"We saved cinema by killing its audience"

When the New York Film Festival championed Structural Film in the 1960s — Michael Snow's Wavelength, Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma — it executed a masterclass in canonization. Those films survived, entered film history books, shaped how serious filmmakers thought about the medium's possibilities. The institution worked perfectly. It failed at everything else. The same critical apparatus that secured those films' legacy in film schools also announced to the general audience that cinema was becoming their concern no longer. That difficulty was the price of seriousness. If you could not pay it, you were not the cinema's reader anymore. Television offered narrative, pleasure, accessibility. The festival offered purity. The audience chose television. By the time cinema realized what had happened, the split was permanent.

This is not nostalgia for populism. Structural Film's formal investigations mattered. They opened genuine possibilities for what moving images could do. The problem was not the films. It was the choice to treat institutional canonization and audience expansion as separate projects, when they have always been inseparable.

NYFF 2026's abstract cinema is doing the same work. Critics at the festival celebrate Bardi and Heil Jupiter! for their formal bravery, their refusal of narrative convention, their mesmerizing opacity. All of this is real. The difficulty is not feigned. But the institutional celebration that follows performs the same function it did sixty years ago: it certifies these films as serious while implicitly certifying their inaccessibility as a feature rather than a problem to be solved. And thus validates the expectation that general audiences will not see them.

The pattern persists because institutions are not built to expand their own reach. They are built to distinguish themselves. Accessibility is institutionally expensive; difficulty is free. A film that requires expertise to appreciate proves that the expertise matters. The festival's job is to exist. The audience's job is to keep up or step aside.

But here is what the pattern obscures: the problem was never formal complexity itself. It was the assumption that formal complexity and genuine communication exist in opposition. A filmmaker can demand rigor and reach simultaneously. Can make work that operates at the level of pure form and offers something to the viewer who comes without training. This requires not less ambition but more: not simplification but clarity about what the work is arguing for. The real test is not whether institutional gatekeepers recognize genius. It is whether the work survives once gatekeeping ends.