Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat May 13, 2006 9:37 am 
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SFIFF 2006: CONCLUDING WORDS

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Isabelle Huppert in Gabrielle

THIS IS JUST A PARTIAL OVERVIEW; There's no way one person can see over two hundred films or "film events" in five weeks, the total time the press is allowed access to the SFIFF selections, and in real terms rating a big film festival is therefore strictly speaking impossible, but based on my random samplings I have some comments.

THE SFIFF'S NEW DIRECTOR is Graham Leggett, who's Scottish-born but a previous Bay Area resident and Stanford graduate. He was Director of Communications of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, where I met him at the NYFF press screenings. I like Graham's clarity and enthusiasm, and even his dour Scot side suggests he'll brook no nonsense, though he is great at hyping films and that's an important part of his job. He seems thoroughly energized and stoked about what he's doing here and well poised to liven things up over the next couple of years. His arrival is a hopeful note for the festival.

POLITICS AND PECKING ORDERS OF FESTIVALS is a topic still new to me; but it seems San Francisco might be at a disadvantage coming when it does. It ends just a couple weeks before Cannes begins. Big films are held for a first appearance at Cannes, which looks like being the beginning of the annual international festival cycle. Movie promoters may not want to dilute the big Cannes buzz by debuting their products at San Francisco -- or anywhere else that isn't a major festival venue.

THE SFIFF IS VIABLE AND WORTHWHILE because it plays to a large, sophisticated, and eager local audience. And there are a lot of filmmakers including some big guys who've escaped Hollywood to live up here, which increases the pool of celebs and talents at hand to participate.

THE SFIFF'S MOST DIRECT COMPETITION might be the new and smaller (by about a hundred films) Tribeca Film Festival, which comes in almost the same calendar spot and being in New York City has a powerhouse of talent to promote and run it. My guess is Tribeca may have had more new or offbeat stuff. Unlike the SFIFF, it naturally avoided any movies that had been screened previously in New York. Some of the best movies at SFIFF in my opinion that were not new to festivals, had been shown last year or this spring in New York.

LATIN AMERICA was confirmed for me as a great source of new filmmaking talent. Out of the 40 or so films/events of the SFIFF that I saw the most exciting new names were Alicia Scherson, whose Play is a witty, highly observant story of people wandering around in Santiago de Chile; and Ricardo Benet, a Mexican, whose News from Afar/Noticias lejanas is a haunting coming of age story that's also about marginalization. (And maybe globalization; but that word is being so overused in film talk it's becoming increasingly meaningless.) Each of these two Spanish-language movies provided the exhilaration of witnessing a brilliant, fully achieved first feature, and was a sign Latin America may be a hotbed of film creativity in years to come.

GREAT STUFF AT THE SFIFF I'D SEEN BEFORE: Sokurov's The Sun achieves greatness, Hou's Three Times is partly great, Chéreau's Gabrielle and Garrel's Regular Lovers are unforgettable: I had seen these four films at the NYFF. Two French selections were also repeats from New York, from the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema put on by the Film Society at Lincoln Center this March. Of these, I Saw Ben Barka Killed is somewhat dispensable (though worthy of attention if you're into modern French colonial history), but the second -- another story entirely -- Beauvois' Le Petit Lieutenant -- is an absolutely terrific cop flick, like many other cop flicks in every way except that it's more touching, more real, more felt and personal, and, for a French one, unusually sympathetic to cops. Tribeca didn't show any of these, because New Yorkers had already had a chance to see them.

DOCUMENTARIES I saw all seemed of value -- the politics-related Brazilian one Favela Rising and the more sweepingly political Venezuelan Dignity of the Nobodies. Shooting Under Fire and Beyond the Call are well-told stories about people doing good work in some of the world's major hot spots. Iraq in Fragments has wonderful images in its three separate segments -- though the director might have used editing and narration to make better use of them; it wasn't clear if it was Iraq that's in fragments, or the film. Other reportedly good documentaries at the festival: The Giant Buddhas, Workingman's Death, The Bridge. Funny and personal: Alan Berliner's Wide Awake.

COMPLETE GAPS IN THE PROGRAM? According to at least one source there were "grumblings that the festival's new regime neglects women directors and isn't looking hard enough for African and Middle Eastern films," but "few complaints about the continued strong selection of Asian entries." Indeed there weren't many African or Middle Eastern films, but maybe the programmers looked hard but couldn't find.

ASIAN SELECTIONS WERE DISAPPOINTING, though perhaps numerous enough. Tsai's Wayward Cloud is not the work of genius some think; in fact it may be the worst thing he's done and oscillates between being boring, shocking, and bizarre. Hou's aforementioned Three Times is brilliant and touching -- or one third of it is. Tsubokawa's sadly grainy and hard to follow Clouds of Yesterday is steeped in cinematic sense and may be a rough hint of fine work to come. Wakamatsu's Cycling Chronicles is little more than a troubling trifle. Kang's Sa-Kwa didn't quite make it. All About Love by Daniel Yu is slick schlock. Perhaps Love (which I didn't see) sounds like a hit or miss musical with great production values and big stars, if that's what you look for at a festival. Probably it isn't. Taking Father Home was amateurish and lame: not every rough hewn new generation mainland Chinese director is a Jia Zhang-ke. What were the judges thinking of in giving this their SKYY Prize? I guess they were rewarding financial need, more than talent. I also wonder why the festival awarded its Fipresci Prize to Half Nelson, starring Ryan Gosling, which didn't live up to expectations in either the acting or the screenwriting categories.

ANOTHER SHORT AREA WAS IRANIAN FILMS. While Tribeca boasted eight of them, all we got was the microcosm on an abandoned tanker, Iron Island, which was in the New Directors series at Lincoln Center a couple months before and was shown at an art house in lower Manhattan afterwards.

UNNECESSARY PREVIEWS SEEM A FEATURE OF FESTIVALS. Why do movies show up which are about to open in theaters? Oddly, audiences flock to see them, eager to be a few weeks ahead of the mob. Besides Half Nelson, Factotum, A Prairie Home Companion, and Art School Confidential all fell into this category. Tribeca, Cannes, etc. have things like this too. I guess it's part of the festival game, which isn't all about enriching our experience but also about promotion and reveling in novelty. At least San Francisco got a lavish Chinese musical as their opener and not what Cannes is starting with -- The Da Vinci Code.

LESSONS LEARNED? The obvious one: a sense that the world of cinema is rich today -- far richer than our cineplexes or art houses let us know; but an equally strong sense that the world isn't producing dozens of great new films every six months. No, that's just not about to happen. While not a festival junkie -- the type who's plotting the next one, and the next, and the next, to maintain the high of wall-to-wall new movies -- and the exhaustion of watching them -- I sure liked having the opportunity to see all this new stuff -- and to re-watch The Sun and Le Petit Lieutenant and Gabrielle. The latter gets limted release July 14. The other two, plus Hou's Three Times, have distributors but their release dates are unannounced. No distributor for Play or News from Afar. And that's too bad…but that's why there are festivals, and why we have to attend them.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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