The New York Film Festival — which begins its 48th iteration Friday night at Lincoln Center with a gala screening of “The Social Network” — is at once buoyed and burdened by its past. This is true of other festivals, too. Spend a few hours at Sundance or Cannes and you are bound to hear someone conjuring up the old days, when indie film really, you know, mattered or when Marcello Mastroianniwas standing right over there.
And so as the crowds filter into Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater between now and Oct. 10, shadows of earlier times are likely to flicker across the marble and glass. This was where, in the ’60s and ’70s, the French and German New Waves — particularly represented by Godard and Fassbinder — broke on North American soil, and where local audiences in subsequent decades became aware of the boom times in Asian and American independent cinema. Remember?
But though such backward glances are part of the festival atmosphere, they are not really the point. When you watch a movie you sit facing forward, and the festival’s annual program — a relatively small bouquet of new films, selected and arranged by a committee of critics and programmers —
is both a sampling of the present and an intimation of the future. Other festivals are more comprehensive or more attuned to the business of buying, selling and publicizing films. New York, though, is about something else: discrimination, criticism, the formation of taste.
“We’re saying, ‘Here are the 25 essential films of this year,’ ” said Rose Kuo, the new executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which oversees the festival. “We’re telling you that you should see these things. We’re making a statement about film culture.”
Ms. Kuo, hired in June to replace Mara Manus — a change so abrupt that it took many in the film world by surprise, not least Ms. Kuo herself — takes over at a time of ambitious growth and economic uncertainty. The nonprofit fund-raising climate is as grim as the job market, and the film society is about to add two new theaters, a cafe and a bookstore as part of the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, which will open early next year.
Ms. Kuo, most recently the artistic director of the AFI Fest in Los Angeles, said she hoped to expand the film society’s audience without diluting its tradition of programming ambitious and sometimes challenging films.
“This is a public endeavor,” she said, “a conversation with the public. That means talking and listening and having opinions — and sometimes your opinions aren’t well received.”
This year the selection committee (led by Richard Peña, the film society’s longtime head of programming, and including the critics Todd McCarthy, Melissa Anderson, Scott Foundas and Dennis Lim, a frequent contributor to The New York Times) was blessed with good luck and guided by a spirit of eclecticism. In some previous years, the available pool of work has been weaker or thinner, and the committee has at times pursued a narrow aesthetic agenda at odds with the essential heterogeneity of the art form.
The opening-night attraction, David Fincher’s latest, about the founding of Facebook, is one of the most anticipated releases of the year, having inspired quite a lot of debate before anyone has even seen it. It may be the movie of the moment, but its place in this festival, alongside low-key realist dramas, form-bending documentaries and surreal explorations of the natural world, suggests that the moment is much more complicated, more layered with echoes from the past, than we might suspect.
The other two gala presentations, the centerpiece and closing night films, are Julie Taymor’s adaptation of “The Tempest” and Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” a quiet and contemplative examination of the possibility of some kind of life after death. “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s last play, is among other things a tale of leave-taking and last things, and the youthful aggression of “The Social Network” is balanced by quite a few films that explore age, ripeness and mortality.
None quite as boldly as “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” the latest feature from the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. “Uncle Boonmee” won the top prize in Cannes this year, to the surprise of nearly everyone and the dismay of some who grumbled that the jury had somehow gone too far in honoring something so esoteric, so puzzling, so downright weird.
It is all of those things, but “Uncle Boonmee,” filmed mostly in the forests of Northeastern Thailand, is also dreamy, funny and surpassingly gentle, a pastoral ghost story that seems driven by a serene tolerance of the mysteries of the universe. There are talking monkeys with laser-beam eyes, an amorous catfish (who also talks), various apparitions and narrative digressions (to the extent that there is a narrative at all). You could react with impatience, but the title character’s acceptance of the strangeness that surrounds him serves as a guide to watching the film, which can, if you allow it, alter your sense of the relationship between human beings and the natural world.
That relationship is something of a motif at this year’s festival. Some of the most memorable films are journeys into landscapes, some drab, some gorgeous. Patrick Keiller’s “Robinson in Ruins,” a historical essay on the rise and fall of capitalism built around the adventures of an unseen fictional protagonist, is composed of lingering glances at road signs, old bridges, crumbling houses and other everyday vistas. Aleksei Fedorchenko’s “Silent Souls” infuses the waterways and meadows of northern Russia with a melancholy soul. And “Le Quattro Volte” by Michelangelo Frammartino turns its crazily sublime views of the Italian countryside into an animist tour de force. One of the principal characters is a tree, and most of the dialogue is in goat, without subtitles.
But there is plenty of human drama to be found at the festival: in “Tuesday, After Christmas,” an unsparing anatomy of everyday adultery and its consequences from the Romanian director Radu Muntean; in “Poetry,” an exquisite melodrama by the South Korean filmmaker (and former minister of culture) Lee Chang-dong, about an elderly woman struggling with incipient Alzheimer’s disease and her beloved grandson’s involvement in a nasty crime; and in “Of Gods and Men,” by Xavier Beauvois, the quietly intense story of a community of French monks caught up in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s.
And this is only the beginning, and only a sampling. There will also be documentaries about John Lennon and Elia Kazan, discussions with filmmakers (including Mr. Fincher and Mr. Apichatpong) and judiciously chosen revival programs. Enough to make you forget about the old days, at least until next year.
