.



REFLEXIVE, SURREAL, MYTHOLOGICAL LAYERS

The thinning of linear time within numerous entries in NYFF 2004 is but one of the cutting edge issues reflected in another group of entries, those that are characterized by the way they play reflexively with surrealism and mythology. For example, there is the 1969 film _Macunaima_, directed by Joaquim De Andrade, a Brazilian director unfortunately unknown outside his country except by aficionados. Wildly popular when it was first released in Brazil, this is an extraordinary film with much to teach even the bravest of the current filmmakers about pushing the envelope. To sum the situation up bluntly, _Macunaima_ is a surreal comedy about cannibalism; but please do not skip down to the next film. This may be my festival favorite.

_Macunaima_ is based on a 1928 experimental novel of the same name, written by Mario De Andrade. The film, prodigious in its modernism, nevertheless reflects a humor reminiscent of the grotesque satires of Rabelais, Voltaire, and Swift as well that of the New Brazilian Cinema of the 1960s in its blend of folklore, radical politics, and the absurd. Many of the fantastic character inventions also remind me of Jean-Luc Godard's _Weekend_. Macunaima is the name of the hero of this tale of a mad society in which the rich are out to devour anything and anyone they can. (Does this sort of cultural milieu sound familiar to anyone?) The film begins with a jolt and never lets up. The first thing we see is a red screen and the first sound we hear is a blood curdling scream. The scream emanates from what is clearly a man dressed as an Indian woman giving birth, and what drops from between his/her legs is clearly a corpulent adult well into his thirties; he is black not Indian (Grande Otelo) and he is certainly not a baby. The 'mother' hates her 'baby' and intentionally gives him an unlucky name. Macunaima's 'birth' immediately turns the family upside down, as a result of his very unbabylike lechery. To increase her pleasure with Macunaima, his sister-in-law Sofara (Joanna Fomm), a witch, turns him from a black man to a white man (Paulo Jose), who is considered infinitely handsomer than his original black incarnation: actually they are each costumed like clowns and made up to look grotesque.

As Macunaima makes his way in this episodic film, he finds and loses love and comrades and continually bumps into convoluted methods by means of which the greedy devour people. Although the film opens in the jungle, the impassable chasm between nature and human beings soon becomes evident. Whether in a verdant setting or in the city to which Macuaima eventually travels, everything is constructed: racial identity, sexual identity, maternity, family, power hierarchies, art, and architecture. There is a whiff of something more grounded in some of Macunaima's relationships with people who do not want him for their lunch, but these relationships cannot stand the centrifugal pressures of cultural realities and come and go with frightening rapidity. When Macunaima returns to the jungle at the end of the film, although he has evaded all human interest in ingesting him, we receive a final shock: the cannibalism of human beings is an outgrowth of the natural world. After all, not everything is constructed. In the verdant paradise, Macunaima succumbs to a gorgeous spirit of the wilderness who entices him into the water from which he never returns. Despite the bleak, nihilistic hard core of this film, the images and conceits are so fresh, vivid, and full of life, that somehow this worst case scenario is transformed into a joyous assertion of all that is best in the human imagination.

A plentitude of invention is also the hallmark of Zhang Yimou's _The House of Flying Daggers_, but for highly romantic purposes. Yimou, like many other Asian filmmakers with an eye on an international market, plays with genre conventions reminiscent of those at the core of the Hollywood production; but always with a freedom uncommon in the United States. _The House of Flying Daggers_ is an action film, but it is also a cinematic poem. It begins with a theme common to Chinese kung fu films, the battle between police and secret societies in long ago China. But the mission of two fighters of the Imperial Guard, Tang (Andy Lau) and Leo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to subvert and destroy The House of Flying Daggers, a secret society that works in opposition to the corrupt Tang Dynasty, is soon revealed as a tissue of illusion in a world in which no one is what he or she seems. As the layers are peeled away, the film also turns on its axis to become a love story in which politics becomes all but irrelevant.

Originally, Tang and Leo seem bound and determined to succeed in their mission for the greater glory of their own careers, but one of them is actually a mole for the House of Flying Daggers -- I will leave you that discovery to make for yourself. And in the Peony Pavillion, a brothel of thrilling beauty and charm, to which Leo is sent in disguise to gain information for the Imperial guard about The House of Flying Daggers, unsuspected secrets lurk behind some of the beautiful and willing faces, among them the beautiful and lithe Mei (Ziyi Zhang) and the affable and conciliatory madam (Song Dandan), seemingly there only to give pleasure to paying customers. As Leo and Tang make their separate discoveries about the women and about each other, quests for military glory and political justice give way to obsession with erotic passion. This film tells us that on the most basic level, the quarrels we pick with each other have little to do with the apparent cultural reasons that seem to inform conflict.

