Cinema: A Festival of Diamonds and Zircons

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THE New York Film Festival isn't what it used to be. Perhaps it never was. True, previous festivals did provide American debuts for some major foreign films: Poland's Knife in the Water (1963), Czechoslovakia's The Shop on Main Street (1965), Italy's The Battle of Algiers (1967). But movie enthusiasts tend to forget the undistinguished and unmemorable fare that made up the bulk of the programs. Even at its best, Lincoln Center offered the viewer only a few diamonds in a setting of zircons.

The 1968 festival may contain more costume jewelry than ever before. This year's program list is more notable for its absentees than for those in attendance: there are no British, Canadian or Oriental films. On the other hand, France is lopsidedly represented by twelve movies—half of the full-length features. The lack of balance may not be entirely the festival's fault. Some films were unavailable for screening: Hollywood, as usual, refused to provide any of its major productions; and Jacques Tali's new comedy, Playtime, is on 70-mm. film, too large for Lincoln Center's projectors. Several works by major directors—notably Francois Truffaut's Stolen Kisses and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus—were judged unfit.

Just how much more unfit than some of the items accepted by the festival is difficult to imagine. Closely Watched Trains, by Jiri Menzel of Czechoslovakia, won an Oscar as the Best Foreign Film of 1967. This year Menzel returns with Capricious Summer, a disappointingly slight fable about a traveling carnival in a small country town. There are three films from what the festival labels "the German Renaissance"; two of them suggest that it might have been better advertised as "the Return of the Visigoths." The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is a paralyzed semidocumentary in which the Top 20 Bach hits are rendered by some bewigged court musicians. Signs of Life, an Antonioniesque account of the Wehrmacht in Greece in 1944, belies its title.

Still, the festival has always performed a valuable service in offering certain films that were either too flawed or too offbeat for commercial distribution. The program directors' taste in revivals remains impeccable. Jean Renoir's Toni, made in 1934, is a gentle, loving tribute to the peasants of pre-Civil War Spain. The uncut version of Max Ophuls' Lola Montes (1955), never commercially released in the U.S., is one of the most sumptuous romances ever filmed. Among the other festival highlights:

Faces, one of the two full-length American features in the festival, may be the most impressive of the lot. This is Actor John Cassavetes' second effort as both writer and director. He spent six months shooting the film—mostly in his own Los Angeles house—and almost three years editing it. The result is a 130-minute study of human pain, shame, cruelty and crudity of such abrasive intensity that it constitutes more of an experience than a show.