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i enjoyed this and hope you will too...
A beloved N.Y. film collection finds a new home in Sicily
By Sophia Hollander
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
NEW YORK: In 1987, when a broad-shouldered Korean immigrant named Yongman
Kim opened a movie rental store on St. Marks Place in the East Village,
he began with 8,000 films, from the odd to the adored.
Kim originally started renting films from the corner of his dry-cleaning
business on Avenue A. But the St. Marks store, which would eventually
occupy an entire scruffy building in the middle of the block, quickly
became a local institution.
The eccentric selections intimidated some patrons. But many others,
enthralled, frequently used the word "adventurous" to describe their
forays through the shelves.
It was an adventure that extended to the assembly of the collection. Over
the years, Kim, now in his late 40s, built a staff that traveled the
world scouring for additional titles - the only way to find obscure films
in the pre-Internet age. By 2008, the collection had swelled to 55,000
eclectic works, many impossible to find anywhere else.
Then the world changed.
The Internet had spawned Netflix, the elimination of late fees and
no-effort rentals. The Internet also distracted consumers, stealing hours
they might once have spent reveling in movies. In other words, the
Internet was a force more powerful than the "Blood Sword of the 99th
Virgin," one of the more esoteric works in the Kim's Video collection.
At the store's peak in the 1990s, more than 200,000 people were listed in
Kim's database, but by the end of last year, only about 1,500 of them
were considered active members. Though customers still harbored an
obsessive affinity for Kim's cult collection, along with its cantankerous
employees and underground spirit, for too many of them, that affection
had faded into a fond memory.
"Kim's was the cutting-edge; that was always the business concept," Kim
said the other day in one of a series of conversations about the fate of
his video collection. "But ironically, I didn't prepare."
Last September, in a move that swept through the Internet at viral speed,
he issued a public challenge. In a notice pasted on a wall inside the
front door, he wrote, "We hope to find a sponsor who can make this
collection available to those who have loved Kim's over the past two
decades." He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone
who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to
update it and make it accessible to Kim's members and others.
Offers poured in. Every one failed on one count or another. Every offer,
that is, except one.
The month that Kim posted his notice, a 42-year-old Italian graphic
designer named Franca Pauli found herself intrigued by an article in La
Repubblica, one of Italy's national newspapers.
According to the report, an ancient town in western Sicily called Salemi
had initiated an unusual renewal project. Founded around the fourth
century B.C., the town achieved brief renown as the site where Giuseppe
Garibaldi first planted the country's tricolored flag in 1860 during his
quest for a unified Italy.
But Salemi's moment of glory lasted only a day before the place slipped
into oblivion. A devastating earthquake in 1968 proved the final blow,
and for decades, the historic center sat abandoned, the town largely
forgotten.
Now, an ambitious effort was under way to reverse the damage.
The town had invited prominent artists and intellectuals to assume
control of the government. An art critic and onetime anarchist named
Vittorio Sgarbi was elected mayor. A prince was put in charge of town
planning, and a performance artist was officially declared alderman to
nothing. The provocative Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, whose ad
campaigns for Benetton included a series on AIDS patients and inmates on
death row, was named alderman of creativity.
Pauli had worked with Toscani years earlier. Now, as president of a small
arts foundation called Clio, an organization devoted, as she put it, to
promoting "culture as an everyday thing, something you consume every
day," she was fascinated by this effort to give artists political power.
Two months later, on Nov. 23, she and her husband, Dario Colombo, a
photographer and a partner in the foundation, packed up their four
children and traveled to Salemi from their home near Venice for a quick,
investigatory vacation.
Sgarbi's renewal program, Progetto Terremoto - Project Earthquake - was
beginning that very day. Already, the town was offering to sell houses in
the historic center for a single euro in exchange for commitments to
restore the buildings within two years. After a dizzying three days of
questions, conversations and exchanged business cards, Pauli returned
home determined to suggest a project of her own.
Within days of her return, an itinerant graduate sociology student named
Glen Hyman arrived in Italy. One of the items on his schedule was dinner
with Pauli, whom he had met through mutual friends.
