The festival’s opening-night crowd, made up largely of civic-spirited patrons, trophy wives, industry players and hangers-on, is generally more well-heeled and dolled-up than the scruffier film buffs who attend later screenings. Many of them trooped off afterward to party gamely at Tavern on the Green, though they cannot have been in much of a celebrating mood after “Mystic River,” not exactly a feel-good flick. It was typical of the festival’s selectors that they would honor a film whose artistry they unreservedly admired, regardless of “upper” or “downer” considerations. Part of what makes the New York Film Festival such a unique, if controversial, cultural institution is its insistence on adhering to the highest standards in the face of criticism that it is snobbish, elitist or irrelevant to the marketplace.
Here are a few things that make the New York Film Festival the inimitable if somewhat rigid institution it is:
It shows only 26 features (many of which are preceded by a short film), giving the festival a curated, boutique quality, which makes for a strong, state-of-the-art summary annually.
It awards no prizes, and puts the focus on serious film watching, with little of the glitzy atmosphere of parties, deal-making, topless starlets or celebrity-spotting that characterizes the international film festival circuit.
The selection committee’s erudite chairman, Richard Pena, and four rotating members bring a vast comprehension of world cinema to their work, and a serene disregard for hype and other bandwagon pressures.
Its retrospectives of great filmmakers and unearthing of past treasures help to connect present innovators with the grand tradition of film art. Since roughly a third of the features shown here will never receive commercial distribution, this 17-day festival represents a rare opportunity to see worthy, if difficult, films from around the globe.
The festival began in 1963, at a highpoint in film culture, when art theaters, movie magazines and university film-studies programs were springing up everywhere and the French New Wave, Fellini, Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray and the American underground cinema were all operating at full tilt. It continued to nurture its favorite auteurs, or personal filmmakers, such as Godard, Truffaut, Fassbinder and Tarkovsky, through the ’70s and ’80s, under Richard Roud’s direction. When Richard Pena replaced Roud in 1988, he upheld the high standards Roud had established, even as the cinematic terrain began to alter. One need not agree with Susan Sontag’s assessment that the art of film is dead (I certainly don’t), to concur that the culture surrounding the art film has much diminished from what it was when the festival began. The national European cinemas, especially the smaller ones, no longer turn out filmic gems in abundance, while the artistic lead has shifted to Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Pena’s own expertise happens to be in these areas, so he was able to champion such masterful filmmakers as Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien, South Korea’s Im Kwon Taek and Mali’s Abderahmane Sissako. These prize-winning figures on the international film circuit have never, alas, become established in America as marquee names, in the same way that Fellini or Godard or Kurosawa once were. But the New York Film Festival continues to plow ahead, offering what it has good reason to regard as the best achievements of contemporary cinema, regardless of how arcane their choices may look to the man in the street. Fortunately, the festival has managed to retain a sufficiently loyal constituency at the box office to sell out 98 percent of its screenings. Members of the press, who often get much more pampering attention at other film festivals, are wont to complain that most titles shown at the NYFF have already been screened at Cannes, Berlin, Telluride or Toronto: there are very few premieres, nothing “new.” This is true, but it is not the job of this particular film festival to provide journalistic scoops. Its purpose is to shine a very strong, focused spotlight on a bouquet of two dozen films and say: here is where the art of film is being kept alive, here is where the subtlest narratives and most formally rigorous visuals are to be found, here is where the old masters are passing the baton on to the younger. Last year, it was a privilege to see such mature work by acknowledged masters as Pedro Almodovar’s marvelous “Talk to Her,” Kiarostomi’s audaciously minimalist “Ten,” the more-than-90-year-old Manoel de Oliveira’s youthfully frisky “The Uncertainty Principle,” Otar Iosseliani’s droll “Monday Morning” and Nicolas Philibert’s beautiful documentary about a French schoolteacher, “To Be and To Have” (now in general distribution). This year, the highlights so far include, beside “Mystic River,” Errol Morris’s fascinating film, “The Fog of War,” about Robert McNamara; an amazing if grueling Cambodian documentary, “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine”; the exquisite “Since Otar Left,” a story of three generations of Georgian women living under the same roof; Lars von Trier’s remarkable, quirky “Dogville,” with Nicole Kidman, and a powerful Iranian film about a bungled jewel robbery, Jafar Panahi’s “Crimson Gold.” For those who love old movies, there is a full-scale retrospective of the magnificent Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and “Piccadilly,” a 1929 silent by E. A. Dupont, starring the sensational Anna Mae Wong, maybe the most fluidly suave and stylish film in the entire festival.
Sometimes the selection committee bends over backward too far in honoring seniority and ethnographic interest, as was evident from this year’s selection of a real dud, “Mansion by the Lake,” by the 84-year-old Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries. The threat of the sclerotic and the predictable, in tandem with an aging demographic base, hovers around the New York Film Festival, as it does over the entire Lincoln Center cultural complex. It happens that there are very few aged directors in this year’s crop, Claude Chabrol being one of the few exceptions, represented by his supremely assured “The Flower of Evil.” We wouldn’t want to see the NYFF neglect the latest autumnal offerings of graybeard giants; but it is possible to sweep away some of the cobwebs in the festival’s structure. For one thing, the time may have come to expand it. In a year with a great crop, the exclusionary principle works well, and the festival becomes a kind of teaching seminar on the possibilities of cinema. In a weaker year, harsh critical scrutiny may be placed on too many smallish, so-so films that cannot bear that intense a spotlight. Every year there are also heated discussions about edgy, problematic pictures (such as last year’s “Bowling for Columbine”) that were left out because they violated the festival’s fastidious sense of taste. Were the festival to be opened up to 50, or even 35 titles, it could be more boisterously provocative and representative in its inclusions, and less precious.
Spreading some of the screenings around town, in nearby cineplexes or even, dare I suggest, other boroughs such as Brooklyn and the Bronx, would make it into more of a citywide celebration. The organizers need to find a new venue for opening and closing nights than the acoustically challenged Avery Fisher Hall, especially when the picture shown is English-language. The NYFF could also afford to be more, well, festival-like: there is no reason to cling to a public manner so stiffly serious, so puritanically verging on the inhospitable. (The upstart Tribeca Film Festival has already surpassed its uptown rival in hospitality suites, press cosseting, parties and dynamic courting of the public: all it lacks, so far, is an identifiable aesthetic and stronger films).
For many of us who have grown up with the New York Film Festival, fall in New York is unthinkable without it. During two weeks or more we can go around in a cinematic bubble, discussing our favorites and picking apart the others, secure in the knowledge that we have been exposed to the best, most refined celluloid (give or take a half dozen omissions) the film world of that year has to offer. Long may the New York Film Festival thrive. It’s sound as it is; it need not be afraid to tinker with its formula.