Some cinephiles and cineastes (did _Film-Philosophy_ ever resolve *that* dispute?) will resist a film that at first appears to present human life as a Russian doll of concentric constructions, each one revealing another construction within it, but at last finds not a void at the heart of cultural posturing but an abundance of passion that renders all political struggle a displacement for the personal desires that really concern us. However, a great many viewers of all socio-cultural stances will be ravished by the beauty of this film, which thrillingly plays with the sensual aspects of color and sound so that, time and again, they almost relegate story to limbo. Frames designed around blues are succeeded by frames designed around greens. CGI is used to stimulate audience sensitivity to sound, most spectacularly in the Echo Game in the Peony Pavillion at the beginning of the film when Tang seems to be testing Mei to determine whether her arrest would further his political aims. Typically in this film, and unlike most Hollywood inspired use of special effects, the Echo Game is a breathtaking example of what CGI can do when it is subordinated to artistic goals rather than running off with the film as a demonstration of its own virtuosity. Ironically, however, the most spectacular transformative effect of all in the film only looks like an application of CGI, a tantalizingly strange case of life imitating art. The final, extremely bloody, conflict among Mei, Leo, and Tang takes place in a breathtakingly tinted autumnal landscape which suddenly frosts over with winter snow as they fight, piling them, with uncannily metaphoric impact, deeper and deeper into the white drifts as death overtakes them. Yet this seemingly impossible transition was a natural event. The on-location shoot was confounded by an unexpected snowfall in the middle of the choreography of the final battle. Yimou's appalled frustration turned to delight when he saw a rough cut of the magic that was a present to him from nature, the equal of anything he could create technologically.

In contrast, the constructed aspects of culture consistently dominate _The World_, another Chinese entry that examines modern mythos from within the hollow fabrications of a theme park in China that produces a simulation of traveling from country to country for spectators who in reality go nowhere at all. For those who, like me, have never heard of it, The World is an actual theme park in China, which eerily replicates Hollywood's iconography of international culture. Being in France, then, is equated with seeing the Eiffel Tower; in India with seeing the Taj Mahal; in New York with a skyline of skyscrapers; England with Big Ben. Jia Jhang-ke's film, embodied in both live action and animated sequences, casts an ironic eye on the lives of several young Chinese men and women from the provinces who have seemingly fulfilled their dreams by coming to work at The World. What is revealed about them indicates that they are infantilized or disoriented by the modern state of affairs that the theme park represents.

The main character is Tao (Zhao Tao), the equivalent of a Las Vegas showgirl in the musical extravaganzas of all nations performed many times daily at The World. Tao's words open and close the film, and the distance she has traveled from her first, screeching appearance onscreen to her last softly phrased whisper measures what development the movie deems possible within the shallow fantasy that is life in modern day China. Tao opens _ The World_ barnstorming through the dressing rooms just before a performance, mouth open wide and bawling in infantile tones for a bandaid. The disparity between her beauty and her repetitive, high pitched cries -- a repetition which verges on the pathology of perseveration -- prefigures the structure of the film, in which an attractive group of people behave like children, with distinctly foreshortened attention spans.

Further delineating the dystopian aspects of The World, is the discrepancy between the private rooms for the performers and the public display areas. Backstage, the performers drift through poorly lit, grungy halls, and live in rooms that are monastic in their lack of amenities, and Spartan in their colorless, functional furniture. In their private lives, the characters wear adolescent play clothes, much like the denim-tee-shirt-sneaker-wear that has invaded the wardrobes of adults in Europe and the United States. But in their professional lives, they sport snazzy uniforms and glittering, jewel tone glamour outfits as they step in pre-designed patterns through brilliantly lit, sleek, and/or vividly colored public spaces. Their banal conversations on cell phones morph into colorful animated fantasies in their deprived imaginations.

