CELLULOID RETREAT

Telluride: Vanguard movies and baked goods

JOAN JULIET BUCK

GOING OUT IN

For the past ten years the extremely small (population 1,100) ColoI rado town of Telluride has been the site of a festival dedicated to the proposition that there is more I to films than glamour. The festival is high-minded and obscure. European directors know about it because many of them have been honored here before they were heard of in the rest of America. It is familiar to the American avant-garde: abstract filmmaker Stan Brakhage and documentary maker Les Blank are recurrent visitors with the status of mascots. One of Les Blank’s betterknown films is Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the austere German director eats the leather uppers of one shoe. Werner Herzog is one of the names that Telluride conjures with. Others are Francis Coppola, Agnes Varda, Abel Gance (his Napoleon was first shown in its new, uncut version here), Michael Powell, King Vidor, Robert Wise, Robert Altman (on the occasion of his unreleasable film, Health), Samuel Fuller, Sterling Hayden, Gloria Swanson, Jack Nicholson, Klaus Kinski, playwright Athol Fugard as an actor, the crew who built the original King Kong, the Czech New Wave, “The American Character Actor,” and the man who created Bugs Bunny and Road Runner. It was at Telluride that Louis Malle’s eccentric My Dinner with Andre was received with a standing ovation that turned its protagonists, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, into surprised, unlikely stars.

It takes a day to get there from New York, with a change of planes at Denver. West Coast visitors prefer to drive through the Grand Canyon and the Rockies, acting sporty in open jeeps. It may be that they prefer not to expose themselves to the brave little planes that mountain-hop with many aeolian thrills from Denver to Montrose.

I’m terrified of flying. On the plane, one of my companions took a Gideon Bible out of the magazine rack and placed it on my knees to calm me. At the Montrose airport the most prominent object in the foyer was a revolving wire stand full of religious booklets.

From Montrose to Telluride one drives through bright red mountains with gray peaks in the distance like cracked giant teeth, incisor cliffs under a big sky full of rainbows. At the elevation of 8,735 feet, one reaches the dead-end valley of Telluride. The first glance at dusk suffices to explain why Europeans who come here can speak of little else. This is perfect West, small-town America of the movies, with only Main Street (Colorado Avenue) paved, small buildings of old brick and painted wood, a decor for cowboy boots. Telluride has no traffic lights and no McDonald’s, and has therefore served as a movie set many times. It was the backdrop for Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, which left a large sign with an elephant on it that falsely identifies a Tshirt shop as a saloon.

The town is a blend of fact and fiction, the physical equivalent of faction. Behind the hotel is the Sheridan Opera House, seat of the festival. The opera house is now for sale at $537,000. The lower end of town is full of newly built Victorian condominium units with Jacuzzis, also for sale. The spectacularly American town is on the frontier of hedonism, home of pioneers in sport, art, and real estate.

Hang gliders swam the air above the first-day crowd, which included the German director Luis Trenker, once known as “the German John Wayne,” now ninety years old; Richard Widmark; Lino Brocka, a socialrealist maker of gutsy melodramas from the Philippines; and handsome Italian director Marco Bellocchio.

Many of the festival guests, as a salute to the mountain, had bought new hiking boots and were wincing from the pain. Gathered around a tent next to the opera house were the seventy or so patrons, journalists casting about for a face that could be called famous, and film experts. Outside were the potters and weavers who had moved out west for the good air and the opportunity to bake small sweet brown things and sell them in shops where no smoking would be tolerated. Punch was served, along with slices of a large home-baked chocolate cake iced in blue and white. “Blue never works,” said Irina Zivian, a New Yorker with a house in Telluride. The cake turned up at the candy counters of the various cinemas the next day.

The Eastern bloc stood together. They were the four aces of the festival: Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian director of increasingly impenetrable films, a small, tense man with black hair parted on the side and a wide mustache; Krzysztof Zanussi, a Pole whose films are prized and perhaps even understood in Paris, a physicist turned director who looked natty in a pale blue suit and tie, and continued to look natty in the same suit and tie for the next five days; Zbigniew Rybczynski, a long-haired Polish director of animated films, who made an impassioned speech in Polish when he received an Academy Award this year for his Tango and ended up in the L.A. jail after a backstage altercation; and Zsolt Kezdi-Kovacs, a Hungarian director of unsentimental films about love, the only wise man from the East with a suntan. They all watched with interest as the Americans devoured cake and brownies and drank the pale yellow punch.

