Their goal is clear: to entertain and inform.
He is in charge of images. Her deal is words. Together George and Beth Gage make highly intelligent, visually seductive documentaries that can make a difference to their neighbors and to the planet.
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.
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.
“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”
Corinne 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
The 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.”
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.
The Telluride Film Festival was going on both inside theatres and out on the street. Not everyone was interested in the movies: several young people were jumping on trampolene/bungee setups in the Mountain Village, only a few yards from the Chuck Jones Theatre. On...
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.
One word of advice- don't miss "American Violet". Telluride loved it. ...
This is our first film this year. On line old friends are greeting not yet adding to the buzz of this film or that. The weather is Telluride beautiful- a few puffy clouds, temperature 73, and an air of expectation. ...
