An Interview with Amos Vogel
- An Interview with Amos Vogel
I interviewed Vogel in February and March 1983. An addendum was recorded in September of 1995.
Tell me about your background, especially as it relates to film. Were you involved with film before you got to New York?
I lived in Vienna from the beginning of my life (in 1921) until age seventeen. At age seven or so, I got a laterna magica, complete with color slides—just like Ingmar Bergman. I was entranced. Later (I must have been ten or eleven) my father bought me a home movie projector, 9.5mm. It came from France. It was handcranked, not motorized. With that projector came not only the ability to make and show home movies—my father filmed family trips and so on—but also the possibility of buying films available in 9.5mm: Krazy Kat and Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chase, Chaplin. I enjoyed running the comedies backward as well—the magic of transforming, subverting reality.
It seems to me that at a very young age I was already an avid movie goer. I must have been, because I remember many films that I must have seen in Vienna, judging from the way the dates work out. I went to see a lot of American films as a kid, the typical Hollywood exports. I was also able to see not only Austrian films, but German films. We’re talking about the period prior to 1938, so that included films made during the Nazi period, not just the German films of the late twenties or early thirties.
Furthermore, there was a film society in Vienna. It’s hard for me to believe, but I must have joined at around the age of twelve or thirteen. The programs were held in a beautiful theater at the Urania, a miniature Lincoln Center in Vienna. There must have been five hundred to a thousand members per [End Page 49] performance. And I remember all the films I saw there, and I saw quite a few: early German cinema, Russian cinema (well, in 1934, it became illegal to show Russian films, but I did see Russian films prior to that, so that must have been even prior to age thirteen). One film I remember specifically and very strongly is Night Mail [1936], the collaboration of Harry Watt, Basil Wright and, on the sound, W.H. Auden, Cavalcanti, and Benjamin Britten. The whole notion of documentary became important to me because of that film. And simultaneously I realized that this was really a poetic film, and I was amazed that such a boring subject—the workings of the British mail system—could be made interesting. Wright’s Song of Ceylon [1934] was also tremendously important to me.
Did the film society show a variety of kinds of film?
They showed mostly feature-length films, but they would accompany the feature with one or two offbeat shorts, not available in regular theaters. I don’t remember any “social” aspects to that film society, and I have no recollection of who organized and ran it. I was a kid, and I went on my own. I guess I was only interested in the films. I enjoyed going to the movies almost as much as reading books. I read extensively: American, British, and French literature in translation—Dreiser, Dos Passos, Sinclair, Twain, Whitman, Wells, Walpole, Sinclair Lewis, Gide, Zola...—and German literature, in the original.
When did you leave Vienna?
In the fall of 1938, six months after Hitler took over Austria. I’ll never forget what I experienced during those six months. I was very lucky to be able to leave. If I had waited, undoubtedly I would be dead by now. It was very traumatic and has stayed with me all my life.
Did you have any money when you got here?
No. Whatever money we did have in Vienna (my father was a lawyer and my mother a teacher—they couldn’t get those jobs here) was taken by the Nazis. We even had to leave Europe on a German ship so they would get the [End Page 50] money for the...