As the relationships of Tao and her friends slip, slide, and refuse to stay in place, some may find the film in need of cutting to forestall the drifting of the audience along with that of the characters. But other spectators will see in Jian Zhan-ke's decision a necessary immersion of the audience in the nebulous state of torpor that defines the characters' lives. Unlike many films depicting modern life as a series of dissociated, abortive attempts at meaning, this film does not end with a whimper, but with an actual bang, the explosion of a defective gas heater in the Tao's drab apartment which may or may not have killed Tao and her on and off boyfriend Taisheng (Chen Tai-sheng). The ambiguity of these final moments is emphatically represented in a cut from a penultimate scene of neighbors murmuring inconclusive, sorrowful comments about the explosion, to a final black screen over which we hear Tao's voiceover whisper to Taisheng that the two of them have not come to an end but to a beginning. Clearly something has come to a head, but it is visually unrepresentable so it is not clear whether _The World_ has arrived at a place at which it can begin to conceive of a life that has room for what supecedes cliched iconography, or whether that must wait for the afterlife.

The freedom and freshness of _The House of Flying Daggers_ and _The World_ outstrip the much touted, overheated new film by Pedro Almadovar, _Bad Education_, which was featured at the Festival, and celebrated at a special night dedicated to Mr Almadovar. Despite its beautiful cinematography and frame compositions, and its sexy, bravura performances, _Bad Education_ suffers from a superficiality that may stem from its director's propensity to overthink his work. Not only does he manage the details of his film with a firm hand, but he also rushes to control its interpretation, as is obvious in the monograph length, detailed notes he made available to the press, and his unceremonious, albeit charming interruption of his stars at their press conference. Almodovar's authoritarianism may be explained in this case not only by narcissism, but also by the extra personal charge in this film which has some roots in his personal experience of the abuses he and other children suffered at the hands of the priests who taught them.

_Bad Education_, a film virtually devoid of women, even in comas, begins as if it had been plotted by an NYU film student making the obligatory self-referential movie about making movies. An actor, Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael Garcia Bernal), shows up at the office of Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) a rising, young director. Ignacio is a friend from the old days, who wants a part in his old friend's next film. The room is full of homo-erotic energy, as the director's assistant seethes with jealousy at the entrance of this young, sexy hopeful. But the original premise soon becomes a reflexive hall of mirrors full of portentous interior narratives woven by the characters. Not only does 'Ignacio' complicate things by insisting that he be called Angel, his stage name, but we find out as time goes by that he isn't Ignacio. In the first scene, Enrique is on to something when he expresses amazement about how his old friend has changed. The real Ignacio (Francisco Boire) shows up later. So the newly celebrated Gael Garcia Bernal is actually playing a person who calls himself Ignacio and Angel in the first scene of the movie but who really he is Juan, Ignacio's little brother, now grown up. Stay with me.

Interior narratives within the larger narrative frame run rife, as Enrique reads a script handed to him in that opening scene by Juan, pretending to be Ignacio, though he demands to be called Angel. The script is visually embodied in part onscreen so the audience can see what Enrique is reading. This prompts his memories of the 'real' Ignacio and the time when they were children together getting a very bad education from Father Manolo (Daniel Gimenez-Cacho) at a boarding school. These memories are visualized for us too. The interior narratives of script and memories are equally informed by Father Manolo's passion for Ignacio and his self-intrerested interference in the burgeoning love between the very young Enrique and Ignacio. But the script within the script also interpellates into its fictionalization of history a fantasy character entirely created by Juan/Angel. The filmscript version of Ignacio works as a female impersonator who has created for his act a smoky, blonde bombshell persona named Zahara. Zahara appears in Almadovar's film, portrayed by Gael Garcia Bernal in drag, in both the embodied realization for the audience of the script, and the film Enrique finally shoots based on the script. (The real Ignacio has indeed grown up to impersonate women onstage, but he is not nearly so ravishing.) As the past returns in memory and on celluloid, fantasies of murder arise from the angers generated by the past. In juxtaposition, the present day narrative follows Enrique's wavering affair with Juan/Angel which lurches toward plans for a real murder.

Ultimately, Father Manolo emerges out of the mists of time and memoir/fantasy in the 'real' present time of Juan/Angel, Enrique, and the 'real' Ignacio. Like everyone else, he now has an alternate identity: priest no more, he has metamorphosed into a married, but still homoerotically obsessed businessman who has renamed himself Berenguer and is played by a different actor, Luis Homar. Berenguer becomes the catalyst for an actual homicide and the resolution, such as it is, of the many colliding passions. (Perhaps it is the Manolo/Berenguer part of Almadovar that prompted him to resolve an issue about which none of the assembled press had inquired: even if there is an autobiographical edge to this film, he told us, he does not, like Enrique Goded, sleep with his actors.)

