Leonard Quart is Professor Emeritus of Cinema — CUNY and COSI; Contributing Editor, Cineaste; Columnist for Berkshire Eagle; and co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945 —4th Edition (Praeger).
As always, the city engages my modest powers of seeing and noticing. During the last week or so, I have been trying to look more closely at the people I encounter on my walks, from the window of a bus, and while sitting in various parks.
Sometimes I conjure up images of good friends who have died, the number mounting with each passing year, and the sense of loss never quite disappearing. Other times I recall memories of pleasurable—even exhilarating—times my wife and I spent walking the streets and parks and sitting in pubs and cafes of London and Paris.
On March 31, my wife and I and an old friend/colleague decided we needed to take part in a protest rally organized by my union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), and the Cross-Union Organizing Committee at City Hall.
It’s hard to be cool and stoical about Chicago’s crime problem. So far in 2023, more than 70 people have been killed. That follows a surge of gun violence during the pandemic when more than 800 people were killed in 2021, and nearly 700 in 2022.
Kureishi’s work was usually committed to an anarchic, impulsive sexual life, the enemy being bourgeois respectability and orthodoxy of any sort. My thoughts have centered on him because, while on holiday in Rome in December, Kureishi fainted and had a severe fall on his head.
The college students I observe in my favorite cafe in New York City make me feel that life the world after me will see the survival of pockets of decency, despite all the murderous lunacy and political reaction that often feels pre-eminent in our public world.
Aging and the pandemic years have cut into most of the activities I once engaged in, and since my walking is impaired, I especially do much less flaneuring these days. But, at times, I reflect on the nature of life from a seat at a café table or from the vantage point of a park bench.
One always hopes that group identity politics, whose historical and political reasons for being are obvious, are not the final goal of a minority group, but part of the process of ultimately committing to a politics that has a larger and more inclusive agenda.
Memories are a way of coping with difficult personal and political times. I have just skimmed the surface here, so I hope to resurrect other moments in my life soon.
As I prepare to return to New York in September, my thoughts have returned to the city. At the moment, I want to focus on some of the positives of my roiling, problematic, and sometimes exhilarating city.
At the moment, I am looking backward as much as I am looking forward. It’s much easier for me to look at the past than at a future that feels more and more bleak.
Auteur Marco Bellochio's "Marx Can Wait," a film that captures the despair of a family tragedy from which creator and his siblings can’t escape, opens July 15.
