THE FORTIETH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
by Tony Zaza
I was just a teenager in love when the festival first opened my heart to the world of international cinema on September 10, 1963. I had grown-up on a steady diet of salami sandwiches and Abbot & Costello. New York was a much tougher city then, check out the crime rate and ,of course, the crime of the century, the assassination of an American President. The summer had seen Civil Rights protests all over the country, and Martin Luther King had "a dream". Cardinal Montini became Pope Paul VI. The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, and Michael De Bakey performed the first successful heart transplant. Mine was also a transplant of sorts. I was drawn to the mystery and danger of a trek into the city in defiance of my New Jersey buddies who always wanted me to stay around for a stick-ball game. I was slowly drawn into the underground film movement developing around the work of new-born Pop Artist Andy Warhol. I went to Max’s Kansas City and then further downtown, Soho did not yet exist but artists were showing super 8 and 16mm films in their lofts. Allan Kaprow included films in his ‘Happenings’. Meanwhile, Dr. Strangelove, and, The Birds, caused ripples at the boxoffice , at home I was watching The Fugitive, and yes, I confess now, Petticoat Junction, and, 77 Sunset Strip. Valium hit the pharmacies to help take some of the edge off the Cold War. Robert Moses’ Hell’s Kitchen was reborn as The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in a city that had not yet become fully socialized.
I had spent many Saturday mornings at the Fox Fabian Theatre in Hoboken, New Jersey avoiding the hard Juicy Fruits hurled from the balcony. I can’t remember any of the movies I had seen. But at the festival, suddenly, I discovered a world of ideas and alternative perspectives that could be shared, wisdom high school had failed to provoke. Amazingly, I also discovered a world of the spirit the church had not yet instilled in my soul. Imagine after years of Westerns and a scattering of epics, being greeted with Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, – after years of American pop fair, my exposure to foreign films was limited to sneaking into Boccaccio 70, the first film to screen in the then new Cinema 1/Cinema 2 Twin on Third Avenue across from Blomingdales. The Paris Theatre was the only other venue for foreign fare. But the films at the first festival were different, they evoked feelings, ideas, ideals, compassion, a sense of the universality of humans from worlds I had never seen or imagined. ‘Angel’ was political, spiritual, passionate. It was followed by Polansky’s mysterious, expressive, poetic Knife in the Water. I was also treated to The Servant, Joseph Losey’s lyrical, disturbing, thought-provoking closet drama and The Trial of Joan of Arc , a transgressive, transforming, transcendent work of Robert Bresson. I wasn’t brought up in a closet, but neither had I the opportunity of visiting Calcutta, Paris or Barcelona or the dreamscape of directors with a point-of-view. The second-hand experience was enough incentive to keep coming back. I still find it preferable to reality.
The New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center is 40 years old yet it has never lost the youthful exuberance nor the values of its birth in 1962. From its inception, festival organizers made a tactical decision not to give awards and not to honor anything but the filmic experience itself. Today it remains a festival for lovers of the cinema continuing to stoically avoid crass commercialism and merchandising. Neither the cult of celebrity nor the glitz of showmanship can find root in its confines. It remains as democratic an enterprise as possible in a world marketplace where festivals of lesser integrity have grown to iconic stature. This is not to imply that this celebration of international cinema is stodgy or retro. Simply put, the Film Society of Lincoln Center which has sponsored the event for four decades through the trials and tribulations of life in New York City, knows well its true audience and never betrays it to the Hollywood Itch. There are no accolades given ,there are no votes taken, there are no parties or sidebars, no wet -shirt contests, no soap-boxing, no ‘bests’. It has, over the years this celebration has served as a model of decorum evoking both the spirit as well as the substance of the unique dreamworld of the cinema. Like a fine aged wine, the festival never fails to provide tasteful experiences. Over the years it has introduced, or rather educated and sensitized a viewership to the intricacies and intimacies of a very intoxicating art form. The year 2002 in keeping with tradition boasts a diverse array of perspective, not all popular, but singular. The first 40 years , rich with cinema landmarks, define a curious history of culture with movies that either reflected or induced the temperament of the times in which they played. From the beginning, the festival provided a careful mix of vintage films unscreened for decades and foreign films which could not easily find distribution and that had no other venue in a city that would only later give birth to numerous art houses. Into this mix were pioneering examples of American independent cinema . Surveying the four decades, one might see the 1960s as inspiring, energizing, nourishing; the 1970s as intoxicating, inspiring, escapist, the 1980s as indulgent, diverse, politicized; and the 1990s as shocking, excessive, self-reflexive.
