The Telluride Menu: Eclectic, Rewarding : Commentary: Film festival reflected the omni-vision of guest curator Peter Sellars.

For some, the 26th Telluride Film Festival began Friday in the festival’s precious Sheridan Opera House with the tribute to the stately French movie star Catherine Deneuve. Mine began with Chuck Jones’ great cartoon “One Froggy Evening,” one of the most perfect short films of all time, in which the very green Michigan J. Frog leaps from a time capsule to astound a befuddled construction worker with a dancing version of “Hello My Honey.”

The man dreams of wealth and fame until he learns to his grave dismay that the frog will only sing in private. The journey from wild hopes to despair, and then the possibility that it could all happen again, takes but six lovely minutes.

The films this year took Telluride’s packed houses all over the cinematic map. There was “Time Regained,” an elegant--yet funny--constantly moving, turning, dreaming, deepening version of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” in French, by Chilean French director Raul Ruiz. And there was the intentionally hasty, unruly “Mifune,” Danish director Soren Jacobsen’s partly comic movie (named for the late Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune) about some of the most dysfunctional people in Denmark, all gathered on one run-down farm.

Jacobsen delivered his take on the “Dogma 95 Vow of Chastity,” which demands a hand-held camera, location shooting, along with no extra props, music or lighting. He said he took on those restrictions established by fellow Dane Lars Von Trier “for the fun of it,” and in response to a question about doing it again, he said with a laugh, “Are you kidding?”

The festival went to video with Bill Viola’s “The Passing,” a dreamy presentation about his mother’s death, and right afterward showed a devastating $4,000 African film about a father’s death.

The latter film, “Allah Tantou,” was from David Achkar of Guinea, who in the mid-’80s finally learned that his imprisoned father, his country’s first ambassador to the U.N., had been killed in 1971. In 1991, Achkar stitched together “Allah Tantou” from the family’s home movies and shots of the father’s days in prison as imagined by his son--as a way to reawaken the father’s spirit.

Then, just as this somber mood might have taken over, came the 1934 “Nothing More Than a Woman,” a magnificently silly melodrama, in Spanish, produced in Hollywood, directed by Harry Lachman and starring an over-the-top, electrifying, poetry-reciting Russian Jewish star of Argentine theater, Berta Singerman.

A Long Journey by Lawn Mower

One of the most provocative new films of the festival was David Lynch’s “The Straight Story.” Lynch, with screenwriter/editor/co-producer Mary Sweeney, based the film on an actual incident in which an elderly retired farmer from Iowa rode a lawn mower more than 300 miles to see his ailing, estranged brother.

In its way, the terrifying darkness of some of “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart” underlies this film, but here the darkness is implied instead of shown. Viewers were amused to see that “The Straight Story” is also a G-rated Disney picture, that’s sentimental, full of expressions of conventional family values and modest.

But Lynch has always showed a Puritan strain. That’s why he’s so interested in sin. And while some younger viewers wondered out loud if Lynch had softened or sold out, to me it seems that Lynch has found his way past his own shtick. He doesn’t have to turn all his characters into outlaws; he can love them even if they’re merely tortured.

“The Straight Story” prompted many people to wonder about Academy Award possibilities for Richard Farnsworth as the old man.

Saturday evening’s tribute to Lynch ended on the kind of blissfully surreal note that festival veterans almost expect. After he placed the Telluride medallion over Lynch’s head, Werner Herzog revealed how these two unique filmmakers first met: They were introduced by Mel Brooks.

The one constant in the festival, though, was what Lynch mentioned at his tribute--that Telluride “celebrates the art of film instead of the commerce.”

Guest Director Sellars Makes His Mark

Each year, the two permanent directors of the festival, Bill Pence and Tom Luddy, choose a third person to help select films and, in Pence’s words, “to put his or her stamp on the festival.” No one has done it with such panache as this year’s guest director, Peter Sellars. His reputation may come from his work as a theater director, but over this weekend Sellars showed an enormous breadth and depth in cinema, from Hollywood to Asia and even to the silent films of Egypt.

