“The cinema is an invention without any future.”
- Louis Lumière

It’s a sad time for cinephiles as film distributor New Yorker Films has called it quits and will no longer be in business. After 43 years of releasing stateside releases of quintessential foreign films—the works of Godard and Bertolucci included—the company has shut its doors after financial mishandling and debts. Meanwhile, Hollywood remains seemingly unscathed, spending another self-masturbatory evening of decadence and navel-gazing at the Academy Awards this past Sunday. This is troubling news as New Yorker Films is one of many distribution companies going under in the past year—Tartan Films, premier distributor of East Asian cinema, had to cease operations last June before being sold off to U.S.-based Palisades Media Group.

Meanwhile, a wealth of worthy foreign films remain absent in American theatres and DVD collections. Sure, with the Internet, it’s not too difficult to order a foreign import and have it delivered to your home, but certain films are not always easily accessible, and without proper subtitles and domestic marketing, foreign cinema doesn’t attain the audience it deserves. Likewise, the audience misses out on some remarkable cinema. American cinephiles deserve better than the soul-crushing releases that the post-Oscar season has to offer. One look at the latest releases listed on Metacritic highlights Fired Up, a teenage comedy about two jocks who join the cheerleading team to get closer to their school’s most beautiful girls, only to find they must prove themselves worthy by helping the team win a cheer competition (whatever).

It’s a tragic, pathetic state of affairs we have in American cinema right now—yes, I admit that there are plenty of American filmmakers doing exceptional work outside of the range of major distributors, but like music and television, mainstream cinema prefers to cater to the lowest common denominator with low-brow releases like Fired Up. If anything, distributors should consider importing quality foreign films during these sluggish times, but again, Americans balk at the prospect of reading, god forbid, subtitles. Sigh.

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Source: http://www.indiewire.com/article/end_of_the_road_for_new_yorker_films_legendary_distributor_of_difficult_cin/