A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO RAHUL HAMID (1970–2022)

Cineaste Editors and NYU Colleagues Recall One of This Magazine’s Most Beloved Staff Members and Good Friends

Cineaste Has Lost a Most Congenial Collaborator
by Gary Crowdus, Cineaste Editor-in-Chief

On October 9, 2022, Rahul Hamid joined me and other co-editors and staff members at an editorial meeting at which we discussed manuscripts and made plans for our then-upcoming Winter 2022 issue. Just weeks later, on November 1, Rahul emailed us to say he had been able to schedule an interview with Todd Field about his new film Tár, which had created quite a stir at the New York Film Festival just a few weeks earlier, so we were all excited to learn that we’d be able to include that topical interview in our Spring 2023 issue. 

Rahul emailed us again on November 3 to report that the interview “went well,” adding that, “I just wanted to let you guys know he said that he had stacks of old copies of Cineaste from his film school days!” It was therefore absolutely devastating to learn, via an email from his wife Ragan the following week, that Rahul had died from a heart attack on the evening of November 14. We all knew that Rahul had been dealing with other health issues for many years, including two kidney transplants several decades apart, but neither he nor we were ever aware of his having heart problems. Of course, as the medical cliché has it, the first symptom of a heart attack is a heart attack. To learn of his death, at the relatively young age of 52, was a shocking experience that reminded all of us of the other clichés about how we all live on a knife’s edge, or how none of us know how long we have. And just like that, completely unexpectedly, all of us at Cineaste lost not only a valuable staff member but also a good friend. As always with such deaths in the family, whether literal or figurative, it’s hard to comprehend that we will not see Rahul’s smiling face at our next editorial meeting.

That’s one quality that everyone on staff who knew Rahul and collaborated with him would agree about. In an all-volunteer work environment such as Cineaste, perhaps the most important factor is the existence of good personal “chemistry” among staff members, a respect for one’s co-workers despite often divergent tastes and opinions. During editorial meetings, Rahul would occasionally point out weaknesses in a manuscript that should be addressed either through editing or a rewrite by the author. More rarely, he would argue strongly for or against specific manuscripts, but I don’t recall ever seeing Rahul become truly angry or upset. In this, he characterized the ideal sort of collegial, congenial personality that is essential for productive collaboration with others. Indeed, he seemed always to have a smile on his face and was quick to crack jokes that amused everyone.

Rahul first joined Cineaste as an Editorial Intern with our Winter 2000 issue, at first helping with Website chores because of his HTML skills, but his increasingly apparent broad knowledge of cinema saw him promoted to Assistant Editor with our Spring 2004 issue, followed by an overdue invitation to join the Editorial Board with our Summer 2009 issue. During those early years, shortly after he completed his MA in Cinema Studies at NYU in 2001, Rahul was working on a PhD dissertation on contemporary Iranian cinema, and so became Cineaste’s “go-to” guy for coverage of Iranian cinema. He conducted excellent feature interviews for us with Mohsen Makhalbaf, Asghar Farhadi, and Bahman Ghobadi, and wrote insightful reviews of the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohammad Rasoulof, Jafar Panahi, and Marjane Satrapi, among others.

But as a professor of film studies at NYU, his cinematic interests and areas of expertise were far more eclectic, and his contributions, whether feature articles or interviews or reviews, ranged widely throughout both foreign and American cinema (a visit to our online Cumulative Index reveals the scores of contributions he made), including, most recently, in our Fall 2022 issue, “Citizen Storyteller: An Interview with Ron Howard,” a discussion with the Academy Award–winning director of films such as Apollo 13 (1995), A Beautiful Mind (2002), and Frost/Nixon (2008) about his sideline in making socially relevant documentaries.

Given the unusual nature of Cineaste as a magazine edited and administered by an unpaid, all-volunteer staff, it’s extraordinarily difficult to find highly qualified people to work with us, while they maintain a full-time job elsewhere to make a living, and hopefully to also enjoy a family life. Indeed, while all of us at Cineaste have lost a valued and irreplaceable editorial colleague, Rahul also left behind his wife Ragan (a former film student herself) and two daughters Oona and Olive, all of whom he loved very much. It is thus even more tragic to realize that Rahul had so much to live for, which prompts yet another cliché—Life is not fair. 

His absence will be felt by anyone who knew him.

Remembering Rahul: Over Fancy Cocktails
by Cynthia Lucia, Member of the Cineaste Editorial Board

I will never forget Rahul’s giggle—it wasn’t a laugh or a guffaw but a giggle, inflected by a little crack in his voice that expressed so much. With that one small sound Rahul’s whole being came to light—his genial joy, easygoing sense of surprise, affable good will, kind-heartedness, and understated wisdom. All of these qualities were a part of the Rahul Hamid I knew and will dearly miss as a part of our Cineaste family.

