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Author: Susan Viebrock

The mission of the National Film Preserve, the 501 C (3) umbrella corporation under which the Telluride Film Festival operates all year, is to celebrate the art of filmmaking, not the business, which pumps out and promotes easy-to-swallow audio-visual capsules.

Each year, Festival directors Tom Luddy and Gary Meyer, screen hundreds of movies to find the highest quality product about 20 – 30 features, that collectively provide a great perspective of the past, present and future of film. Documentaries are given as much prominence as features.

This year, as in years past, the 35th annual Film Festival was as educational as it was entertaining, and it was played as a contact sport – minus the teeth. On the field, almost no one is overtly mollycoddled or petted. Actors, directors, cinematographers, buffs and students walk side-by-side down Main Street and side streets of town critiquing what they have just seen. But most of the buzz comes from the lines.

12 September, 2008 /

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Officially Mr. & Mrs. Vroom

Some reporter was sleeping on the job to have missed this gem for the New York Times Sunday Styles “Vows” feature.

It was adult entertainment at its best – vintage Cole Porter, not “Boogie Nights.”

And it was not just a Big Deal. It was Brobdingnagian.

10 September, 2008 /

It’s Kris Holstrom here. I’ve lived in the Telluride region for 22 years now. Can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be. My family, husband John, son Kirk and daughter Kelsey lives on Tomten Farm, Hastings Mesa.  You reach our place by turning “up” at Sawpit, climbing through the switchbacks and leveling out in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  I love my job as the Executive Director for The New Community Coalition where I act as the Regional Sustainability Coordinator for Telluride, Mountain Village and San Miguel County.

06 September, 2008 /

CzrzdevilstowerIn 1970, just out of high school, Denver-born Cynthia Hansen Zehm decided to visit the Southwest corner of the state. The incredible beauty of the Telluride region called her and she moved to town in 1977.

When she first moved to Telluride, Cynthia opened a store right above the current location of the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon. The Ritzy Gypsy sold her hand-made leather clothes and consignment from other local fibroids.

Cynthia met her husband Richard, a wild man skier from California, and the two built a house on Hastings Mesa.

06 September, 2008 /

The Women’s Travel Company is owned and operated by Telluride locals Wendy Brooks and Donna Fernald.

P1010008The Telluride Academy is the local institution Wendy Brooks founded in her backyard in 1981. A single mom with three young boys of her own, Brooks started the daycare/camp to help her friends. The initial enrollment was six kids. Today, up to 850 students, ages 5 – 17, attend about 100 unique summer course and specialized programs.

06 September, 2008 /

Hollywood regularly spits out films featuring the kvetching narcissistic alpha males who rule Tinsel Town. “Revanche” is an indie flick whose star, Johannes Krisch, is a virtual unknown in the U.S. The talented actor is, however, a big stage star at home in Austria, which his countryman, writer/director Götz Spielmann, described as a “more of a theatre place than a movie place.”

Spielmann spoke Monday morning, September 3, at the Sheridan Opera House. He was in town all weekend for the screening of “Revanche" at the 35th annual Telluride Film Festival.

06 September, 2008 /

“Every work of art is the child of its time; often it is the mother of our emotions,” Wassily Kandinsky in “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”

Img_6600Corinne Creel’s changing landscapes are little corners of creation, seen through the polished lens of her imagination and evolving temperament. Darkness brightens. Chaos organizes itself into landscapes, still abstract, but increasingly coherent and recognizable. What’s it all about? The intensely private, autobiographical element inherent in these images is instead of what actually happened in recent years.

This show of Creel’s latest work, which opened on September 4, 2008, was the centerpiece of Telluride’s traditional First Thursday Art Walk, a daylong showcase of the town’s fine art scene, including galleries and studios, which stay open late until 8 p.m. The event, the brainchild of Rene Marr, executive director of the Telluride Council on Arts & Humanities, was designed to deepen ties between Telluride’s business and cultural economies by exposing locals and visitors to emerging and established artists and the town’s retail scene

05 September, 2008 /

Img_2002The living room that looks like a small museum is in fact the studio of local artist Robert Weatherford, a Telluride original. (He paints at the far end of the room, not shown.)

Weatherford’s legacy is expressionism, a term describing a movement in art history in which traditional ideas of naturalism and representation take a back seat to exaggerations of shape and color. The point is to communicate with some urgency the artist’s emotions.

Feeling is paramount in Weatherford’s work, and virtuosic flashes just because he can, is the enemy.

The artist tends to hang his narratives on familiar objects such as his vast collection of tchotkes (bric-a-brac), floral bouquets, and aspen leaves. However, his images are never about the objects themselves. They are about the force fields emanating from the object.

“The objects in my work are talismans that invite me to show the world what they (the objects) know. My job as an artist is to surrender to their will.”

04 September, 2008 /

Once the cat is out of the bag  – the directors of the Telluride Film Festival are notorious for keeping their selections top secret – and the weekend is in full swing, the “buzz” drives the traffic. Perfect strangers become fast friends chatting on line and at venues all over town about what’s hot and what’s not.

At a Monday morning screening of Götz Spielmann’s classic-in-the-making “Revanche” (see Views below), the elegant woman next to me introduced herself to talk the talk. “My name is Linda Clough. I am Chuck Jones’s daughter,” she said.

04 September, 2008 /

It must be in the zeitgeist. The 35th annual Telluride Film Festival was all about change we can believe in.

In film after film, we watched Everyman underdogs beat the odds and triumph over the rich and the powerful, all in the context of unvarnished reality.

A sneak peak world premiere, Danny Boyle’s “Slum Dog Millionaire,” was, hands down, our favorite of that genre.

Only a spoiler would have given a second thought to outsourcing or annoying customer service calls. But there were none in the house. Forget about the Full Maharani. There was no gauze, gaudy colors, bling, or long glance looks – well, a few of those – in this rags-to-riches fairytale about a streetwise orphan boy who becomesone of the new India’s 230 million or so arrivistes.

The only direct quote of Bollywood was a spoof: line dancing in the final credits.

03 September, 2008 /