AFI Film Festival: A True International Dialogue : Cinema: The influence of Godard and Fellini was widespread. By far the biggest revelation was Czechoslovakia’s Juraj Jakubisko.

There’s something about international film festivals that inevitably widens horizons. Walking away from an experience like the recently completed 1991 American Film Institute Los Angeles Film Festival--or AFIFEST--with its schedule of 200 movies in two weeks, you may feel that your cinematic psyche has been permanently changed.

Happily so.

As you move through these movies, pictures and nations merge, psychological datelines keep getting crossed. Hong Kong sunsets melt into Argentine oceans, and birds from Sri Lanka swoop over Parisian flower markets. On bad days, it’s hard to tell the Finnish cowgirl comedy from the Belgian anti-war fable, the Syrian sex farce from the Brazilian private-eye parody.

On good days, questions nag: What are the first names of the Taviani brothers? How many Ks are there in Aki Kaurismaki? (And how come nobody shows his brother’s films?) Your mind flicks on crazily, riffling through 40 countries and 200 films.

I felt swamped back in 1984, when I covered AFIFEST’s forerunner, the last FILMEX. Now, five years later, AFIFEST is something I look to with rich anticipation, high excitement.

In some ways, AFIFEST ’91 highlights were more predictable than in other years. They included new films by two old postwar masters: France’s Jean-Luc Godard and Italy’s Federico Fellini.

Watching Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague” and Fellini’s “The Voice of the Moon,” it was remarkable how many shadows of the young artist remained in the older one. Fellini was still playing carnival tunes in provincial Italian towns, full of clowns, oddballs, lovers and traveling players. Godard was still fixated on cars and quotes from American movies, still showing outsiders on the run, caught in ambiguous, deadly love affairs.

Yet there was a deepening, a mellowing. For both men, the images were richer, more beautiful, the weave of image and language more subtle, the elaboration more complex. “Nouvelle Vague” takes its title from the ‘60s French movement that Godard shared with critic-director comrades Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut--and something about its setting and structure was vaguely reminiscent of the French film they all admired the most: Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game.”

The setting for Godard’s film is a Swiss chateau populated by an amoral crowd of the super-rich and a bevy of oddly philosophical servants. It’s an almost abstract backdrop and, using it, Godard keeps reaching back, almost mournfully, to the past, quoting favorite American films and directors: Howard Hawks, Joseph Mankiewicz, Robert Aldrich, F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise.”

Fellini, a satirical cartoonist in his youth--whose delight in caricature has never left him--reached back almost as obviously as Godard. The provincial setting suggested “I Vitteloni,” the bittersweet moonstruck mood recalled “La Strada” and the town full of grotesques echoed “Amarcord.”

At times, it seems, there’s a never-ending conversation among the world’s filmmakers, a universal, border-crossing dialogue. In “Nouvelle Vague,” Godard cast the bewitching Italian actress, Domiziano Giordano, as a semi-homage to the late Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom she starred in “Nostalghia.” And Tarkovsky’s unique style and imagery was obviously the prime influence on Paul Leduc’s “Latino Bar” from Mexico, and Ken McMullen’s “Partition” and “Zina” from Great Britain (also starring Giordano).

What all these borrowings and allusions reveal is not secret codes to a closed community, but an open one, to which American filmmakers in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s obviously felt they belonged as well: the Woody Allen who quoted Bergman, the Paul Mazursky who quoted Truffaut and Fellini, the action directors who revered Kurosawa. In the 1980s, there was a relative loss, in both American filmmaking and foreign language film distribution, of that international dialogue, and it impoverished films, directors and audiences alike. It’s a measure of AFIFEST’s vitality that it always tries to re-establish the discourse.

There were other reintroductions and delights at AFIFEST 91: Another “old master,” Poland’s Andrzej Wajda, recaptured the starkly beautiful black-and-white imagery of his ‘50’s postwar trilogy, in the poignant Warsaw ghetto drama “Korczak.” There were two new Kaurismakis (one shot in England with Truffaut’s old surrogate/lead, Jean-Pierre Leaud), an old Pedro Almodovar (disappointing), new films by Poland’s Krzysztof Zanussi, Japan’s Masahiro Shinoda, Germany’s Werner Herzog, America’s Blake Edwards, and Portugal’s 81-year-old prodigy, Manoel de Oliveria.

There were discoveries, too: the hypnotic Czech film “Vojtech, called Orphan” (by 24-year-old director Zdenek Tyc); Maria Luisa Benberg’s eerily austere and chaste feminist tragedy “I the Worst of All”; and the lively U.S. independent “Steal America” by Lucy Phillips--who took her stylistic keynotes from both the French and Czech new waves. There were three more young, first-time Americans directors worth noting, all from UCLA: Alexander Payne (“The Passion of Martin”) and the team of Caveh Zahedi and Greg Watkins (“A Little Stiff”).

By far, the biggest revelation this year, was the work of Czechoslovakia’s Juraj Jakubisko. Immensely crowd-pleasing, hugely inventive and sensuously delightful, Jakubisko’s films have been almost invisible here: banned in Czechoslovakia after the Russian invasion, and ignored in America even after he began winning awards throughout Europe.

For Jakubisko, the international dialogue was strongly in operation. His models include Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles, Russia’s Alexander Dovzhenko and Italy’s Fellini. In fact, Fellini’s wife, Guilietta Masina, starred in Jakubisko’s 1985 “Feather Fairy,” and Jakubisko often approaches Fellini’s opulent fantasy, impudence and sensual grace.

AFIFEST had a setback this year: It was forced by a demand for higher rent to vacate its usual base at Century City’s Century Plaza. But it wasn’t necessarily bad to see the movies at longtime foreign film venues like Laemmle’s Music Hall and Monica, Landmark’s Nuart and the AFI Campus, just considerably more difficult to get from place to place. Once you were inside the theaters, of course, getting from place to place--to the ends of the earth, the tallest mountains and most impassable seas, the deepest souls and most exotic cities--proved no problem at all.