Culture
Opening Night on Celluloid at the New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival begins its run with a 35mm print and a slate built to keep the city up late
Four screenings, two rooms, one reel format that most of the industry gave up years ago. Tonight the 64th New York Film Festival opens at Lincoln Center with James Gray's Paper Tiger, and every opening night show is on film.
The schedule is tidy. Alice Tully Hall runs the picture at 6 p.m. and again at 9 p.m. A short walk away, the Walter Reade Theater follows each half an hour later, at 6:30 and 9:30. According to IndieWire, which first reported the plan, the distributor Neon will present all four in 35mm. By the time the last one lets out, the Upper West Side will be well past its dinner hour and deep into its second wind.
The festival runs through October 12. It is long, it is crowded, and it does not hand out prizes. That last part is deliberate.
A Print Worth Waiting For
Paper Tiger is a family crime story set in the Brooklyn and Queens of the 1980s. Adam Driver plays Gary Pearl, a former police officer who pulls his brother Irwin, played by Miles Teller, into a deal that looks far too good. The deal runs through the city's docks and a circle of Russian mobsters. Scarlett Johansson plays Hester, who is hiding something too. Neon opens the film in theaters on November 13.
Gray has made the case for celluloid before, and he made it again this week. In a statement to IndieWire he said a 35mm print, projected right, carries what people call "the magic of the silver screen." In an earlier IndieWire conversation he predicted film would get its own vinyl moment, the way record buyers rediscovered analog sound after the digital switch.
The festival has been good to him. The Lost City of Z closed the program in 2016, and Armageddon Time was part of the festival's 60th anniversary edition, as The Hollywood Reporter noted. Dennis Lim, the festival's artistic director, told that outlet that a film like Paper Tiger is hard to get made in the current climate. He called it "a miraculous film."
Every opening night show is on film.
For a city that still keeps its repertory houses running past midnight, the choice lands. A reel of 35mm is a physical object. It arrives in cans. Someone has to thread it. On opening night that labor becomes part of the show.
The Long Middle
What follows is an unusually loud program. The Centerpiece is Behemoth!, Tony Gilroy's film about movie music, with Pedro Pascal as a cellist. The closing night film is 14th, Ava DuVernay's documentary on the Fourteenth Amendment, which The Hollywood Reporter describes as a spiritual sequel to her film 13th, itself a festival opener in 2016.
In between come world premieres that would have fit comfortably on the Lido or in Toronto. Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, lands here after a public back and forth between distributors before Neon picked it up. Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus Zero, the follow-up to the Oscar winning Godzilla Minus One, has its first screening in New York before it reaches Tokyo. Tom McCarthy brings A Statement, a drama built around a climate conference from 1980.
Lim told Variety the pile of premieres came from a mix of factors, with timing chief among them. The festival lands about a month after Telluride, Venice and Toronto. It is not a competitive festival, he said, so it makes no sense for premieres to fill most of the program. He was just as firm about competition. "As long as I have any say, there will not be competitions," he told the outlet, adding that many filmmakers tell him the lack of a competition is one of the reasons they enjoy New York.
The smaller titles matter to him too. Lim singled out films like The Loneliest Man in Town, an Austrian character study, as the kind of discovery the main slate is built to make room for. IndieWire counts more than a hundred films in the full program, with names ranging from Mike Leigh and Pedro Almodóvar to Werner Herzog and Lee Chang-dong.
After the Credits
The festival is a Lincoln Center affair, but it does not stay there. IndieWire reports that NAZA, a documentary from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of the No Other Land collective, has its sold out festival premiere on September 26 and then moves into a theatrical run at IFC Center within days. A downtown marquee picks up where the uptown one leaves off.
Repertory habits show up in the program as well. Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, recently restored, screens from a 35mm print. It is the kind of booking that turns a festival week into a crash course, with the new and the notorious sharing a single calendar.
Getting in takes some patience. Lim told ABC7 New York that a lot of tickets have already sold out, that the festival releases its held seats three days before each screening, and that there are standby lines. The station quoted Lim with a simple pitch for the whole enterprise. "If you're going to come to one film fest per year, this is the one," he said.
He also knows what the stretch does to a person. Asked by Variety how he resets after a day of three or four films, he said stepping away from screens entirely is the only cure, then added that caffeine helps. Last year, IndieWire noted in passing, the opening film was followed by the annual party at Tavern on the Green. The party is one night. The screenings keep going for two and a half weeks.
That is the real shape of the thing. Not one gala, but a season of late shows, standby lines and walks to the train after the lights come up. It starts tonight with a reel of film and a projector that still knows how to run it.