Carte Blanche: Amy Taubin

The Museum of Modern Art is currently showing the Film Series Carte Blanche: Amy Taubin at The Museum of Modern Art from April 27th through May 26th.

Amy Taubin’s brilliant, iconoclastic, and impassioned writing on cinema has spurred delight and dissent in readers of the Soho News, the Village Voice, Artforum, and Film Comment since the 1970s. And when she wasn’t championing then-unknown or willfully ignored filmmakers like Chantal Akerman and Todd Haynes, she was appearing as herself in films by Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow, and Andy Warhol.

Taubin has accepted our invitation to delve into MoMA’s film archives to put together a thrilling, thrumming vision of New York City, the place she has called home her entire life. Inspired in part by the isolation we’ve all experienced over the past three years, and by her own solitary walks throughout the city, Taubin’s selections celebrate a New York of the collective imagination—whether popular, personal, or somewhere in between—starting with a movie she discovered as a high school freshman: Samuel Fuller’s 1953 Pickup on South Street.

She recalls, “When Richard Widmark reaches into Jean Peters’ pocketbook and steals her wallet, I instantly understood in my body and psyche that the subway on which I innocently traveled alone could be an opening into a dangerous, and yes, erotically exciting underworld, rendered even more thrilling on screen by Fuller’s kinetically charged camera movements. Later my involvement with underground film and then with independently made narrative film was similarly fueled by the connection of these movies to my hometown.”