2021 marks the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. As part of its centenary celebrations this fall, the NYFF inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. 

For the first edition, NYFF welcomed Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra, known for singular and transgressive films like The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté. An avowed fan of Vogel, Serra also wrote the foreword for the French edition of Film as a Subversive Art. Serra’s original lecture was followed by a conversation with NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim, and is published here for the first time.

We hope you enjoy the lecture. And don’t miss our previous podcast, a roundtable discussion on the extraordinary life and work of Amos Vogel, featuring programmers and writers Richard Peña, Tom Waibel, and Edo Choi.