Ralph Arlyck explores aging and death in intimately personal I Like It Here
I LIKE IT HERE (Ralph Arlyck, 2022)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
August 23-29
212-966-4510
www.dctvny.org
timedexposures.com
“I wanna stay here forever,” a young boy says in his grandfather’s latest documentary, I Like It Here. But as that grandfather, Ralph Arlyck, points out throughout the film, life comes to an end for us all.
Made over the course of several years, I Like It Here is a wistful, painfully honest exploration of aging and death, written, directed, photographed, and narrated by Arlyck, who was born in Brooklyn in 1940 and raised in Suffern, New York. It started out as a documentary about Arlyck’s upstate neighbor, Erno Szemes, an elderly hermit from Hungary, but the gruff Erno decided he didn’t want to share his life in front of a camera.
The project then morphed into a deeply personal story about facing the end, as Arlyck, whose previous films include 1968’s Natural Habitat, 1980’s An Acquired Taste, 1989’s Current Events, and 2004’s Following Sean, visits friends, lovers, and colleagues from his past, some of whom he hasn’t seen in more than half a century or more, while spending time with his wife, children, and grandchildren. In addition, he speaks with unique strangers he meets along his journey.
“I’m wondering how much my friends are thinking about the upcoming end of the days we’re all walking through, about the absolute finality of what will soon happen,” Arlyck says.
He encounters an Iranian man named Homer attempting to cheat death by walking along the side of a road and pulling a tire connected to his body by a chain. Fellow filmmaker Jack Baran is boisterous about life even though he has suffered two major losses. Arlyck visits his first serious girlfriend, writer Linda Chase; his Colgate buddy Mel Watkins; nonagenarian ski instructor Lou Ambrico and his wife, Pat; graveyard caretaker Jackie Szatko; childless artist couple Harry Roseman and Catherine Murphy; Upstate Films cofounder Steve Leiber; filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker; and therapist Terry Antman. Ralph and his wife, Elisabeth Cardonne, return to their old campus house at Vassar, which is in danger of being torn down, and travel to Paris, where they are surrounded by youth.
Arlyck has the unique skill of being able to get people to share intimate moments from their lives, often with humor. As Leiber laughs while detailing his heart attack, Arlyck tells us, “As I’m questioning him, it strikes me that documentary filmmaking is almost as invasive as the quadruple bypass he had.” At various times, Erno, Elisabeth, and a neurologist ask Arlyck to turn off the camera, but it seems to be infused into his very being, part of his body. He just cannot stop filming.
Despite dealing with numerous types of severe illness and death, I Like It Here is a lovely and poignant record of one man taking stock before he dies. Editor Emmet Dotan weaves in archival footage, clips from some of Arlyck’s films, and, in the second half, many scenes, old and new, of the director enjoying time with his family, from his parents to his grandkids. The title is somewhat misleading; at one point, Arlyck declares, “I love it here. Maintaining it is a bitch, but I must like that too.” He’s talking about more than just his upstate farm as he contemplates being put out to pasture.
Spoiler alert: I Like It Here runs August 23–29 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with Arlyck, who is very much still alive, participating in five Q&As opening weekend, joined by Dotan at two and moderated by Alan Berliner, Kent Jones, Gabrielle Glaser, Phillip Lopate, and Chloé Trayner.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]