enormous backup. They couldn't get out. So it was very funny. It was a big success, the opening night."

Filmstill: The Exterminating Angel (1962)

The 35th president of the USA is killed by two gunshots in Dallas.

Peter Konlechner and Peter Kubelka launch the Austrian Film Museum.

Peter Kubelka (left side) and Peter Konlechner (right side) 1964

US President Lyndon B. Johnson will not allow "Vietnam to follow the same path as China".

US-Invasion in Vietnam

During a public lecture in New York, Malcolm X is murdered with 21 shots.

Malcom X

State Troopers attac the first Selma-to-Montgomery-March of the Civil Rights Movement.

Selma-to-Montgomery-March

Foundation of the Black Panthers Party for Self-Defense.

Black Panther Party

Beginning of the "Black Wave" in Yugoslavian Film.

Filmstill: Early Works (Želimir Žilnik, 1969)

Amos Vogel: "In previous times, the young ‘took hold’ of the pen. Today, they take hold of the camera. They carry it everywhere."

Direct Cinema

Amos Vogel on the confusion of the US American avant-garde: "After two decades of obscurity, poverty, ignorant rejection, and dogged persistence, the American film avant-garde suffers today, for the first time in its history, from an ominous new ailment: over-attention without understanding, over-acceptance without discrimination. Crime of crimes, it has become fashionable. Its gurus and artists are in danger of becoming the avant-garde establishment; its growing fame hides only imperfectly an inner weakness. The following observations, aimed at the removal of confusions, represent a criticism from within, fully cognizant of the movement’s many achievements."

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

also known as the June War, 1967 Arab–Israeli War, or Third Arab–Israeli War fought by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

Jerusalem, Lions Gate 7.6.1967

Amos Vogel organizes the first US Conference on Film Education.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel organizes the New Czechoslovak Film Festival in cooperation with the New York Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art N.Y.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

War crimes committed by US soldiers in South Vietnam.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

King gets shot on a balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jesse Jackson reading the Daily Defender

Students occupy the Sorbonne.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Warsaw Pact troops march into Czechoslovakia.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel's Advice to the Moviegoers: "Discriminate in favor of the New York Film Festival and similar endeavors: actively play down what you dislike and accentuate the positive in your movie-going habits: remember that your ticket is a ballot, counted by the moguls to determine future policy. Amidst all the powerful, negative influences that suffocate us, these half-way pure, relatively uncorrupted films, these courageous projects and showcases are hesitant signposts of a better future. Where would we be without them?"

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Mass murder of peaceful demonstrating students in Mexico City.

Amos Vogel organizes the Grove Press Film Festival.

La Noire de... (Ousmane Sembene)

concerning God. Amos Vogel: "The proposed duration of the film is infinite, for greater veracity. The film thereby becomes a living monument to the dilemma of God, viewable by successive generations. Particular seats could be reserved to individual family groups for several centuries ahead. As the simple experience of attending the film becomes habitual, hereditary and an object of anticipatory family discussion, the screening begins to partake of a rite and the cinema finally becomes transformed into a temple, though not necessarily a home of worship."

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Dušan Makavejev films WR: Mysteries of the Organism and dedicates the corresponding publication to Amos Vogel.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel launches the Annenberg Cinematheque at the University of Pennsylvania.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Military coup in Chile.

Salvador Allende 1972

The fourth Arab-Israeli war in the context of the Middle East conflict.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel publishes his groundbreaking work: "The power of the image, our fear of it, the thrill that pulls us toward it, is real. Short of closing one's eyes – in cinema, a difficult and unprecedented act – there is no defense against it."

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

US President Nixon resigns as a result of the scandal.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Professor of Visual Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Amos Vogel: "I enjoyed very much the teaching experience where, suddenly, instead of adressing 60.000 people through a festival, just showing films, I would, on a micro-level, get to a few people, but on a deeper level then, because I was able to influence and interest them in what film was all about: the visuals, the editing, the sound track, the ideological and political agendas hidden in the narrative, etc."

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Fall of the Somoza regime by the FSNL.

Women in militia, Nicaragua 1983.

The brutal repression by the military regime drives the opposition into armed resistance.

Guerrilla fighter in the Salvadoran civil war. (Photo: El Museo de la Palabra e  Imagen in San Salvador)

In Central Park John Lennon gets shot in the back.

John Lennon and Amos Vogel

Amos Vogel: "One rainy afternoon, the young man, fatigued by his exertions to find common ground with his grandfather, indulgently reopened the ancient subject. It was a magnificent, terrifying one, sure to lead the other into lengthy reveries of horror, its shattering details recounted with precision. Kindly, indifferently, he asked the old man one again about his years in the camps."

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

makes Fitzcarraldo.

Werner Herzog and Amos Vogel

Amos Vogel: "It is a tribute to the organizers of the Festival that it survived at all; I had not been sure of this and am glad that I was wrong. Its continuing achievements cannot be denied."

