For much of cinema history, the sight of a big Z slashing across the screen promised the fictional adventures of a sword-wielding caped crusader, but starting in 1988, that big red Z started to stand for something else amongst discerning cinephiles, as real life heroes Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo believed there was a better way forward for the films they loved. Starting Zeitgeist Films out of a small West Village apartment after working a variety of jobs in film distribution, the two have played an outsized role in shaping film culture in the decades since, taking a quality over quantity approach to making room in a crowded American theatrical marketplace for some of the most daring work from around the world. Limiting their acquisitions to a manageable slate of four to five releases a year where each one would receive their undivided attention, a necessity when championing artists such as Bruce Weber (“Let’s Get Lost”), Peter Greenaway (“The Draughtman’s Contract”), Derek Jarman (“Blue”) and Guy Maddin (“Cowards Bend at the Knee”) without deep pockets, the duo has not only had the foresight to see the enduring nature of the films themselves that they release, but the value of time in how much they put into each film and how it has afforded them the sustainability to keep going.
“We noticed that there were companies that started that spent a lot of money on films and would acquire a lot and those companies went out of business extremely quickly,” Gerstman said recently on the occasion of the company’s 35th anniversary. “And we wanted to stay in business and we were able to.”
Their latest milestone has led the Metrograph in New York to pay Zeitgeist a much-deserved month-long tribute with an in-theater 13-film retrospective, kicking off this Friday with Gerstman and Russo introducing a newly spiffed up 4K restoration of “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” Marc Rohemund’s unfortunately all-too-relevant WWII tale of the Munich University student who stood up against the infiltration of Nazi thought at school, and an additional 20 films being made available on the theater’s streaming service Metrograph-At-Home, tilting towards the visionary meta-fiction works from Yvonne Rainer, Atom Egoyan and Jennifer Baichwal that the distributor pushed long before such playful documentaries were in fashion. Guests of the series such as Raoul Peck (“Lumumba”), Christine Vachon (“Poison”) and Astra Taylor (“Examined Life”) reflect the range of Gerstman and Russo’s belief in taking advantage of the big screen’s ability to hold a variety of perspectives, yielding a catalog deep with films where the ordinary becomes extraordinary simply by telling stories that have been overlooked, particularly when it comes to the hidden histories of women and gay life in the 20th century.
With the machinery they’ve built over the years, Gerstman and Russo have celebrated the careers of free-thinking artists and activists as a home to documentary profiles of filmmakers such as Maya Deren (“In the Mirror of Maya Deren”) and Alice Guy Blache (“Be Natural”), photographers Cecil Beaton (“Love Cecil”) and Bill Cunningham (“Bill Cunningham: New York”) and intellectuals Noam Chomsky (“Manufacturing Consent”), Hannah Arendt (“Vita Activa”) and Slavoj Zizek (“The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”) while helping launch so many others, picking up on the early promise in the work of Todd Haynes (“Dottie Got Spanked”), Laura Poitras (“The Oath”), Chaitanya Tamhane (“Court”), Talya Lavie (“Zero Motivation”), and Andrey Zvyagintsev (“Elena”). (Only they could arrange for a documentary to be made about the stop-motion animation maestros the Brothers Quay made by Christopher Nolan, whose first film “Following” they shepherded to theaters.)
As Gerstman and Russo readily acknowledge, the work has only gotten more difficult as time has gone on, but leaning on good taste and institutional knowledge, they have beaten the odds to become a pillar of arthouse cinema and in having such a hand in bringing important voices into those sacred spaces, it was truly an honor to get to speak to them on the eve of their retrospective at the Metrograph, which may be a short distance from their offices, but involves a journey that cuts across multiple countries and decades as they’ve brought global cinema to the city and beyond.
I know outside programmers are involved, but when one of these retrospectives comes around, and you’ve got such an incredible group of films in your collection, is it hard to pick?
Nancy Gerstman: Yeah, it really is. We really love our movies, all of them, and to make a selection is very, very difficult. They just have to be representative of certain stages in our career.