The 48th New York Film Festival runs through Oct. 10. Most movies will be shown in Alice Tully Hall or the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Information: (212) 875-5050; tickets: (212) 721-6500; filmlinc.com.
And so as the crowds filter into Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater between now and Oct. 10, shadows of earlier times are likely to flicker across the marble and glass. This was where, in the ’60s and ’70s, the French and German New Waves — particularly represented by Godard and Fassbinder — broke on North American soil, and where local audiences in subsequent decades became aware of the boom times in Asian and American independent cinema. Remember?
But though such backward glances are part of the festival atmosphere, they are not really the point. When you watch a movie you sit facing forward, and the festival’s annual program — a relatively small bouquet of new films, selected and arranged by a committee of critics and programmers —
is both a sampling of the present and an intimation of the future. Other festivals are more comprehensive or more attuned to the business of buying, selling and publicizing films. New York, though, is about something else: discrimination, criticism, the formation of taste.“We’re saying, ‘Here are the 25 essential films of this year,’ ” said Rose Kuo, the new executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which oversees the festival. “We’re telling you that you should see these things. We’re making a statement about film culture.”
Ms. Kuo, hired in June to replace Mara Manus — a change so abrupt that it took many in the film world by surprise, not least Ms. Kuo herself — takes over at a time of ambitious growth and economic uncertainty. The nonprofit fund-raising climate is as grim as the job market, and the film society is about to add two new theaters, a cafe and a bookstore as part of the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, which will open early next year.
Ms. Kuo, most recently the artistic director of the AFI Fest in Los Angeles, said she hoped to expand the film society’s audience without diluting its tradition of programming ambitious and sometimes challenging films.
“This is a public endeavor,” she said, “a conversation with the public. That means talking and listening and having opinions — and sometimes your opinions aren’t well received.”
This year the selection committee (led by Richard Peña, the film society’s longtime head of programming, and including the critics Todd McCarthy, Melissa Anderson, Scott Foundas and Dennis Lim, a frequent contributor to The New York Times) was blessed with good luck and guided by a spirit of eclecticism. In some previous years, the available pool of work has been weaker or thinner, and the committee has at times pursued a narrow aesthetic agenda at odds with the essential heterogeneity of the art form.
The opening-night attraction, David Fincher’s latest, about the founding of Facebook, is one of the most anticipated releases of the year, having inspired quite a lot of debate before anyone has even seen it. It may be the movie of the moment, but its place in this festival, alongside low-key realist dramas, form-bending documentaries and surreal explorations of the natural world, suggests that the moment is much more complicated, more layered with echoes from the past, than we might suspect.
The other two gala presentations, the centerpiece and closing night films, are Julie Taymor’s adaptation of “The Tempest” and Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” a quiet and contemplative examination of the possibility of some kind of life after death. “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s last play, is among other things a tale of leave-taking and last things, and the youthful aggression of “The Social Network” is balanced by quite a few films that explore age, ripeness and mortality.
None quite as boldly as “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” the latest feature from the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. “Uncle Boonmee” won the top prize in Cannes this year, to the surprise of nearly everyone and the dismay of some who grumbled that the jury had somehow gone too far in honoring something so esoteric, so puzzling, so downright weird.
It is all of those things, but “Uncle Boonmee,” filmed mostly in the forests of Northeastern Thailand, is also dreamy, funny and surpassingly gentle, a pastoral ghost story that seems driven by a serene tolerance of the mysteries of the universe. There are talking monkeys with laser-beam eyes, an amorous catfish (who also talks), various apparitions and narrative digressions (to the extent that there is a narrative at all). You could react with impatience, but the title character’s acceptance of the strangeness that surrounds him serves as a guide to watching the film, which can, if you allow it, alter your sense of the relationship between human beings and the natural world.
That relationship is something of a motif at this year’s festival. Some of the most memorable films are journeys into landscapes, some drab, some gorgeous. Patrick Keiller’s “Robinson in Ruins,” a historical essay on the rise and fall of capitalism built around the adventures of an unseen fictional protagonist, is composed of lingering glances at road signs, old bridges, crumbling houses and other everyday vistas. Aleksei Fedorchenko’s “Silent Souls” infuses the waterways and meadows of northern Russia with a melancholy soul. And “Le Quattro Volte” by Michelangelo Frammartino turns its crazily sublime views of the Italian countryside into an animist tour de force. One of the principal characters is a tree, and most of the dialogue is in goat, without subtitles.
But there is plenty of human drama to be found at the festival: in “Tuesday, After Christmas,” an unsparing anatomy of everyday adultery and its consequences from the Romanian director Radu Muntean; in “Poetry,” an exquisite melodrama by the South Korean filmmaker (and former minister of culture) Lee Chang-dong, about an elderly woman struggling with incipient Alzheimer’s disease and her beloved grandson’s involvement in a nasty crime; and in “Of Gods and Men,” by Xavier Beauvois, the quietly intense story of a community of French monks caught up in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s.
And this is only the beginning, and only a sampling. There will also be documentaries about John Lennon and Elia Kazan, discussions with filmmakers (including Mr. Fincher and Mr. Apichatpong) and judiciously chosen revival programs. Enough to make you forget about the old days, at least until next year.
The 48th New York Film Festival runs through Oct. 10. Most movies will be shown in Alice Tully Hall or the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Information: (212) 875-5050; tickets: (212) 721-6500; filmlinc.com.
