At a time when print media is on the way out and streaming technology has slashed into box office returns, a band of downtown cinephiles in New York has started a film magazine.
The Metrograph, a biannual publication from the art-house theater of the same name, will make its debut in December. The first issue, priced at $25, includes an in-depth interview with Clint Eastwood, a critical appraisal of the Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, an essay on Filipino action movies and an analysis of a single shot of Maggie Cheung from the 1996 film “Irma Vep.”
“This magazine is meant to be an extension of what happens at Metrograph, and everything about Metrograph is intended to enhance moviegoing and the seductiveness of cinema,” Annabel Brady-Brown, the magazine’s editor, said. “We want this magazine to evoke that feeling you get when you go to Metrograph on a Saturday afternoon with a friend or on a date.”
The photo on the cover — showing the cinematographer Ed Lachman standing next to the director Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1980s — conveys the idea that this is a publication for serious film fans.
The issue features a wide-ranging conversation between Ari Aster, the director of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” and the graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. Steve Martin also interviews the two men behind Deceptive Practices, a consultancy founded by magicians that has advised a number of film productions, including “Ocean’s Thirteen” and “The Prestige.”
The music journalist Sasha Frere-Jones contributed an ode to the synthesizer used by the composer Vangelis for “Blade Runner.” Other contributors include Lucy Sante, Josh Safdie, Sean Price Williams, the writer Yiyun Li, the critic Naomi Fry and the cinematographer Bradford Young.
The artist and film director Amalia Ulman wrote a diarylike dispatch for the issue about her experiences shooting her next film, “Magic Farm,” in rural Argentina.
“Right now it feels like there’s little space for dialogue or criticism in the film world,” Ms. Ulman said. “I think it’s a good idea Metrograph is starting this magazine, if it isn’t just a marketing tool. Any honest writing on filmmaking now is a good thing.”
Magazines no longer sell the way they did in the long-ago days when Premiere, Movieline and American Film filled the racks at newsstands and bookstores. Film Comment, a prestigious journal operated by Film at Lincoln Center, managed to hang on until 2020 as a print entity before morphing into a podcast and digital newsletter. Cinema Scope, a Canadian journal, ended its print operation this year. Cinéaste, an independent quarterly in New York, is an exception, having survived as a print publication for more than 50 years.
The home base for the new entrant in the field is a two-screen theater on the Lower East Side. It opened in 2016, and its bustling operation on Ludlow Street has a bar, a restaurant and a store that sells film books, vintage movie posters and T-shirts labeled “Summer of Rohmer.” The Metrograph also has an independent distribution company and a subscription streaming platform.
“We are aware that we’re blessed to have resources and a following through Metrograph, and that we’re not starting out from zero,” Ms. Brady-Brown said. “People already know what Metrograph stands for.”
At the Metrograph office, in a walk-up building near the cinema, Ms. Brady-Brown presented a digital version of the issue, which had gone to press that day. Seated by her computer, she pointed out some highlights on a screen and described a column, “The Shot That Made Me Gay.”
“The idea is, we ask queer writers and filmmakers about the first movie they watched that gave them an insight into their own sexuality,” she said. For the first one, Jackson Howard, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, wrote about Disney’s 1997 animated musical, “Hercules.”
As evening fell, Ms. Brady-Brown’s three fellow editors arrived to celebrate the magazine’s going to press. The staff includes Kelli Weston and Gabriel Jandali Appel, who work for Metrograph’s online outlet, The Journal, and Nick Pinkerton, a journalist and critic who also wrote the screenplay for last year’s indie hit “The Sweet East.”
Mr. Pinkerton had brought along a bottle of champagne. Before the cork was popped, he considered the new publication.
“The gesture of starting a print magazine probably has some of that same foolhardy energy of Metrograph opening a repertory cinema eight years ago,” he said. “We know that starting an intellectual film journal right now isn’t exactly where the wind is blowing.”
“But I think that, while other film magazines unfortunately have had to shut down,” he continued, “there’s a sense of bravura for us to say: ‘Well, we’re not doing that. We’re starting a magazine of our own.’”
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