TELLURIDE FESTIVAL FINDS TIME FOR RENEWAL

Glasnost seemed to have come to the Telluride Film Festival with a vengeance Labor Day weekend. The openness was demonstrated not only in the unchaperoned presence of Georgian director Tenghiz Abuladze and his landmark film “Repentence,” which in so many images equates Stalinism with repression, but in the festival’s own efforts to deal with its seeping bad rep--mutterings underground and observations in print that the warmth that had marked Telluride’s earlier years had eroded; that it had become “smug, self-congratulatory, elitist.”

Perhaps in a deliberate effort to prove its critics wrong, what emerged was vintage Telluride--programming with a warm heart and a cutting edge.

Festival co-director Bill Pence’s opening remarks had a mollifying ring to them. They were partly the usual chalk-talk about finances, ticket lines and the specialness of the place itself, and partly a moving description of the two men in whose memory this 14th festival was dedicated: the celebrated Andrei Tarkovsky, who received “his first tribute anywhere here in 1983,” and young Malcolm Goldie, unknown except in Telluride, the tireless and beloved Opera House manager who died of AIDS in April. These two, whose life’s direction was changed--in Pence’s view--by their time here, symbolized the opposite poles of Telluride.

Pence’s speech was affecting and disarming; it also carried the tone of a director not unaware of certain internal problems. What no one could have guessed was that these remarks prefaced one of the most challenging and better-run festivals in recent memory. It may have gotten off to a late and shaky start after one of those enveloping power blackouts for which southwestern Colorado is famous, but when it ended late Monday, with a sweating, pumping Chuck Berry onscreen in the barn-burning documentary “Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll,” the 14th festival had become one for the memory banks. When it was good, it was very very good, and when it was bad, it was unforgettable.

What are the ingredients for such a festival? First you need one world-class artist, virtually unknown in America, imported for a magical unveiling: Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Larissa Shepitko, Abel Gance. For 1987, take Tenghiz Abuladze of the U.S.S.R., but most specifically a Georgian, and as the program notes quote: “It is nearly impossible for a Georgian to make an ordinary movie,” a notion richly reinforced by Abuladze’s breathtaking work on view here.

After Cannes, of course, he is hardly a secret and “Repentence” is soon to be at other major world festivals. The particular Telluride spin on the ball is to show the two films which precede his intentional trilogy on the subject of repression, as well; the black and white “Molba” from 1968 and the searing colors of “The Magic Tree” from 1977. And of course, there was the courtly Abuladze himself, utterly without an official companion, answering gravely (through his interpreter, San Francisco-based journalist-writer Olga Carlisle) every question posed to him, watching other films, poking intently into Telluride’s hardware store.

Next, one needs a great name from American cinema, preferably one insufficiently honored in the past: Richard Widmark, art director Ben Carre, Henry Hathaway. This year’s great notion was to put the meticulous craft and pungently ironic personality of Don Siegel in the spotlight, in one of the most rewarding tributes in years.

Finally, there needs to be a buzz-film: that utter surprise which fires every imagination: “My Dinner With Andre,” “Testament,” “Koyaanisqatsi.” This year it was Louis Malle’s mature and piercing “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” based on “the most tragic memory” of Malle’s wartime childhood, the “Lacome, Lucien” era, perceived with perfect clarity, understanding and suppleness.

Add to these such discoveries as Barbet Schroeder’s “Barfly,” from a script by Charles Bukowski, unexpectedly funny, ribaldly alive and played (by Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway) to a fare-thee-well; Souleymane Cisse’s gorgeous and haunting ritual story from Black Africa; “Brightness,” which understandably won this year’s Jury Prize at Cannes, or the richness of a morning spent as director/author/critic Lindsay Anderson and Harry Carey Jr. spun a web of personal reminisence about John Ford, and you have some notion of this year’s more powerful moments. A real coup came in the presence of the elusive Chris Marker, as his experimental “La Jette” and “Sans Soleil” were shown.

At the other end of the spectrum was the deliberate baaaadness of John Waters, whose dry wit, pencil-moustache and stand-up introduction to the great old days of movie hucksterism was tons o’ fun. And there was the inadvertent awfulness of Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Shy People,” starring Jill Clayburgh and Barbara Hershey. A cross-cultural odyssey, the film has taut Cosmo writer (Clayburgh) paying a surprise visit to her kinfolk on the bayou and ends up a movie collectable for all the wrong reasons.

This raised the question how Hershey’s plucky performance had triumphed over Faye Dunaway’s delicate and daring one in “Barfly” at Cannes.

But Telluride also had its supply of questionable decisions, the most glaring of which was the choice of Stephen Frears (“My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Prick Up Your Ears”) as its third special tributee. Frears is an intersting director but, at this stage of his career, a tribute seems faintly premature. And his newest film, with “Laundrette’s” writer Hanif Kureishi, “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” which previewed here, does not seem a notable stretch for either writer or director.

The choice was made to seem especially thin by the presence of Frears’ countryman, the veteran Anderson (“If,” “O, Lucky Man”), here with his newest film “The Whales of August,” with its rapturous performance by Lillian Gish. If ever a vivid and iconoclastic body of work seemed to merit tribute, it is Anderson’s, a sentiment heard more than once around town.

There is a certain sadness, too, to the news that, except for an occasional special program, William Everson, one of the programming troika for more than a decade, will be leaving. Partly because, as he expressed it, most of the special people he has wanted to bring have now been here “and the rest aren’t worth bringing,” and partly because Everson feels out of step with certain Telluride programming trends--with the “hot ticket” theory which has been growing in recent years.

One might wonder, also, if Everson wasn’t tired of seeing his own presentations invariably stashed off in the Community Center, a Quonset hut by any other name, with the festival’s least forgiving chairs. (It has also come to be the documentary film ghetto--and three-hour films on those chairs carry a sense memory all their own.)

Telluride still needs to address itself to a few worrying points: the need to differentiate between trendiness and the true sense of discovery for which they were best known; the documentary--when it isn’t a combo like Chuck Berry by Taylor Hackford--needs more careful programming and is still pretty shabbily housed.

That bugaboo, endless lines, seems far more crisply handled, and the new Abel Gance free theater down at the end of town had superb projection the night I went. As for tickets, some festival-goers who came, as the flier suggested, to pick up tickets willy nilly, found few to be had; other late-comers said they’d had no problems at all.

But most importantly, Telluride seems to have stopped just short of becoming the Festival You’d Love to Hate, and has quite consciously reevaluated itself. You could see on the faces of first-timers a flush of wonderment and pleasure that felt strangely warming and familiar. And there still isn’t time--or space--for everything good there was to be seen.