I hope it is now clear, even though you do not know who gets killed, that _Bad Education_ uses multiple layers of reality and fantasy, to weave one more Almadovar story about time, memory, sexual freedom, creativity, and religious repression. What remains to be seen is whether audiences will care. The intricate, lapidary crafting of this manifold reality left me cold and uninterested in the lives I observed; though I was fascinated by the artistry.

SMALL PERSONAL STORIES

_Look at Me_, _In the Battlefields_, and _Kings and Queen_ all deal in the undercurrents of ordinary life, employing the personal camera and editing styles emphasized by the French New Wave. In the spirit of the New Wave, these films employ a free use of the cinema echoed in their narrative concerns about freedom, emphasizing the point of view of protagonists who are constrained by cultural forces. _Look at Me_ was the film chosen to be shown at the opening night of the public screenings of the NYFF. One of four feature length features directed by women accepted by NYFF 2004, Agnes Jaoui's film focuses on Lolita Cassard (Marilou Berry), the twenty-something daughter of Etienne Cassard (Jean Pierre Bacri) -- a tyrannical, celebrated writer, and a number of his other acquaintances and intimates, who struggle to breathe in his oppressive presence. The film begins with an emphasis on the literal breath: Lolita, an aspiring singer, preparing for a concert is being instructed in the opening frames to breathe by her singing teacher, Sylvia (Agnes Jaoui). In good New Wave style, we have no idea who any of these characters are and continue for some time to ponder their identities as Lolita is bullied by a cab driver when she frantically rushes to arrive at an awards ceremony, where she is unceremoniously barred from entering by the guardians of the door. She covers with her coat a man completely unknown to her who has collapsed in the street outside this congregation of the famous, and leaves it there with him distractedly, as someone with influence finally arrives to shepherd her into the festivities of the cultural inner circle.

As we discover that it is her father who is receiving an award, we make other discoveries as well. Karine (Virginie Desarnauts), a lovely blonde woman slightly older than Lolita, is Etienne's lover not his daughter's friend, as it first appears. Etienne is able to subjugate the impertinent cab driver with a few well placed words, where Lolita was completely overwhelmed. And, most important of all, we are introduced to the main issues of the film: Lolita, a round, substantially built young woman with dark hair and Mediterranean features, is not only ignored by the culture in favor of slender, nordic, flaxen-haired sylphs, but also by her own father and her purported boyfriend. Even her singing teacher is not nearly as interested in her for herself as she is when she discovers Lolita is the daughter of the eminent Etienne Cassard.

The film meanders in and out of interesting locations as we watch Lolita's travails and disappointments echoed and refracted by the problems of others with Etienne. Admirably, Jaoui, with the help of a script delicately crafted by Jean Pierre Bacri, finds the dark and the light in all her characters. There are no deep dyed villains and no saints. Even Etienne has a charm and penetrating insight that leavens his autocratic narcissism. There are also no triumphal victories, but rather the small shifts in attitude and situation that taste of the real. The climax of the film is reached during a weekend in the country at Cassard's country estate, which permits Jaoui to use that convention imaginatively. During the course of the weekend, Lolita begins to separate herself from her father, to understand that his inability to give her his approval is his problem. She is helped in this move toward liberation by a new friend: the young man to whom she absentmindedly gave her coat at the beginning of the film has pursued her, in friendship, to her father's estate. She has, of course, written off his growing attraction to her, in the way that women who internalize social prejudices against their appearance will do, preferring at first to make herself miserable over a boyfriend who has rejected her in favor of a girl with the prescribed measurements and features. But as the film closes, Lolita finds the confidence to accept his affection and to value this possible new love affair. Sylvia, the singing teacher, disengages a little from the cult of celebrity when, exasperated with Etienne's cold dismissal of his daughter, she hits upon a delightfully bold stratagem, which I will leave for you to discover. Simple and spontaneous, it ensures that, if Etienne will not look at his daughter, he will for at least a few minutes be forced to pay heed to the talents of his embattled, emphatically non-nymphette, Lolita.