Emily Russo: It was a bit of a collaboration between the Metrograph programmers and Nancy and I. They had a few titles in mind that they wanted to show, and we had a few that we felt should be included — I don’t know if I’ll call them favorites, and of course, a lot got left aside. But the nice thing about the Metrograph retrospective is they’re going to pick up a lot of those titles for their Metrograph At-Home [streaming service], so there’ll be a little mini-Zeitgeist retrospective that will include more of the titles that are not being shown in the theater.
What were the ones you absolutely had to have in there?
Emily Russo: For sure, we wanted to show “Poison.” Todd’s having a moment right now — he’s always having a moment as far as we’re concerned, but right now, we thought that was a must show and as part of his collection of films that he’s released, “Poison” is sometimes overlooked as his first film because it’s really quite different than the rest of them.
I’ve heard he actually brought that film to you rather than you having to pursue it. What was it like having faith in him to give him that backing so early on?
Emily Russo: We had a relationship with Todd from “Superstar, the Karen Carpenter Story,” which we weren’t able to distribute because of rights issues. But we were working with Todd and Christine [Vachon] on the Apparatus program and the short films they were producing, so we knew that he was making “Poison,” and when the film was ready, they wanted to know if we wanted to work [on it] and no questions asked, we were really, really happy to take the film. That was just before it won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance, and it was really because we already had the relationship and it just made sense at that juncture for us to work together on Todd’s feature. And once it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the floodgates really opened.
Has it been a gratifying part of your careers to help establish so many others?
Nancy Gerstman: When we first started, a lot of filmmakers came to us and we established quite a few careers. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that we were the ones that established Christopher Nolan’s career by playing his first film “Following,” and we played films, some of which we really don’t have [the distribution rights to] anymore, but a few of which are playing in the retrospective. Olivier Assayas’ film “Irma Vep,” and Agnes Varda, whose “Gleaners and I” we distributed. That wasn’t establishing her as a filmmaker, but she hadn’t had a new film out in quite a long time and that was a really big film for us and for her.
Emily Russo: And Raoul Peck, for example, had an earlier film, but he wasn’t very well-known [in the States] and “Lumumba” was a very successful film. He’s gone on to do some bigger and more wonderful things too, and Francois Ozon is another — we did his first little mini-feature film too before he became well-known. It’s never been so much that we deliberated over who would be up and coming, as much as just responding always to the work itself. [We’d ask ourselves] how we felt about the work and did we think that this would be something that we could make work [in getting it out to audiences], and responding to their first strong work and no one else getting that at the time, there was no competition for being able to acquire it. There were plenty of films we couldn’t get.
Nancy Gerstman: And then once the people did become famous or they really established their careers more, then sometimes we weren’t able to get the films, and that was not a lot of fun for us, but we accepted it.
Emily Russo: Actually, the Metrograph is showing “Speaking Parts,” one of Atom Egoyan’s earlier films and our catalog is filled with filmmakers like that, who have gone on, and as a distribution company, it wasn’t possible for us to maintain those kinds of distribution relationships with them for their next films. We learned that very, very early on and that was okay with us because our model was what it was, and we were sticking to what was working. So we were happy to just be part of that discovery process and sometimes we did get to distribute later films like [we have with] Guy Maddin. Now we have these 4K restorations that we are getting to re-release — we’re doing that with [his film] “Archangel” in this retrospective and “Sophie Scholl — the Final Days, another wonderful Academy Award-nominated film that has a now 4K restoration and is part of the retrospective as well.
There’s a story out there that this all started with $2000 with a office in the West Village. What was it like to get the business off the ground?
Nancy Gerstman: We didn’t even make an acquisition with that $2,000. We had an apartment that we didn’t actually live in and we bought a fax machine. We didn’t have a computer. We had a typewriter. And it was like very, very cheap to rent this very tiny space in somebody else’s gift business, so we really didn’t have to spend a lot of money.