The rich tapestry of retrospective screenings included some of the great revelatory discoveries like Becky Sharp, screened in a two-color technicolor imbibition print; the triptych widescreen extravaganza of Napoleon, the black and white nitrate luminosity of La Ronde, the classically melodramatic weight of Doktor Mabuse, Intolerance, Strike, Spies. Lola Montes opened my eyes to the plastic possibilities of color; Applause in it’s primitive utilization of sound nevertheless defined for modern audiences, a totally distinct aural reality. Vertigo, Rocco and His Brothers, Lillith, The Manchurian Candidate, helped create directorial icons.
The early years displayed an unrivaled selection of films that would become archetypal: each a singular event holding a special place in the history of cinema: Accattone, Godard’s reinvention of filmic space in Alphaville, Pontecorvo’s heightening of historical simulation in Battle of Algiers, Bertolucci’s exploration of psychic denial in The Conformist, The political whimsy of The Fireman’s Ball by Milos Forman , Faces employs Cassavettes’ ‘subjective’ camera, Day for Night by Truffaut turns a cinematic device into a filmic leitmotif ; and films that defined the Auteur Theory: Passer’s Intimate Lighting, Penn’s Mickey One, Forman’s Loves of a Blonde, Attenborough’s Oh, What a Lovely War, Rosselini’s Open City, Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, , Hanoun’s Une Simple Histoire, Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Strategem, Bunuel’s Tristana, Watkins’ The War Game, Godard’s Weekend,Teshigahara Woman in the Dunes, Makavejev’s WR-Mysteries of the Organism, Paradjhanov’s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors.
The cinema’s mid life crises were well represented in the mid 70s to mid 80s with many solemn indictments or socially interrogating explorations of life: Underground, 36 Fillette, Sid and Nancy, Rumble Fish, Red, Paris, Texas, Once Upon a Time in America, 1900, Night of the Shooting Stars, Last Tango in Paris, Last Picture Show, The King of New York, Five Easy Pieces, Point Blank, Pierrot le Fou, The Rapture, Roseland, Shadows, Stavisky, Fitzcaraldo, The King of Marvin Gardens. In more recent years, the festival was dominated by films that struck a nerve or opened a wound: Boy’s Don’t Cry, The Crying Game, Intimacy,Ice Storm, Mean Streets, Homicide, In the Name of the Father,Padre Padrone, Paisan, Nothing But a Man, Mephisto, Police, Hope and Glory, The General, Pulp Fiction, Storytelling, Badlands, Blood Simple, Une Femme Douce, The Piano; or re-affirmed the essential goodness of people or opened dialogues of trust : Waking Life, Zebrahead, The Sweet Hereafter, A Taxing Woman, Sugarbaby, My Night at Maude’s, Strange Than Paradise, Round Midnight, Ed Woods, Peggy Sue Got Married, Man of Flowers, The Black Stallion, Kaos, The Scent of Green Papaya, Fiorile, George Washington, The Apostle.
