Pictures at an Exhibition

By JAY COCKS

The New York Film Festival, which opened its twelfth annual installment at Manhattan's Lincoln Center last week, could use a friendly, or at least a forbearing hand. Each year, a selection committee headed by Festival Director Richard Roud (who also functions as a critic for scholarly film magazines like Sight and Sound) picks a couple of dozen movies for showing, and promptly finds itself attacked on one of two fronts.

When many of the chosen films are guaranteed swift commercial release, the festival is accused of being a kind of swank showcase, the plaything of movie distributors. At other times--this year's festival is an example--there are no ambitious films from Hollywood, few major works from the Continental masters. So the festival is blamed for being stodgy, esoteric and elitist.

Both complaints are correct, of course, and there is probably nothing to be done about it. Still, the main function of a film festival is to present material that might not otherwise be seen, and most of the films during the festival's first week do not have distributors in this country. For various reasons, it is not hard to see why.

STAVISKY, Alain Resnais's first feature in five years, is a sort of symbolic biography of the French swindler (nicely played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) whose exposure almost brought down the Third Republic in 1934. Resnais has had the movie photographed like a posh '30s illustration, a style made fashionable by films as varied as The Conformist and Chinatown. But Resnais undercuts all his images of antique chic (among which may be counted Anny Duperey as Stavisky's wife) with symbols of death: orchids, cemeteries, the funeral pyramid in the Pare Monceau. Resnais and his screenwriter, Jorge Semprun (Z), present their Stavisky as a doom-haunted manic-depressive and try to groom him into a symbol for all of prewar France. There is a subplot involving Trotsky, who had sought asylum in France during that time, and Resnais obviously hoped to suggest that the swindler and the Communist here represent in effect the two political alternatives between which the country had to choose. This notion remains unwieldy as a device and unresolved as an idea. Resnais does not fracture his time structure nearly so much as in Last Year at Marienbad or Muriel. Stavisky achieves a kind of glacial elegance. If it is not among the director's very best, it is at least a welcome return to form.

LANCELOT OF THE LAKE is the work of Robert Bresson, a great and trying film maker. Just as one would expect from the creator of Pickpocket and The Trial of Joan of Arc, there are scenes and images here of a terrible, severe beauty: knights dying in battle or competing in joust, a mailed hand clutching the handle of a weapon, a horse's eye going wide in terror. These visions occur, however, not in an epic adventure, but as part of a moral speculation in miniature. Bresson's ascetic attentions converge on the fateful romance of Lancelot (Luc Simon) and Queen Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas) and extend beyond it to the end of the courtly tradition, as did the original Arthurian legends. What is missing is passion, a quality essential to such a subject. Without it, for all its frosty beauty, Lancelot of the Lake looks like a museum diorama of the Middle Ages.

ROOTS is a catchall title that contains some of the best film in the festival. It is four short subjects, all under an hour in length, linked by a common concern: the director's attempt to delineate ethnic identity. William Greaves' (The Fighters) From These Roots, a montage of still photos of Harlem in the 1920s with a stentorian narration by Actor Brock Peters, is the most traditional of the group. It struggles to compress a decade of black his tory into 30 minutes, and still man ages to repeat itself. Film Editor Mirra Banks' Yudie is a loving cameo of her Jewish aunt, observant and a little mel ancholy. An Old-Fashioned Woman offers a mellow and admiring portrait of Documentary Director Martha Coolidge's Grandmother, a redoubtable 86-year-old Yankee. She not only reminisces and airs her views on birth control and abortion (she is for both), but considers the approach of her own death with a gentle dignity. Coolidge inserts herself directly into her own film, as interrogator and fond grand child and, most tellingly, as explorer, searching for a way back into her own past. This same personal approach is carried even further in the fourth of the quartet by Martin Scorsese's (Mean Streets) singular Italianamerican, which is a portrait of Scorsese's parents as well as a rough sketch for part of the director's autobiography. Scorsese portrays his parents not only through their own reminiscences about growing up and marrying on New York's Lower East Side but through their relationships with him and with each other, as they talk about a recent trip to Italy, argue or bicker or tease. Scorsese even defies that eternal cliche of Italian-American life by showing his mother cooking meat balls and tomato sauce. At film's end, in gleeful tribute, he includes the recipe in the credits. Italianamerican has a kind of impulsive immediacy and is rich in the sort of raucous humor that people can create only when they are not conscious of being overheard.

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