The 54th New York Film Festival (2016) had been so spectacular, filled with so many films which were revelations, that anticipation was high for the 55th New York Film Festival (2017). In 2016, the festival had been so well organized. Some of the distributors arranged for press screenings for Main Slate selections at the end of August; the last one had been for Mia Hansen-Love's "Things to Come", with its ruminative investigation into the life of a middle-aged woman faced with many challenges, both professional and personal, and containing one of the two major performances by Isabelle Huppert (the other was in Paul Verhoeven's "Elle", which was also in the festival). Armed with the knowledge of how strong many of the films were, the first official press screening of the 54th New York Film Festival was for Barry Jenkin's "Moonlight", and the astounding impression of that film cannot be underestimated. From there, the festival seemed to go from strength to strength; by the end, there was no denying (certainly not among the people i talked to) that the 54th New York Film Festival had been one of the best in many years, and was a showcase of the intelligence of Kent Jones' programming skills.

But you can only program what is available, and that was true of the 55th New York Film Festival. On paper, it seemed to be a perfect festival, with many tried-and-true filmmakers included in the mix. Three examples: the opening night film ("Last Flag Flying") and the centerpiece ("Wonderstruck") and the closing night film ("Wonder Wheel"). Richard Linklater had been on a career high since his 2014 "Boyhood", and the idea of a collaboration with the writer Darryl Ponicsan seemed enticing, so it was hard not to look forward to "Last Flag Flying". Though the idea of the film as a "loose" sequel to "The Last Detail" was quickly dealt with, the film turned out to be a solid drama about the effects of the "endless war" now engaged by the US in the Middle East on military families. It was good, with sterling performances by Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne; what it wasn't was somehow transcendent. The film never reached beyond the confines of its story to suggest some other dimension which would provide some deeper meaning to the narrative.

In the case of "Wonderstruck", Todd Haynes had reached a plateau with his last three films: the cubist "biopic" of Bob Dylan's life, "I'm Not There", the exquisitely faithful adaptation of James M. Cain's novel "Mildred Pierce", and the stunning romance of "Carol" (based on Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt"), so anticipation for "Wonderstruck" was keen. Once again, the film turned out to be a solid achievement, but it seemed rather flat-footed; it never quite took flight, it never became magical. The commingling of the two time frames (with black-and-white imagery for the 1920s and color for the 1970s) proceeded diligently, without any sense of a vital connection, so that when the revelations of the ways the stories were intertwined came, there was more a sense of coincidence rather than inevitability.

Of course, Woody Allen's "Wonder Wheel" was met with a great deal of skepticism. The Tennessee Williams derivations which had worked in "Blue Jasmine" seemed to be warmed over and threadbare in this new incarnation. And the period stylings in the Coney Island setting has been done before in Allen's work, so the sense of deja vu became the most prominent aspect of "Wonder Wheel".

And the sense of mild disappointment began to seep into many of the films. Two of the most celebrated of French directors, Arnaud Desplechin and Claire Denis, were represented with works that proved wildly uneven, Desplechin with "Ismael's Ghosts" and Denis with "Let the Sun Shine In". There were two films by the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, "The Day After" and "On the Beach at Night Alone", which proved to have some charm but did not provide any major new dramatic insights. Enough of these films, and sometimes it seemed as if the 55th New York Film Festival was a chore.

Yet it proved that the programming committee was taking seriously the need to diversify the Main Slate, and the number of women directors represented was impressive, more so because these films provided some of the best of the festival. Having already discussed Lucretia Martel's "Zama", i'll now discuss two of the films which really impressed me, Valeska Griesbach's "Western" and Chloe Zhao's "The Rider".

In "Western", a group of German workers are sent to a remote region of Bulgaria, to construct a hydroelectric plant which will provide electricity for the region (that's how remote this place is). Yet the interactions between the workers and the townspeople are fraught with misunderstandings. One of the workers begins to try to find ways to get to know the townspeople; his actions are met with suspicion from the townspeople and hostility from his fellow Germans. The title "Western" is purposefully ironic, stressing the idea of invading settlers confronting a native population. The film's narrative is understated, and in keeping with the neo-realist aesthetic, Griesbach does not resort to melodrama, so that the tentative reconciliation which ends the film is a signal of optimism.

