THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN Over the years the New York Film Festival has become less and less superfluous until, now, it is downright essential. This change in its status has been brought about by three things....
...To cite just one other service the Festival performed, one year it gave its subscribers a chance to discover an unknown young Italian director named Bernardo Bertolucci...
...This may sound as if the Festival is just being used as a launching pad again, but actually such is not the case...
...Ophuls apologized to the audience that he would have made the film shorter if he could...
...This is not to say bad films were shown...
...But all's well that ends well...
...But the truth is it could probably not be any shorter and still do justice to our memories of Nuremberg and Vietnam the way it does now...
...And in the meantime, there are key theaters in Manhattan that have recently closed for varying periods because their owners could find nothing to show...
...Think for example of Alt-man's Nashville or Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty, both of Which winder from episode to episode without really having any central characters or story line at all...
...The next year Roud clamped down ruthlessly on the press passes, attendance at some press screenings barely reaching a dozen...
...But gradually Ophuls brings both men down to human scale, and thus makes us confront more thoughtfully than any other work I know the banalities, and sympathies, of both good and evil...
...That year some of the press screenings were standing-room-only despite the size of the hall- Andy Warhol swept in each day with.fan entourage of around twenty free-loaders-but at the paid-admission screenings for the public, the place was often half empty...
...First it was in cavernous Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall...
...The answer to this is that these owners have not been looking very hard, or have been purposely looking the other way while worthwhile films have gone begging for play dates...
...About half of this year's films ran over two hours, and a couple of films, as in other years recently, were in the three-five hour range...
...The Festival has been at Lincoln Center ever since it was begun in 1963, but in the early seventies it traveled around from one Center theater to the other like a carnival staying just one jump ahead of the sheriff...
...What he is after in terms of framing, lighting effects and atmosphere is demonstrated in one incredible shot where he gets not only his two main characters, but both the sun and moon on his wide, wide screen at the same time...
...In fact, Roud's own article for the Festival program this year is about this development...
...But I mention Godard especially as a reminder 6f the golden age of innovation and regeneration filmmaking was experiencing in the sixties...
...It now shows us all the new, inventive, potentially classic and influential films that are too cerebral, too crazy, too obscure, too remote, too controversial, too long, or too wide to be seen eke-where...
...The Festival has had its distribution problems too, .however...
...Because of the breathing spell in movie history, and, perhaps too, because of its own administrative difficulties as Rood teamed the ropes, the Festival looked for awhile as if it would become a mere launching pad...
...But perhaps more about these later...
...and the Festival's sponsors clamped down on Road, punishing him through banishment of the Festival to tmy Vivian Beaumont Theater, a semicircular space that was ill-suited, to say the least, for projecting movies...
...Five years ago somewhere between 200 and 400 films were getting distribution of some kind in New York each year, but now the annual figures run about half of that and are still shrinking...
...A Japanese-Soviet co-production about a guide in the Siberian wilderness, the film was made in some ultra-widescreen process that will not even fit on most movie screens...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The former of course begins as Nazi villainy incarnate and the latter as an avenging hero, especially when seen as well in newsreel footage from his prosecution of the war crimes trials...
...So this is where the Festival comes in today...
...But the longest film in the Festival, Marcel Ophuls' The Memory of Justice, was also perhaps the best and certainly the most moving...
...If a film gets distribution and shows signs of being popular, it often takes over two, three or four other theaters besides the one it opened in...
...Only the Russians could have invented such a process, and only Kurosawa, who is the world's past master of the epic style, could use a process like this to advantage...
...There may be some hope for movies yet...
...The Festival has now found aa appropriate home in Alice Tully Hall, and, more important, film history has taken a couple of new twists that only a festival can accommodate...
...Among the films that were too long was Touch of Zen, which, as I made clear in my last column, I did not care for (though of course I'm glad for the chance to have seen it...
...First, the general distribution of films has grown less reliable and responsible...
...These are, besides new constrictions in the general distributing system and administrative improvements in the Festival itself, tile third thing that has restored the significance of the Festival...
...Again, these eccentric shapes and running times have appeared in movies at just the moment conventional distribution channels were atrophying-and becoming less able to accommodate change...
...While distributors used to tell the Festival what to show, it is now sometimes telling them instead...
...As the excitement of those years and the energy of the New Wave subsided in the early seventies, the Festival seemed uncertain where to turn for inspiration...
...The fact is that both Truffaut's film and Tanner's have, like Ophuls', already gotten commercial openings in New York, and they therefore stand a chance of being seen elsewhere as well...
...One of these historical twists is that films have begun to get longer-much longer...
...Thus, while some films saturate the market, others get no chance to open at all...
...As a consequence of this situation, many New Yorkers try to squeeze their whole year's movie-going into the two weeks of the Festival, whose thirty-five or forty screenings-two for each film-are now almost always sold out...
...Godard was not alone, of course...
...In those years the Festival seemed to lose its sense of mission as well...
...In recent years, too, filmmaking has lost its grip on reality...
...One wondered briefly whether the Festival could become the same sort of servile aid to money and power in the American film industry that the American Film Institute is...
...Up until then there had been, for instance, two new Godard films for it to introduce to American audiences each year...
...There were a couple of years back in the early seventies, at the time Richard Roud first moved from the job of program organizer to director of the Festival as a whole, when the Festival went through some wild gyrations...
...It is just that the Festival, as if trying to recover popularity by grabbing some Big Boffo for itself, fell into the habit of premiering films which then had immediate commercial openings fueled .by big advertising campaigns...
...Among the films that were too cerebral, too crazy or too unconventional in their narratives were also a couple of the best-Francois Truffaut's Small Change, about a bunch of kids who just happen to go to the same grade school, and Alain Tanner's Jonah Who Witt Be 25 in the Year 2000, about a bunch of politically-minded people who happen,to come together in the same short-lived commune...
...That is to say, it has tended increasingly to give up the sort of linear narrative that audiences think of as "realistic" in movies, and it has edged toward much more open, free-associative forms that used to be found only in avant-garde filmmaking...
...On the contrary, where the Festival used to be exploited by distributors, its films have commercial runs now because it has real influence on the distributors...
...The film that was too wide this year was Akira Kuro-saw's Dersu Uzeda...
...The film's epicenters are its long, intermittent interviews with Albert Speer and Telford Taylor...
Vol. 103 • November 1976 • No. 24
