On Attending The Telluride Film Festival, part 1

5 months ago

On Attending The Telluride Film Festival, part 1

by Edward Montgomery

One should not travel to Telluride reading about geology.

On my daily gondola ride into the town, I found myself staring at the striated ridges and ancient domes around me like a child in wonder at seeing the world for the first time. The gondola itself rises quickly out of Mountain Village (Telluride’s bastard, ski-town child) and hits an elevation of over 12,000’ before dropping sharply into the valley where Telluride itself is found, three thousand feet below. I found myself reeling in the knowledge that the layers of iron ferrate in the exposed ridge, red lines of rock like angry scars, were probably over 200 million years in the making. While the pulleys overhead moved me down the mountain in a controlled fall, I mouthed phrases of John McPhee (“chaotic, concatenated shards of time”), phrases more amplified the further I fell.

For the first part of the festival, this daily perspective of solitude paired with descent ended up being the appropriate one. I found myself confronted with silent films and restorations, some over a century old, and watching other films that owed so much to their ancestral history that I felt this year’s festival recourse for a degree in film studies. What was formed from these conflations of art and time was a realization of the true role of image and music in film.

While image may seem obvious, the reliance upon visual explanations in silent films and its different metamorphoses can be surprisingly subtle and delicate (see our previous article on Five Perfect Camera Shots). Should we try to prove the importance of image through its negative, an opposite of subtle and delicate images may be found in modern incarnations such as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Silent film produced some of the most horrid overacting in the history of film, but it also created some of the most honest and touching—the ability for a perfectly timed smile to tell an entire character’s secrets is still a skill most actors have not mastered. And though music has existed in film from the start, music contains the unique property of being both time-stamped at its creation and yet, perpetually judged by its ability to ride the cultural crest of modernity—Bach sounds, and can be described as, baroque; but Bach played by Glenn Gould has an ethereal and enduring quality that has made it forever necessary, unhinged from time.

The idea, then, in practice. Try an image from 1902: Georges Méliès’s infamous A Trip to the Moon, a moon with a rocket in the eye. This film (of which I was unaware until my first trip to Telluride) was described as a “Holy Grail for film preservationists”, and had been only available in tattered black and white film prints until this year. Still, A Trip to the Moon had long been known for its remarkable special effects and strange science fiction, and was now being presented to Telluride as fully restored (or as restored as a 109 year-old film can be).

Its image was as close to the original color version as possible, but in an imaginative triumph, its score was completely rewritten and re-imagined by Sofia Coppola’s pet-band, Air. All cheekiness aside, Air’s score invigorates this new version of A Trip to the Moon, the old image being enlightened more by the music than its own restored color. The result was an old film feeling young, ancient bedrock of film exposed and shining again.

Another recipe, the role of image and music reversed: Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet, Opus 84, Dance of the Knights, and a shot inside of a refrigerator: fresh food being placed precariously close to the rotting detritus near the back. Of course, as far as plots go, there must be war. Zergüt, a short by Alisa Lapidus and Natasha Subramaniam, was shot using high-speed filmmaking and stop-motion animation in what the directors perfectly describe as a “contemporary day Fantasia”. The splashes of color, the explosions of fruit, and an ever-present orchestral score morphing and playing in concert with the gastronomical fusion onscreen: all of this led to a complete infatuation with the film playing before me.

Official Zergüt trailer

But beyond experimental and ancient shorts lay the great, modern films, indebted to the rich histories of film from the very start. What many would argue was the eventual coup de grâce of the festival, The Artist was a surprise for us all. Director Michel Hazanavicius found both the courage and funding to film a fully re-imagined and authentic silent film in our modern day. The Artist’s hero is George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent-film era star facing his own extinction with the industrial evolution of the talkies.

The film itself is a comedy turned tragedy: Valentin’s efforts to hold onto the past ultimately fail him and his estate is brought to ruin by both his obsolescence and the Great Depression. Unlike other mock-silent films of the modern day (I’m looking at you Three Times), Hazanavicius was wise enough to allow the actors to speak for themselves, to ignore the modern, unnerving feeling that too little is being said by the acting itself. The dialogue shots were enough for the wit to shine through and moments to be clarified, but they were happily in rare supply, and whatever was missing in the acting could be easily found in the film’s score (Ludovic Bourse).

The film’s masterful balance of sound and image resulted in everyone being sucked into Valentin’s fear of words themselves. The nightmare scene itself was perfectly timed to ease the audience’s misgivings about a “new” silent-film (and containing the first sound-effect you’ll hear the entire film), as were multiple homage scenes to film’s origins (keep an eye out for a beautiful nod to Metropolis). Still, it was the final allowance of sound in the conclusion that drove home all the humanity of the characters, revealing their graciousness at being allowed to move forward into a new world.

Sadly, not all filmmakers have Hazanavicius’ kind of talent. Passerby, a new film by Brazilian filmmaker Eryk Rocha, could also be described as an ancestral pastiche, except that it was more interested in the noise of a city drowning out any words we might choose to say rather than any new interpretation of image and sound. In fact, noise is Rocha’s score. A nearly silent film (especially as it was left un-translated from its original Portuguese—as an aside, I do wonder how I would have reacted if I could have understood the little that was said), Passerby wanders for two hours, searching for a personal subject in the everyman character of Expedito.

Expedito, a 65-year-old man who lives alone, visits his mother’s grave, stares wistfully at women on the street, and gapes uncomprehendingly at the construction site across the street from his apartment. Eventually, he begins to attend a karaoke nightclub. And that’s it.

Rocha was too interested in the image and noise of a chaotic city, so much so that any pathos we were supposed to feel for Expedito’s postmodern confusion disappears into boredom. The unfolding of sound, the weight of our single voice in a city of noise, the construction of the unimaginable even as our world bobs without meaning—these are strong messages in a film bogged down by the weight of its own ambivalence. Here is art house cinema for all those who use that term disparagingly.

Geological pressure and time; the basin and range of quality, both in the mountainous new, and the eroded and forgotten valleys of old. Image and sound repeated as accented notes, the very melody of film for this tiny pocket of art. Our modern iterations may follow and change slightly, but all the tools that make us gasp and burst into laughter, that make us sink lower into our seats out of fear for the characters—these have not changed.

Another quote of McPhee’s that stuck in my head: “Mountains are not somehow created whole and subsequently worn away. They wear down as they come up, and these mountains have been rising and eroding in fairly even ratio for millions of years—rising and shredding sediment steadily through time, always the same, never the same, like row upon row of fountains.” Who are we to argue that films do not act as mountains do, all of us chained to the changing land through which we move?

Edward Montgomery is a writer who has promised all of us (including his editors) that part two of his adventures at this year’s Telluride Film Festival are shortly forthcoming. He tumbls here.