DO FILMFESTS HAVE A FUNCTION? : In Dallas, a Roundup of Good Films Draws an Audience

Fifteen years ago a quarrelsome quorum of critics spent a week at a ranch outside Dallas, looking at movies from nine in the morning until midnight and making choices for the first USA Film Festival. Dwight MacDonald and Jonas Mekas arguing were more interesting, as I remember, than anything we watched on the screen in the billiard room.

I went back several times to the Southern Methodist University campus where the festival was then centered, organized by Prof. G. William Jones and held in the intimate Bob Hope Theater.

After a hiatus, I returned to Dallas again this year, to judge a selection of independent films, four documentaries and eleven narrative works, with $3,000 prizes to the makers of the best of each. We gave the award for best feature to Bobby Roth’s knowing look at two Los Angeles pals and the women in their lives, “Heartbreakers,” which seems better--more subtle in its relationships, more skilled in its presentation--each time I see it.

The documentary prize went to a controversial and startling account of a sex therapist/surrogate at work. “Private Practices,” made by Kirby Dick, is a curious match with Roth’s film, another look at screwed-up contemporary California lives, these more uncomfortable to watch because they are not invented. Whatever must they think of us in Dallas? The film played to a sold-out house.

(The film makes the viewer a willing, or unwilling, voyeur, and raises unsettling questions about the limits, if any, to what private citizens will consent to have the camera watch. At that, what gives the documentary its real power is not the pretty therapist at work but the abrasive confrontations--man and ex-wife, therapist and family--that leave no doubt the film is finally about love, and the absence of love.)

Much has changed with the festival. Its connection with SMU ended and its base is the Inwood, a faded triplex with a built-in cocktail lounge on an outlying boulevard named Lovers Lane (whatever will we think of Dallas?).

Bill Jones opted out to give undistracted time to teaching and to the Southwest Film and Television archive, which not long ago discovered, unclaimed in a warehouse, a historically invaluable trove of early black films.

His second successor at the festival is Robert Hull, who had been chief fund-raiser for the Dallas Opera. The 1985 running of the festival, concluded a week ago, seemed a kind of holding action while Hull (in office less than a year) and his board decide what the USA can best be and do--fair questions for any film festival.

Except for the big marketplace festivals, like Cannes, or the festivals in major market centers, like Filmex and New York, what the regional festivals like Dallas do best, it has always seemed to me, is simply to showcase good films for local audiences that might not otherwise have a chance to see them.

In a more general way, festivals celebrate the idea of film and honor the people who make it. This year the festival honored Jack Lemmon, who flew in for a visit; special- effects wizard Richard Edlund (“Ghostbusters”); and directors Richard Brooks, showing “In Cold Blood” and several other of his films, and Larry Cohen.

“If you want to make movies,” Brooks told a young audience at the Inwood, “you’d better love it a lot, because they’ll break your heart a hundred times, in a hundred different ways.” He made it sound thrilling and satisfying, always presuming you survive.

At the start the USA Festival limited itself strictly to American films, reflecting a certain Texas chauvinism, no doubt, but also because no other festival was operating that way. From necessity as much as design, it majored in independent films, because the Hollywood majors weren’t much interested.

By now, the festival has wisely broadened its scope to include foreign films, including Andrzej Wajda’s “A Love in Germany” and Werner Herzog’s “Where the Green Ants Dream.”

It offers prizes for short films and video work, and has for several years. It now consciously stresses independent work, because that’s where the vitality in American film making increasingly is to be found.

The prizes for independent features and documentaries are new, and beyond the fiscal relief the prizes bring to the film makers, the recognition is a calling card for films that, lacking major exposure, can use the boost.

The USA now has a year-round calendar of events, retrospectives, children’s films, fund-raising premieres, and even courses in aspects of film production. It has had its effect on its city, drawing together a sizable audience for good films, both mainstream and alternative.

The Inwood itself, under a dedicated young management, is, after a shaky start, settling in as the city’s principal forum for foreign films and other art objects.

There is life after “Porky’s Revenge” and what regional film festivals do best is to say it loud and clear.