HIGH TIMES CONTINUE AS TELLURIDE STRIKES 12

The Telluride Film Festival spread its delicacies and discoveries again this Labor Day weekend and emerged with its reputation intact. After 12 years, it’s still the most eclectic, ardent and rewarding hand-packed orgy of film in America.

It’s also an amazing exercise in faith and/or chutzpah: You buy a Telluride ticket early and you buy blind--no advance word is ever given on the program and the certain rumors that seep out flop more often than they materialize. (Louise Brooks, Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa, none of whom ever arrived, were all sure bets in years past.)

This year, the tributes went to a pioneer and shamefully neglected Mexican director, the striking stylist Emilio Fernandez; to Europe’s compelling, enigmatic Hanna Schygulla, and to a magnificent visual artist, Alexander Trauner, whose nearly 50 years of production designs range from “Children of Paradise” to “The Man Who Would Be King” to “Round About Midnight” for Bertrand Tavernier, currently in production in Paris.

Gathered around these honorees was a brilliantly motley collection of films, their makers and their subjects from all over the globe. You could discover Peter Wang’s deftly disarming cross-cultural hit, “The Great Wall Is a Great Wall,” or meet, on film or on the irregular streets of Telluride, three amazing documentary subjects: string band greats Howard Armstrong and Ted Bogan, stars of the exuberant “Louie Bluie,” and agent/producer/raconteur Paul Kohner, surpassing in person and in every way a documentary on his life and artfulness.

Overall, however, Telluride’s 12th felt faintly like a program with a hole in it: It lacked one towering entry around which every other film would have fallen into its proper perspective. (Orion Pictures reportedly withdrew Kurosawa’s “Ran,” possibly his crowning achievement, at a late date, saving its American debut for the New York Film Festival.)

The Kurosawa or the presence of Italy’s great Taviani brothers with their masterly “Chaoes,” might have provided the ballast that has distinguished some of the truly great past festivals; the years, for example, of Abel Gance or Andrei Tarkovsky. Still, this festival contained its own share of tremendous moments: “Chaos,” based on four stories by Pirandello; Fernandez’s “The Pearl,” a luminous film from the thinnest of John Steinbeck stories, and “The Funeral” by Juzo Itami, which might be called a Japanese film with Czech sensibilities.

In the pressure-cooker intensity of programming like Telluride’s, it’s sometimes possible to see one theme floating to the surface of films separated by style as well as geography.

The rituals and very rhythms of death were explored in at least three of the most interesting works: Lynne Littman’s heroic new documentary “In Her Own Time,” about the end of the life and the investigations of anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff; in the “Requiem” and “Epilog” sections of the Tavianis’ “Chaos,” and in Itami’s “The Funeral.” They also pervade the less-than successful but not uninteresting Australian feature “Bliss” by Ray Lawrence.

It’s as though, after cycles of coming-of-age, alienation and apocalypse films, death is the next appropriate subject (sometimes in dryly hilarious terms).

The second subject that seems to be preoccupying current film makers is what James Thurber used to call the man-woman thing. It is at its most bleak and most brilliant in Margarethe von Trotta’s “Sheer Madness,” a 1983 film that has never played the United States commercially. As performed by Schygulla and Angela Winkler, it is harrowing and hypnotic. (Are there no contemporary German films in which relationships between men and women are not battlefields?)

The explosive/supportive relationship between painter Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera, was an integral part of the fictionalized “Frida” by Paul Leduc, one of the many films from or about Mexico.

All was not warfare, however. There was a playful feeling afoot, too, which could probably be traced directly to this year’s wonderfully jaunty poster of an Alpine and Chaplinesque Bugs Bunny by Chuck Jones (a pioneer Telluride tributee). There were puffs of hilarity in some of the short films, too: “Tom Goes to the Bar” by Dean Parisot, as original and intelligently funny a 10 minutes as you could hope for; in Les Blank’s fine and merciless “Cigarette Blues” (made for the American Cancer Society) or Jane Aaron’s beautiful and delicately amusing “Traveling Light.”

The weather provided unintentional comedy Monday, as the traditional last day’s picnic on the mountaintop was called on account of rain, but not until after a goodly number had already taken the chairlift up. With the lift becalmed, winds whipping the small food tent almost horizontal and lightning ominously close down the valley, it was, in the memories of some drenched picnickers, “Woodstock all over again.”

What dangers does Telluride face in its next dozen years? Not a loss of ideals, apparently. The standards for the tributes remains extremely high. The balance of the esoteric and the commercial also seems to be no problem. (The Hollywood movie this year, “The Journey of Natty Gann,” seemed nicely suited to whole Telluride families.) Overcrowding seems to have been somewhat relieved by the completion this year of a fine new theater, Mason’s Hall Cinema, which has given the festival 150 new seats. Even though this was the most heavily attended year yet, three showings of many of the films gave audiences better flexibility of scheduling.

The worry is that this will become entirely a rich person’s festival or a totally industry-oriented one. It’s already perilously close. The lowest-priced ticket for the Sheridan Opera House, scene of the tribute events, has spiraled to $280. The feeling of the early years, when the whole festival ticket cost $25, of being there in “the gods,” is gone, and with that a certain vitality.

An untoward reserve also has crept in lately. It’s nice that Telluride audiences don’t leap to their feet for every film maker; on the other hand, you might think that, after generous examples of their work, that the presence of Fernandez or Trauner might stir anyone to his or her feet.

The festival has always prided itself on being the best gathering of those who love film. It is no simple matter to reduce a deficit, woo necessary patrons and still keep its founding fervor. But to lose the vitality of the impassioned (and sometimes impoverished) film lover is to lose a very real part of the festival’s character.