The New Jersey Film Festival offers films open to interpretation.
By: Anthony Stoeckert
Autumn is here, and it’s time to get serious about movies. No more pirates, mutants, snake-infested planes, and, best of all, not an Adam Sandler movie in sight. But even as mainstream movies start to get serious, true film devotees seek out that extra something special at venues like the New Jersey Film Festival in New Brunswick.
Celebrating its 25th season, the festival is playing home to an eclectic mix of foreign and independent films, documentaries, shorts and revivals. This year, particular attention is being paid to experimental films.
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Jersey’s film festivals and programs feature everything from rarely seen shorts to the opportunity to experience some of the year’s most anticipated movies, while also meeting the filmmakers. The Last Picture Show 2006 Film Festival will feature screenings of award-winning shorts from all over the world and appearances from filmmakers. Craig MacNeil and Clay Mcleod Chapman will be on hand to discuss their film Late Bloomer, as will Yon Motskin, director of The Cutman. Also appearing on the panel will be Oscar-nominated screenwriter Robert Festinger (In the Bedroom) and editor Joe Bini (Grizzly Man). Other titles being shown include Six Shooter, which won this year’s Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and More, which received a Best Animated Short Oscar nomination in 2003. The festival will take place at The Forum Theatre, 314 Main St., Metuchen, Sept 16, 7:30-11 p.m. Admission costs $15, $10 seniors/students/artists. For information, call (732) 906-0009. Filmmakers Symposium offers screenings of movies at the Multiplex Cinemas at Town Center Plaza in East Windsor (as well as AMC Loews in Mountainside and in New York at Anthology Film Archives). The movies are followed with question-and-answer sessions with filmmakers. Titles under consideration include All the King’s Men starring Sean Penn and Jude Law, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and Christopher Guest’s latest "mockumentary" For Your Consideration. Subscription costs $166 for six weeks, $299 for 12 weeks. For information, call (800) 531-9416. On the Web: www.privatescreenings.org The 2006-2007 West Windsor Film series kicks off with Machuca Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the community room of the West Windsor Branch of the Mercer County Library System, 333 North Post Road, West Windsor. The 2004 film by internationally acclaimed director Andres Woods explores the intriguing friendship between two boys (one "have" and one "have-not") and that cataclysm in Chile as it hurled from populist leadership to dictatorship. The guest speaker for this showing is Carlo Momo, a Princeton-based restaurateur who lived in Chile in 1975 right after the coup. The evening will include refreshments and discussion. Free admission. As seating is limited, early arrival is suggested. For information, call (609) 919-1982. On the Web: www.westwindsorarts.org |
Those include new works like The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes from the Brothers Quay and older films such as Performance, Nicholas Roeg’s and Donald Cammell’s piece of 1960s psychedelia starring Mick Jagger as a washed-up rock star. Another movie featuring a ’60s music legend is Girl on a Motorcycle, starring Marianne Faithful as a bored newlywed. Heavily cut to get an R rating when it was released in 1968 (under the tile Naked Under Leather), the film is being shown at the festival unedited Oct. 19.
"We don’t shy away from showing unusual films," says A.G. Nigrin, executive director of the Rutgers Film Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Center, which presents the festival. "’La Moustache’ (showing in October) is a very strange film," he says. "It’s hard to figure out what actually takes place in that film. But I like movies that aren’t closed, that are open-ended. That way the viewers have to work for meaning and get something out of it themselves. Linear narratives are fine, but that shouldn’t be the only type of movie out there, and that’s what we try to do."
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is part of the festival’s retrospective of the works of the Brothers Quay. Stephen and Timothy Quay were born in Pennsylvania and now live and work in London, where they keep a low profile. Their animated films are known for their originality and two of their other works, Institute Benjamenta and Streets of Crocodiles, will be screened Sept. 21 and 22.
Also being shown is Lunacy, the newest work by Jan Svankmajer, who Mr. Nigrin says is one of the Quay Brothers’ mentors. Described as "surreal animation" in the festival’s brochure, it tells the story of a man traveling through 19th-century France after his mother’s funeral. He spends a night in a castle where he witnesses blasphemous behavior and attempts to escape.
One of the festival’s goals is to offer film lovers the chance to experience movies they aren’t going to find elsewhere. The farther you get from New York and Philadelphia, the harder it is to find these movies, and some selections, like The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, are getting their metro area premiere at the festival.
"We fill a void, there’s no question," Mr. Nigrin says. "There are no more revival theaters anywhere. DVDs are nice but it’s still not the same experience as seeing it with a lot of people on a big screen and on film whenever we can."
It’s not all about the strange and experimental. More mainstream selections of the festival include Woody Allen’s latest, Scoop, and Al Gore’s global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Devotees of Michael Apted’s Up series (which has followed the lives of 14 English people by interviewing them every seven years) will be thrilled to learn that the newest entry, 49 Up, will be shown Oct. 6 to 8.
The festival also has its fun side. For Halloween thrills a "Creature Double-Feature" will include 3-D showings of Creature From the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature (blink during Revenge and you’ll risk missing Clint Eastwood’s film debut) Nov. 27 to 29.
Mr. Nigrin takes pride not only in the selection of movies being shown, but in the growth of the festival. As he described it, the festival has grown from 20 to 30 people sitting in a smelly basement classroom with an echo, to a soundproof auditorium (for weekend screenings) whose only current drawback is its plastic chairs. Some screenings include commentary from Mr. Nigrin. November’s Street Art Film Festival will see appearances by filmmakers and artists.
In celebrating the festival’s 25th year, films marking its history are being shown. These include showing Dada/Surrealist films that were hallmarks of the earliest festivals. Daughters of the Dusk (1991), which was one of the first movies to be shown at the festival on a first-run basis, will also be screened. According to Mr. Nigrin, that film, about an African-American family during the turn of the 20th century, got its only Jersey screening at the festival and all of its screenings sold out.
DVDs can turn a living room into an art house theater, but festivals like the New Jersey Film Festival offer a chance to see these films with an audience, one made up of fellow film devotees. Mr. Nigrin says he’s even gotten letters and e-mails from people who met their spouses at previous festivals (making it, he says, "a pickup joint for smart people").
"I think the nice thing about the festival itself is that it’s an oasis," he says. "Somebody called it a mecca for filmgoers in the state. There’s nothing else like it. You have nine months of alternative programming that is user friendly and very reasonably priced ($7 for general admission). It’s cheaper and sometimes we even show things before they’re released commercially."
The New Jersey Film Festival Fall 2006 continues through November at Scott Hall, near the corner of College Avenue and Hamilton Street, College Avenue campus, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and the Ruth Adams Building, near the corner of Jones and George streets, Douglass College campus, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Admission costs $7, $5 seniors/students, $4 Rutgers Film Co-op/NJMAC friends. Admission for the Suzan Pitt Animation Retrospective Oct. 20-22 and the Halloween 3D Creature Double Feature Oct. 27-29 costs $10, $9 seniors/students, $8 Rutgers Film Co-op/NJMAC friends. For schedules and information, call (732) 932-8482. On the Web: www.njfilmfest.com