The sixty-first New York Film Festival.
Ascending from the theater in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, up stairs of an awkward breadth best taken two at a time—impossible because of the mob encroaching on all sides—I hold my tongue. I want to tell my companion my thoughts on what we just saw, but the block is hot at these things. You never know if a needling critic is behind you, recording whispers for a Letterboxd review. When the throng mercifully spits us out onto Broadway, there is a place to pause: a sunken micro-plaza angled toward the street, its geometry of concrete and glass plunging from the venue and into the public realm. This was the vantage point from which I surveyed the New York Film Festival (NYFF) in its two-week run this October: if I was not shifting in a theater seat, I was sitting on a staircase to nowhere.
That particular Saturday, I was sort of miserable. I had already seen a short about a woman locked out of her apartment in Berlin, a feature made of vignettes about a woman in New York who enjoys BDSM, and a four-hour documentary about a Michelin-starred restaurant in France. I still had a three-minute portrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini by Agnès Varda and a winding Italian myth that premiered at Cannes to go. Everything was good. I was riding a sumptuous-image high, but I also ached from watching life happen in fictions and trekking to this faraway part of town where I don’t know where to get a drink. In 1955, André Bazin wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma that he had “witnessed first-hand the gradual perfecting of the Festival phenomenon, the practical creation of its rituals … fully-fledged participation in the Festival is like being provisionally admitted to convent life.” Shuffling between the three theaters on the Upper West Side campus, I felt bound like a monk to his vows of obedience. Each time the lights dimmed and a film started, I was filled with a reverence that, in my delirium, certainly counted as religious.
The Varda film is a strange missive discovered in the late director’s storage by her daughter, Rosalie. She might not have known what to do with it if her mother’s trademark voice-over at the beginning didn’t provide direction: the footage is from Manhattan in 1966, shot on silent sixteen-millimeter film during NYFF’s fourth edition. Pasolini stalks a Midtown street, himself unreadable behind black wayfarer sunglasses and a starched shirt buttoned to the collar. Later, Varda asks in French what he notices about New York. The poverty, he replies without hesitation. Sirens blare. Varda’s camera, curious, turns to the people of the street, lingering on hairstyles and heels.
I like to think of the directors escaping from the ritual of the festival for an afternoon. Maybe, sick of the arthouse, they go to see the commercial film advertised on the marquee at the edge of the frame. Maybe they go south, into the thickness swelling inside the city grid, because they are sick of the spatial experience of a film festival, the thing that was starting to get to me: the darting in and out of dark and light, the sudden dropoff into someone else’s fantasy or memory, the necessary bodily stillness. Maybe the problem was Lincoln Center.
The arts have never received an agreement of equal respect from Lincoln Center. When Robert Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee razed eighteen blocks of the neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, it displaced a Black and Puerto Rican community where cultural activity was in organic abundance. Destroyed was the apartment where Thelonius Monk learned to play piano; gone were the dance halls where James P. Johnson introduced “The Charleston.” In their place would be true, serious, fine art—the opera and the ballet and the symphony, to be attended by coeds after class at the new satellite campus of Fordham University.
In the original 1959 agenda for the highbrow playground, cinema didn’t even make the cut. A member of the board apparently declared that if film were included, Lincoln Center might as well have a baseball field. By 1968, Lincoln Center’s finances were in the red already; the first thing to go was the projection equipment, which had been worked painstakingly into blueprints for Tully Hall. NYFF cofounder Amos Vogel resigned, and in a letter to the editors of the Times, he claimed his colleagues saw his beloved medium as “a rented, surrogate, periodic entertainment” and portended that “the Center’s artistic demise, coinciding with completion of its physical plant, will forever and ironically be linked to its disregard of film.”
Will I offend anyone by saying that Lincoln Center is most alive—that is, busy with young people in good outfits with good tattoos having interesting conversations—during NYFF? Even as I am teetering on the brink of losing my mind, starving after watching a parade of animated foods in the new Miyazaki, I manage to admire everyone around me, dressed up to be in the dark.