Rahul loved fancy cocktails, and it was part of his mission to suss out all of the good “lounges” that concocted them—preferably below 14th Street—in Manhattan. Before he married his most wonderful wife Ragan (and possibly before he even had met her) and certainly well before having their two lovely daughters, Oona and Olive, we would meet at a newly discovered spot every few months, with one or several of our Cineaste colleagues. I remember our thumbs down on the drinks at several chosen locations—too twee, too expensive, too watery, or too lacking in the proper punch. We were looking for “just a little more gin in this drink, please?” But still, the fun of being in Rahul’s presence meant everything. We would mildly joke about the details of our many marathon-length Cineaste meetings—sometimes five hours or more!—but all in good humor and expressing the love he and we all felt for the magazine and its mission, as well as for Gary, our editor-in-chief and treasured taskmaster. Rahul helped guide me when I occasionally felt disgruntled about this or that aspect of our operation—a calming presence that, at his memorial, so many of his NYU Gallatin students remarked upon. He became a “good father” to us all, as he most certainly was in all ways to Oona and Olive, whom he adored. 

Rahul was a devoted Cineaste intern during his student days at NYU, and his dedication was so unwavering that he easily earned promotion to Assistant Editor and then to the Editorial Board. It is impossible to catalogue all of Rahul’s outstanding contributions over his more than twenty years at the magazine, except to say what a great pleasure it was for me to work with him as co-editor of our collection, Cineaste on Film Criticism, Programming, and Preservation in the New Millennium (University of Texas Press, 2017). In recent years, when we were an active Editorial Board of only four, Rahul was the one—in addition to Gary, of course—whom we could depend upon to have dutifully, consistently, and carefully read every single manuscript contributed to every single section of the magazine. As we discussed those manuscripts, his insights were, as usual, understated yet incisively invaluable.

To say that we, at Cineaste, will miss our beloved colleague Rahul is, itself, a grave understatement. As Ragan recently has shared, Cineaste was Rahul’s passion. We will deeply miss his passion, his intelligence, and above all, his good-natured giggle.

Remembering Rahul: A Life In (and Out) of the Movies
by Robert Cashill, Member of the Cineaste Editorial Board

It’s grossly unfair to have to reminisce about Rahul Hamid, to think about him in the past tense when so much more should have been ahead of him. At Cineaste we were somewhat conjoined, coming aboard the magazine at about the same time and each of us being married with young children. About ten years ago, our personal lives intersected, when both our daughters attended the same Brooklyn preschool and our families got together for social events. And we celebrated the same markers on Facebook—birthdays, anniversaries, vacations. (I marveled at how easily he and his wife Ragan seemed to get their daughters to and from places like Paris, while I could barely get my kids to New Jersey.)

Cineaste recently had its first quarterly meeting without Rahul and we all missed his collegiality, affability, and warmth. However daunting the problem—and getting our Website up and running, something he was immersed in, presented many a challenge some years back—he was able to solve it, on top of his duties at New York University and family life. When strong opinions were voiced at the sometimes rather cramped tables we gathered around, Rahul could always be counted on to add light rather than more heat to the discussion; when matters took a less serious turn, he was the first to laugh. We didn’t meet much outside of our scheduled, work-oriented gatherings, but when we did, he was always jovial and welcoming. 

Much of our time together was spent on the number 6 train from Grand Central, leaving our Sunday afternoon sessions with the magazine. I forget what we were talking about on our last ride together last October, but he quoted from Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography, something to the effect that “film people are shy of life.” Rahul, a good friend to many and a loving dad and husband, was not shy of life. On his Letterboxd page he chose Notorious, Le Samouraï, The Color of Pomegranates, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as his four favorite movies, exhibiting the same pleasing range as a cinephile that he did as a person, always engaged with New York City, its lively cinema scene, his students, and the lives he touched.

About ten years ago, my daughter Larissa attended a party for his Oona, complete with a screening of The Wizard of Oz. Rahul himself was the wizard of that evening, dashing in and out of the kitchen making sure the kids and the adults in attendance were well-provisioned. We surely were—Rahul was a noted host—but what Larissa and all the children remembered was the film itself, a first-time experience for many of the little ones. Rahul gave them, and all of us, the gift of cinema, and the gift of his friendship and kindness.


Remembering Rahul Hamid
by Doug Dibbern, Graduate School Colleague and Longtime Friend
 

I met Rahul during the first semester of graduate school in the Fall of 1999. I remember it well: Lincoln Center was hosting the first American retrospective of the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, and the cinephile community in New York was abuzz, as if this was the major event of the year. That first night, I remember sweeping my eyes over the audience as I stepped into the theater, assuming that I’d see a throng of equally excited young scholar-wannabes from our program, but I couldn’t—surprisingly—find a single face, except for one person perched attentively in the very back row, who was similarly casting his leonine gaze over the room, and who met my eyes with a shared sense of recognition. And I knew immediately – as he knew immediately, he admitted to me years later—that he and I would become friends. That person was, of course, Rahul. 

