'Cinematic Spaces' aims to offer audiences the opportunity to travel to iconic locations through their cinematic representations. Each edition of the series brings together a wide range of films that, viewed collectively, create a vivid and tangible sense of place, ideally one so potent that audiences might feel transported. Our next destination is New York, one of cinema's most iconic and frequently filmed cities.

'Cinematic Spaces: New York' offers a broad overview of New York cinema while introducing different ways of seeing and sensing the city. From classic police procedurals and urban crime films to cult oddities, romantic comedies, supernatural adventures, and concert films, works from different eras and genres come together to create a multi-layered portrait of a single city. Taken together, these films present New York as at once a place where dreams and desires can be realized, a labyrinth in which anxiety and solitude are intensified, and a vast stage where different lives and cultures collide and intersect.

Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) captures the police investigation unfolding through the streets of New York alongside the everyday lives of its citizens, while Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1973) captures the city's dynamism surrounding a Brooklyn bank robbery. Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979) transforms the subway and Coney Island into mythic landscapes, while Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters (1984) portrays a playful New York where supernatural events intrude upon the everyday. Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985) turns Lower Manhattan at night into a surreal labyrinth, while John McTiernan's Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) expands New York City into an expansive stage for action. Spike Lee's 25th Hour (2002) confronts New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and reflects on the city's trauma, while Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005) offers an intimate look at a family coming apart amid everyday life in Brooklyn. Finally, Michel Gondry's Dave Chappelle's Block Party (2005) captures New York's cultural energy through a moment when Black music and community come together.

To introduce audiences to New York’s cinephile culture, we also invited programmers from some of the city's leading repertoire cinemas and film institutions to each select a personal pick of a New York film for the program. Part 1 features wonderful selections from Edo Choi of Metrograph, Goran Topalovic of Subway Cinema, Cristina Cacioppo of Nitehawk Cinema, and Michael Koresky of the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI). These diverse selections – Manfred Kirchheimer's Short Circuit (1973), Robert Warmflash's Death Promise (1977), Susan Seidelman's Smithereens (1982), and Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey (1988) - offer audiences a chance to experience films that New York-based programmers find particularly meaningful while introducing the cinemas and film institutions that actively shape New York’s cinephile culture today. Each programmer has provided an in-depth written commentary on their selection, as well as a recorded introduction that will be shown before the screening. We extend to all of them our deepest gratitude for their participation.

Since the Korean Film Archive had the opportunity to co-organize two major Korean film retrospectives at MoMA and Lincoln Center in New York this year, it felt especially meaningful to bring New York films to Cinematheque KOFA. Through 'Cinematic Spaces: New York', we hope audiences will enjoy experiencing the city's many faces on screen, along with the memories accumulated within its spaces. We invite you to encounter the spatial portrait of New York as it emerges through the overlapping images of familiar landmarks and unfamiliar streets, the bustle of daytime and the unease of night, personal solitude and communal vitality.


[Program Introduction]
9.29 (Tue) 13:30 The Naked City
Young Jin Eric Choi (Cinematheque KOFA Programmer)

[Film Introduction]
Short Circuit (1973) 
10.7 (Wed) 14:00 / 10.14 (Wed) 19:30
Edo Choi (Programmer, Metrograph)

Death Promise (1977)
10.6 (Tue) 13:30 / 10.13 (Tue) 16:00
Goran Topalovic (Programmer, Subway Cinema)

Smithereens (1982)
9.29 (Tue) 16:00 / 10.9 (Fri) 19:00
Cristina Cacioppo (Programmer, Nitehawk Cinema)

Crossing Delancey (1988)
10.2 (Fri) 19:00 / 10.14 (Wed) 17:00
Michael Koresky (Senior Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)


Film at Lincoln Center
Korean Cinema's Celluloid Fever: The 1970s
2026.5.15~5.26

MoMA
Seoul After Dark: Personal Memories of Korean Cinema
2026.2.4~2.25