As the founder and sole employee of Film Noir Cinema, Will Malitek appears to be the last movie rental company left in New York City.
As his industry collapsed, Mr. Malitec. Film Noir started in 2005 as a walk-in closet of hidden DVDs shot in a Brooklyn commercial style. In 2017, it became a spacious movie den and movie memorabilia coupled with a 54-seat movie theater.
Malitek, 55, who has worked in New York’s movie rental business for more than 20 years, maintains a way of life that faded with the closure of rental and record stores. He is the shop window scientist, the working-class aesthete, the connoisseur whose respect must be earned, but also the enthusiast whose recommendations can change your life.
A review of five lists published between 2014 and 2018 of the remaining movie rental places in New York City indicates that all lists are closed except Film Noir. The lower Manhattan branch of Alamo Drafthouse, a small chain of theaters, now rents out, but does not employ a movie rental company.
On a recent afternoon at Film Noir, which is located in the traditional Polish section of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Mr. Malitek found a plastic container of borscht and considered the harrowing quality of his store: no furniture, no digital gadgets, just a niche of movie posters (like one for the 1984 black superhero comedy “The Toxic Avenger”) and wooden shelves with DVDs.
“I try to keep it as old-fashioned as possible,” he said, “so when people are here, they feel like they’re in another world.”
Catherine Curtin, an actress who grew up in New York and recently visited Film Noir for the first time, said it reminded her of nothing more than the now-forgotten arthouse theaters of her childhood, like the old Thalia of the Upper West Side. , which closed in 1987.
Whether Film Noir is an emanation from the past or an alternate dimension in its own right, most who get into it come across as noble and somewhat inexplicable.
“I’d say, ‘Do you have ‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’?” Jess Magee, a filmmaker and one-time regular tenant, recalled in a phone interview. “He would say, ‘Come back tomorrow, 2 o’clock.'”
Regardless of the ambiguity of the request, Ms. Magee would return to find Mr. Malitek with a DVD, a sleeve, and a photocopied-looking DVD sleeve.
How did he do it?
“I didn’t ask too many questions,” Mrs. Magee said.
The cinema’s programming seems designed to baffle the audience. Events include “Fear Noir”, which is identified in the schedule only as “a collection of animated shorts to create a total Fear Noir in your mind” and “Cult Cinema”, or “a night of pure cinematic madness dedicated to to the most obscure movies ever made.”
In addition to a few new indie films like the haunting “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” films that have recently been on Film Noir’s calendar include “Tomato,” “Paradise” and “DE” — all listed without explanation of the plot. or any identification of the director, the actors and the year of release.
Mr. Malitek doesn’t care if a movie is likeable; he wants it to shock, and therefore be remembered, and he thinks the reaction can be amplified by shrouding the film in mystery.
His taste reflects his style. Contemporary American mass-market films are “propaganda,” he said; the internet “destroyed art.” But in underground, old and foreign cinema, Mr Malitek finds the authenticity he associates with the macabre.
He likes Japanese movies the most. “They don’t have those ridiculous happy endings,” he said. “They speak to life.”
Malitek gives his own theater an enigmatic motto: “Here at Film Noir Cinema we bring darkness to the light, not light to darkness.”
He thinks his customers are a bit shady himself.
Mitch Horowitz, a historian of alternative spirituality, has spent three years attending Film Noir, which he calls “a little jewel box of the occult and the dark side.” The theater shows, he said, “certain horror classics or martial arts classics that you just don’t see anywhere else, including things you can’t find on streaming services.”
mr. Horowitz has become so close to Mr. Malitek that last month he started hosting his own festival in Film Noir called ‘Chamber of HORRORwitz’.
But during a telephone interview, Mr. Horowitz was shocked to realize that he did not know Mr. Malitek’s last name. They communicate primarily through impromptu visits and handshake agreements.
Jason Grisell, an actor, recording artist and regular Film Noir, said he appreciates the personal qualities of Mr. Malitek cherishes those who make such half-intimate, half-aloof relationships possible.
“In a culture based on overexposure, it’s a disappearing good,” said Mr. Grisell. “Mysticism.”
‘It’s just this guy’
Malitek was born in 1966 in the port city of Gdansk. “There was nothing in the stores except vinegar,” Malitek said. He found another world on Polish TV’s Channel 2, which featured American films like ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and ‘Touch of Evil’.
Malitek had two childhood dreams: to open his own cinema and move to the United States.
He saved for bribes needed to get a passport. When he got one, at age 23, Mr. Malitek was gone within 48 hours. He used East Berlin as a starting point for the other side of the Iron Curtain and soon made his way to New York.
Learning about movies had also taken on an entrepreneurial and rule-breaking spirit. In Gdansk, Mr Malitek was said to visit a flea market where dealers hid censored VHS tapes in backpacks and under tables. If you saw the secret police, you had to tip everyone by whistling. During raids, whistles filled the market.