Emily Russo: Our money went to the phone line, the fax line, and the rent. And we did service deals that first year or two [making] ourselves available to distribute films for filmmakers who could finance [their own] distribution and give us the material to work with, so we worked off of a [flat] service fee and we didn’t benefit from the upside. But we had something coming in that way. Tony Buba was one of those first filmmakers. We did his film, “Lightning Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy” and then Bruce Weber, who I had worked with a little bit on “Broken Noses,” giving him some distribution advice, gave us “Let’s Get Lost,” and that was our really first big opportunity because that film did very well and got an Academy Award nomination in the year of 1989, so that’s how we got started with the $2,000. Then “Poison” was one of our first real acquisitions where we actually had the rights and it wasn’t a service deal.
That became an American indie landmark, but you’ve become one of the most venerable distributors of international films in America as well. Was that always part of the vision?
Nancy Gerstman: We also had many American documentaries, but we went pretty immediately to international films.
Emily Russo: We distributed a Dutch film “Egg” from Danniel Danniel, and we were always very drawn to foreign language films. I had worked at a company that distributed only foreign language films, and Nancy was working at First Run Features before that and then we also found after we did “Poison” that some of the American Indie films we might have liked to have had got somewhat taken up by other companies. We would have loved to have distributed “Slacker,” for example, but Sony bought that and Todd’s next film also went to Sony, so we found the American independent films a little more difficult to acquire than foreign films, frankly.
That seems like it made something like the success of “Nowhere in Africa” possible when you were looking in another direction than most other distributors. What was it like to build momentum for a release like that?
Nancy Gerstman: Yeah, it was really unbelievable. We were very lucky to be offered that film. It was a very woman-oriented movie, and quite a few other companies were offered it as well, but we found that a lot of people who were in companies were not the heads of their companies and even if the women who were the acquisitions people loved the film and adored it, they would bring it back to their male bosses who just didn’t really understand the film. And we did, so it was all to our advantage. And we were incredibly happy not only because it did $6.2 million at the box office, which far surpassed any of our other films, but just because of how meaningful it was.
That took a lot of time to build momentum around the country. Is a long-haul strategy still possible?
Nancy Gerstman: No, you can’t do that. You can’t even come close to doing something like that anymore.
Emily Russo: That film was also distributed in 35 millimeter, so we had to get 30 prints or something, and it was a lot to even keep up with the slow rollout that we did. It’s not the model anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. Those windows have all collapsed.
I’ve still seen you do it, as far as picking out the right locations around the country to get these films to the right audience. What’s it like to put out a movie in this day and age and give it the care that you do?
Emily Russo: Ironically, it needs more care than ever in a way to really try to make it work that way, because you do have so many new obstacles and roadblocks and so many shorter windows to work with. Since 2017, we’ve been working with Kino Lorber doing theatrical releases for titles that we acquire and they do the ancillaries and their windows are now [around] 60 days, so that’s the window that we get to do a theatrical. Some theaters still play the films even after that window is closed, but for the most part, you’ve got to really get your rollout in that period of time and that’s a big change.
Have there been films lately where you get that jolt of excitement where you think “We could do something special with this”?
Nancy Gerstman: When we came to Kino Lorber, our first film that we really went crazy over was “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story,” an absolutely fantastic documentary and it did extremely well for us and that was a must have and must see.
Emily Russo: And fortunately, with our partners Kino Lorber, we were able to acquire it and get that to work both theatrically and then also in ancillaries. That’s why we wanted to include it [in the retrospective]. We did want to include some of the more recent films as well.
Nancy Gerstman: We have another film that’s coming out called “The Old Oak,” Ken Loach’s film and we did [his previous film] “Sorry We Missed You” during COVID when we pivoted towards the way of seeing that virtually, [though] that played in many, many theaters.
The program seems to reflect well the versatility that you’ve had over the years. Is a retrospective like this an interesting moment to take stock of what you’ve actually achieved and also give you the chance to look ahead?
Nancy Gerstman: Yeah, it really is. We try to move ahead, and it’s more difficult to acquire things and to play things. There are a lot of challenges. But we’re so proud of our 35 years. Unbelievably so. We’ve had 10th anniversaries, we’ve had 15th anniversaries, and we had a 20th anniversary at MoMA, which was crazy and really fantastic. But we feel this is really wonderful that Metrograph decided to give this to us.
“Zeitgeist at 35” launches at the Metrograph in New York on November 3rd.