Chloe Zhao's "The Rider" shows the process of rehabilitation undergone by Brady, a young rodeo rider who has suffered a catastrophic head injury after being thrown from a horse. The film is methodical and detailed, yet visually suffused with the incredible beauty of the American West. The backstory of the film is as fascinating as the film itself: Chloe Zhao met Brady Jandreau when she made her first feature film, "Songs My Brothers Taught Me", another study of Native American life; Jandreau, a young bronco rider, had helped Zhao learn how to ride a horse. She had wanted to make her next movie with Jandreau, but during the editing of "Songs", Jandreau met with an accident during one of his rodeo appearances; Zhao then decided to make a film about his rehabilitation, and she worked closely with Jandreau and his family to create the narrative. "The Rider" is an astonishing work, a genuinely empathetic work which presents an unsentimental look at the current lives of Native Americans.

Add to these Agnes Varda and JR's "Faces Places", Agnieszka Holland's "Spoor", Greta Gerwig's "Lady Bird" and Dee Rees' "Mudbound", and there was no denying the mastery shown by these women directors.

So there are always discoveries to be made at the New York Film Festival, and that's why it's central to the filmgoing experience now.

In June, Jordan Ruimy invited me to participate in a poll he was conducting for Awards Daily: it was a summing-up of the first half of 2018, and he was asking for a list of ten of the best films released from January to June. It turned out that there actually had been quite a number of exceptional films released during the first six months of 2018; i started with a list of over 20, and finally winnowed it down to ten (unranked): "Zama" (directed by Lucrecia Martel); "The Rider" (directed by Chloe Zhao); "Lean On Pete" (directed by Andrew Haigh); "24 Frames" (directed by Abbas Kiarostami); "The Guardians" (directed by Xavier Beauvois); "Tehran Taboo" (directed by Ali Soozandeh); "Western" (directed by Valeska Griesbach); "Summer 1993" (directed by Carla Simon); "Good Luck" (directed by Ben Russell); "I Had Nowhere to Go" (directed by Douglas Gordon). (The other films which i had included in the initial list were "The Death of Stalin", "Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc", "This Is Our Land", "Disobedience", "En El Septimo Dia", "Bernard and Huey", "Won't You Be My Neighbor?", "First Reformed", "In the Last Days of the City", "Ava", "Tully", "Where Is Kyra?", "Claire's Camera" and "Black Panther". And a few films which i'd seen just before or right after i'd handed in my list included "Leave No Trace", "Nico, 1988", and "The Captain".)

What this list reminded me was the central importance of the New York Film Festival to my cinematic experience: at least half the films on my "top ten" had been at the New York Film Festival ("Zama", "The Rider", "Western", "Good Luck" and "I Had Nowhere to Go"). These are the kinds of films which exhibited a degree of formal integrity as well as stylistic inventiveness, and also proved to be substantive in terms of content. I'll give the example of "Zama": it started out with subtle dislocations in terms of the soundtrack, and the sense of alienation which the slight aural disjunctions create becomes symptomatic of the alienation of the main character, a European grandee who has been sent to govern in "the New Land". And often, the visuals show the characters dwarfed by the lush landscapes of the tropical jungle. What Martel is doing is creating a visceral framework, with the dislocations of sound and the overwhelming of sight, for the audience to experience the alienation of the Europeans who come to "rule" a land which already had its own population. And the driving narrative is so brilliantly handled, so that the complexities of colonialization are formally foregrounded.

The New York Film Festival has been so much a part of my cinematic education, and though there have been ups and downs, there are always worthwhile films in the mix. Also: the number of sidebar events (the focus on documentaries, the "views from the avant-garde", and so on) means that there will be any number of works which might not be "mainstream" but which will be challenging.

Right now, a controversy has arisen, because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has added a new category, relating to what they are calling "Popular Film"; they're adding a category to account for the "tentpole" movies, the "popular" franchise movies. Of course, this is coming at a time when many of the franchise movies haven't done as well as expected: the "Star Wars" movies seemed to have plateaued, and the profits on the Marvel and DC movies have not been as expansive as before. Of course, there are exceptions, relating to the novelty factor ("Black Panther" proved to be even more successful than had been predicted, and it was a critical bonanza as well), but the Motion Picture Academy started out in 1928 with two awards, one for Best Picture ("Wings") and another for Unique and Artistic Production ("Sunrise"), and now the Academy seems to want to return to those distinctions. After that first year, the Artistic Production award was discontinued, but in recent years, that would be the designation for so many of the winners, and this has meant the ratings for the Oscar telecast have reflected this fact accordingly.

