We had to go in already 1971, in 1970 when we began looking for the best possible prints for the films that we had voted into Essential Cinema Repertory, we discovered that many of those films – nobody knows where the originals are, or they're fading or they're shrinking, or we had to go into film, we started film preservation department which became very, very important because until 1970 many films made in the 1930s, 1940s sort of held the color and... but around 1970 already they had reached the point when they had began shrinking, fading, etc. So we had to focus going to immediately into film preservation.
Then when we moved to Wooster Street we had also to go the video was already going strong and we introduced the video department that Shidea Kokobota, I invited her to be the curator of the video. And since we had no more Essential Cinema Repertory committee to select new films to add to the collection, I had to slowly open, but cinema continued, I opened also two programs of new works. Which means I went back into my irresponsible permissiveness which continues today, and today it's more complicated because as the world... cinemas of various countries became very active, but the outlets like in New York or United States practically disappeared so we became also the outlet, the house for various national cinemas around the world for a little sort of surveys and there are no other places for them to do that because those little festivals, many of them, most of them are curated and supported by, you know... We had the Cuban... first Cuban film festival after 30, 40 years and they curated, when we had Filipinos, Filipino or Greece, Greek festivals they... they program because we cannot program them. We cannot curate because we don't know. We are not there; we don't know what's happening there. So we have very open policy and so that there is a great variety, at the house of the... I don't know what.
Ironically, almost that here is a place created for the avant-garde film and it's... we... it's... we who went to the pains of getting the building, renovating that cost us million point seven and we're still paying debts. We're still owing to the banks 250,000. Here we are, the avant-garde helping the commercial cinema and they're not helping us because some of the commercially minded independents are using us and we're helping them, we're nice people, we're open, we're helping. They don't help us but we don't care about that, we help them.
