Two days (January 4th and January 5th) of press screenings for the New York Jewish Film Festival (always a joint venture of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum). On Wednesday, January 4th, the two films were AMERICA (directed by Ofir Raul Graizer) and WHERE LIFE BEGINS (directed by Stephane Freiss). On Thursday, the two films were THIS IS NATIONAL WAKE (a documentary directed by Mirissa Neff) and JUNE ZERO (directed by Jake Paltrow). Intriguing group of films. I'm reminded of the discussions i had with the late Wanda Bershen, who was curator at The Jewish Museum when she was in charge of programming the initial New York Jewish Film Festivals (32 years ago!), and the issue for her was to continue to show movies which did not narrowcast the definition of what should or should not be in a Jewish film festival. She once said that it would be too easy to simply show a bunch of documentaries dealing with the Holocaust. During Wanda's time as curator at The Jewish Museum, one of the triumphant exhibitions she showed was the installation version of Chantal Akerman's D'EST, which remains one of the most moving installations mounted in a New York City museum. But there was a notice by the press representative given that the films of this year's festivals were not to be given long reviews, only capsule reviews until the festival gets underway. But i'll say that AMERICA was confounding, because there seemed to be crosscurrents in the story which remained unexplored, and when i got home, i looked up Ofir Raul Graizer, and found that he had made THE CAKEMAKER, a film with a decidedly gay storyline, and some of the same dynamics seemed to be working out in AMERICA, but on a far less emphatic scale.

But the experience of going to the screenings was disconcerting. Ran into a number of people i knew, and we were talking about the fact that one of the last major screenings that any of us remember was going to the press screenings for New Directors/New Films... and that those screenings had started, and then midway through, been cancelled because of the first lock-down. Are screenings to be back-to-normal? 

Today, J. Hoberman's review of the revival run of Patrice Chereau's L'HOMME BLESSE appeared in The New York Times, and he remarked on the controversy that attended the movie on its initial release in this country. (I love the fact that he quoted Janet Maslin's original review in the Times, to show the bewilderment of most of the original reviewers.) I had mentioned that there had been a controversy about the movie on its original release, and i'm glad that Hoberman backed me up! But it's still quite a provocative movie, and a definite movie which did not try to present a "positive" gay image.