New York Film Festival
Working with the leadership of Lincoln Center, Amos Vogel and the British Film Institute’s Richard Roud co-founded the New York Film Festival in 1962. The first festival took place in September 1963. Vogel left Lincoln Center and the New York Film Festival in 1968, after collaborating with Roud to program and produce the first five years of the festival.
During this period, the festival showed between twenty and thirty new feature films each year. The main program screened at Lincoln Center’s 2600-seat Philharmonic Hall, and it included films selected from other major festivals, like Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. The staff also produced special film events, with topics like American independent films or documentary. The New York Film Festival was quickly established as a major venue for the U.S. premieres of notable new films from around the world, with European art cinema represented most frequently at this time. As seen in the sample documents below, Vogel worked to balance the emphasis on international films with special events that highlighted New York’s growing independent film culture.