When "Chariots of Fire" won the Oscar for Best Film in 1982, the Film Society of Lincoln Center issued a press release, because "Chariots of Fire" had been the Opening Night of the New York Film Festival. In the last few years, the New York Film Festival has been one of the fall film events which have premiered many of the award season contenders (the others include the Toronto International Film Festival and the Telluride Film Festival). From the point of "Chariots of Fire" on, the New York Film Festival had become a significant guarantor of "quality" in terms of prestige, and many films which passed through the festival have gone on to serious contention. But that's not the reason the New York Film Festival has been so valuable to those of us who really consider film as an art: we're there to discover something revelatory. And at its best, that's what we get at the New York Film Festival.

This summer, PBS showcased a new miniseries based on "Little Women"; it was, in many ways, rather lackluster, without the sharp narrative focus which could be found in the best adaptations (the 1933 version, and the 1994 version). But one thing: though she was wildly uneven, Maya Hawke as Jo was the only actress since Katharine Hepburn to have the proper tomboy quality. And this pointed out the fact that, no matter how skillful a performer may be, if that performer possesses the right qualities for the role, that may be more important than acting skill per se.

This summer, Dan Callahan's book, "The Art of American Screen Acting 1912-1960", was published, and it featured twenty chapters on a range of American screen stars from Lillian Gish to James Dean. At his best, he is one of the most acute and sensitive chroniclers of screen acting that i know. The chapter on Marlene Dietrich, for example, is unparalleled: it might be the best thing i've ever read on Dietrich as an actress. One reason his writing on Dietrich is so insightful and original is that he doesn't try to define her in terms of "acting": he notes the ways in which her work with Josef von Sternberg ran through various modes of presentation, not just "acting" in the classical theatrical sense of the word, but the ways in which photographic representation could redefine acting, and this is very important in considering Dietrich's work in von Sternberg's films.

In her essay on Marlon Brando, Pauline Kael had defined Brando as "the major protagonist of contemporary American themes in the fifties" and explained, "I mean by protagonist the hero who really strikes a nerve - not a Cary Grant who delights with his finesse, nor mushy heartwarmers like Gary Cooper or James Stewart with their blubbering sincerity (sometimes it seemed that the taller the man, the smaller he pretended to be; that was his notion of being 'ordinary' and 'universal' and 'real'), but men whose intensity on the screen stirs an intense reaction in the audience. Not Gregory Peck or Tyrone Power or Robert Taylor with their conventional routine heroics, but James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson in the gangster films, John Garfield in the Depression movies, Kirk Douglas as a postwar heel. These men are not necessarily better actors, but through the accidents of casting and circumstances or because of what they themselves embodied or projected, they meant something important to us. A brilliant actor like Jason Robards, Jr., may never become a protagonist of this kind unless he gets a role in which he embodies something new and relevant to the audience." It was in this sense that Kael defined Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis as the "two great heroines of American talkies". And it is in this sense that Katharine Hepburn "means" something that Miriam Hopkins does not.

As time has gone by, and Brando's centrality as a representative of America in the 1950s has become timeworn, it is important to remember his versatility: with his first film role, (in "The Men"), he played a crippled veteran, and there was a great deal of publicity around the fact that Brando had spent time in rehabilitation wards, closely observing the various therapies and treatments for these veterans. His second film role was, of course, his recreation of his famous stage performance as Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named  Desire"; he followed that with his portrayal of the Mexican rebel Emilio Zapata in "Viva Zapata!", and then he did Marc Antony in "Julius Caesar" as well as the biker in "The Wild One", and then he did "On the Waterfront". With those roles, he showed his range as well as his mastery, from contemporary drama to Shakespeare, from biographical drama to ripped-from-the-headlines stories. And he succeeded in all these roles, and brought the audiences with him. Though Montgomery Clift and James Dean were also "Method acting" stars, neither showed the range that Brando showed, nor did they take the chances that Brando took. People always mention the fact that, by 1955, after Brando had done "Desiree" (done to fulfill a contractual agreement with 20th Century Fox; he'd already passed on several other roles, and if he didn't do this one, Zanuck was threatening a lawsuit) and "Guys and Dolls" (to prove that he could do musical comedy), his career started its decline. What few people seem to realize is that Brando's life was profoundly disrupted in 1955: his mother had died, and he had counted on her as the one he wanted to make proud. Without her guidance, his career fell apart. But the strength of his image (culled from "A Streetcar Named Desire", "The Wild One", and "On the Waterfront") as some sort of inarticulate "rebel" superceded the actual evidence of the work he had done. (On the stage, his first Broadway role was as Nels, the brother in "I Remember Mama", then he did his famous turn as the person who has the seizure in "Truckline Cafe", then he played Marchbanks in Shaw's "Candida" opposite Katherine Cornell - this was the role that most people saw and remembered, because "Truckline Cafe" had a very short run, but "Candida" had a fairly good run, and then the production went on tour, and that's where most of the country got to see Brando; when Brando returned to New York from the national tour of "Candida", his next project was "A Streetcar Named Desire" and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.) But it's important to remember that Brando had done Shaw and Shakespeare, both to great acclaim, and so he had proven that he could be a "classical" actor as well as a star, and he had done contemporary material which had galvanized the audience. In all these ways, Brando had been an important actor as well as a truly popular star.

