EDITH KURZWEIL
Films at the Festival
In its opening salvo about the 1995 New York Film Festival the
Village
Voice
referred to it as our new source of knowledge: "Back to work and
back to school. This year's New York Film Festival offers a crash course
in French race relations and Chinese politics, the new Albania and the
Spanish Civil War, forgotten stars and revisionist movie history." Indeed,
these were the major topics, deftly selected to balance multilingual and
multicultural concerns, and to celebrate the skillful, innovative actors,
producers, directors, photographers and countless experts who nowadays
seem to be required to create stunning visual images accompanied by ca–
cophonous sound effects. Early movies and their luminaries were featured
in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of film. These mostly short
black-and-white features , of course, not only highlighted the stupendous
technical advances over the past hundred years, but applauded all those
now working in the (glamorous) movie industry.
I saw about half of this year's selections, those that were presented on
the days I was free to attend. All of these films astonished in their ex–
tensions of stark realism, exploring every gory facet of crime, and they
displayed a number of obvious and remote symbols to depict the evils of
capitalism and the dire consequences of war and of poverty. And every
film exposing the inhuman brutality human beings are capable of noted
that the producers had been careful not to be cruel to living animals. The
most egregious example, I thought, was
Dead Presidents
by the twenty–
four-year-old Hughes brothers - a saga about a black kid from the South
Bronx who goes to Vietnam, comes back, and desperate for money finally
concocts a ludicrous crime that is bound to end in disaster. At their press
conference, the twin brothers stated that the ghastly, drawn-out and ear–
splitting battle scenes - of a GI who carried with him the head of a Viet–
namese he had severed as a keepsake; of another whose intestines were
hanging out, and so on - had been shot in or near Disney Land.
Whereas this film is a cliched version of the familiar anti-American
variety verging on caricature,
The Gate of Heavenly Peace
is a thoughtful
documentary based on carefully selected film clips taken during the stu–
dents' and workers' uprising in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, nar–
rated by participants on
all
sides of these events. Because the organizers of
the festival refused to withdraw this film, Zhang Yimou, the director of
Shanghai Triad,
was advised by the Chinese government not to attend.
His haunting film depicts a ruthless mafia-type overlord who not only
holds in his grip the life of his stunning mistress but also that of the entire