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel: "You see, he continued, the idea behind this library is an extremely simple one. One might even say it is shattering in its simplicity. It is a library dedicated to memory, or rather to avoidance by means of memory. Yet it is entirely unlike customary libraries. Here we deal in absence, in lack and in gaps, and their elimination by logical means. Have a seat, won't you?"

Annotiertes Exemplar in der Amos Vogel Library

US President Reagan takes responsibility for the scandal.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The "war of stones" is a continuing violent clash between Palestinians and the Israeli army.

Gaza 1987

under the growing pressure of the GDR population demanding freedom.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Emeritus of the University of Philadelphia. Amos Vogel: "There was a law that at age seventy you had to retire. I would not have retired then. That was in 1990. And there is no longer such a law!"

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The Operation Desert Storm attacks targets in Iraq.

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel on the occasion of the retrospective Departure into Uncertainty in the context of the Viennale 1993: "I would like to offer eleven succinct conclusions I have come to at age 72, based on what the Nazis – hard taskmasters – taught me. […]
1. Don’t trust the state. We all believe, almost automatically, that the state exists to protect us. I found out that it can also exist to exterminate us. […]
2. Don’t trust the police. One day in 1938, I watched the Vienna police brutally beat illegal Nazis demonstrating on the Ringstrasse for Hitler. On the next day and on the same spot, I watched the very same police brutally beat anti-Nazis demonstrating against Hitler. Nothing had changed except the political situation. Thus I discovered that the police has no principles. It is merely a tool of whatever government is in power. For a young person to see this 180 degree flip-flop was immensely educational.
3. Fascism is not limited to Germany. It’s not in the Germans’ genes. Potentially, it can exist anywhere. This makes the task of combating fascism larger.[…]"

Retrospective Departure into Uncertainty, Viennale 1993

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) coordinates an indigenous uprising in the state of Chiapas, Mexico.

Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico.

even if it kills you. Amos Vogel's account on Departure into Uncertainty at Viennale 93 in Film Comment March-April 1994: "This mournful, late-in-the-day tribute to Austria's enormous cultural and human losses at the hand of its indigenous amateur painter featured a scintillating and ghostly parade of famous old films and old exiles."

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

is elected president of South Africa; end of apartheid.

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The story of an expulsion. A documentary by Egon Humer in collaboration with Amos Vogel.

Amos Vogelbaum 1938.

Amos Vogel: "I know that while in Vienna, I read extensively. And what did I read? Not only German literature - Goethe, Heine, Mann, so many others… but also, perhaps primarily, Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner… in German of course. Many, many more than that - for instance, French authors, Barbusse, Rolland, Gide, de Maupassant… also other European writers. Not Austrian. So, I had access to all that literature…"

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Amos Vogel: "After all, what is the purpose of avant-garde cinema? Advancing the art of cinema in terms of new forms, new ways of expression, etc. etc., new types of narratives or the absence of narratives."

Filmstill: Stan Brakhage, Song 23 Part 1 (1978)

Signing of the peace treaty after 36 years of civil war.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

Alexander Horwath in the foreword of the German edition: "Instead of a hermetic 'philosophy of cinema', film as a subversive art form is therefore much more of a very personal chamber of curiosities and can be read like a film - an 'over-film' about films".

Amos Vogel and Alexander Horwath (1993)

'Al-Aqsa-Intifada' after the failure of the Oslo peace process.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

A series of four coordinated terrorist attacks against the United States.

Annotated copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The war in Afghanistan is the longest war in US history.

Afghanistan

Invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition.

Copy in the Amos Vogel Library.

The Austrian Film Museum is organising the series Cinema against Taboos. Film and the "Sexual Liberation", 1963-1976 as a homage to Amos Vogel.

Tura Satana in Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Amos Vogel: "But there is someone else I want to pay tribute to before we bring this to an end: Marcia, my wife for almost fifty years now. From the very beginning, in all my endeavors, she has been my collaborator, my colleague, my comrade-in-arms who fully shared in the labors, the rewards, the heartaches of my projects, and this was equally true of my Lincoln center years. She shared her wisdom with me, and i had her support and guidance and acumen throughout all these years."

Marcia and Amos Vogel

A series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions spreading across much of the Islamic world.

Arab Spring

A multi-sided civil war against the Ba'athist Syrian Arab Republic.

Aleppo

The Austrian Film Museum celebrates the 90th birthday of Amos Vogel.

Martin Scorsese in Amos Vogel's obituary: "If you're looking for the origins of film culture in America, look no further than Amos Vogel. Amos opened the doors to every possibility in film viewing, film exhibition, film curating, film appreciation. He was also unfailingly generous, encouraging and supportive of so many young filmmakers, including me when I was just starting to make my first pictures. No doubt about it – the man was a giant."

Amos Vogel