Silver Screen Triangle of NY
Trigonometry. For most people, this five-syllable word conjures up memories of a high school teacher in a sweater vest who taught their least favorite subject—or, more appropriately, their most hated.
Who do we have to blame for this horrid subject? Well, a Greek astronomer named Hipparchus. He may have ruined your junior year of high school and obliterated your dream of getting into an Ivy, but he made it onto Raphael’s School of Athens—which means he was a BIG deal. In fact, he’s considered the greatest astronomer of antiquity. But that doesn’t change the fact that he is responsible for you being an Emory grad and not a Yale grad. Such is life.
I, on the other hand, loved trig. I study it to this day. There’s an adventure in trig that’s appealing, but I’m an empathetic person, so I get why most people dreaded it more than a day of In-School Suspension (ISS). Of course, to know about ISS, you had to have been caught smoking in the boys' room, skipping school, or mouthing off to a teacher—of which I was guilty of all three on many occasions.
In-School Suspension was a real drag. You spent the whole day in a walled-off desk that had every swear word carved into it, your teachers gave you a week’s worth of work that had to be completed in a day, and there was absolutely NO talking. And definitely no cigarette smoking. There was a perk, though, but only for the real heathens who had a week of ISS—Kitchen Duty!
After two or three days of playing nice with the PE teachers who ran ISS (which consisted of tackling crossword puzzles and thumbing through Sports Illustrated’s), you got to make chocolate chip cookies in the school kitchen. The lunch ladies, dressed in hairnets and drab-looking clothing, were sympathetic to our plight. My guess is their sons were serving time in ISS too. They were always polite, had a sense of humor, and let us get away with a chew of tobacco. Thank God for the lunch ladies of America.
Anyway, enough about my bad behavior in high school. The point is, I enjoyed trig. I enjoyed studying triangles. Sine, cosine, and tangent were almost as intuitive as knocking out an A+ on an English paper. Anyone remember SohCahToa?
But not all triangles are equal. The Bermuda Triangle seems to be a real son of a bitch for pilots. And the Golden Triangle, in Southeast Asia, is where most of the world’s opium is grown. These places give triangles a bad name. On the other hand, you have what I call the Silver Screen Triangle of New York, where movies reign supreme.
I got into film in 2020. Which, with my personality, means I went all in. My first goal was to watch the American Film Institute Top 100 movies. Then came the Sight & Sound Top 100 (American and International), Scorsese’s Top 39 Foreign Films, Roger Ebert’s Top 10, 100 Greatest Performances of All Time, and every Best Picture at the Academy Awards. I subscribed to the Criterion Channel, which is, without a doubt, THE best ten dollars I spend every month. I dove deep into Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, German Expressionism, Iranian New Wave, Czechoslovak New Wave... the list goes on and on. I logged everything on Letterboxd and continue to do so.
Thank God for streaming services like Criterion, HBO, Prime, and Vudu. Ninety-nine percent of everything you want to see is on one of them. Prior to streaming, even film students had a hard time finding most of these pictures. But there’s a problem with streaming—you’re not in a theater. I don’t care how big your television is, it’s not a movie screen. Movies are meant to be seen in cinemas. As grateful as I am to have seen hundreds of films on my laptop, there’s something missing. In fact, a hell of a lot is missing. So, I see films in theaters as much as possible.
And that gets us to New York. There are a TON of independent theaters that screen the very best cinema has to offer, with the majority inside the Triangle. They include:
Village East by Angelika – 181-189 2nd Avenue, East Village
Anthology Film Archives – 32 2nd Avenue, East Village
Metrograph – 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side
Angelika Film Center – 18 W Houston St, NoHo
Film Forum – 209 W Houston St, SoHo
IFC Center – 323 6th Avenue, Greenwich Village
Jefferson Market Library – 426 6th Avenue, Greenwich Village
QUAD Cinema – 34 W 13th St, Greenwich Village
Cinema Village – 22 E 12th St, Greenwich Village
I should probably address number seven because it is, in fact, a library and not a theater. But I’ve seen Persona there. I don’t care if your local gas station screens Persona, it’s now a serious cinema of sorts. I am a BIG fan of the Jefferson Market Library. HUGE fan.
I’m of the opinion that any city would be thrilled to have one of these theaters, let alone nine. What’s crazier is that I’m not including Walter Reade Theater, Paris Theater, MoMA Theater, and Roxy Cinema because they’re not in the Triangle.
There you go—the single greatest concentration of independent theaters in the country.
