The Telluride Watch
Published:9/1/06
By Seth Cagin
The program for the Telluride Film Festival is so rich,
year in and year out, that it can be parsed in numerous ways.
There are premieres and retrospectives; tributes and experimental
cinema; student films and the rediscovered works of forgotten
masters.
Particularly evident in this year’s program, perhaps, is the divide
between films you want to see because if you don’t see them here,
you may never have another chance to see them (the revival of Jacques
Tati’s Playtime, 1967, in a new
70 mm print, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky), and films that you want
to see here because they may well go on to great acclaim (Infamous, Fur, Volver,
Babel), and by seeing them here, you’ll have seen them first.
Festival co-director Bill Pence has a healthy regard for the mystery
of the festival’s programming, and the way that a theme – never
preconceived – emerges only as the program takes shape, and presumably
in sync with the state of world cinema.
Still, on the eve of this 33rd Telluride Film Festival, Pence can declare
that this year’s program is conspicuously strong in the two categories
noted above: programs so rare you won’t want to miss them and the
launch of films that will make a mark out in the larger world.
“We’ve always programmed revivals and retrospectives and
have a deep respect for film history,” Pence said, “and we’ve
always shown the best new movies we can find.”
Possibly because three of the films that debuted here last year – Brokeback
Mountain, Walk the Line and Capote – went
on to so much acclaim, tickets for this year’s event sold out
earlier than ever before, Pence reported, and interest from studios,
producers and directors in having their films chosen to premiere here
is at an all-time high. While nobody can say that Telluride single-handedly
made Brokeback Mountain or any other film into a hit, Telluride
certainly has proven it can provide a film that might be out of the
Hollywood mainstream with a successful launch.
“We’re the only film festival with a national, even an international
audience,” Pence said, noting how difficult and expensive it is
for festival goers to get here – which has the effect of insuring
that those who do attend do so for love of the art. “When a film
shows here, it’s like a national sneak preview. If the audience
here discovers a film, it gets an edge.”
The audience this year, more than ever, may be pulled between a desire
to immerse itself in the glories of the past and the challenges of the
present and future. Credit guest director J.P. Gorin with bringing us
the unexpected in Tati’s Playtime, one of those legendary
film follies in which a director at the peak of his fame and influence
puts everything on the line with an enormously expensive production that
challenges all expectations (think Heaven’s Gate or One
From the Heart). It is noteworthy that Gorin, best known, perhaps,
for his collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard, and surely one of the most
radical filmmakers of the French New Wave, would choose to program Tati,
the very epitome of the mainstream French filmmaker whom the New Wave
sought to wash over. Forty years later, Playtime, in a new 70
mm print – a technology that is all-but obsolete – is sure
to be a revelation. In a similar vein, Gorin has programmed a retrospective
of another French classicist, the all-but-forgotten Jean Gremillon.
With raconteurs Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and Michael Korda on hand to talk
about their legendary fathers, and in Korda’s case, uncles, the
festival program includes a revival of Goldwyn’s Dodsworth (1936),
directed by William Wyler, which Pence said is one of his and Stella Pence’s
favorite films, which they watch every couple of years for the sheer pleasure
of it, while the legendary classic Korda production of TheFour
Feathers (1939) plays in Elk’s Park.
All of the above, and others to be ferreted out in the program, fall
into that category of see it here, as only the Telluride Film Festival
can screen it, or forget it.
If these programs conflict with premieres, well, too much to possibly
see is a trademark of the Telluride Film Festival.
“You may be right,” Pence allowed cautiously, when I suggested
that at first glance there are movies that appear more accessible than
in a typical year. But, he quickly suggested, Fur, starring Nicole
Kidman as the photographer Diane Arbus, is “not a typical biopic.” The
movie begins and ends, he reveals, in a nudist colony, and people who
see it at the Chuck Jones cinema in Mountain Village “will be talking
about it all the way down on the gondola,” he predicted.
Another Pence prediction: Forest Whitaker delivers an Oscar-worthy performance
as the Ugandan strongman Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland,
as does Toby Jones playing precisely the same character for which Philip
Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar last year. Jones’s Capote in
the film Infamous is entirely different from Hoffman’s
portrayal, however, Pence said, even though Infamous and Capote cover
precisely the same years and events in Capote’s life. The
festival is staging a tribute to Spanish actress Penélope Cruz,
whose performance in Pedro Almadovar’s Volver could mark
her apotheosis as a screen diva, at least to American audiences.
The festival’s other two tributes this year go to legendary film
editor Walter Murch, whom Pence described as a film theorist whose presentation
before an audience is not to be missed, and Australian director Rolf de
Heer, whom Pence likened to Werner Herzog in his originality, independence
and willingness to experience hardship in the making of his films. De
Heer’s new film, Ten Canoes, makes its American premiere
here this weekend.
Other clues to the program, courtesy of Pence: Peter O’Toole delivers
a tour de force performance, he said, in Venus, from a
screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, playing “a clean dirty old man,” and 20,000
Streets Under the Sky is one of those “only in Telluride” opportunities,
an “absolutely engrossing” film made for BBC. In terms of pure
cinema, “at the pinnacle of film art,” are Ghosts of Cité Soliel and Passio,
a work by film scholar Paolo Cherchi Usai.
