The Brooklyn Rail

In the office of Elena Rossi-Snook, the collection manager for the Reserve Film and Video of the New York Public Library, my right hand is five inches from a 16mm print of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). My left isn’t far from The Black Stallion (1979). Elena is talking about a patron who has just borrowed Giant (1956), all six reels. It’s not a given that such prints get lended. “On the one hand,” she asks, “how many 16mm prints of Giant are out there? But then, the film prints are not getting any younger sitting on the shelf.”

In addition to being a font of inspiration, knowledge, and care, Elena Rossi-Snook is the NYPL’s connection between people and film. Hers is an art of proximity, of seeing needs and knowing how to bridge gaps in understanding. She speaks generously and generatively. Our conversation touched on the history of educational film as a form, the intersection of film programming and film librarianship, and the distance we maintain from film, physically and psychically. I suspect it could have gone on much longer but there were, as always, films to see and show.

Elena Rossi-Snook: In the twenties, film gets talked about as an educational medium. By World War II, there’s this idea that people can learn so much quicker with film. But alongside all this growing consciousness, there’s no truly usable, library-specific distribution network. So people take the time to advocate and lobby Hollywood, and start to build a groundwork for educational films. And that evolved into a solid workflow protocol. We had the Educational Film Library Association (EFLA), an organization dedicated just to educational film. Through this infrastructure, even libraries outside the film culture metropolis of New York could buy educational films sight-unseen. If it had a blue ribbon from the EFLA, you knew it was going to be dynamic, encourage conversation, literacy, and mindfulness. All of that disappeared practically overnight in the nineties.

Frank Falisi (Rail): Was it VHS? Institutional funding drying up?

Rossi-Snook: It was a bad combination. I’m going to theorize. I’m going to posit that with video distribution—when the format was broadly thought of as home entertainment—the productions themselves got demoted in the public consciousness to just being home entertainment. Therefore, the departments and libraries conformed to the idea that we were only providing home entertainment.

Why have library schools stopped teaching film librarianship? Maybe there’s a shift when it becomes conflated with “media,” where it’s not film, it’s “video” or “DVD” where “media” gets conflated with IT. Maybe school librarians, instead of being taught to purchase films to support curriculum, are now just teaching computer classes. There’s a pivot away from industrial money funding educational film because educational film itself seems to disappear. It’s Reaganomics, video, differing awareness of educational film, how we teach.

And with the centralization of purchasing, it is just another hurdle—the way purchasing gets done these days, film-specific librarians aren’t empowered to purchase, say, First Look (1988), which documents the first ever US exhibit of post-revolutionary Cuban art. How can you understand the world without at least knowing about post-revolutionary Cuban art? How can a three-year-old feel truly seen and heard without Storm De Hirsch and her cine-sonnets? Why are we waiting for some corporate guy to decide what children need?

Rail: Can you talk about the relationship between access and preservation?

Rossi-Snook: I’ve become more adamant about how people think about and talk about the language we use: this is not an archive, it’s a public library collection that does archival work. I love film history. I’m excited by archival work, saving this stuff. I get both sides. But during the shutdown, I realized, I really just want the nature of these kinds of works in the world. I just want to see—in the streaming world—the types of works I know exist on 16mm.

We have a film called Year of the Mountain Goat (1976). It defies commercial viability by today’s standard. It’s about ten minutes long, a beautiful contemplation of this little mountain goat and the phases of the year shot by a poetry student. It’s just this lovely demonstration of life. You can use it with young children, showing them that there’s nothing to fear about growing up. The mountain goat’s growing. We all grow. We all age. Outside of a single commercial appearance, this isn’t a film widely, theatrically available. But libraries bought like, eight prints. If we can put a baboon’s heart into a human, we can figure out a space for the non-theatrical.

Rail: It feels like we as cinephiles often talk about “film culture” without ever considering the public library.

Rossi-Snook: In some ways, I’m really pleased with the state of things in New York. We’ve got young people coming in to watch Jack Smith films! But I am concerned about the direction that we as a society are moving in, to streamline and automate. Film librarianship is not a function that aligns well with streamlining and automating. People want to think in linear ways: if Giant is “special collection” material, this is how the material has to behave, be treated. But that’s how society tries to create a mindless working class. It comes down to this existential quandary: the film print is simultaneously priceless and worth nothing. We cannot replace it. It has a value more precious than rubies. And yet, if we don’t put it in the projector, it has zero value.

Rail: That feels like the crucial difference between librarianship and curation—how do we involve education? And how do we think of questions of access for children?

