Biography

With wife Marcia Vogel created the US film society Cinema 16.

Founded the Lincoln Center Film Department. Co-founded the New York Film Festival - was the first director of the film festival, programming there until 1968.

He founded Cinema 16 in 1947 and ran it with his wife, Marcia Vogel, until 1963. He founded the New York Film Festival in 1962. He directed the festival from 1963 to 1968. He was the film department director at Lincoln Center in New York City. He was also a film consultant to Grove Press and National Educational Television. He taught at Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, New York; New York University in New York City; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he was director of the film at the Annenberg Center.

Son of Mathilde Vogelbaum, a teacher; and Samuel Vogelbaum, a lawyer. He began his fascination with film when his father bought him a 9.5 millimeter camera. His family fled the Nazis and spent several months in Cuba before coming to the United States. He was determined to make a life in a Jewish homeland, prepared by living on a kibbutz by studying animal husbandry at the University of Georgia. But by 1941, he had abandoned his belief in Zionism and settled in New York City where he trained as a diamond cutter in the jewelry district.

He is survived by his two sons, Steven Vogel and Loring Vogel and four grandchildren.

The individual brave enough to venture into this troublesome field must be no matter what the size of the audience, an organizer, promoter, publicist, and copyrighter, businessman, public speaker, and artist. A conscientious if not pedantic person versed in mass psychology, he must have roots in his community. And he must know a good film when he sees it.

Films were always selected from the point of view of how they would collide with each other in the minds of the audience.

The commercialization of art and entertainment is a negative factor in human development.

[letter to Stanley Kubrick, 1968]: "2001" is one of the few films that catches, in a very understated way, the ominous irony of present-day trends toward an inhuman society, as well as the metaphysical mystery of the universe, which is as clear to thoughtful atheists as it is to truly religious people. I'm afraid that neither one of these two aspects of your film was grasped by so many of the critics.