ALSO SEE: ART | OPERA

Melissa Anderson, Film editor

I’m going to dream big but start small: I’d like to take over the programming at the Quad, the wee fourplex on West 13th Street that can always be relied upon to screen the most juvenile gay cinema and the most pedestrian documentaries—titles that usually vanish after six days before they’re replaced by another crop of mediocre, inconsequential fare. Yet some of my most memorable moviegoing experiences happened at the Quad: seeing Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown in 2001 (Susan Sontag sat behind me, close enough so that I could smell the popcorn on her breath); being the only woman in a crowd full of muscle daddies in 2002 to catch João Pedro Rodrigues’s feral, fetishist O Fantasma. That those two titles screened at the Quad is proof that it can show real commitment to quality; what’s missing is consistency.

Here, in my grandiose vision, is where I come in. No more coming-out narratives (these were already old a decade ago). A six-month hiatus from new documentaries, the genre that’s also glutting venues like Cinema Village and IFC Center. To revamp the Quad’s reputation as the dumping ground for the most puerile homo cinema, I’d mount a complete retrospective of Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman, whose Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels (1994) and La Captive (2000) are landmarks in queer cinema. If this fare sounds ridiculously recondite, Akerman’s popularity was proved to me just this month at a nearly sold-out BAM screening of her three-and-a-half-hour-long Jeanne Dielman (1975), an almost wordless look at the ritualized life of a housewife. New York audiences crave challenging fare: Let’s give them what they want instead of insulting their intelligence and clogging their screens with junk.