Rossi-Snook: Our first librarian gave a lecture discussing Scorpio Rising (1963) as an educational film! But then there’s the appeal of something like the Swank library. It’s a very cognizant, very deliberate choice to purchase the Swank license for public programming. Because when a child goes to school and all their friends are talking about Encanto (2021), every child in New York City should be able to participate in that conversation. It’s not for us to decide, it’s to make it accessible.

How do you curate a film series when your oldest patron is three? But then it clicks. I opened with Storm de Hirsch. It made perfect sense: the gaze of the experimental filmmaker often mimics the gaze of the very young child. You’re looking at a snowflake, and then you’re looking at this tree branch and the way it comes out of the ice. There’s something about the cadence of the editing, the bluegrass!

There’s a whole generation of public school children on the Upper West Side who know about film and projection because of our outreach programs. That’s over four-hundred kids. But that’s the only thing that’s preventing people from knowing about these works: accessing them. I have to tell myself that I didn’t fabricate this, that this didn’t come out of my Gen X after-school special cognition. That children’s film series—I would stress, think, am I pushing it too far? I showed this one film, super experimental, Subway (1982), with a soundtrack by The Clash. And I thought it might have been too much for the two year-olds. And then this little tiny person walked—didn’t walk up, was carried over by his caregiver. And he’s like boop boop boop boop. And the caregiver says, “did you understand what he said?” And I said, “no, not at all.” And she said, “he wants to tell you that he loves your films.”

Rail: We’re constantly debating the aliveness of film culture—is it dying? Is it dead? How could it be, if moments like that are still possible?

Rossi-Snook: We have to present media to our public made by members of our public. When I show a film that was made in the Bronx by someone from the Bronx, thus creating a platform for these neighborhoods and these residents to really speak about what it means to be neglected, and when I show that film to a class of kids of color and have them tell me, in 2024, that they never truly understood until now… I’m sorry, you’re going to have to pry the film out of my cold dead hands.

Rail: What are you thinking when you start to think about a library film program?

Rossi-Snook: You show Paris is Burning (1991) because that’s the big title that everyone gravitates towards. But what happens when you open that program with Chromophobia (1968), a 16mm Belgian animation about a rooster fighting fascist soldiers who want to take the color out of the landscape. What does this animation have to do with Paris is Burning? That’s what makes it a library program, because people are now thinking about that question. It’s the cognitive energy that makes sense of disparate things. And then it’s opening a space to talk about what you watch.

Now, I’m mulling over Giant, and Liz Taylor through the lens of a middle-aged woman. And that hits different. You can see that film and close the door on it, or you can turn to your friends and say, I need you to watch Giant. We’ve all been married for a while and tell me about what you think about that last scene. And then the film screening is complete.

It’s like when silent filmmakers used to say that the production wasn’t done until the audience was watching the film, reacting to the film, the score, the projection. Then the film is finished. And the production’s always changing, because maybe the music changes depending on who’s playing piano. A screening is not truly finished until you are conversing about it, working out what it means through dialogue.

Rail: It’s a little like giving filmgoers access to each other.

Rossi-Snook: People want to discuss it! And I’m blessed with New Yorkers. They want to talk about what it meant to them. You’ve got to give them that space, even if it goes a little bit off the rails. I showed Skokie: Rights or Wrong (1980), about a neo-Nazi uprising in Chicago in the late seventies. A really good documentary, an ACLU thing that takes on this little nasty man who wants to have his Nazi parades not in the middle of Chicago, but in Skokie, which was a largely Jewish neighborhood of survivors. Does he have the right to do it? And being from upstate New York, I can’t help but notice that the map of their little Nazi clubhouse satellite offices had a lot of locations in upstate New York—which is where there’s Klan activity today, that flared up in 2016.

So the relationship between this film and this guy, voting patterns in the 2016 election, and Klan activity—I’m just noticing it while talking with the patrons at the screening. And people are bringing up Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, definitely confusing the Nazi Socialist Party with Democratic Socialists—that’s fine, say your piece. And there someone manages to say something about abortion. But there was one woman at the end, and she says, “You know, I just can’t believe that people are born evil. So if this guy is a product of society, maybe we as a community can come together and have an equal and opposite effect on each other.”

Giving people an opportunity to not just think about these things, but articulate them… there are great Americans at our film programs. I’ll hold up a camera—or a projector—and we’ll figure it out. I’ll sit in the audience, I’ll say what I’m thinking. And that’s film criticism, and that’s film culture, and that’s critical thinking, literacy, civic-mindedness. It’s all the things we as an institution hold up.

General information about the NYPL’s Reserve Film and Video Collection is available at https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/lpa/circulating-collections/reserve-film. Patrons can email Elena Rossi-Snook at [email protected] for additional guidance on catalog browsing. Patrons have the opportunity to form their own film clubs/cine salons in the Library’s Film Study Room.