Claus Mueller

Held from September 28 – October 14 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center  the New York Film Festival continued to expand in its 56^th edition an extensive program covering more themes, filmmaking approaches, and emerging production technologies with each edition.  Over past decades the festival has carved out a significant role as a curator for the most important domestic and international films. NYFF introduced a savvy New York cinephile audience to a film world beyond Hollywood and groundbreaking foreign directors that might otherwise not have been accessible.  The film society also continued to expand its year round programming of screenings and special film events.

Today there is an ever expanding production of films. Almost every country has established or is now building a film industry, sometimes misguided by the notion of the power of visual media or commercial success. So far this year there have been films from 87 vying for Oscar nominations. The global budget for film and television productions continues to grow year after year. Access to domestic and foreign productions has also grown as facilitated by digital platforms unknown or unimagined only ten years ago. This year, Amazon and Netflix have a subscription base of more than 160 million people in the United States in addition to the millions subscribed to smaller and more specialized streaming platforms. Further access to foreign productions is enabled through the presence of large U.S. streaming corporations in overseas media markets where they set up production facilities to mesh with local creative talents and locally appealing themes.

There is an overabundance of programs consumers can select from which will only increase as other major media players work on setting up their own streaming platforms with billion dollar production projects. Netflix maintains its dominant position, spending about $12 billion in 2018 for films and series of which a significant portion has been devoted to foreign programs and joint ventures. Netflix will have generated an estimated 700 new original productions this year.  The digital distribution system will also expand because even with limited budgets, new streaming services can be set up. In the United States there are already an estimated 500 scripted series in distribution on all platforms but new ones are created consistently.  The growth of film and series productions has been accompanied by a steady expansion of distribution systems, specifically in the digitally, but also by the expansion of both broadly designed, and more specialized, film festivals, as well as the recent rise of television festivals like the Tribeca TV Festival.  These festivals report in most cases an expansion of their audiences and extension of their programs into new production areas such as virtual reality. Most festival films do not enter theatrical distribution but observers note that many will sooner or later be on streaming services which in turn may permit theatrical distribution of the most prominent films ones as Netflix has shown with ROMA and other titles.   

Netflix  certainly enhances its  image by partnering with the New York Film Festival, and its presence at the 2018 fest was no surprise. Six of the thirty films from 22 countries in the Main Slate were provided by Netflix, adding more heft to Netflix’s standing with filmmakers. These productions certainly carried weight with some already having scored major festival awards.  They Include  ROMA  (Alfonso Charon) the centerpiece of the festival, THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS  (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) to be screened on Netflix in mid-November, HAPPY AS LAZZARO (Alice Rohrwacher), PRIVATE LIFE (Tamara Jenkins), THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD (Morgan Neville) and its companion THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND ( Orson Welles), both accessible already on Netflix.  In the Spotlight on Documentary section fourteen films were presented as the best in current non-fiction cinema ranging from Errol Morris portrait in AMERICAN DHARMA of Steve Bannon, former principal advisor of Donald Trump, to Ruth Beckermann’s THE WALDHEIN WALTZ, a long overdue demystification of Kurt Waldheim’s role during the Nazi rule. In Revivals eleven classic films were shown which had been restored, including the 1992 production HYENAS by the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety about a wealthy woman seeking revenge for being raped and abandoned when she was young.  Special Events featured the never shown before Orson Welles film THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, started in 1970 and finally completed this year by his collaborators. Other films in this section were selected by the editors of Film Comment with one premiering in North America, the 1921 production THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE by Rex Ingram. A discussion with Barry Jenkins was held on his film IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel.  The Retrospective section of the program celebrated 17 features, the contributions of film industry luminaries Dan Talbot and Pierre Rissient and the outstanding films they brought to the United States by directors like Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbender, Lino Brocka and Fritz Lang.

Three documentaries in Retrospective focused on historical movie figures like Ingmar Bergman.  21 narrative and documentary selections were included in the Shorts section.  In Projections, artists explored new applications and uses of the moving image in 30 short and long form productions including  five thematic programs on “Place  Revisited”, “Strategies for Renewal”, “Trips to the Interiors”, “Form and Function” and “Persistent Analogues”.  Some screenings were free and open to the public. Convergence, stressing innovative storytelling during the last days of the festival, focused on a dozen virtual reality productions. The VR Arcade featured new projects from Disney Animation Studios with three shorts in the virtual reality documentary section. As in prior editions, free conversations accompanied the festival, covering the wrap of the fest, dialogues with directors whose work was shown, Alice Rohrwacher, Alfonso Cuaro, Jian Zhangke, and Errol Morris, as well as an in depth discussions between the festival director Kent Jones and the French filmmaker Claire Denis whose HIGH LIFE was in this year’s Main Slate.

