Pena envy
So the cinetrix understands there's some sort of film festival? In New York? Starting today? How nice!
It's nearly impossible to troll the cinematically inclined interwebs lately without stumbling over copious coverage of the New York Film Festival. And for those of you who, like the cinetrix, foolishly opted to live somewhere other than the city, it's also hard not to hear a little nyah-nyah undergirding the copy.
Or, in the case of camera-shy Manohla Dargis's audio slideshow, a howling siren [around 1:30]. The NYT critic is clearly filing from her hometown, for a change, and it's fun to hear how quickly the Valley cadences she's picked up in L.A. get shoved aside by her L.E.S.-bred vowels.
In the accompanying article, Dargis looks back and to the future and sounds her own alarm:
The question is how the Film Society will rise to the occasion of these new digs: notably, will it expand beyond its cozy core constituency? For those of us who have despaired at the Walter Reade's inability to fill its seats consistently, and for those of us who have also long thought of the New York Film Festival as an uptown event, these are no small matters. The Film Society does get out of the neighborhood, most recently with outdoor screenings in Stuyvesant Town, but its distance from many of the city's most vibrant communities can make it seem as remote as the far side of the Moon. The Film Society has often seemed as if it expected the city to come to it, never the reverse.
Its willingness to go beyond its comfort and perhaps even its geographic zone feels especially urgent now because it won't be long before the old art-house faithful start slipping away like Antonioni and Bergman. Cinemania is alive and well on the Internet, notably in blogs, where young movie nuts rant and rave and help cultivate one another's cinematic interests. This is heartening, but film -- especially the kind that distinguishes this year's edition of the New York Film Festival -- needs more than passion. It needs an audience, a paying public. If we don't cultivate a new generation of movie lovers who get excited at the very idea of a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, we may as well hold a memorial service for foreign-language-film theatrical distribution right now.
You bring the flowers; I'll bring the Scotch.
The cutesy kicker points up part of the problem facing festivals and the future of foreign-language-film theatrical distribution. If art house cinema can be no country for old men if it is to survive, ditch the old-man drinks. And the name-checking of Bergman and Antonioni that smacks of laurel-resting and "kids today" muttering may not be the best way to bring "young movie nuts" through the doors. If they can afford to gamble $16 to $40 on a ticket, that is.
It's true that bloggers "rant and rave and help
cultivate one another's cinematic interests," but it's not always such a circle jerk. Still, Dargis is right to look beyond them for a "new generation of movie lovers." She might also want to look beyond Manhattan -- and even the outer boroughs. Here's why: The cinetrix would hazard that even the most passionate bloggers, and especially those in New
York, don't aspire to be part of the "paying public" at all, if they can help it. They want the
access old-media reviewers have -- to press screenings, press passes, screeners, and
seen-it-first bragging rights. Meanwhile, the closest the rest of the new generation will get to NYFF-type films is reading about them online [via blogs or the Times] and then adding intriguing titles -- fingers crossed -- to the "Saved" section of their Netflix queue, where they'll languish indefinitely until they land DVD distribution. Maybe.
So, how do we get the young people hooked on art house flicks? Got me. But an article in Variety's NYFF package may shed more light on the problem, if not the solution. In a profile of Richard Pena, the NYFF's 54-year-old director sounds some of the same alarms heard in Dargis's article and indulges in some of the same off-putting lionizing of the past:
Like a true movie junkie, Richard Pena can tick off the great double features he saw as a child as if the movies were still showing downtown. In New York of the 1960s, a time when arthouse and repertory cinemas thrived, Pena's 75¢ bought him afternoons with Renoir and weighty pairings like Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night" and "The Seventh Seal."
Pena, now in his 20th year as selection committee chairman of the New York Film Festival, remembers those times fondly. Back then, he says, audiences went to the movies to explore and to be challenged, and Americans' taste for foreign films hit a high-water mark.*
"We like to think that things only change for the better, but ... that openness that existed in the '60s disappeared," says Pena. "We not only lost it, we became hostile to it."
Since coming to Lincoln Center, Pena has made it his job to, if not resist the narrowing of the audience's collective mind, then at least to ignore it.
Oh, sweet Christ: the '60s? Not that hoary locution. And who is this "We"? Is he saying it's the lazy younger g-g-g-generation's failure to explore and be challenged that's to blame for "the narrowing of the audience's collective mind"?
...the 54-year-old Pena says the festival's mission isn't to be the first, but rather to spotlight the highest-caliber films being made. He aims to show how cinema, at its best, is the equal of opera, ballet and the other arts.
You mean because it relies on repertory programming broken up by the occasional cynical blockbuster, and appeals to a dwindling, aging audience? I'd say you're well on your way! But wanting to be more like opera may not be the best business model.
And check out this closing graf:
"I am in the film history business," [Pena] says. "I look at this vast, worldwide gurgling mass of films produced in the past 110 years ... and try to help people find a way into it."
The cinetrix is in the film history business, too, on a much smaller scale. This semester, she's trying to help a hardy band of undergrads find their way into a panoply of world cinema classics, ordained as such by Criterion, Janus Films, and, yes, a festival or two. These students couldn't live further from NYFF's "comfort and perhaps even its geographic zone," as Dargis puts it, if they did live on "the far side of the moon." But some of them have been known to drive hours to see a film. Otherwise, they wait for the DVD.
Thank God for DVDs. The cinetrix can serve up some of those big names -- Bergman, Truffaut, Antonioni, Foreman -- that the NYFF has championed over the decades, in far better condition than the shitty Swank 16mms she watched in school. The kids may never have seen anything like 'em before, but they're down for whatever. They ask good questions that demand more than the "because I said so" cant answers rooted in reputations and history.
However, they also struggle to overcome the anxiety, fostered by the calcified attitudes of taste-makers like Pena, that maybe these films are not for them. That a bland diet of multiplex flicks [dished out by the art-house boomers' evil twins running Hollywood] has left them unprepared for the gourmet films and unsure of their own tastes. But the openness is still there, even if the access to these films in all their projected glory is not.
So, if you're fortunate enough to be going to NYFF this year, enjoy the festival. Do it for the kids.
*Oh, and another reason Americans' taste for foreign films hit the high-water mark in the 1960s was far from highbrow: European films showed a lot more skin.
Poor Andula. Left high and dry yet again.
So, the cinetrix was screening Singin' in the Rain tonight for her Intro class, and she has a quick question for you smarty-pants cinephile types out there on the Interwebs.
