Getting personal at the movies
Date
Location
Sponsors
Admission
Open to the public
RSVP required
$10 | General admission
$25 | Includes a copy of the new issue of Salmagundi Magazine
About the Event
SALMAGUNDI is an international quarterly magazine of politics and the arts, described some years ago by Susan Sontag as “my favorite little magazine.” To celebrate its 61st year of publication SALMAGUNDI is bringing out a fall 2026, 350-page special issue on “Getting Personal at the Movies.” The new issue features deeply personal, memoiristic essays, each inspired by a film and written by many of the country’s leading writers: from Marilynne Robinson to Phillip Lopate.
To launch its special movie issue, the magazine is staging a public event at The Salmagundi Club. A panel of distinguished speakers will “get personal,” talking about their favorite films, about themselves, and also responding to audience questions.
Speakers
Phillip Lopate
The leading proponent of the personal essay and a major American film critic, author of many books include “Portrait of My Body,” “Against Joie De Vivre,” Totally, Tenderly, Ttagically” & “My Affair With Art-House Cinema.”
Ian Buruma
Former Editor of NY Review of Books, New Yorker writer, author of many books including Murder In Amsterdam, Year Zero, The Wages of Guilt, Their Promised Land & others.
Elizabeth Benedict
National Book Award finalist in fiction, author of Writing Sex, Slow Dancing, Safe Conduct, Practice of Deceit, Rewriting Illness, Almost, others.
Pamela Katz
Screenwriter, novelist, teacher of screenwriting at Tisch School of Arts @NYU. Screenwriter for German director Margarethe von Trotta’s films Hannah Arendt, Rosenstrase, The Other Woman.
Robert Boyers
Founder/ Editor of Salmagundi Magazine, author of a dozen books including The Tyranny of Virtue, The Fate of Ideas, Maestros & Monsters (Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner), Excitable Women & Damaged Men.
Ruth Franklin
Ruth Franklin won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017 for her biography, “Shirley
Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life,” which also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society Book Award and
the Plutarch Award. Formerly an editor at THE NEW REPUBLIC Magazine, she was for some
years the regular film critic for the quarterly SALMAGUNDI. Other books by Ruth Franklin
include “A Thousand Darknesses” and “The Many Lives of Anne Frank.”
Brief Excerpts
“I went so far as to provide my therapist with a list of aspects of the film that I suspected might correspond to unresolved psychological issues, some from my childhood.”
— Howard Norman
“What Susan Sontag long ago referred to as the ‘Jewish moral earnestness’ which is a vital, not always welcome aspect of my very being, is barely in play as I watch ‘Claire’s Knee’ and think about why it has always made me happy.”
— Robert Boyers
“What can you say about a movie whose opening shot is a photo of two mostly dressed people fucking in the woods, and the man, on top, still has his hat on?”
— Elizabeth Benedict