Over the next year, our friendship deepened primarily because of our similar taste in film. And listening to Rahul talk about the movies he loved was a way of learning about the person he aspired to be, but also the person that I knew he’d already become. Rahul fell in love with art-cinema auteurs with an intellectual bent—like Hou or Krzysztof Kieslowski—but he was especially drawn to that rare subset of formally radical filmmakers who were also able to manifest a deep emotional connection to other human beings because he was himself a fundamentally kind, gentle, and compassionate person. To provide just one example, Rahul had planned on writing a dissertation about the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and Rahul was drawn to Kiarostami’s films because they reflected some aspect of his own inner core. He admired Kiarostami’s austere formalism and postmodern self-reflexivity, of course, but Rahul would become most impassioned when he started speaking about the heartfelt human element in his work.

Rahul was very bookish and articulate, but when he became most fervent about a subject, his facility for language would—in a very charming way—suddenly disappear: he’d stammer, searching for words; he’d gaze up at the ceiling or stare at the floor; he’d break off in the middle of his sentences, sometimes backtracking to elaborate on a previous comment, sometimes launching off into another equally impassioned tangent. And he’d start to make wild, indecipherable hand gestures—as if he knew, despite how bookish he’d always been, that language was incapable of expressing the intensity of his feelings. He became most ardent when he spoke about Kiarostami’s protagonists, characters who mirrored his own unconscious sense of self: the filmmaker’s innocently curious, awestruck children who’d earnestly recite poetry by heart and the despairing drifters who’d release sudden, pent-up emotions in lyrical waves of unchecked sincerity.

Rahul never did finish that dissertation about Kiarostami, but I think I know why. It wasn’t because he was lazy or disorganized or disinterested. On the contrary, Rahul was passionate about art and intellectual life, but, like many sensible people trying to find a home in academia, he was a bit suspicious that one might have to perform a kind of pretentious hyperintellectuality to get ahead, and that ran counter to his investment in emotional authenticity. And despite his openness and uncritical attitude toward others, Rahul was a perfectionist about himself in his own quiet way. I think he felt that writing about the art that he loved—trying to express the inexpressible in language—would always, inevitably, end up being merely a shadow of his genuine feelings.

Rahul’s values about art and writing manifested themselves as well in his other great passion: food culture and cooking. Early on, when we were first becoming friends, we’d often meet for lunch so that we could gab for an hour or two about movies, but I learned very quickly with Rahul that we could never just grab a quick bite at some random place near NYU. No. How ’bout we catch a bus across town, he’d say, to see if the burger at Corner Bistro was as good as The New York Times dining section had said or catch a bus uptown (because Rahul was equally passionate about buses) to some underrated Shanghainese lunch counter he’d discovered in Chelsea.

Later, I was lucky enough to be invited as a frequent dinner guest at Ragan and Rahul’s. I feel very grateful to say that Rahul made me dinner literally hundreds of times. For those of you who don’t know, Rahul was a very accomplished home cook. And his ideas about food reflected his ideas about the movies. With food, Rahul was equally disinterested in anything pretentious. He loved learning about sophisticated culinary techniques, of course—just like he loved studying the elaborately choreographed tracking shots of De Palma, Kalatazov, or Ophuls—but he wasn’t one of these home cooks who experimented with foams or designed elaborate platings to emulate the experience of dining at Jean-Georges. He always preferred any dish that was rustic and down-to-earth. He liked umami flavors, just like any self-respecting peasant. He was the same way with wine: he’d splurge now and then on a fancy Burgundy Grand Cru, but I think he was genuinely happier with a $14 bottle of Muscadet that might reveal a surprising hint of salinity and express a distinctive terroir.

When Ragan and I were reminiscing about his favorite dishes, spaghetti carbonara was the first thing that came to mind for both of us. It’s a simple, hearty, dish—like the simple, heartfelt characters he loved—but it has layers of flavor and a great variety of sophisticated permutations: Rahul would go for Parmigiano-Reggiano rather than Pecorino Romano—or maybe on some nights experiment with a mixture of both—pancetta rather than bacon when he was in a fancy mood, or even guanciale for a special occasion.

In the end, though, cooking wasn’t primarily about food for him. It was culture and history. It was aesthetics. It was a means of inventing a sense of order in his everyday life, a way of expressing his values. Cooking was a way of nurturing a sense of friendship, of family, and of home. It was a way for him to express his love for his wife and for his daughters.