Alice Rohrwacher’s HAPPY AS LAZZARO (Italy, 2018), is the feature which impressed me most for its innovative storytelling, original execution, acting, effective use of non-actors, and political subtext.  The film is rooted in the depiction of a small Italian rural community in Inviolata living in isolation without any connection to the outside world.  Without knowledge of their rights, sharecroppers are living in bondage and exploitation on the estate of a wealthy woman. Their life in a feudal-like setting seems to have been arrested in time.  Rohrwacher shows their static existence with superb cinematography. Lazzaro, a young peasant living at the estate, gets close to Tancredi, the son of the estate’s owner, and together they stage a kidnapping to blackmail his mother, the Marquise. After Tancredi’s sister contacts the police they dissolve the hidden community which that had no prior knowledge of. The film then shifts to an urban setting. Lazzaro, having suffered an accident, awakens 20 years in the future without having aged a day. Based in part on a true story from Italy, Rohrwacher provides a realistic fable in which time and space shifts its protagonists. Lazzaro discovers that the people he grew up with have aged and live in poverty once more along with Tancredi.  Tancredi’s family wealth and property was stripped away by the banks. We discover through Lazzaro the dismal new world. He is naïve but intelligent and not alienated from the new world, seemingly as at home there as he was in his old rustic environment. For the director the film provides a critical political fable about massive displacement and impoverishment of rural people. The policies practiced now keep them and others immured and dependent, having them living once more like share croppers in cages. Rohrwacher wrote her script while she was a Film Society resident in New York.

TRANSIT, a 2018 German French co-production directed by Christian Petzold is a persuasive adaptation of Anna Segher’s 1942 novel Transit Visa.  Before leaving Paris, Georg, a concentration camp survivor, removes a manuscript and documents from the hotel room of a writer that had killed himself. The documents include papers needed for the exit of the writer and his wife Marie from Marseille to Mexico. When the Mexican consul mistakes him for the writer, Georg gradually slides into the newly assumed identity, and accepts the papers and ticket assigned to the dead man, claiming that his wife Marie had left him.  When Marie arrives at the consulate, she is advised that her husband is alive and so she begins a search for him. After encountering Georg they become involved. Although her provides her with her dead husband’s papers and persuades the consul that they have reconciled, she refuses to accept that her husband is truly dead and continues her search. Petzold’s TRANSIT has no melodramatic overtones. Like HAPPY AS LAZZARO, Petzold’s shifts time by placing the narratives into contemporary Marseille, there are no German uniforms or people clad in the early 40’s cloth, the restaurants look like todays as do the cars. It is the communication between protagonists and the comments made by fellow refugees that conveys the narration and sharpens its impact.  The cognitive dissonance he creates fades yet the detachment or Verfremdung to use B. Brecht’s term remains.  The film heightens the tension and keeps the viewer alert to the very end.  TRANSIT is equally important as PHOENIX is, the other feature of Petzold focusing on issues of identity tied to the Nazi prosecution of Jews.

Ruth Beckmann’s Austrian documentary THE WALDHEIM WALTZ is a perfect topical selection for the New York Film Festivals. The politician Kurt Waldheim served as the secretary general for the United Nations from 1972 – 1981 and president of Austria from 1986-1992.  He was able to conceal his past involvement as an officer in the German army in 1942 and 1943 in the killing of Yugoslav partisans and the deportation of Greek Jews. Using extensive research including documentary material and footage she shot, Beckmann demonstrates the systematic cover up of the truth and demystifies the notion of ignorance of the crimes committed. More importantly she shows that his successful election as an Austrian president was tied to the convictions of those voting for him placing respect for Austria and for Waldheim in the center of their concerns. Her documentary also clarifies why Austria, as distinct from Germany, was never forced to confront its past as a willing collaborator with the Third Reich depicting itself instead as the first victim of Nazi Germany. The shift towards the cold war several years after 1945 made this mystification as a victim easier and it took thirty years until Waldheim ran for office that the opposition to him mobilized and forced Austria to look at Waldheim’s war crimes.  This ruptured the prevailing notion of Austria as the first victim. A large part of the political elites who had closed ranks with Hitler’s German nationalism also did so in supporting Waldheim’s nationalistic view of his country. The link between those elites and the contemporary parties ruling Austria today is troubling.

Claus Mueller,  filmexchange@gmail.com