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Starshine in Italy. Pajama Party up North.
On a clear day in Venice in the first years of the 17th century, Galileo decided he could see forever and perfected the modem telescope. But if he had had his instrument trained on the Lido di Venezia this year he would have been doubly agog (and very very old): first at the number of VIPs and products gathered together on one island, then at the fury of cordons and caveats used to protect them.
It was a challenge simply to keep up with the famous names present. Try to say in one breath, "Bernardo Bertolucci, Jack Clayton, Peter Handke, Leon Hirszman, Marta Meszaros, Nagisa Oshima, Gleb Panfilov, Bob Rafelson, Ousmane Sembene, Mrinal Sen, Alain Tanner, Agnes Varda." And that was just the jury.
Those bringing or sending their films included Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Alexander Kluge, George Cukor, Kon Ichikawa, Robert Altman, and Constantin Costa-Gavras. Overwhelmed by the largesse, festivalgoers began to believe that anything that other Mediterranean festival cannes do, Venice can now do equally well. Even to making the movies run on time, and the directors, and the special events and the tributes. A tough task which new fest chief Gian Luigi Rondi took in his stride.
And never tougher than with the flexiform shape of cinema today. The new trend toward discovering forgotten footage has helped distend fests beyond recognition. In Venice we had the "complete" A Star Is Born (midnight movie-addicts mainlining with Norman Maine); the complete Fanny and Alexander (half-again as long as the 195-minute version that played theatrically in Europe and the U.S.); a pretty-near René Clair retrospective; and a trove of neverbefore-seen silent comedy footage in Kevin Brownlow's latest feat of spadework, Unknown Chaplin.
Past-delving is big in modern cinema in other ways. At Venice there was a rash of films in which present-day truthseekers go back in search of Ie temps perdu: digging up Nazi history in Wadja's A Love In Germany and Thomas Koerfer's Glut, reviving the luxury liner epoch in Fellini's E La Nave Va (And the Ship Sails On), remembering Rimbaud in Daryush Mehrjui's Voyage Au Pays de Rimbaud, running a metaphysical shuttle-service between Past and Present in Alain...