Festival in New York

In a year starved for screen greatness, the second New York Film Festival, currently pulling near-capacity crowds into the blue fastness of Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, is a creditable success. What Lincoln Center offers in effect is a festival of festivals "dedicated to the exhibition of the year's outstanding films," a list that includes the cream of films shown at Europe's major festivals.

A film festival is an esthetic booby trap fraught with perils. It can be little more than a lure for cinesnobs who like to see important movies before the public does. It can be the cause of ulcers and chronic hangover among bleary international delegates who traipse the circuit year after year, vying for palms, cups, lions and laurels at more than 100 festivals from Valladolid to Venice, from Karlovy Vary to Knokke-Le-Zoute. But it can also be the crackling excitement of the new cinema giving birth to authentic genius.

Because the conservative sponsors of the New York festival offer no prizes, horse trading and razzmatazz are minimal. Opening night was a sober, even stately occasion, geared to the Slavic measures of Hamlet, Soviet Director Kozintsev's 21-hour epic in collaboration with Pasternak, Shostakovich and Shakespeare. Some viewers were enthralled, some appalled by the brooding, glacial, quasi-operatic doings at Elsinore, which at times seemed haunted by the ghost of Boris Godunov.

If some of this year's 26 festival choices fall short, others give glowing evidence that cinema, for all its vicissitudes, remains an astonishingly diversified international art. Moviemakers of eleven nations sent films. At least two of the five Japanese entries introduced gifted young directors whose achievements may well challenge the supremacy of Japan's great Akira Kurosawa. Four U.S. films flail at the nerve ends with everything from nuclear war (Fail Safe) to nymphomania (Lilith). Passionate cinemanes may also scrutinize works by established masters (Satyajit Ray, Kenji Mizoguchi, Joseph Losey), and some flashy Wunderkinder from Argentina, Sweden, Italy, France and Canada. Among the better entries:

PROTEST

The Brig is a raw slice of new American cinema filmed on an off-Broadway stage by Jonas and Adolfas Mekas (Hallelujah the Hills) with such brutish authenticity that it won a Venice festival grand prize as best documentary. Part drama, part polemic, with shockwave sound and a nightmare air that suggests Kafka with a Kodak, the movie does exactly what it sets out to do--seizes an audience by the shirtfront and slams it around from wall to wall for one grueling day in a Marine Corps lockup.

She and He, directed by Susumu Hani, 35, is an exquisitely ironical tragedy of progress. The hero (Eiji Okada), a rising young executive who lives in a handsome Tokyo housing development, discovers to his dismay that one of his old college chums is living in the ragman's row he can see from his back window. Tactfully he offers to get the fellow a better job; tactfully the ragman refuses. Why? Perhaps, Hani suggests, it is difficult to have a house full of things and a heart full of joy. Perhaps, in building a terrestrial paradise, modern man is actually building a spiritual slum.

Passenger. Two worldly matrons meet aboard a luxury liner, and flashbacks recall their relationship in Auschwitz concentration camp, one as a strong-willed prisoner, the other as a vindictive German guard. There, in an unexpected reversal of the usual atrocity tale, the guard is revealed to be not the master but the victim of the evil power she owns. Polish Director Andrzej Munk died in an auto accident in 1961 before the film was finished, but admiring associates fleshed it out with narration and eloquent still photographs to shape a classic, poignant memorial.

PARABLE

Woman in the Dunes, the second picture directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, 37, is a cinema masterpiece. Deep, original, strange, it propounds the parable of a young teacher (Eiji Okada again) who takes a field trip to an isolated duneland, misses the last train, accepts an invitation from the village elders to sleep in a shack at the bottom of a sand pit. In the morning he finds the ladder drawn up and no way out of the pit. "I'm sorry," says the young woman (Kyoko Kishada), who lives alone in the sand pit. "You cannot leave." Again and again he tries, again and again he fails. Slowly, through long years of suffering, he learns to relinquish his will, to accept his fate. In the end, serene as a sage, he fathoms a great mystery of life: a man is not free unless his will is free, but if his will is free it does not matter if his body is bound.

SEX

To Love announces an exciting new talent from Scandinavia: Jorn Donner, 31, a prolific writer and critic turned moviemaker and a Finnish protege of Ingmar Bergman. In his second full-length movie Donner has produced a satyr play, the story of an orgiastic courtship of a merry widow (Harriet Andersson) by a lecherous travel agent (Zbigniew Cybulski) that some will consider too sexplicit, but almost all will find continually and wildly hilarious.

A Woman Is a Woman is a 35-mm. salute to life, liberty and off-beat movies by Director Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), whose joy in his work has never been more apparent. In this fresh and giddy free-form improvisation, Godard weaves all the bright idiocy of a Hollywood musical into some very je m'en fiche French rounds involving an ecdysiast (Anna Karina) who sheds her last flimsy inhibition and decides to have a baby with her lover, or--if it happens to work out that way--with her lover's best friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo).

SATIRE

The Inheritance, the work of Argentina's Ricardo Alventosa, 33, is a wicked little misanthropic comedy that develops as a spectacular succession of sight gags. The plot is taken from Maupassant's tale of a legacy and the absurd or appalling things three people do to get it; the wit is dry, fast, subtle. When an impotent man looks at an obelisk, he winces. When a sour old spinster finally drops dead, her happy-go-lucky brother sidles up to the death bed, leans forward with a glitter of maniacal triumph in his eyes and deftly distorts her customary sneer into a pretty little smile. At his best, Alventosa is a master mechanic of comedy, an intellectual Keaton.

Diary of a Chambermaid, like the Gallic classic on which it is based, begins as a gay little gibe at the manners and morals of a French provincial town. Like most movies made by Mexico's Luis Bunuel (Los Olvidados, The Exterminating Angel), it ends as a harrowing vision of hell on earth. In the early reels Bunuel respectfully inspects the comfortable surfaces of life in a "good family." In the rest of the film, with the help of his cunning heroine (Jeanne Moreau), he cruelly forces the family's closets and drags out its skeletons: avarice, impotence, sadism, frigidity, fetishism, rape, murder. The film is not Bunuel's best,, but it demonstrates anew that he is the most powerful and profound of cinema satirists.

*Missing from the Lincoln Center bill, however, were Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, winner of the 1964 Cannes Festival's Grand Prix, and Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, recent top choice of the judges at Venice.

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