Hyman, 31, had taught bread-making in China, sailing in Sweden and
English in French villages. A doctoral student in Paris who lived largely
on friends' couches, he was also a fan of Kim's Video, which he had first
encountered some years earlier through a friend at New York University's
film school.
"It was like film heaven, in a way," Hyman said recently by phone from
Brazil, where he was doing field work. "You couldn't make it up."
That evening in late November, over a dinner of stew, homemade bread and
fresh polenta, Pauli shared the story of Salemi with her young visitor,
and he in turn talked about what was happening at Kim's. As he described
the video store's collection and Kim's offer, Pauli listened in
amazement.
"My first thought was like, 'Wow, I might propose that to Salemi,"' Pauli
said. "But really, it was almost like a joke. I really didn't expect this
to come true."
Nevertheless, unable to shake the idea, she e-mailed Kim, eager to gauge
whether he would even consider an offer from Italy.
He would, he told her, but only if the offer were serious. She started
making phone calls.
"It was almost like falling in love with this thing, and I was trying not
to," Pauli said. "You're thinking, 'I'm sure someone from New York will
take the collection,' so I was trying to be really cautious. But I also
thought, maybe this community that's coming about in Salemi could be the
right place after all to understand this, this amazing collection."
As details about the possible arrangement leaked out, some Kim's
customers took the news as a second, more serious blow. Some of them even
confronted Kim in the store and by phone, challenging him to find a way
to keep the movies in the community, or at least on the continent.
And he says he tried. "Until the last minute," Kim said, "I was still
waiting for some decent offer. It was very disappointing."
According to his account, 30 proposals were submitted from throughout the
metropolitan region, but for one reason or another, all fell short. And
slowly he was won over by the enthusiasm of Pauli and the new team in
charge in Salemi.
"When I saw that we could have this collection," said Toscani, director
of the town's Department of Creativity, "I thought it would be a great
adventure, a great project." New Yorkers, he added, "shouldn't be upset
because the movies are going to be in an incredible place; and on top of
seeing Kim's movies, they can see the landscape around Salemi that is
something very special, much better than New York.",
Plans under way include what is described as a Never-ending Festival - a
24-hour projection of up to 10 films at once for the foreseeable future.
The town also plans a relationship with the Venice Biennale, a
collaboration with the University of Palermo and a professional
translation company to subtitle the films, a Web site with a searchable
database and, eventually, the conversion of all Kim's VHS films to DVDs
to ensure their preservation.
Projection spaces and lodging for visitors will be created within a
restored 17th-century Jesuit college, which will house the collection.
The building, which now serves as the town's municipal museum, has a
large inner courtyard perfect for public projections.
Still to be worked out is how much all this will cost - the unofficial
figure for what has happened so far is ?80,000, or about $100,000, though
donated services may have made the actual cost much less - and where the
money will come from. Because everything happened so fast - within two
months - only now are budgets being prepared and sponsorships sought.
"We all generally start projects from an idea, but then we have to
calculate a budget and planning and timing and meetings," Pauli said,
laughing. "This was the opposite. It was all friends and phone calls and
meeting people in a bar."
The team is working on provisions for Kim's members who venture to
Salemi, including free access to films and discounted places to stay. The
team is also exploring the possibility of letting Kim's members continue
to "rent" films, either through mail order or, yes, Internet streaming.
Today, Kim's entire collection is in containers and on its way to Italy,
carefully packed to preserve his unique filing system, and scheduled to
arrive in Palermo by Feb. 26 When the collection reaches Salemi a few
days later, what Pauli described as a "human chain" of people will unload
the cardboard boxes, carry them through the town's narrow streets and
deposit the videos in their new home.
Everyone involved realizes that duplicating in the Old World what existed
in the New will be impossible. "But it's a new door we can open," Pauli
said.
Kim, for his part, lamented the end of the business that he loved, a
business that once allowed him to carve out his own contribution in
America. And he mourns more than the loss of his movies.
"My passion was the introduction to my new community in U.S. of my film
love," he said. "This kind of passion is no longer welcome, due to the
new technology of the Internet."
He looked off into the distance. "The future of the video rental business
is really dying and declining so fast, so fast," he added. "I realized
this thing so late."
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