A CAUTIOUS START FOR AFI’S FILM FEST

Now that Filmex has officially sputtered to a halt, the good news for the serious movie-going public in Los Angeles is that we will have an international film festival after all: the American Film Institute’s Film Festival Los Angeles, from March 12 through 26.

From a look at the program released last week, it would appear to be a steady, pleasant, cautious beginning entirely in keeping with the AFI itself--including its theme, which salutes the motion picture producer.

There will be an opening-night tribute to Hal Wallis, the first organized here since the producer’s death last October; a seminar moderated by producer Irwin Winkler; a retrospective of producer Arthur Cohn’s films (“Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” et al.); an homage to producer George Pal; an appearance by producer-director Frederick Wiseman, and, one may note, the producer credit leading the way in all of the festival’s film listings.

There also will be a round of free films of exceptional interest at Barnsdall Park; seminars on subjects ranging from “German Filmmaking” to the “Art of Cinematography”; screenings of old films--the restored, 1937, William Wellman-directed version of “A Star Is Born”--and new ones--Ken Russell’s “Gothic,” the Keats/Shelley/Mary Wollstonecraft story--in conjunction with UCLA’s Film Archive; movies from some 37 countries around the world, and a special film program, “Sugar Bear Film Fair” (sponsored by guess-what-cereal company?) that will be distributed to Los Angeles schoolchildren.

In a telephone interview, Ken Wlaschin, the festival’s dryly knowledgeable director who formerly headed the London Film Festival and the last incarnations of Filmex, commented that “ever since the auteur theory, directors have been given authorship of their films. The idea of saluting the producer was to redress the balance on that score. There are many, many producers whose influence has been as great, or greater than the director. They’re not all rich--and they like films as much. The screenwriters have (the Writers Guild) to protest ( auteurism ), but the producers don’t really have a body that speaks on their behalf.”

(One might comment that the 3,000-pound gorilla doesn’t particularly need a voice, it only needs to lean, but certainly there are producers from the past and the immediate present, celebrated and not-so, whose care and creativity have made a life-or-death difference to films, and to celebrate their contribution is absolutely valid.)

If there seem to be no burning, must-see films (and, since “Blue Velvet,” where are those films hiding, anyway?), there is a supply of good-to-interesting international fare that Wlaschin has gathered from Cannes, Montreal, Munich, London, the IFP’s market in New York, the American Film Market in Los Angeles, and from among the foreign-language films submitted for Academy Award consideration this year.

They’ve been organized in a remarkably sensible fashion: one day for each grouping--Asian Film Day, Documentary Day, Latin American Film Day and so on, rather than sown willy-nilly across the 15 days of the event, as was Filmex’s wont. That’s a plus right there for audiences who have an interest in a specific subject.

Press screenings have begun just this week and we’ll know the complete direction of the programming better when they are finished--five weeks from now--but some films have been seen at various far-flung festivals.

On the basis of these, we could unreservedly recommend in advance two Japanese comedies by Juzo Itami, “The Funeral” and “Tanpopo” (they screen March 17); a slyly magnificent Spanish film, “Half of Heaven,” by Manuel Guterrez Aragon, starring the indispensable Angela Molina (March 26), and the minor-key and interesting “Static,” directed by Mark Romanek, with actor/co-writer Keith Gordon and Amanda Plummer, plus the U.S. Festival co-first prize winner “Trouble With Dick” by director/writer/producer Gary Walkow (March 21, as part of Independents’ Day). Laemmle’s Los Feliz will be the festival’s primary theater.

It is director Wlaschin’s aim to “restore to Los Angeles a major international festival, since, of all places, Los Angeles deserves one. The festival is a two-way street: It’s not only a chance to introduce new talents and new ideas to Los Angeles; it’s also a chance for these film makers to develop their careers.”

Certainly the city deserves a film festival that keeps pace with its enormous leaps in the art and theater worlds.