These days, Mr. Malitek sometimes answers questions about himself as if he were being interrogated by one of those undercover cops.
Before opening the first rental version of Film Noir (also based in Greenpoint), Mr. Malitek in the industry in a place in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. “From obscure, sick, perverted porn to Hollywood titles – everything was there,” he said. Nevertheless, Mr. Malitek, despite having worked in this shop for five years, he can’t remember the name.
Malitek answers general questions about Film Noir – a large part of his income comes from events hosted in the cinema, for example – but at one point he tends to answer, “I don’t want to talk about money.”
Kier-La Janisse, the founder of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, a film scholarship group that uses Film Noir as its New York venue, described the theater as noisy well-suited for discussions of horror. Two open lamps dimly illuminate the teachers, leaving darkness around them, as if telling a ghost story. And, says Mrs. Janisse, the building used to house a funeral home.
An average screening at Film Noir draws a crowd of just a handful, all first-time visitors looking for an unusual night out.
The evening of May 5 was typical: five young Brooklyn newcomers showed up to a night billed only as a “movie club” in which Mr. Malitek performed the Baroque Japanese noir “I, the Executioner” (1968).
Not only does it show rape and murder, but also a serial campaign of rapes and murders by a man against a group of women in retaliation for raping a young boy (who, of course, also commits suicide).
The group generally agreed that the surprise display had shockingly offended the enlightenment and sensibilities of 21st century liberal progressivism.
Can they imagine returning to Film Noir?
“Frankly,” said Molly Walls, a 27-year-old book editor, “yes.”
mr. Malitek prefers bending the minds of a few to entertaining the many.
Here lies the real mystery of Film Noir: that a place that presents itself as a company that caters to the public is actually the owner’s fantasy world.
mr. Malitek designed the theater himself. Thanks to the income from private events, his whims determine the programming. He avoids checking the tents of New York’s other independent movie theaters because he doesn’t want to be influenced by outside forces.
He shows up at Film Noir whenever he wants. He doesn’t answer his phone and email very often – you head to Greenpoint if you really want to talk to him. He rewards the Film Noir faithful with the fruits of his learning.
“I don’t like recommending movies to people I don’t know,” said Mr. Malitec. “You have to know the taste of a person.”
All this makes Film Noir underground, even by the standards of New York’s underground film scene.
Sean Price Williams is a cinematographer and director who worked at the flagship location of Kim’s video library in St. Marks Place, the former headquarters of underground film in New York, and who now hosts his own unofficial film screenings at Kraine Theater and Roxy Cinema in Manhattan. Still, Mr Williams said that although he has attended Film Noir, he had never seen a film there.
“The smaller his audience, the cooler and purer it makes him,” said Mr Williams. “It’s just this guy — it’s his personal collection, it’s his personal taste.”
Guide to the obscure
Malitek has established that taste for 25 years by watching at least one movie almost every day. He has read hundreds of books on film and studied encyclopedias as esoteric as “The Definitive Guide to Italian Sex and Horror Movies.” As a final rental agent, he is arguably the most knowledgeable movie suggestion in New York, which is also open to every member of the public.
If you tell him you’re interested in the 1982 horror film ‘Manhattan Baby’ by Italian director Lucio Fulci, he’ll beg you to watch Mr. Fulci to see. If you happen to mention that you loved “Le Samouraï”, the 1967 noir thriller by French director Jean-Pierre Melville, on your next visit he will have another French film of the same style on hand. If you enjoyed the 2010 Jason Statham and 50 Cent vehicle “13”, Mr. Malitek give you “13 Tzameti”, the mid-2000s Georgian-French film it was based on.
mr. Grisell, the regular Film Noir, once talked to Mr. Malitek on “The Denial of Death,” a 1973 book that explores cultural attitudes toward morality. Malitek suggested to Mr. Grisell to watch a series of Eastern European films, Mr. Grisell said, and in them he discovered a view of death – one with “roughness and aggressiveness but also spiritual qualities” – that seemed new to him.
Mr Grisell was hesitant to talk to a journalist about Film Noir for fear it would become “too popular”, he said. “It would risk losing its freedom and ability to express enthusiasm because I think commerce suppresses that at some point.”
It would indeed be an honor to be on the receiving end of Mr. Malitek’s special kind of enthusiasm, but he would hate it if it felt too pleasant.
A customer returned a film on a sunny afternoon in May. “It’s not much laughed at,” he noted.
“It’s Czech,” Mr Malitek replied.
What was the movie – a bloody but profoundly lesser classic?
The erudite recommender became the cryptic film noir character. mr. Malitek did not mention any names.
The movie was just “something weird,” he said. “That’s exactly what this place is all about.”
