Good Movies Are Worse Than Ever

Autumn in new york, the second annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Six French, five Japanese, four American, three Italian, two Polish entries, plus one apiece from the USSR, Argentina, India, Britain, Canada and Sweden make twenty-six features. No prizes, few celebs—just the joy of exhibiting our tenderness toward art in advance of the unfeeling mobs on the espresso circuit. Besides, who knows? This greatness may not come again. Of the thirty films shown at last year’s Festival, nine gained commercial bookings. Resnais’ Muriel—ah, how they mocked it, twisted it—died at the Plaza.

Program Director Richard Roud writes: “Nobody would seriously claim that such books as Gone With the Wind or Forever Amber were greater than The Sound and the Fury or The Waves, even though the former certainly sold more copies.” One learns the essentially anti-democratic nature of art: “. . . a certain number of films will be found which can only be classified as difficult, films that demand more than merely passive enjoyment.”

AC

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Arlene Croce

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Autumn in new york, the second annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Six French, five Japanese, four American, three Italian, two Polish entries, plus one apiece from the USSR, Argentina, India, Britain, Canada and Sweden make twenty-six features. No prizes, few celebs—just the joy of exhibiting our tenderness toward art in advance of the unfeeling mobs on the espresso circuit. Besides, who knows? This greatness may not come again. Of the thirty films shown at last year’s Festival, nine gained commercial bookings. Resnais’ Muriel—ah, how they mocked it, twisted it—died at the Plaza.

Program Director Richard Roud writes: “Nobody would seriously claim that such books as Gone With the Wind or Forever Amber were greater than The Sound and the Fury or The Waves, even though the former certainly sold more copies.” One learns the essentially anti-democratic nature of art: “. . . a certain number of films will be found which can only be classified as difficult, films that demand more than merely passive enjoyment.”