From inside the hall, whoever is lounging on the steps in an autumn sweater becomes a pale greeter to the gate of this world, after some two hours of immersion in another.
Cinema is a medium of style. A filmmaker uses her particular touchpoints to spin an aesthetic experience born out of reality but previously unseen while employing, in the case of the best movies, an echo of familiar feelings. Style is a nonfixed state, an interpretation of elements contingent on original thought, which is what differentiates it from fashion or taste. It may be associated with an era while being endlessly buildable; architecturally, Tully Hall is in the tradition of Brutalism, with a postmodern update by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and its distinct style is formed at the meeting points of two design languages. Style is also something that anyone can have. The root of the original fear around including cinema at Lincoln Center, if I had to guess, was of a kind of populism. A distinctly modern, accessible art form, cinema in the twentieth century was, as Susan Sontag called it, “a crusade.” The bohemian auteurs would teach everyone how to talk and hold a cigarette, and no one would ever want to vote conservative or close their eyes to listen to Mozart’s Requiem. The recent dissolution of the Mostly Mozart festival, held at Lincoln Center for the last fifty-five years, could be read as acquiescence to that binary view.
Reportedly, this year’s NYFF ticket sales were through the roof. Standby lines snaked around cement walls at all hours. This is certainly in part thanks to the programming, which transported Palme d’Or and Golden Lion winners like Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things across the Atlantic. (Zooming out further, I might point to the fact that we’re living in a golden age of cinema, people! In the void created by the disastrous state of the Hollywood blockbuster, international and indie films explode.) The cause might also be, as the festival chairman suggested in his opening night remarks, that the organizers have been “trying hard to be the New York Film Festival—not the Lincoln Center or Upper West Side Film Festival.”
In practice, this resulted in a decent handful of screenings at theaters in all five boroughs, such as BAM in Brooklyn and the Alamo Drafthouse on Staten Island. It was an important effort that ultimately lacked the imagination that would have pushed it beyond the “rented” attitude Vogel derided. The dream would be a total takeover, an enmeshment of cinema and the city à la the missing person posters that were plastered across Park City, Utah, for the premiere of The Blair Witch Project at Sundance in 1999, though I concede there’s a difference in scale.
The architecture of a film festival is roving by design. The moviegoer must enter and exit a theater. Then, within this walled space, he is confronted with compellingly constructed images and words, which, on leaving, he takes with him. Liz Diller once described the theater within Tully Hall as a “sensory deprivation space,” but its exterior is the opposite, an airy glass facade meant to declare the building’s existence after years of patrons complaining they couldn’t find the door. (Though last year Cole—probably not Dylan—Sprouse asked me where to find Alice Tully while standing just outside it, so perhaps the success is not absolute.) What makes the structure’s street identity is an eighteen-foot tiered shard parallel to the hall’s entrance overhang so that from afar, when one is running breathless to a no-late-seating screening, it looks like a wedge of sky was carved from solid mass. From inside the hall, whoever is lounging on the steps in an autumn sweater becomes a pale greeter to the gate of this world, after some two hours of immersion in another.
Perception of a film will be influenced by the setting in which it is seen—this just can’t be helped. I was never going to love Blair Witch, because I watched it on a laptop and it’s a sound movie—at least that’s what some guy told me. It is a privilege to see the masterpieces of the year on a massive screen, cloaked in enviable acoustics. What Lincoln Center should be most proud of providing is the cloister of a cinematic experience, a dedicated space for the gathering of cinephilic freaks. A film lingers after it’s over. You get out of the theater and feel high because you acclimated to the world of the film; it’s still with you on the stairs to nowhere. Pasolini said to Varda, “There’s no difference between reality and fiction because cinema is reality expressing itself through itself. In reality, I can film a man walking down a street. He’s not aware that he’s being filmed, and this is reality. If I choose an actor to play that man, then there’s another reality, the actor’s reality. But it’s always reality, it’s never fiction.” It’s midnight on a Sunday and I’m walking away, down 66th. Imagine there’s a camera: I leave a movie in my wake.