Amos Vogel

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Amos Vogel (born 1921 in Vienna, Austria, as Amos Vogelbaum) is among the most influential cineasts of the 20th century. He is best known for his book Film as a Subversive Art (1974), still among the most unorthodox film histories ever published, and as the founder of the New York City avantgarde ciné-club Cinema 16 (1947-1963), where he was the first programmer to present films by Roman Polanski, John Cassavetes, Nagisa Oshima, Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais as well as early and important screenings by American avant-gardists of the time like Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, James Broughton, Kenneth Anger, Sidney Peterson, Bruce Conner, Carmen D'Avino and many others. In 1963, together with Richard Roud, he founded the New York Film Festival, and served as its program director until 1968. In 1973, Vogel started the Annenberg Cinematheque at the University of Pennsylvania and was eventually given a Chair for film studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he taught and lectured for two decades.

He fled Nazism with his parents in 1938 to the American South, where, he noted, the racial divide was analogous to the anti-Semitism he witnessed in Europe.

Vogel participated in the 2003 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren by Martina Kudlácek.