Trying to write this over the last few days has reminded me once again of the inadequacy of language. I could talk about Rahul for hours—as many of us could—and still feel like I wasn’t able to portray him the way that I knew him. All I can say is that Rahul was one of the best friends I’ve ever had. And I will miss him very much.

Remembering A Compassionate Man
by Patrick McCreery, NYU

Rahul Hamid is being memorialized here primarily because of the contributions he made as an editor of Cineaste, but I knew him in an entirely different context—as a colleague at New York University. 

Starting in 2008, Rahul was both a full-time administrator and an associate faculty member at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He played a unique role at the school. Not only was he an extremely popular faculty member and academic adviser, but he also worked closely with our most fragile students as the director of Student Affairs. All of us at Gallatin valued Rahul as a witty, affable, and highly engaged colleague. In the classroom, he taught students how to view film with a critical eye; outside the classroom, he drew from seemingly limitless wells of patience and compassion to help students at some of the most difficult moments of their lives. 

As a faculty member, Rahul conceptualized and taught interdisciplinary seminars that included “African American Cinema and the Stakes of Representation,” “The Coen Brothers: Failure and the American Dream,” and “Night and the City: Film Noir and the Noir Imagination.” In Fall 2022, the semester in which he died, Rahul was teaching his course on the Coen brothers. Students in the class were enchanted by Rahul’s enthusiasm for Joel and Ethan Coen’s work, describing to me afterward how he routinely giggled his way—loudly, apparently—through the films he watched with them in a darkened classroom. Rahul had a distinctively naughty giggle, and in hearing the students describe it, one could feel the delight Rahul took in the antics on the screen.

As the school’s director of Student Affairs, Rahul worked closely with students who needed special assistance because they were struggling in some way. Maybe the student had a mental health challenge or a family emergency, or maybe the student was going through a bad break-up or realized they were in dire need of extra financial aid. Whatever the situation, faculty and administrators knew they could hand the student over to Rahul, and that he would approach the student with a sweet gentleness and immense empathy. He would help the student, but he never made the student feel bad for needing help. In doing so, Rahul touched many students deeply, and he changed their lives for the better. Time after time, he encouraged, cajoled, and negotiated with students and faculty alike so that students address whatever issues they were facing and graduate in a timely way—“graduated by the grace of Rahul,” as a colleague put it. 

On Dec. 16, 2022, Gallatin hosted a memorial for Rahul that was attended by family, friends, Cineaste and Gallatin colleagues, and many current and former students. The memorial was held in Gallatin’s Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts. The theater itself is not a particularly special space, being only another very large room on NYU’s expansive yet indistinct campus. But it is a room where Rahul spent a great deal of time, and that helped to make it special. Rahul was there each August, when the room is packed with excited new first-year students attending Gallatin Convocation, their first taste of college academic life; he was there each January, when we throw a wonderfully frivolous birthday party for Albert Gallatin, a long-gone founder of NYU; and he was there each May, when we toast our graduating seniors and wish them well as they embark on their lives after graduation.

We at NYU will miss Rahul immensely. To honor Rahul, and to remind ourselves of the characteristics he embodied—compassion, kindness, intellectual curiosity, and deep engagement with New York City—the Gallatin School has established the Rahul Hamid Award for Community Spirit, which will be given to a graduating senior each May. (The graduation awards typically are given at a reception held in the same theater that hosted Rahul’s memorial. Rahul used to complain that the awards reception already was too long. Oh, well…!)

IN LOVING MEMORY OF RAHUL HAMID
May 20, 1970 — November 15, 2022

(An excerpt from the NYU Memorial Service booklet) 

Rahul Hamid was born in London in 1970 to Vera and Andy Hamid, bohemian expats from India and Trinidad. When he was two, he moved to Nigeria, where his parents taught English literature at a local high school. In 1974, with his younger brother, Jyotin, in tow, their family moved to New York City. Rahul began his education at Greenhouse Nursery School, where he almost immediately got in trouble for his salty language. He straightened up in time for kindergarten at Hunter College Elementary School. Rahul graduated from Hunter College High School in 1988, received his BA in Film Studies at Columbia University in 1999, and an MA in Cinema Studies at New York University in 2001.

Rahul worked at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU for fifteen years, most recently as the Director of Student Affairs and Associate Faculty. His courses included “The Coen Brothers: Failure and the American Dream” and “Night and the City: Film Noir and the Noir Imagination.” He also advised a full roster of Gallatin students. In addition to this scholarly work, he was a noted film critic and served on the editorial board of Cineaste Magazine, one of America’s oldest film publications.

Rahul was married to Ragan Rhyne for nearly 20 years and was the proud father of two daughters, Oona (13) and Olive (7). He was a New Yorker through and through, preferred the bus to the subway, and was a burgeoning potter. He was an avid traveler, a devoted cinephile, and he spent the better part of a decade perfecting his spaghetti carbonara recipe. 

Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 3