1940 New York, New York

Ruth Majdrakoff

Born 1931

Manhattan, NY

Interviewed on Friday, September 20th, 2019

by Diego Martell

My first time going to the movies was very memorable– I was around eight years old, and I saw Pinocchio at a public screening hosted by an interesting residential hotel. We lived on Riverside Drive near Columbia University, and the residential hotel was about 10 blocks further south than we were. It had a very beautiful theater. We had a very close family friend whose name was Rudolf Arnheim– he was a psychologist with a doctorate from the University of Berlin, but his real interest was in visual arts. He lived in Rome before he came to America, just as my family did, and he wrote a very prominent book in the field of visual perception, called Art and Visual Perception. But in any case, Rudy was very good friends with my parents, and he decided that it was time my older sister and I get to a film. He lived pretty close to us near Columbia; his building was only a block away, so he took us to see screening of Pinocchio. 

We walked, as we always did, along Riverside Drive– a very pleasant walk. Growing up where we lived, you just walked. The public library was about 15 blocks away from where we lived, and it never would’ve occurred to me to take the bus. The residential hotel had a remarkable theater, and of course I had never seen anything like it– so that was pretty impressive, and the film was simply incredible. I had never been exposed to anything visual since the little slides and ViewMaster our parents had gotten for us when we were little, so the film was an incredible adventure. Sitting in that big theatre felt very exciting and new, surrounded by so many people. Sadly, the most lasting impression for me was fright. It was all so large. The screen was huge for someone like me, who had only ever seen slides before. Rudy of course knew these things, and the reason he had taken me and my sister was because he wanted to see how we would react; I have a feeling we were always a little bit on the back of his mind when he was doing studies of one kind or another. Still, I was happy he was with us because I was very, very frightened by it. That was my first and probably only experience with film when I was that young, mostly because my mother and father weren’t really all that interested in film. When they had the time and opportunity, they were more European: they would be at the opera or symphony. 

That was essentially the first of three phases of three periods of my film life as a child.  Apart from Pinocchio, during the first phase I never really went to the movies because my parents didn’t go. The next phase would be in my young teenage years– I remember going to the movies primarily in the summertime, and the way I remember it, I always associated it with air conditioning, because there really was no air conditioning in Manhattan at the time and the humidity was hot and miserable in the summer. My entire relationship with movies during this second period of my film life as a child revolved around the air conditioning units that many theaters had installed at the time– it had to do with getting cool. I laugh thinking about it now because it was totally irrelevant which film was being shown at the time– we would just get some Cracker Jacks, see what toy we got out of the box, hang out. 

There was one sort of nasty memory I have of this period. I usually would walk to the movies with a friend from the building across the street, and many theaters had a matron whose job it was to watch the children during the films. We were less than fourteen years old, so we had to sit in the children’s section that she patrolled. She was always of a really kind of nasty disposition, whoever she was. I don’t remember matrons being very tender or gentle. Instead they were more like a rather negative force of nature for a child. Of course, our parents were delighted; I don’t think they would’ve let us go alone to the movies without the matron’s presence. Still, that negative was outweighed by the big positive of the air conditioning. It’s funny, for most of this second period I can’t remember the names of any of the theaters I went to, but I can tell you exactly where they are. One was at 110th and Broadway, and there was another one on 101st and Broadway. 

The third phase is more eclectic, more selective, because it began when I started reading film reviews and spending time with very astute friends– we chose our films very carefully. The third phase began around 1955 and continues basically all the way to the present, and now I enjoy reading about films as well as watching them.