And though there are any number of actors who have shown such versatility and skill since, there have not been any to have become that central a figure in American culture. And a lot of that has to do with the ways in which our recent media landscape has fractured. And that's why it seems (at times) as if (to quote from "The Shop Around the Corner") "we might be in the same room, but we are not on the same planet."

Today was Katharine Hepburn day as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. I watched "Little Women" again, for i don't know how many times; it remains one of my favorite movies. What i have found depressing is that, in the decades since i first saw the movie, it has been downgraded; instead of being celebrated for what it is (a quite precise approximation of Louisa May Alcott's novel, with many of the performers - such as Edna May Oliver and Henry Stephenson - performing in the theatrical style which was part of the professional theater of the period after the Civil War, and with Katharine Hepburn giving a definitive performance, as George Cukor always stated, it was the role she was born to play), it is now derided for its sentimentality, for its "miscasting" (why, the actresses playing the March sisters are adults) and for sundry other infractions which were totally part of the theatrical tradition which this particular production grew out of.

And i have to admit i'm also tired of people i know always trying to downgrade Katharine Hepburn. Yes, it is true that, starting in the late 1960s, Hepburn did as much to destroy her own reputation as anyone else, giving performances which ranged from misjudged to egregious. It's hard to deny that she gave some terrible performances. But at her best (which would be her work in the 1930s), she represented something that was unique. And that's important. Another thing people say is that so-and-so was a "better" actress (i have friends who would claim Miriam Hopkins, or Barbara Stanwyck, or Myrna Loy as "better" actresses) and that may be true, but they never signified something the way that Katharine Hepburn signified something.

It's rather like Diane Keaton. Starting in the 1970s, Diane Keaton signified the neurotic, post-analytic woman. Now, was Diane Keaton actually a skillful actress? Maybe. Maybe not. Were there better actresses out there? Yes. Blythe Danner is an example. Blythe Danner was a brilliant actress, with far greater depth, immense range, and incredible expressivity. But Blythe Danner never became a movie star, and she certainly didn't incarnate a specific archetype. Diane Keaton did.

And so it was with Katharine Hepburn. In the 1930s, she represented something unique: a defiantly independent woman, a post-suffragette heroine. She brought a specifically political perspective to her work. She had a rather limited range, and there were roles she definitely couldn't play (and when she was cast in some of those roles, such as the hillbilly in "Spitfire", she was dreadful). But when she was right for a role, she brought more to it than other actresses could. And she did that with "Little Women", which was, by the way, the most successful movie of her career (until "The Philadelphia Story").

It's been almost a year since i've posted anything on this blog; i've been seeing a lot, but mostly i post a short notice on Facebook, and usually those short takes get read. I also spent a year posting a daily "birthday tribute" to directors and actors (also on Facebook). One important feature was my attempt to highlight the contributions of women. I especially wanted to make sure that women directors were featured, and i tried to make sure these were as international as possible.

But actually my lack of interest in maintaining my blog has to do with my depression: the fact that we are now living under a fascist regime is the cause of despair. There's no other word for it: we must face the fact that we are no longer a "democracy" (whatever that is) but a country ruled by an autocrat who was elected on a technicality (the Electoral College) that was facilitated by foreign interference. And he is abetted by the Republican Party. Exactly what can be done is open to question.

And so one marches, one signs petitions, one donates to causes (Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Move On, et al), one does what one can.

However, since my last post, there have been: The New York Film Festival (which is fast approaching once again), New Directors/New Films, DOC NYC, Rendez-vous With French Cinema, BAM CinemaFest, as well as various smaller film events. And so i'll be reporting on my experiences at these film events.