To Veteran festivaliers, a socially conscious film festival may sound like a contradiction in terms. But for Taos Talking Picture Festival executive director Josh Bryant, like Marshall McLuhan before him, the medium is the message.
"Media has long since stopped reflecting society and now actively shapes it," says the lank, bearded former actor. "To say 'It's just entertainment' is almost criminal. The electronic media — movies, TV, now the internet — is more than just entertainment. It's us."
The attraction of Bryant's message is evident in the response to the festival he helped to found in this artist's enclave high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. In only its second year, the Taos Talking Picture festival witnessed a 300% in attendance over its 1995 debut. Over four days (18-21 April), festival boxoffices recorded sales of 9000 tickets to 108 screenings and events, reporting sellout audiences for virtually every program.
Decidated to late western character actor Ben Johnson, this year's Taos Talking Picture Festival opened with Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott's Sundance-prized Big Night and closed with Jim Jarmusch's long overdue revisionist western Dead Man. Programmer Ron Henderson sought to celebrate what he called "the defining cinematic voice of the 1990s -- that of the independent filmmaker. While the mega-budget studio productions dominate our theater screens, Hollywood formula fare trivializes our cultural values and the once potent indigenousd international cinema has been diminished by political and economic revolutions."
Feature films receiving their local premieres included the powerful domestic drama Caught, the festival's most talked-about entry, marking the ninth collaboration between festival Filmmakers' Award winners director Robert Young and actor Edward James Olmos; Anthony Hopkins' directorial debut August, a Welsh reworking of Uncle Vanya; Hal Salwen's relationship comedy Denise Calls Up; Susan Streitfeld's feminist manifesto Female Perversions, starring Tilda Swinton, and shoestring filmmaker DW Harper's Delicate Art of the Rifle, a black comedy based on one of the worst mass murders in American history.
Among documentaries screened were the advertised world premiere of Ollie's Army, recounting the recent congressional race of former Iram-contra collaborator Oliver North; George Ungar's Champagne Safari, the bizarre story of French millionaire and Nazi sympathizer Charle Bedaux; Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg; Craig Baldwin's Sonic Outlaws, chronicling U2's copyright infingement lawsuit against san francisco band Negativeland, and Paradise Lost, a story of real life "satanic cult" murders in Arkansas from Brothers Keeper filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinkofsky.
A media literacy forum running concurrently with the festival addressed such issues as "The Power of the Pusestrings: The Limiting Freedoms of the Dollar," "Intellectual Property Rights in the Age of Appropriation," and "Watching TV Watching Us." A sidebar event at nearby Taos Pueblo heralded the work of Native American filmmakers, including festival tributee Sandy Osawa, a member of the Makah Indian Nation in Washington State, who brought her latest effort, Pepper's Powwow, a portrait of the late Native American jazz saxophonist Jim Pepper.
Attending filmmakers appeared visibly surprised by the festival's strong, almost messianic social slant. "This place is like Sundance used to be five years ago," enthused Gary Walkow. "People are interested in something substantive." Walkow's distrurbing adaptation of Dostoevski's Notes From Undergound topped both Rappaport's Journals and Bruce Sweeney's Live Bait for the festival's ususual Innovation Award: five acres of land on the spectacular Rio Grande River gorge. Sponsored by independent filmmaker Jeff Jackson's Taos Land & Film Company, the award is intended to promote the growth a regional filmmaking collective composed of festival prizewinners.
For festival director Bryant, the evolution of a local film enclave is a natural outgrowth of Taos' reputation as a progressive, even controversial art colony once frequented by such writers and artists as DH Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe and now home to Navajo artist RC Gorman, reputed to be America's richest (and certainly most marketed) painter, who hosted festival attendees at a lavish private party attended by state governor Gary Johnson. "We don't want to be preachy," Bryant insists. "We just want people to be more informed consumers and more responsible producers. Electronic media could be as important as the wheel or fire."
Unlike other festival directors, Bryant is willing to put his money where his mouth is. He financed the festival's inaugural year himself ("We just went ahead and did it and figured we'd find out how to pay for it later"), winning support from leading US lender Norwest for this year's event, with local galleries chipping in for individual programs. Despite comparisons to the heydey of Sundance, Bryant is keeping ambitions for future Taos festivals small. "This is a very fragile community we serve. If we have to have a model, let it be Telluride. They've kept it contained."
There are still the inevitable growing pains. "This is a very fragile community culturally," Bryant observed of Taos, whose mixed Anglo, Hispanic and Native American communities remain in large part mutually exclusive. Calls for better integration within the festival itself were frequently voiced by Native American filmmakers, some of whom bristled at the sidebar pueblo venue. "Next year I'd like to be involved in the planning from the ground up," says house manager Rosy Lennartsson, who nevertheless observes that "Anytime you showcase native media that can sensitize people, it's a powerful thing."
Noting that the US is "the only industrialized country in the world without a media literacy program," Bryant quotes media critic Neil Postman's observation that "Americans are not the most informed people on earth -- they're the most entertained." In establishing the Taos Talking Picture Festival, Bryant hopes to return the focus of the industry on its core commodity: storytelling. "The stories that we tell each other are how we know how to behave in the world." Abdication of that responsibility has its downside, concurs Olmos:. "Our films have been pretty penetrating. They've done a pretty good job of introducing us to the most sophisticated violence ever experienced by humankind."
Bryant is quick to insist he bears the media no grudge. "We should look at the technological revolution not as a failure, but an opportunity," he observes. "When the printing press was invented, people thought it was the work of the devil -- but now, nobody would think of going back to the days of the printing press." Nevertheless, Bryant regards the current fragmentation of information in the mass media, exemplified by the discontiuous nature of modern news broadcasts, as a troubling phenomenon. "It erodes the ability to make moral choices over time," he says.
Guests agreed that the media must shoulder some responsibility for the decline in quality feature films and television programming. "What about the social value of what we do?" asked director Young, bristling at newsmagazine insistence on broadcasting a weekly boxoffice top ten. "The only thing that matters is the bottom line. That's true of everything in modern life." Echoed Olmos, "the only thing the industry holds up to us is did (your movie) make dollars. They could give a shit if it makes sense. I can't make Stand and Deliver 2, but the industry can make Friday the 13th, Part 39."
Viewers, too, must shoulder some responsibility. "I don't blame the industry as much as the audience," Olmos added. "The responsibility lies on society to participate." Mindful of the 60's catch phrase "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, Bryant agreed that a radical alteration in American viewing patters would not come about easily. "After the sixties everybody became mercenary. It was un-hip to be righteous," he laments. "You have to make it hip to have integrity."
KIRK ELLIS
© 1996 - MOVING PICTURES INTERNATIONAL
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