Tarkovsky was talking in Italian about his drive through the Southwest. “Monument Valley: It’s not American. It’s another world, not the material one. It wasn’t put there so that westerns could be shot, but as a place to meditate. The Indians were right to pray there and look for God.”

The festival crowd was hungry not only for cake but for meaning—itchy for big answers to the big questions. There was disappointment that the early references to the deportation of French Jews to death camps in Diane Kurys’s Entre Nous did not recur in the movie, which dealt with the love between two women. The first of three seminars held on a plot of grass grandly named Elks Park was entitled “What Are the Concerns of World Cinema Today?” Around the moderator, film critic Annette Insdorf, sat a Frenchman, two Filipinos, two Poles, a Swede, and an Italian. Inevitably, the questions got bigger, and “the American myth” was bandied about, until someone asked what the directors meant by it. Zanussi spoke: “Tarkovsky noticed that people here talk a lot about being happy. I don’t think it’s the most important thing, but everyone in this country thinks so.” Applause followed.

The line for Testament, said to be the sleeper of the festival, began two hours before the movie. Inside, Lynne Littman, the director, stood by the stage and said, “The only reason for me to go through this experience of making my first feature film is if I have the chance to make a film that changes my life.”

The first reel was all happy family life in a pretty part of northern California. Jane Alexander and William Devane coped with three lyrical and moody children, and loved each other. Loving portraits of happiness signal tragedy, and the audience waited for it.

Then the TV set on the screen went blank, a bland announcer said, “This is not a test.” White flash, radiation sickness, thick brown fog, slow death. Littman’s view of American life after the bomb ignored panic. The people of her little town were exceptionally meek and kindly victims, and there seemed to be an infinity of canned goods to eat. It’s an emotional film. People came out into the bright day of Telluride weeping, kissing babies, gazing on real life long and hard with tears in their eyes.

“It’s a movie about the death of a pet, made by a pet,” said one of the Eastern visitors.

That night was the tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky. The Sheridan Opera House was full, little pink lights aglow on its balconies. Zanussi and Tarkovsky stood in front of the stage curtain, which depicts a Swiss-Venetian fantasy with swans. Tarkovsky’s speech, translated by Zanussi, sounded like a call to throw the money changers out of the bank. “The birth of the cinema was sinful, and in the marketplace. It was born to earn money. No other discipline of art was born with this purpose, and up to now whoever makes films must feel the consequences of this sinful birth.”

Clips were shown from Tarkovsky’s films: My Name Is Ivan (a small boy held prisoner by soldiers at the bottom of a well); Andrei Rublev (a young man casts a bronze bell while a silent priest paces); The Mirror (ghosts leave rings of mist on a table in a boy’s house); Solaris (astronaut returned to earth yearns for his love in the cosmos while rain falls inside a country house); Stalker (men lying down talk about music as water runs over pages from the Apocalypse). Applause, popcorn, more home-baked cakes under the tent in the icy mountain night. “This is the perfect way to end the evening,” said one man. “No, we go back now to see Nostalghia,” his wife told him. “Finish your cake.”

Nostalghia is a slow film. A Russian writer in Italy yearns for home and dreams of his dacha, refuses the advances of a beautiful Italian interpreter, while Italians bathe in the steamy waters that fill what looks like a cloister garden, a madman sets himself on fire astride Marcus Aurelius’s statue in the Campidoglio while more mad people look on, and the writer at last attempts to cross the captive water holding a lit candle, and dies. The image of the dacha returns, and is ringed at the end by the walls of a ruined church.

People lied a lot about this one.

The next morning Zsolt Kezdi-Kovacs’s film Forbidden Relations was shown, with Zbigniew Rybczynski’s short films. Mad lust between half brother and sister, who defy the authorities and keep reproducing: a true story. “Well, it’s only about incest,” snorted one woman. The film is optimistic. “At least we have a year,” says the heroine to her brother lover, “before I have to go back to prison.”

