NY Film Festival

The Fourth New York Film Festival recently ambled in and out of Lincoln Center, everybody's favorite temple of culture. Its sole accomplishment was that seven or eight of the twenty-five films shown were good, or better. By showing eight good pictures in a week and a half, the Festival neatly satisfied the requirements of a neighborhood repertory art house, like New York's Thalia and New Yorker Theatres. That's not too bad a batting average; eight good pictures are eight good pictures, after all, and one can hardly hold a grudge agianst the organization that presents them. But all in all, the Fourth New York Film Festival was a dud.

Part of the blame must rest squarely on the slightly stopped shoulders of John Brockcan, the "coordinator" of the supplementary events: a series of discussions, lectures, and screenings presented in the afternoons free-of-charge at the Library for the Performing Arts, next door to Philharmonic Hall.

Having promised the best film-making of the New American Cinema, Brockman and the Festival directors refused to pay transportation costs of bringing Stan Brakhage and his films from Colorado to New York. This infuriated New York independent film-makers Jonas Mekas and Gregory Markopolous, both of whom led a campaign to stop other New American cinema-makers from exhibiting their films at the Festival. Denied access, therefore, to Brakhage's "Scenes From Under Childhood," and Markopolous's "Galaxie," the best Brockman could come up with were the films of Harry Smith, an avant-garde film-maker of some decades past whose work in color and light, if interesting, is hardly what's happening, baby.

The real problem, though, was that the film-makers who came to the Festival with their work were sadly wasted. Never called upon to present anything remotely resembling a lecture or an explanation of their films, they were introduced to press and public, and put through the excruciating ordeal of the impromptu question-answer period. Well, the press and public don't ask very intelligent questions these days, so the results were limited at best. We learned, for instance, that Agnes Varda, directress of "Le Bonheur" and "Les Creatures," is a very clever woman with a wicked sense of humor, but we hardly learned whether Agnes Varda has anything to say about film-making.

The tedium did not stop with the supplementary events, and the big show -- the night-time screenings -- fell short of expectations on several levels. The short subjects (lasting approximately 20 minutes each night) were dreadful, pretentious and unimaginative film-making, almost without exception most of the shorts were made on animation stands, and consisted of endless zooming, tracking, and panning around someone's photographs, drawings, or statuary.

Only one short, "Adolescence," a cinema-verite documentary about a young ballet student, had any merit. It wasn't surprising--the technical consultant was Jacques Rozier, a young French film-maker whose first feature "Adieu Phillipine" was hailed as one of the best of its kind in France, and recently at the Museum of Modern Art.

If the retrospective screenings, as initially scheduled, looked less interesting than usual, they were made even worse by the last-minute cancellation of Jean Renoir's 1932 film "La Chienne," long considered one of the director's finest films. With the Renoir gone, the only "revivals" at the Festival were "A Woman Of Affairs," a mediocre Garbo film directed by a Metro hack, Clarence Brown, and "The Cheat," an old DeMille silent which the Festival apparently screened at sound speed (30 per cent faster).

The Festival's best film, Robert Bresson's "Au Hasard, Balthazar," went largely unheralded. Bresson's austere French film, made in 1965-66, confronts huge abstract themes, including time, love, and coincidence. Bresson creates some of the most enigmatic and interesting characters in all film, including a beautiful fatalistic young girl who is finally killed by the leader of a motorcycle gang, and a Christ-like town drunk who is perhaps a murderer.

These people and the other adults in the town represent different characteristics of Bresson's attitude toward humanity. The characters' relationships to one another are further explored indirectly through their connection with Balathazar himself is symbolic of patience and, the program notes tell us, of love. But more important, Bresson reveals the truths about his characters by contrasting their attitudes toward and treatment of the donkey.

Actually, another major fault of the Fourth New York Film Festival was that the best films shown were those made by the best-known directors: Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, Alain Resnais, Adnes Varda. The Festival failed to screen any films of importance by unknown film-makers, and also little that won't be seen again. The box-office power of directors like Resnais and Godard will assure almost all of the Festival's films a theatrical release sooner or later.

Of the two excellent Godard films shown, "Masculine Feminine," a violent and genuinely witty film about young people in Paris, was most popular, and "Pierrot Le Fou" was the best -- one of Godard's greatest achievements. On the surface, "Pierrot Le Fou," the 1965 film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, is a color and cinema-scope re-make of "The Maltese Falcon." But thematically, Godard's film is much blacker and more terrifying than its melodramatic plot line would imply.

In "Pierrot," a would-be writer, Ferdinand, abruptly walks out on the life he has been leading, one where his friends speak in advertising slogans, and travels cross-country trying to write and live by the standards he considers important. But the girl with whom he has run away turns out to be corrupt, and finally his love for her destroys him. Ferdinand has journeyed from one trap to another, and the realization of this is deeply disturbing. "Pierrot Le Fou" is an extension of Godard's preoccupation with the importance of human values in a world of emotional and intellectual bankruptcy. Godard's pessimistic attitude indirectly makes his lament more powerful than in his previous films, and in "Pierrot," Godard is working on a larger scale than before.

Alain Resnais's "La Guerre Est Finie" is a sombre and intellectual story of left-wing Spanish revolutionaries centered in Paris. Resnais has abandoned the strongly contrasting black-and-white tones of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year At Marienbad" in favor of low-contrast greys which deliberately reduce the effect of the plot's melodramatic content. Although the visual construction is simpler than that of "Marienbad" and "Muriel," Resnais does insert short scenes which represent the imagination of the hero, a tired revolutionary played brilliantly by Yves Montand.

Bunuel's 42 minute black comedy, "Simon of the Desert" turned out to be one of his most flawless, if shortest, films. "Simon," a re-telling of the life of the famous ascetic who spent most of his life standing on a huge pillar in the desert, is a synthesis of Bunuel's anti-clerical nature and his feelings about temptation and innate corruption in society. Bunuel heightened the power of the theme with photography and cutting. Using simple, almost formal, camera movement to create a sense of Simon's grandeur and isolation, Bunuel undercuts the effect with his cynical dialogue and ironic ending (Simon understands the futility of his faith when the Devil takes him into the future to a Greenwich Village discotheque).

The Festival also screened a Russian film, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," which had taken the honors at the San Francisco Film Festival, arriving in New York with a hearty endorsement from Kenneth Anger, director of "Scorpio Rising." Like most Russian films, it was crude, old-fashioned, sentimental, and arty. But taking all that into account, it was really interesting, with good color, some nice free-form camerawork, and a lot of costumes and noisy Russian folk-music.

Run on its present basis, the success of the New York Film Festival depends almost entirely on the output of the world's major directors, and on the highly debatable number of decent narrative films produced in a given year. The taste of the programmers is decidedly old-fashioned (the schedules proudly announced that one film was "discovered by Bosley Crowther"). Unless they are content to have history record them only as a show-case for the films of three or four great directors, the Festival committee must explore films outside of the straight-narrative form.

Unfortunately, the financial success of the New York Film Festival will probably serve to preserve is status as the "establishment" film festival. But maybe if nobody buys tickets next year, Richard Roud will have to program all eight hours of Andy Warhol's "The Chelsea Girls." And then,, everything will start to be all right.