South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
New York’s last movie clerk knows more than you
As the founder and sole employee of Film Noir Cinema, Will Malitek appears to be the final movie rental clerk left in New York City.
While his industry collapsed, Malitek flourished. Film Noir began in 2005 as a walk-in closet of recondite DVDs angled into a Brooklyn commercial drag. In 2017, it became a spacious den of films and film memorabilia attached to a 54-seat cinema.
Malitek, 55, who has worked in New York movie rentals for more than 20 years, perpetuates a way of life that faded with the closure of rental and record shops. He is the storefront scholar, the working-class aesthete, the connoisseur whose respect must be earned but also the enthusiast whose recommendations might change your life.
A review of five lists published between 2014 and 2018 of New York City’s remaining movie rental places indicates that all except Film Noir have closed.
The lower Manhattan outlet of Alamo Drafthouse, a small chain of theaters, now does rentals, but it does not employ a movie rental clerk.
On a recent afternoon at Film Noir, which is located in the traditionally Polish section of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Malitek nursed a plastic container of borscht and considered the shrinelike quality of his store: no furniture, no digital gizmos, just niche film posters and wooden shelves with DVDs.
“I am trying to keep it as old school as possible,” he said, “so when people are
here they feel like they’re in a different world.”
Catherine Curtin, an actress who grew up in New York and recently visited Film Noir for the first time, said it reminded her of nothing so much as the now-forgotten art house theaters of her youth, like the Upper West Side’s old Thalia, which closed in 1987.
Whether Film Noir is an emanation from the past or an alternate dimension unto
itself, it strikes most who enter it as noble and somewhat inexplicable.
“I’d be like, ‘Do you have ‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’?” Jess Magee, a filmmaker and onetime habitual renter, recalled in a phone interview. “He’d be like, ‘Come back tomorrow, 2 o’clock.’ ”
No matter the obscurity of the request, Magee would return to find Malitek with a DVD, a case and photocopied-looking DVD cover.
How did he do it? “I didn’t ask too many questions,” Magee said.
The cinema’s programming seems designed to bewilder the public. Events include “Fear Noir,” which the schedule identifies only as “a collection of short animated films to create a total Fear Noir in your mind” and “Cult Cinema,” or “a night of sheer cinematic madness dedicated to the most obscure films ever made.”
Alongside a few new indie films like the haunting “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” movies recently on Film Noir’s calendar include “Tomato,” “Paradise” and “D.E.” — all listed without explanation of the plot or any identification of the director, the actors and the year of release.
Malitek does not care if a movie is likable; he wants it to shock, and therefore to be remembered, and he thinks that response can be heightened by shrouding the movie in mystery.
Malitek gives his own theater an enigmatic motto: “Here at Film Noir Cinema, we bring darkness to light, not light to darkness.”
He strikes patrons as a little shadowy himself.
Jason Grisell, an actor, artist and Film Noir regular, said he treasures the personal qualities of Malitek that make such half-intimate, half-distant relationships possible.
“In a culture that’s founded on overexposure, it’s a vanishing commodity,” Grisell said. “Mystique.”
Unusual nights out
Malitek was born in the port city of Gdansk, Poland, in 1966. “There was nothing in the stores except vinegar,” Malitek said. He found another world on Channel 2 of Polish TV, which showed American movies like “The Maltese Falcon” and “Touch of Evil.”
Malitek formed two boyhood dreams: to open his own cinema and to move to the United States.
He saved up for a bribe needed to obtain a passport. When he got one, at the age of 23, Malitek was gone within 48 hours. He used East Berlin as a jumping-off point for the other side of the Iron Curtain and soon made his way to New York.
Before he opened the initial rentals-only version of Film Noir, Malitek’s first job in the industry was at a place in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. “From obscure, sick, perverted porn to Hollywood titles — everything was there,” he said. Yet Malitek, despite working at this store for five years, claims he does not remember its name.
Malitek answers general questions about Film Noir — much of its income comes from events hosted in the cinema, for example — but at a certain point he tends to reply, “I don’t want to talk about money.”
An average screening at Film Noir draws a crowd of just a handful of people, all of them generally first-time visitors seeking an unusual night out.
Here lies the real mystery of Film Noir: that a place presenting itself as a business catering to the public is actually the fantasy world of its owner.
Malitek designed the theater himself. Thanks to the income from private events, his whims dictate the programming. He rewards the Film Noir faithful with the fruits of his learnedness.
“I don’t like to recommend films to people I don’t know,” Malitek said. “You have to know the taste of a person.”
All of this makes Film Noir underground even by the standards of New York’s underground film scene.
Guide to the obscure
Malitek established his taste during 25 years of watching at least one movie almost every day. He has read hundreds of books about film and studied encyclopedias. As the last rental clerk, he may be the most expert suggester of movies in New York who is also accessible to any member of the public.
A customer returned a movie on a sunny afternoon in May. “Not many laughs in that one,” he commented.
“It’s Czech,” Malitek replied.
What was the movie — some bloody but profound lesser classic?
The erudite recommender became the cryptic film noir character. Malitek was not naming names.
The movie was just “something weird,” he said. “That’s exactly what this place is all about.”