The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

The New York Times, Friday, september 29, 2006
e1&10
New York Film Festival
Quietly Demands
Attention
By A.O. SCOTT
The Walter Reade Theater, home of the Film
Society of Lincoln Center and the primary
screening site for the New York Film Festival,
used to be connected to the rest of the Lincoln Center
complex by a wide plaza that stretched across West 65th
Street. Because of the elaborate reconstruction and expansion
of Lincoln Center in progress, that familiar
bridge is gone, and the broad stairway that rose from
Broadway over Alice Tully Hall is closed. To reach the
mezzanine where the Walter Reade sits, you now must
climb a narrow stairway tucked into the middle of the
block (an escalator and elevators are also available), and
from the top of it you look across 65th at Avery Fisher
Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House as though gazing
from a lonely parapet over a moat full of taxicabs.
The physical separation of the theater from its Lincoln
Center siblings is temporary of course, but it suggests a
metaphor for the festival, which is an increasingly unusual
outcropping on the cultural landscape. Film festivals
crowd the calendar and circle the globe, but New York’s
is different. Instead of hundreds of films, it presents a
few dozen, and it presents them, for the most part, one
at a time, rather than in a frenzy of overscheduling. It is
neither a hectic marketplace nor a pre-Oscar buzz factory,
like Cannes or Toronto, or a film industry frat party,
like Sundance. Its tone tends to be serious, sober, and
perhaps sometimes a little sedate, even when the movies
it shows are daring and provocative.
If I may trot out another metaphor, the New York Film
Festival might be compared to an established, somewhat
exclusive boutique holding its own in a world of big box superstores,
oversize shopping malls and Internet retailers.
If you want quantity – racks and shelves full of stuff to
sort through in the hope of finding something that might
fit your taste – wait for Tribeca, with its grab-bag programs
and crowd-pleasing extras. The New York Film
Festival, in contrast, prides itself on quality, refinement
and selectivity. It is not so much programmed as curated.
This selection is a form of criticism – it involves applying
aesthetic standards and deciding that some films are better
than others – and to understand this festival it helps to
understand that its selection committee, led by Richard
Peña, the festival’s program director, is made up of film
critics. This year’s movies were chosen by Mr. Peña; Kent
Jones, associate programmer at the Film Society and
editor at large of Film Comment; Lisa Schwarzbaum
of Entertainment Weekly; John Powers of Vogue; and
Phillip Lopate, editor of the recently published Library
of America anthology of American movie criticism and
an all-around man of letters.
These critics, like others in their profession, incline toward
material that is sometimes described as difficult or
challenging, but that requires a disciplined, active attention.
In previewing the movies that will be shown over
the first week of the festival – and some that will come
later – I have been struck by how few of them conform
to the conventions of genre and narrative that dominate
American commercial cinema. The split between the domestic
mainstream and the world of international “art”
films has rarely seemed so wide. As the big Hollywood
studios, with their eyes on the global market, strive for
maximum scale and minimal nuance, independentminded
filmmakers in other countries seem to be going in
the other direction. Or, rather, in their own idiosyncratic
directions, forging a decentralized, multifarious cinema
of nuance, intimacy and formal experimentation.
Some of them veer toward abstraction, like Marc Recha’s
“August Days,” in which the story is a faint shadow cast by
the images, which consist mainly of views of the mountains
and rivers of Catalonia. Other films mix their moods
in ways that complicate traditional distinctions between
comedy and drama, realism and artifice, or even present
and past. All of them reward a first look – even if you
don’t like what you see, you will have seen something new
– and some may even change the way you look at things.
The director Abderrahmane Sissako’s “Bamako,” the
most politically urgent film in the festival and also the
most formally audacious, combines a bracing indictment
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