MORRIS DICKSTEIN
New Cinema: The Next Generation
As
foreign film distribution in the United States has fallen apart or gone
commercial, the New York Film Festival has become an even more essen–
tial venue for exposing American audiences to serious cinema. The
Festival began in 1963 at the creative peak of the French New Wave, the
new Italian cinema, and the work of directors like Buiiuel and Bergman.
The talent featured in the early years makes up a roll call of film history:
Antonioni, Bellocchio, Bertol ucci, Bresson, Buiiuel, Chabrol, Dreyer,
Franju, Godard, Ichikawa, Kurosawa, Losey, Melville, Olmi,
Ow,
Pasolini,
Ray, Resnais, Rohmer, Rosi, Rossellini, Varda, Visconti, and Wajda. As the
film scene changed and such names grew scarce, the focus shifted to East
European films, the new German cinema, and, more recently, Latin
American, Asian, and American independent films . The choices could be
perverse and infuriating, but they gave us our film education.
In most European countries except France, film production has disin–
tegrated - a casualty of television and the Hollywood juggernaut. But the
Festival continues to showcase provocative work from unlikely places,
from Iran to Taiwan. The 1996 roster was a return to the Festival's roots
in more ways than one. The unexpected abundance of French fums
recalled the Francophile passions of its first program director, Richard
Roud. One exhilarating selection, Olivier Assayas's
Irma Vep,
was about a
French director filming an
hommage
to Feuillade's silent serial
Les vampires,
a New Wave
favorit~
I saw as a retrospective at the 1965 Festival. This
year's most reckless film,
Breaking the Waves,
by a young Danish director,
Lars von Trier, was partly inspired by the austere religious films of his dif–
ficul t predecessor, Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose great swan song,
Gertrud,
was shown the same year. Another fine French film, Arnaud Desplechin's
How I Got into an Argument .
..
(my sex life),
was clearly inspired by those
aimless epics of student angst that Godard and Truffaut crafted around
actors like Jean-Pierre Leaud, who himself plays the aging, over-the-hill
director in
Irma Vep.
These gifted directors scarcely constitute a new wave,
but at a time when most Hollywood films seem hackneyed and imper–
sonal, this new generation looks back to the best work of the fifties and
sixties as valuable examples of cinema as personal expression.
Among the films I saw at this year's festival, there were inevitably
some duds and disappointments . The usually re liable Maurice
