The Spirit of Telluride : The annual Colorado film festival has its own quirky attitude and keeps its schedule under wraps, but that’s all part of its charm.

You can fly to Telluride, if you want, but the runway heads right toward the cliff. You can also fly into the bigger, flatter airport in Montrose and take a 90-minute van ride to Telluride. But if you’re going to the Telluride Film Festival, which opens for the 26th time tonight, the ideal way to get there is to drive.

When the yearly festival began in 1974, it was meant to be difficult to reach, and nothing prepares you for the four days of nonstop movies like the curves and rhythms of the narrow mountain roads, the effort (psychic at least) of climbing a couple of major passes and the sense of triumph when you finally reach the box canyon where the San Miguel river begins and some hungry miners started the settlement they soon named Telluride.

Telluride is now a chic--and gorgeous--resort, but Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank in Telluride, and Western historian David Lavendar of Ojai remembers the two-day ride by horse into Telluride from his family’s ranch.

Ever since that first year, Telluride has tried (in movie terms) to hold onto the rugged spirit of the place. In 1978 the festival showed all four hours and 20 minutes--20 minutes longer than the traveling road show--of the restored 1927 “Napoleon” by Abel Gance. And because there was (and is) no theater in Telluride (altitude nearly 9,000 feet) big enough to hold the three-screen triptych at the end, the film played outdoors to an ever-dwindling number of chilled spectators. At another extreme of the cinematic spectrum, John McNaughton’s still-fearsome “Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer” premiered at Telluride.

Telluride is the one major American film festival that’s still committed to showing films you can’t find any place else--silent pictures; little-known films by great directors; new, often buzz-less films from around the world.

Bill Pence, co-founder and co-director of the festival, says that in its first years, a good chunk of the Telluride audience--more than now--was in the film business. Back then there were still small art houses around the country willing to show unknown films (even with subtitles!) and those exhibitors came to Telluride to see some of what was available for the rest of the year.

But the festival never became a market for the corporate side of the film business--like Sundance or the much bigger Toronto Film Festival. Telluride is still a festival devoted primarily to film lovers who are serious enough about movies to fork out $500 of their own money for a ticket and make the arduous trek to a festival that doesn’t even release its schedule until the night before it opens.

This year’s choice of Peter Sellars as the guest festival director is a typical Telluride move. Each year, Pence and his partner, Tom Luddy, choose a third person to help them shape the festival, and Sellars, a man of the performing arts, will guide this year’s festival toward a look at the connection between film and music. He’s responsible for the third-night tribute to composer Philip Glass (“Koyaanisqatsi,” “Mishima,” “The Thin Blue Line,” “The Truman Show” and “Kundun”) and a screening of Tod Browning’s 1931 “Dracula”--a film made without music--with a new score written by Glass. Sellars will also introduce a program featuring William Wyler’s 1929 silent, “The Shakedown,” accompanied by two “dueling” pianists.

The two other festival tributes lead in different directions. The opening-night event goes to the elegant French actress Catherine Deneuve, who in her best work (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “Repulsion,” “Belle de Jour”) undercuts her glamour with betrayal, psychotic breakdown and prostitution. Her two latest films will screen this year--Raul Ruiz’s “Time Regained,” the latest attempt at Proust, and Nicole Garcia’s “Place Vendome.”

On Saturday night, the festival will honor David Lynch. With “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart” and the TV series “Twin Peaks,” Lynch became possibly the most avant-gardish of Hollywood directors, but his career has quieted down. His new picture, “The Straight Story,” stars Richard Farnsworth as a man who drives hundreds of miles on a riding lawn mower to reconcile with his ailing brother, and has a more conventional look, at least at first glance.

Festival director Pence calls “The Straight Story” his personal favorite this year.

“It’s like a John Ford movie,” he said. “On the surface it’s not what we’d expect from David Lynch, but deeper down it is. I put it in a category [as a major festival presentation] with ‘Secrets & Lies’ and ‘Breaking the Waves.’ ”

Typically, when the Telluride schedule comes out, it doesn’t make much sense. In the hours before the festival starts, people gather in twos and threes and fours. They stare at the program booklet and scrunch their foreheads while they try to figure out what to see. Newcomers will soon hear the awful words from Pence that festival veterans try to forget--”You can’t see everything. You have to make choices.”

Films aren’t labeled in themes or categories, and you wonder how the programs will fit together, or if they’ll fit together. The American independent film “I’ll Take You There,” by Adrienne Shelly, with Ally Sheedy, may have nothing at all to do with “East Is East,” an English film about a Pakistani immigrant living in England with an English wife. And neither of them seems to connect to another English film, “Wisconsin Death Trip,” by James Marsh, based on a small American Midwestern town’s late 19th century history of madness, death and cruelty.

But Telluride is even more intense than other film festivals. Whether it’s the spectacular canyon walls that enclose the town, the continuous screenings and movie talk, or the altitude, after a day or so, the movies start to connect and to ricochet off one another. It’s hard to tell, in advance, exactly how that will occur, but it does.

Some patterns, of course, appear beforehand. A number of films come from the East this year. Besides “East Is East,” there’s Iranian director Bahram Bayzai’s “Travellers,” a Sufi-like story set between a funeral and a wedding, and Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai’s “Kadosh,” described as both critical of and sympathetic to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox.

The festival also has a triad of nearly unknown films (in the U.S.) by three major Asian directors: Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1987 “Dust in the Wind,” South Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-Taek’s 1994 “The Taebeck Mountains” and the 1981 film “Bona,” by the late Filipino director Lino Brocka.

Along with these films are several East-West combinations. “Journey to the Sun,” directed by the Turkish Yesim Ustaoglu, is a Turkish-Dutch co-production. Georgian director Otar Iosseliani will present his latest film, a French/Swiss film called “Farewell, Home Sweet Home.”

Some things are traditional at Telluride. Nearly every film Werner Herzog has made has had its American premiere here, and this year it’s “My Best Friend,” an account of Herzog’s relationship with the late actor Klaus Kinski, who at his own Telluride tribute in 1979 convinced most people that he was one of the creepiest human beings on Earth. Brazilian director Carlos Diegues, a tributee at the eighth festival, will present “Orfeu,” 30 years in the making.

Pence has said that if the full eight hours of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” were ever to be found, “it would be in Jim Card’s backyard.” In 1973, Card, the retired director of the Eastman House archive in Rochester, N.Y., drove to Telluride with Pence to visit the precious Sheridan Opera House. His reaction: “You have to do a film festival here.”

The lost six hours of “Greed” have not turned up anywhere, but preservationist Rick Schmidlin and film historian Richard Koszarski have used recently discovered stills and digital animation to add about 45 minutes to the existing print, which at Telluride will run 250 minutes and--one hopes--add to the aura of the legendary movie. What other festival would show it?

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Howie Movshovitz is film critic for Colorado Public Radio and serves as the director of FilmCenter Denver at the University of Colorado at Denver.