Anyone who has come to know and love arthouse movies — by the likes of Almodovar, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Fellini, Fassbinder, Godard, Herzog, Jarmusch, Resnais, Rohmer, Sayles, Rossellini, Tarkovsky, Truffaut, Wenders and other major filmmakers from around the globe — has to be saddened by this news:

New Yorker Films, a major distributor of foreign and independent films, is going out of business, according to a report published Monday in the New York Times.

The distributor’s library of 400+ titles will be auctioned off, founder Dan Talbot, who started the company in 1965, told Times reporter Ben Sisario.

“New Yorker Films held rights to distribute movies to theaters and to institutions like colleges, and also to release DVDs,” Sisario wrote.

Here’s the email sent by the company to filmmakers: “I have sad news. The parent company of New Yorker Films has defaulted on a loan. The assets of New Yorker were used as security on the loan. The lender has informed us that it intends to foreclose on these assets. New Yorker stopped doing business yesterday…We are in total shock that after forty three years this has happened.”

Said Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman: ”Without a doubt it was the pre-eminent distributor of foreign art films in the United States from the mid-1960s really into the ’80s. And for much of the time he was the only game in town.”

Click here to read the rest of the Times story.

More coverage:

New Yorker Films, 1965-2009 (IFC.com)

New Yorker Films Shuts Its Doors (New Yorker mag – no relation)

New Yorker Films Dies; Will Rebirth Follow? (Salon)

End of the Road for New Yorker Films (indieWIRE.com)

Reid Rosefelt on New Yorker Films (indieWIRE.com)

John Vanco on New Yorker Films (indieWIRE.com)

Remembering New Yorker Films (Parallax View–Sean Axmaker)

Update on Shuttered New Yorker Films (Hot Splice – Northwest Film Forum)

New Yorker Films (Movie City Indie – Ray Pride)

R.I.P. New Yorker Films (Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow – Chris MaGee)

Thinking Like a New Yorker (Hot Docs – Matt Dentler)

Here’s a 1987 profile on the company, published in the New York Times.

(Thanks to IFC.com’s “The Daily” for many of these links)