Sellars was everywhere during the festival, giving introductions that were themselves works of art. He made friends with what seemed like half the town and implored them to see “Allah Tantou” and a special sidebar of largely undistributed Asian films.

“Dust in the Wind,” a 1987 film from the rarely screened (in the U.S.) Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien, is an especially affecting picture about young Taiwanese who leave their rural homes for what will be the terrible unfulfilled promise of making a living in Taipei’s garment industry.

Sellars pointed out that most of the things closest to our bodies--clothing and shoes--were made in Asia by people in these circumstances. The intimate connections between human beings all over the world, and the harsh consequences to many outside the U.S. and Europe, was one of Sellars’ themes this weekend, but he didn’t preach. Instead, he guided the festival toward the range of ways different human beings use the moving image.

His choices were extraordinary. He brought to the festival the Bill Viola program, “Allah Tantou” and the Sunday evening tribute to composer Philip Glass. As for himself, he said, “I’m not interested in film; I’m interested in life,” but he didn’t mean it narrowly--”Nothing but a Woman” was also a Sellars selection.

What was especially good? “The Straight Story,” certainly. “Time Regained” is a remarkable cinematic translation of Proust. The Japanese film “Princess Mano-noke,” one of the biggest box-office hits ever in Japan, showed how beautifully animation can render the poetic transformations of mythology.

“Wisconsin Death Trip,” directed by James Marsh for the BBC’s famous Arena group, left people shaken. Marsh based the film on a book by Michael Lesy about the town of Black River Falls, Wis., during the deep economic depression of the 1890s. Lesy used newspaper accounts and photographs by the town’s one photographer that together chronicled a period of unbelievable murder, suicide and madness.

Story after story ends with actual photographs or re-creations of wives dead in the street, children in coffins, and one person after another carted off to the nearest asylum, all related by the cool, even British voice of the narrator (the town’s newspaper editor of the period was British).

At times, though, the picture seems amused or sarcastic, as if we the enlightened in the audience are superior to this sort of behavior. But it also seemed right on the mark, because one’s reaction to the litany of such events often veers and turns, trying to avoid the possibility that the history of Black River Falls is not unlike the present all over our country.

Yet the film’s color shots of present-day life in the town are clearly condescending. Marsh does to Wisconsin’s cheerleaders and civic groups what American filmmakers have been doing to British life for decade--he made it look quaint and vapid.

A Greek Myth Set in the Time of Carnival

Of the films I saw (I hated to miss “East Is East,” “Girl on the Bridge” and “Journey to the Sun” but the festival is also about making choices), the one thoroughly dazzling movie was Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Diegues’ “Orfeu.” It’s the Greek myth moved to the Favellas, the slums, of Rio de Janeiro during the ecstatic time of Carnival.

Frenchman Marcel Camus made “Black Orpheus” in the mid-’50s, and Diegues worked for 30 years on his film, to counter Camus’ nostalgic platitudes about the happy, ever-dancing poor. “Orfeu” takes in the social realities of Brazil, the plague of drugs and police and misery that don’t stop while Carnival grows ever glitzier, with cheery TV coverage and samba contests in the “Sambadrome.” The film gives you the music and the energy of the culture, but not without alloy. So you feel the liberating rhythm and the pain simultaneously, which makes “Orfeu” a complete, magnificent film.

And now this wonderful festival is over. You can’t judge Telluride simply by the percentage of good films. Each year, this festival looks at the movies to see what they’re doing, how they’re doing and what they’ve done before. It’s a time to think about what the movies are and what they could be, and even who we are and who we might be.

And the festival did those things.

But it’s not quite over. In about an hour, when the sun’s gone down and at 8,700 feet you can see the Milky Way, they’re going to fire up the projectors at the outdoor theater for some Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy--and a few more Chuck Jones cartoons.

Sunday night, a student from Alabama named Stephanie saw her first shooting star. Now that’s a film festival!