Let’s start with the bad news, which also happens to be the good news. With the erosion of state funding virtually everywhere and the concomitant streamlining of many film festivals toward certifiable hits–basically what an audience already knows, or worse, what it thinks it knows–there isn’t a great deal of difference anymore between the lineups of most large international festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, and even Chicago. By and large, the critics at Toronto last month, myself included, who thought it was an unusually good festival were those who hadn’t made it to the previous three big festivals.
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Yet generally speaking, as far as important films are concerned, the differences between the big festivals are mainly circumstantial. This month’s New York festival is showing the world premiere of It’s All True, a documentary about Orson Welles’s unfinished Brazilian film, but the same feature opens at the Music Box late this month. However, the New York festival–which unlike Toronto and Chicago never accepts anything sight unseen–isn’t showing either Chantal Akerman’s From the East or Jean-Luc Godard’s Helas pour moi, both important (albeit difficult) films that made the Toronto and Chicago lineups.
Three of the films I’ve already seen–Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, Jane Campion’s The Piano, and Mike Leigh’s Naked–are scheduled to open here commercially, and three more are older features by Jerry Schatzberg that have already had commercial runs. Most of the nine others are highly unlikely to be distributed commercially; in roughly descending order of preference these are Jean-Luc Godard’s three-year-old Nouvelle vague, Chantal Akerman’s From the East, Godard’s brand-new Helas pour moi, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, Manoel de Oliveira’s The Day of Despair, Ray Muller’s three-hour The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Dusan Makavejev’s Gorilla Bathes at Noon, Clara Law’s Autumn Moon, and Chen Kuo-fu’s Treasure Island. The films I haven’t seen but would most like to see are, in no particular order, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue (scheduled for commercial release, along with Farewell, which by then will have been cut by Miramax–if it hasn’t been already), Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God, Ildiko Szabo’s Child Murders, Atom Egoyan’s Calendar, Serge Toublana and Michel Pascal’s Francois Truffaut, Stolen Portraits, and Agnes Varda’s The Young Girls Turn 25.
The festival runs from Friday, October 8, through Sunday, October 24. Screenings are at the Pipers Alley Theatre, 1608 N. Wells, and the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets can be purchased at the festival store at Pipers Alley and at the theater box offices an hour before show time; they’re also available by phone (for a service charge) at 559-1212 and 644-3456. General admission to most programs is $7; $6 for students and seniors; $5 for Cinema/Chicago members. Shows before 6 PM at both theaters are $5, $4 for students, seniors, and Cinema/Chicago members. Festival passes are also available. For more information call 644-3456 (644-FILM).
