Consider the sum total of all the psychic and social energy expended on whatever today’s social-media pileup happens to be. Now imagine a world where that same gigawattage would have been spent debating the merits and meaning of a film such as L’Avventura or Persona or Last Tango in Paris. That’s what movie-going was like in the 60s and 70s and even into the 80s, when catching the “new Fellini”—or Godard or Altman—was essential if you aspired to be culturally literate. It was the golden era of art-house cinema.
It was also “an epoch that has vanished,” as Werner Herzog writes in his introduction to a new memoir by the late Daniel Talbot. The latter name may not be familiar, but Talbot was a behind-the-scenes hero to several generations of New York City movie-lovers, first as a pioneering repertory-theater owner, later as a distributor of films such as The Marriage of Maria Braun, My Dinner with Andre, Tampopo, and Shoah.