Not surprisingly, a daughter is also at the center of Danielle Arbid's _In The Battlefields_ (the situation of the daughter is an important subject for women). At the same time, Arbid is also interested in class and world politics, for the battlefield of a family in which Lina (Marianne Feghali), a 12 year old girl born into a middle-class Lebanese family, finds herself, is framed by a battle raging around them in the streets. The time is 1983; the place is Lebanon, torn by civil war. Brutal soldiers patrol the streets with little concern for civil liberties. To some extent they replicate on a cultural level what is going on in Lina's personal life. Inside Lina, the siege of hormones is raging; in her family, her father and mother are locked in bitter dispute because her father is a compulsive gambler who is impoverishing the family, as well as making them vulnerable to the violence of gangsters to whom he owes large sums of money. Despite the fact that Lina lives with her extended family, she is unable to find an ally within this unstable nest; the person who is most in control of herself is her aging aunt Yvonne (Laudi Arbid), a snob who abuses the family servants and ignores Lina, not out of meanness, but rather out of an obliviousness to children endemic to her class. Lina allies herself with Shahib (Rawia Elchab), the voluptuous working class family maid, thus crossing class lines but not for any political purpose. Shahib, who is in her early twenties, enjoys Lina's adulation and makes use of her when she sneaks out to see her boyfriend.

As in _Look at Me_, characters are defined with 360 degrees of complexity. All commit shameful acts that are contextualized by their situations; all exhibit attractive qualities, with, perhaps, the exception of Lina's solipsistic father. No one, however, learns anything. Rather, the film pushes the status-seeking and inhumane attitudes of middle class values to their limits by subjecting them to the pressure cooker of warfare, and draws a detailed portrait of a young girl under attack from the materialism and obsessions of her family. The film portrays people in reduced financial circumstances; hence there is a spare rather than a rich texture to the set and costume design, but the acting seems effortless and unhampered by cliché, and the frame compositions are striking, original, and often expressive of the characters's emotional situations. One stunning instance occurs when Lina is listening from the lower staircase, attentively trying to hear what is going on in the rest of the house. The shot is framed so that Lina's head looms large in the extreme lower right hand corner of the frame while a sterile, grey cement staircase seems to weigh heavily on it as it climbs in what seems like an endless ascent that masks the rooms to which it leads.

Finally _Kings and Queen_ is a film built around a highly eccentric selection of characters that in some ways may be characterized as bifurcated between consumers and producers of art. A daughter is foregrounded in this film, too, but not from the perspective of a female sensibility, and the difference between the way men and women explore the relationships between women and their parents is telling. Jaoui's Lolita is an artist and Arbid's Lina is a bundle of sensate longings, both probed from within. But Nora (Emanuelle Devos), the daughter in Arnaud Desplechin's film, is scrutinized from a distance as a cold, thin lipped, pallid blonde who buys and sells art objects. The film begins with her examination of a painting of Leda and the Swan, which she examines with the exquisite detachment of a connoisseur and then buys for her father. Juxtaposed to Nora's story is the story of Ishmael (Mathieu Amalric), Nora's ex-husband, whose name echoes that of the famous outcast in the Bible, and not accidentally. Ishmael is an artist who lives at the edge of sanity, and indeed winds up in a mental hospital, to which he is committed anonymously by his own sister. Read: artists are the outcasts of society, and 'normal' women are the first among their tormentors. In the mental hospital, Ishmael has what is intended to be a therapeutic relationship with a doctor, played by Catherine Deneuve in an amusing cameo about another cool blonde, but which provides nothing useful to him. He more usefully initiates with Chloe (Nathalie Boutefeu), a suicidal woman much younger than he is, a fraught relationship that sizzles with sexual abandon. As the film rolls on, 'insane' and marginal women reveal themselves as more congenial to this artist, and Ishmael appears to be heading toward a permanent connection with Chloe, but not conventional marriage.

In contrast, Nora is heading toward conventional marriage, having had enough of the other kind of relationship with Ishmael and a previous lover, who in the film's backstory committed suicide. As the film begins she's attached herself to a very highly placed power broker who takes recreational drugs on weekends, is barely interested in sex, and has no interest in her son. Shrugging off his lack of emotional availability and addiction as what comes with the territory of being a successful man's wife, she marries him at the end of the film. But before she does that, she nurses her father who is dying of cancer and is rewarded for her efforts with a glimpse into his feelings for her in his journal which she finds after he expires. The journal reveals his hatred for and fear of her. In a particularly searing passage, the old fellow expresses a wish that Nora were dying in his place. Arguably, Nora's ability to move past this terrible insight into a home truth and go on with the wedding, which though opulent appears to be a fairly pro forma business, suggests emotional numbness.

Though this at first looks like it's going to be a multiplot story in which the protagonists of each separate story line do not meet, Nora and Ishmael do cross paths. Nora wants nothing to do with Ishmael, but he gets along very well with Nora's son and she wants him to adopt the child, knowing that her new husband will have little but material affluence to offer him. Ishmael entertains the idea, but ultimately rejects it as a form of dishonesty and the epilogue of the film shows him explaining his decision to the child. Ishmael is loving in his attempt to assuage the disappointment of Nora's son, but the fact of his refusal to become a father of sorts to a little one, who will not get the love and attention he needs from the new family his mother is now forming, is haunted by the fact of desertion.

