The Cat Who Loved Subtitles

Downtown film cognoscenti are planning Saturday to celebrate the life of Max, the tortoise-shell cat who called the Anthology Film Archives home for 17 years. You may be familiar with Felix the Cat, Tom of “Tom and Jerry,” cat-food star Morris the Cat, or even the educational television puppet Henrietta Pussycat, from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” But few non-starring film felines are so fondly loved as Max, who died on September 16 after spending the majority of her life in Anthology’s corners and crevasses. A theater manager, Jed Rapfogel, described her as the soul of the repertory theater. Max will at last receive nine lives of marquee billing, so to speak, at an evening of avant-garde “catcentric” cinema planned in her honor.According to Anthology’s director of collections, Robert Haller, Max would brush by a filmgoer’s pants or perch herself atop a film seat, caring not a whisker for dubbed films. She also typically ignored films with intertitles, the words shown between scenes in old silent films. But she was a fan of subtitled films. “We think she liked the movement of the subtitles, with the words swimming around,” Mr. Haller said.Arnold Plotnick, a veterinary internist and cat specialist, demurred. “I don’t think the cat read the subtitles.” But he did say cats can recognize some images on a television screen and have better hearing than humans.Curiously, Max ignored non-subtitled films unless they were by the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Perhaps she was captivated by the rapid rhythm of Brakhage’s editing and cutting. “There’s no way of really knowing,” Mr. Haller said. A professor at Princeton University, P. Adams Sitney, said Brakhage gradually learned to structure his films around the ways the human eye moves back and forth in scanning and “the speed with which images pass through our mind.”Fittingly, four films by Brakhage, who specialized in personal short films, are scheduled to be screened: “Nightcats” (1956), in which the filmmaker was able, Mr. Sitney said, to derive film poetry from observing the movements and fights of cats at night; “Pasht” (1965), which takes its name from an Egyptian goddess and features an extreme close-up of cat fur; “Cat’s Cradle” (1959), about friendship and latent rivalry between two couples, and “Max” (2002), which was named for a male cat owned by Brakhage. Made while the filmmaker was dying, “Max” is “a kind of homage to the vital force that Brakhage sees in the animal and recognizes as departing from his own body,” Mr. Sitney said. It should be noted that the four films combine for a running time of 23 minutes.Anthology archivist Andrew Lampert recalled once heading down Second Avenue from his college dorm to watch Brakhage’s film “Dog Star Man” — which, incidentally, is not about dogs. During the film, he was astonished to see the famous Anthology cat emerge after rustling the curtain beneath the screen. Mr. Lampert watched Max watch the entire film “without budging an inch, readjusting herself, or taking a nap.” He recalled this was in contrast to his childhood cat, Elliott, who had sometimes watched car races on television but whose interest in them “never lasted longer than a couple minutes before he’d wander out of the room.”In her younger days, when not watching the occasional film, Max would peruse the voluminous collection of metal film canisters in the Anthology vault, or occasionally get locked overnight in the third-floor library. The director of administration and exhibitions, John Mhiripiri, recalled how the staff would sometimes have to corral her back into the office before opening the building to the public. Max also loved sitting in on board meetings. “She would just sprawl there, frequently putting her paws or her tail on the papers being discussed,” Mr. Haller said. At these meetings, the founder of Anthology Film Archives, Jonas Mekas, himself an accomplished director, would sometimes address her. In fact, by the end of her life, Max had spent more years at Anthology than all but two employees — Messrs. Mekas and Haller, the latter of whom occasionally played ping-pong with Max.On Saturday, a film of Max’s burial last October in Mr. Haller’s back yard on Staten Island will be shown. The theater’s staff laid multicolored roses on her burial plot, and Mr. Haller offered a toast in tribute to the cat who first entered Anthology through the back alley. Max would sit by the redbrick building’s front door, never venturing onto the sidewalk, though “she had endless opportunities to do so,” Mr. Haller said.This will not be New York’s first feline film program. In recognition of this, Anthology will also screen a movie called “Intercat ’69” by Pola Chapelle, who hosted a cat film festival in 1969 to raise money for feeding stray cats. The filmmaker recalled that members of the Black Panthers appeared and tried unsuccessfully to ask the audience for money, and she added that felines are always a popular theme for a film event.“Cats can never be boring,” she said.The tribute to Max the cat will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).

The Cat Who Loved Subtitles

The Cat Who Loved Subtitles

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