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Above: 1973 New York Film Festival poster designed by Niki de Saint Phalle.The 61st edition of the New York Film Festival, which opens tonight, has 32 films in its Main Slate, fifteen films in its Spotlight section, ten films and seven collections of shorts in the Currents sidebar, and eleven revivals. That's over 60 feature films. Fifty years ago, in 1973, the 11th edition of the festival had just eighteen feature films and nineteen shorts. Just like this year’s opener—Todd Haynes’s May December—1973’s opening night film, François Truffaut’s Day for Night, had premiered four months earlier at the Cannes Film Festival. And as with this year’s festival, the 1973 edition opened, fifty years and one day ago exactly, in the shadow of an artists' strike. Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians had been picketing the New York Philharmonic outside Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, where the festival was taking place,...

Above: French grande for Capricious Summer. Artist: F. Dervanore.As the 56th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I wanted to look back half a century to the 6th edition of the festival. Uppermost in everyone’s minds in September 1968 was Czechoslovakia, which, after a brief seven months of liberation known as the Prague Spring, had been invaded less than a month before the festival began, by Warsaw Pact tanks and troops intended to suppress reforms. Whether it had been planned before the Soviet invasion, the 6th New York Film Festival notably opened and closed with Czech films: Jiri Menzel’s Capricious Summer and Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball. It also featured Jan Nemec’s previously banned 1966 film A Report on the Party and the Guests which had been released in ’68 under the reformist president Alexander Dubček and shown as a special event on Czech national...