Tarkovsky’s seminar was called “What Are the Concerns of Andrei Tarkovsky?” The first question was about Littman’s Testament. Tarkovsky’s answer: “I congratulate the author to be able to imagine what a nuclear war is. I am envious when I see such a naive and unrebellious vision of atomic war, amazed how out of such tragic material you may make such a limited, mild fairy tale.” The next question was about the director’s use of water in films. “Water for me is like blood of the material world,” he said. His insistence on defining the world as material intimated that he was more familiar with another one. “Human spirit, soul, are immortal. If I were of a different opinion, I wouldn’t be able to survive ten minutes because my life would be senseless. If happiness and senselessness are identical, I don’t want happiness—who told you you were born to be happy?”

“Aristotle,” whispered a voice behind me on the grass. I turned and saw hairy tattooed legs, running shorts, shoes, people drinking Sprite out of cans.

“It’s important to recognize spiritual inferiority, and once we do we can make a step forward from inner emptiness.”

“Right on,” shouted a Jesus freak.

Stan Brakhage offered his own view of the spirit: “One day a mediumsized bird was flying low behind me, and the sound was of such struggle that at first I mistook it for a freight train coming at me from behind.”

The crowd nodded. An old lady in a sun visor asked the director what to do about the hostility of nations, and Tarkovsky invoked sacrifice:

“Humanity is falling into a war. We want to be saved and yet ask others for our salvation. If someone is ready to sacrifice, it will be his self-realization and he will never suffer.

“I make films in order to share,” he continued. “Sharing the substance. I hope to be a medium between the universal spirit and human beings. But I won’t make a step in your direction to make your perception of my work any easier.”

That night Richard Widmark, interviewed at his own tribute, said: “Tarkovsky. He’s a phony. He stinks.”

Mercedes Gregory’s Rings over Water was a documentary about Scandinavians marching in the Soviet Union against nuclear arms, and it seemed to prove, above all, the futility of good intentions. The Americans responded well, but one member of the Eastern bloc was outraged: “You don’t stop wars with picnics!”

The festival culminates every year with a 2,000-foot ride in the chair lift to the top of the mountain, there to eat Haagen-Dazs ice cream and hold one last seminar. This year it was called “What Are the Concerns of the New American Directors?”

Fear of flying is related to fear of heights, particularly of spiky pine trees and rubble beneath one’s chairlift seat. I attached myself to Zanussi in the line for the lift, and he offered this little tale as we waited for the flying chair: “Walt Disney originally wanted living people and animals as the attractions at Disneyland, but then he realized that living people and animals remind one of death. So he used plastic, because plastic is eternal life.”

At the top, independent American filmmakers were talking openly about money, and the Eastern bloc decided to go to the rodeo down at Ridgway.

At the rodeo, families in straw Stetsons ate hot dogs and watched barrel racing and steer roping. Tarkovsky, Zanussi, Kezdi-Kovacs, and Marco Bellocchio sat on a fence and watched cowboys riding prehistoric Brahma bulls. Zbigniew Rybczvnski was still up on the mountain, being interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter.

The festival ended with Les Blank’s In Heaven There Is No Beer, followed by a polka party in the community center. Later, Zanussi’s film Imperatif was shown. A youngish mathematician questions chance and fate. He is shown holy books and icons by a Russian Orthodox priest, desecrates the books and steals an icon, and then gives himself up. He later cuts off the finger with which he jabbed the holy books. He ends up realizing that nothing matters, and is able to laugh.

This film divided the audience according to faith: believers in chance and believers in God. Jews and analysands were appalled by the caricature psychiatrist in the film who tells the hero that by stealing the icon he was only trying to get at his mother. At the last party, a man came up to Zanussi to shake his hand. “I liked your movie, and my wife really liked it,” he said. “She’s active in the Jesus movement.”

As we stood on line to be searched at the Montrose airport, various people fingered the little religious booklets on the wire stand. A man handed one to Tarkovsky. At the Denver airport I bought Tarkovsky a giant Hershey bar. It was only in the cab on the way home that I remembered the line from James Merrill’s Book of Ephraim: “No souls came from Hiroshima.” Now that would have been a real debate: Western hedonism versus Eastern fundamentalism on the mortality of the eternal soul.

Let us eat cake.