The first Cinema Arts Festival Houston is in the books now, and by all accounts it was a great success. Curator Richard Herskowitz’s program was quite ambitious, especially for a start-up, but the events all ran smoothly. Most importantly, the quality of the films was very high, and good crowds turned out to see them.
Given the fact that Herskowitz wasn’t interested in programming films with “popcorn appeal,” but instead showed films that either dealt with artists or were themselves avant-garde works of fine art, you couldn’t have blamed him if he’d settled for just a couple of venues and a shorter program.
But instead, his venues ranged from film-festival friendly locales like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Angelika Film Center and the Rice Media Center to more laid-back locations such as Warehouse Live and Discovery Green. Other locations, such as the University of Houston's Gerald R. Hines College of Architecture, were truly sui generis venues. The College of Architecture building, in particular, points to the direction that Herskowitz hopes to take the festival in future years, when he plans for screenings to take place in art galleries and even on the sides of buildings.
The list of high-profile guests was short but selective. It’s a shame that Tommy Lee Jones dropped out, but with Tilda Swinton, Guillermo Arriaga and Richard Linklater on hand, the festival did more than fine.
In fact, Swinton and Arriaga made a very interesting combination. They didn’t appear together, but faithful festival-goers probably saw both. Arriaga is charming and funny, but also a "manly-man" who talked about how his love of hunting teaches him “to respect the line between life and death.”
For all I know, Swinton hunts grouse in her native Scotland (where, I’m told, she can trace her family back to the 9th century). But she is obviously an altogether different kind of presence than Arriaga. With a mane of shocking white blonde hair, she’s less ethereal in person than on screen, where she can seem a total apparition.
But she exudes a love of beauty — which she found even here, in Houston !— that is both rare and rather inspiring. I know that she’s a highly decorated actor, but the pleasure she took in embracing the Discovery Green crowd seemed quite genuine.
For his part, Richard Linklater got to talk baseball with former Astros skipper Larry Dierker, who showed up for the Me and Orson Welles screening. Dierker is always working on some book, screenplay or musical, so he found plenty to talk about with Linklater, a big baseball fan.
I also watched some of the more challenging films with pleasure rather than a sense of duty. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies gave me more to think about than any film has in some time. And while I did a certain amount of wool-gathering during the experimental film When It Was Blue, I generally found it absorbing rather than punishing.
In fact, there was nothing I saw that I wouldn’t gladly see again.
No one person could attend all the screenings. I most regret missing the documentary What If, Why Not? Underground Adventures with the Ant Farm at UH; the “mumblecore musical” Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, which included the trombonist and Houstonian Andre Hayward; and the documentary The Yes Men Fix the World about the pranksters whose genius it is to present the world as it ought to be, rather than as it is. (In other words, they create a world in which Dow Chemical compensates the victims of Bhopal, rather than fighting them in the courts.)
Luckily, Yes Men will open at the Angelika soon, as will Me and Orson Welles. (The Arriaga-directed feature The Burning Plain, which was not in the festival, will also open shortly.)
The festival wasn’t perfect. The “portable screening room” H BOX didn’t do much for me. There were too many screens, with too much to look at, inside the black box. And the Alabama Theater isn’t the best place for public speaking. The now-empty structure swallows up speakers’ voices.
But these observations are truly quibbles. The Cinema Arts Festival was a great success, which left me with just one important question: How are they going to top their debut?