In the final analysis, though Ishmael is far more endearing and sympathetically drawn than Nora, no one is sufficient to the task of nurturing or to anything else beyond self satisfaction. A clue to why this is so is not to be found in the dyad of cool, feminine, conventionality and hot, masculine creativity embodied by Nora and Ishmael, but in the opening image of Leda and the Swan. Director Desplechin prefaces all the doings of Nora and Ishmael with the image of the rape of a helpless girl by a disguised god, the archetypal father god, at that. If the film seems to cast Nora negatively as a stimulus to male desire whose own desire is barely alive, there is also a counterpoint that identifies the paternal as a roving, marauding selfishness.

SELLING THE MARSHALL PLAN

When the United States decided to make a large cash commitment to rebuilding Europe after World War II, it turned to filmmakers, both American and European, to persuade Americans that giving cash, animals, and machinery, as opposed to lending at advantageous terms and selling to the war torn continent, would be a prudent move. The hundreds of films produced for this purpose are impossible to evaluate in terms of cinematography or any other aesthetic criteria. They are flat, out and out propaganda. But they are invaluable as historical and cultural documents, especially now when waging war in order to acquire building contracts in Iraq and tax credits for companies shipping American jobs overseas are being sold to the United States in way very different from those employed in the mid-20th century.

If the films shown at the festival are typical, humor was the choice of the majority of filmmakers touting the Marshall Plan, the three I saw being: _The Story of Koula_, _The Shoemaker and the Hatter_, and _Whitsun Holiday_. _Koula_ turns into a charming tale of a boy and a mule (the Marshal Plan program imported into Greece dozens of mules to get the Greek farmers back on their feet). Manipulating the Italian neorealist agenda for capitalist propaganda purposes, the film uses onsite Greek locations, non-professional actors, available light, and absolutely no set or costume design. It does, however, employ a very controlling anonymous voiceover narrative, which by injecting into the film a passage about how American mules are much bigger and more powerful than the petite local Greek mules, loads the story of how a young Greek boy becomes attached to one of the American imported mules with a strange chauvinism. John Wayne-ism on the hoof. But personification wins the day when the child instinctively knows that the chosen beast's name should be Koula, and melodrama flares when he almost has his heart broken when another farmer draws the mule by lot. The film is calculated to defy anyone hard-hearted enough to want to save money by refusing to ship Koula to his new home and new young friend. With less emotional hype, _The Shoemaker and the Hatter_, an animated short, makes clear how important international cooperation is and how it benefits everyone. The shoemaker thrives because he understands this; the hatter, who is an elitist, ends up driving a taxi. Pride in craft goes down the drain in the process of the shoemaker's new, automated post-war prosperity, but the cartoon makes it all so cute and amusing. Finally, _Whitsun Holiday_, a British comic short, compares how capitalist and communist families spend leisure time. There is almost no attention given to economic issues here, but the subtext is heavily laced to suggest that if the United States doesn't rebuild Europe the Communists could overrun it. All the jokes in the film play on how enabling European families to continue a happy capitalist way of life is the best defense against creeping Marxism. Audiences may find the experience of the Marshall Plan films to be one of oscillating between historical fascination and aesthetic boredom, but the films do bring to life the climate of the 1950s.

NYFF 2004 made available a provocative opportunity to ponder the enormous aesthetic distance between these built-to-order Marshall Plan infomercials and _Tarnation_, a film that is personal and heedless of most of the traditions evolved in a hundred years of filmmaking. I assume that many, like me, were moved to speculate on whether this is a much greater distance than that between cultural traditions, say those of China and Brazil. True, in this idealized form of multiplex known as the film festival, some can neatly avoid occasions for escaping from the ever disposable, ever present mind-forg'd manacles of Hollywood. I can personally attest that at least one New York television critic saw only one film, the one he expected would receive commercial circulation of significant proportions. I still see clearly in my mind's eye the dismissive expression on his face when I asked which other films he had looked in on. Nevertheless, if _Macunaima_ and _Moolaade_ were presented on a New York screen and Channel 7 didn't review them; they were still presented.

Mercy College, New York, USA


Copyright © Film-Philosophy 2004

Martha P. Nochimson, 'New York Film Festival 2004', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 37, November 2004 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n37nochimson>.



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