At the turn of the century, the festival uncovered more expressionistic movies so unique that it is unfair to try to categorize them; evocative, more purely cinematic than traditionally plotted , they defined very personal directorial approaches to the structural burden of narrative: Pola-X, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Down By Law, Mulholland Drive, My Own Private Idaho, Nostalgia, Pollock, Post Coitum, Animal Triste, Cyclo, Strange Days, Hoop Dreams, Therese, Velvet Goldmine, Delicatessen, yet these films echoed the pioneering spirit of some of the earliest and forgotten gems of the earlier years such as : Mahabharata, Night on Earth, The Ritual, Saragosa Manuscript, Shakespeare Wallah, Le T’Aime Je T’Ame, Immortal Story,Wild Child, Identification Marks, None, Hallelujah ,the Hills, Duet for Cannibals, Peeping Tom, Masculin Feminin , Kagemusha.
And finally then this festival gave birth to a certain altered reality of the cinema in which certain films broke narrative strictures and developed new voices, new combinations of time/space, exclaiming that the cinema was a diverse language. : Cinema could make a moral judgement about the nature of oppression-Accattone 1961 Pasolini. A future world could be created out of a cinematic mindset in Alphaville 1965 Godard. The tyranny of history and the nature of truth could be challenged with Andrei Rublev 1966 Tarkovsky., the mutability of the spirit could be evoked in Au Hassard, Balthazar 1966 Bresson. Simulation is another reality in Battle of Algiers 1965 Pontecorvo. Personal history and memory forge internal dialogues in Before the Revolution 1964 Bertolucci. Spirit is a character in The Exterminating Angel 1962 Bunuel. A philosophical position can be the substance of storytelling in Duet for Cannibals, Sontag 1969. Elvira Madigan , Widerberg 1967 demonstrates that romantic tragedy can be philosophically fulfilling. Faces, Cassavettes, 1968, messy, blemished , staccato life is its own gritty reality. A political statement becomes a lyrical metaphor in The Fireman’s Ball, Forman 1967. Drama can be frought with ambiguity, confusion, absurdity in Identification Marks, None, Skolimowski, 1964. Feeling can be conveyed through form alone throughout Intimate Lighting, Passer, 1965. Spirit cannot be separated from animal instinct, Je T’AIme, Je T’Aime, Resnais 1968. Narrative space may operate in several dimensions in Knife in the Water, Polanski 1962. Character is sufficient to drive narrative in Mickey One, Penn 1965. You don’t need to be Ameican-born to have a perspective on the reality of America-Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone 1969. Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice, Mazursky, 1969, sexual preference can be a cinematic theme.
Continuing the tradition of spirit and substance, the 2002 edition of the festival features an eclectic brew of new works.
About Schmidt (Alexander Payne), In a nearly self-reflexive performance, jack Nicholson travels across America in search of lost dreams.
The Son (Jean-Pierre, Luc Darnenne), Christlike carpenter lacks the grace needed to confront the complexities of modernity which makes forgiveness, compassion, and understanding difficult.
The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan), The history of oppression of young women in the Irish Catholic- run laundries is transposed to the stuff of reality-based melodrama and curiously apolitical social commentary.
Unknown Pleasures(Jia Zhang Ke), Jobless teens contend with a world growing-up and changing faster than their hormones can handle.
Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass), Explores the nasty underbelly of the Catholic/Protestant struggle in Northern Ireland using the tragic events of 1972 as the launchpad for stirring up the emotions.
My Mother’s Smile(Marco Bellocchio), A fanciful tale of self-discovery, reclaiming and re-evaluating one’s roots and beliefs evoked by unlikely events in the life of an atheist.
Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson), Adam Sandler inverts the Hollywood cliche he’s created in this romantic comedy that is spiced with sardonic edginess.
Waiting for Happiness, (Abderrahmane Sissako), Teenager Abdallah’s plight to re-assert his sense of belonging upon return to his West African homeland serves as a testament to the dangers as well as the joys of diversity.
Divine Intervention(Elia Suleiman), The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is viewed through a Chaplinesque microscope.
Tony Zaza
