Paradise Lost

Comments (0) By Mark Holcomb Thursday, Jun 14 2012

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Miami Beach Cinematheque

1130 Washington Ave.
Miami Beach, FL 33139

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: South Beach

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New York City’s contradictory dedication to both bohemianism and unchecked greed is exposed in photographer Josef Astor’s bleak film Lost Bohemia. Astor was among the artists inhabiting the live-work studios above Carnegie Hall when, in 2007, its corporate and city government masters evicted most of the occupants in order to build office space. Astor documented the process over several months with an inexpensive video camera and incorporated local news coverage of an ineffective resistance effort led by actor John Turturro into his footage. Lost Bohemia’s real power, though, is in Astor’s impromptu interviews with neighbors, including fellow photographer Editta Sherman, singer Jeanne Beauvais, the New York Times’ Bill Cunningham, and most wrenching, Star Szarek, a homeless ballerina and studio squatter. The blinkered privilege Astor betrays by framing the studios’ demolition as a cultural near-apocalypse — plenty of New York artists live and work without institutional support, after all, and Cunningham for one makes a living wage — is forgivable under the circumstances: The majority of the disenfranchised are well into their 70s and 80s, and tossing them out in the last years of their lives amounts to nothing less than a moral crime.
Tue., June 19, 7 p.m., 2012