Telluried Journal 2026
#53
“Art is the most advanced operating system for explaining human consciousness.”
Roberta Smith in House of Criticism.
Rose, by Director Marcus Schlieizer, was the first film I saw this year at TFF. Sandra Hüller plays Rose, who does not divulge her name until late in the film because she tries to live her life as a man in a small village in Germany in the 17th century. Like Arnaud in the Return of Martin Guerre, she assumes the identity of another man, here a fallen comrade. Having taken possession of the farm with his papers and then finding acceptance in the village by shooting a bear that was threatening the sheep, she revives the neglected farm. However, her success brings her the offer of a wife. One of the outstanding moments in the film occurs after her young wife discovers she is a woman: they discuss Rose’s leaving the farm she has built up and Rose tells Susanna that if she leaves, Suzanna will just be subject to a husband who will be her master.
The word “master” is used again and again, as is the idea that in living as a man, Rose has freedoms she would not otherwise have had in the 17th century. Susanna accepts Rose’s offer—she has her own reasons, as she is pregnant–and the two women form a sort of partnership and in that they find freedom for a while. Then the village turns against Rose and Susanna, and they are ultimately tried and severely punished for their subversion of social norms. Hüller stares into the lens of the camera, her face distorted by a scar, roughened by war and farming. She is full of power and strength, although she is carrying the burden of a huge secret. After she is caught, Rose tells her prosecutors: “I did what I could,” in another stark full frontal close–up that sears her countenance into our minds.
I think this may be the most or one of the most powerful films I have ever seen regarding what we used to call (when we were woke) the social construction of gender. Hüller said the film made her think about “ what it means to perform a gender, which makes the film very modern and a film for today.” “I wasn’t aware,” she went on, “of how difficult it was to perform a male life—maybe even for a man.” The village leaders literally determine who can act like a man or a woman and their power is carried out with appalling violence. It might be worth mentioning that the village adhered to a strong patriarchal protestant sect.
The sound design was subtle, mysterious and melancholy with a voice-over lending a sense of intimacy with a reflective tone. These elements combined with black and white photography to create a haunting sense of place and time. The film “was like a long poem” Hüller told France 24 interviewer Eve Jackson.
I mentioned that Schlieizer’s film brought to mind another film regarding outsiders in an agricultural community, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982). It stars a young Gérard Depardieu and takes place in France in the 16th century. When an imposter returns from the Hundred Years’ War, with knowledge of the village and farm, his wife may or may not know that he is not Martin Guerre. In other words, she makes a choice. Like Rose, Arnaud is unmasked and tried, but our sympathy lies with him completely, rather than the actual Martin Guerre who does eventually show up. Although the man whose identity and land Rose adopted was killed, and the key difference has to do with gender (a woman wearing pants), there are deep resonances between the films.
Martin Guerre the film was based on a true, albeit folkloric story; it was not written by historian Natalie Zemon Davis, but she did write a book of that name. She also wrote a key essay entitled “Women on Top” exploring the active social and economic roles of women in the 16th century when they had much more agency than one might think. Martin Guerre’s wife made the choice of the kind hearted and industrious outsider/imposter. Rose, another imposter/outsider, was determined, capable and hardy; she turned an abandoned farm into a prosperous enterprise. Is it too woke to ask if there is not great goodness within the outsider?
In another notable performance, Sandra Hüller plays the role of the dutiful daughter who escorts her father, famed German writer Thomas Mann back to Germany in 1949, after years of exile in California due to his protests against Hitler. Annette Insdorf referred to Pawel Pawlikowsky’s film, Fatherland, as the third in a trilogy of films regarding postwar WWII Europe: Ida (2013), Cold War (2018) and now Fatherland traverse the ruins, the complex destabilized aftermath of WWII both in Poland and here, Germany. Pawlikowsky studied German literature at Oxford, so the subject matter and wealth of allusions to people such as writers Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig (who, like Mann’s son, committed suicide, although there seems to be some disagreement regarding Klaus Mann) underlies the film.
It’s hard to say whether it was the director’s study of literature or something more that enabled him to make a film that feels like chamber music–possibly Beethoven’s somber string quartets–but it does. Each element of film—sound, script, camera, editing – work together with precision and grace: this formalism and restraint produce the emotional tenor of the film. The diegetic music in Fatherland moves from classical to post-war East German popular songs and ends with father and daughter listening to a man in an abandoned building play a piece on an organ by Bach.
I found myself noting the compositions and rhythm of the shots: close-ups alternated with shots where the action took place in the middle of a crowd, a variety of diagonals alternated with symmetrical compositions. Pawlikowsky’s cinematographer, Lukasz Zal worked with Jonathon Glazer on Zone of Interest (2023) as well as on Pawlikowski’s other films.
Erika Mann attends to her father’s every need, acts as public relations assistant, all the while she is grieving for the death of her brother Klaus Mann, also a writer who was critical of the fascists, but not very welcome in the U.S because he was a gay communist.
The Noble Prize-winning Thomas Mann, forced into exile in 1933 (first to Switzerland, then to L.A. in 1939), makes a return visit to a Germany still in ruins in post-War 1949. Erika ushers her father through cocktail parties, public addresses and meetings. The restraint shown by Hüller’s character and the thoughtful but terse Mann himself shows their feelings for the attempt by officials of the GDR (German Democratic Republic or Communist East Germany) to lure him back and lend them legitimacy.
There are many superb quotations in the film. One of my favorites is Oscar Wilde’s quote about Utopia: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” I took the director’s inclusion of this thought as an expression of the filmmaker’s ambivalence regarding the GDR, which is generally regarded as a failure and certainly lost its way, but began with idealistic hope for socialism.
Early on in the return visit, when he is still in West Germany, he is asked about his political preference, which is reduced to Stalin versus Mickey Mouse. The comment is straight out of Adorno, the philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who felt that there was no chance of becoming free when we are programmed by both the workplace and the entertainment industry to consume. (The Frankfurt School was a group of scholars and intellectuals known for the study of power relations in society, the foundation of critical theory.)
Casting all this aside, the Mann family was set adrift by the war, like so many other artists, filmmakers and writers, so the meaning of exile and home and in the German sense Heimat, (roughly where one truly belongs in terms of identity) is a central theme of the film. And Fatherland’s portrayal of a loving, resigned, protective relationship between a daughter and a problematic father is the heart of the film. Mann tells his daughter, “I don’t believe in anything anymore…it was always you and me against the world.”
https://www.wilde-online.info/the-soul-of-man-under-socialism-page11.html
For anyone not familiar with Thomas Mann who might not want to slog through his long novels, Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain (although I have friend who rereads it every so often) they might have a look at the film based on a Mann novella, Death in Venice (1971) directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Dirk Bogard. This actor, popular in the ‘70s made a celluloid (well, digital) appearance at Telluride in Joseph Losey’s (script by Harold Pinter) The Servant (1973) chosen by guest director, actress, Rebecca Hall. I wasn’t able to attend but I have seen it and recommend it very highly.
Moving from Germany and the 20th century to Russia in the present day, Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev weaves a script based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 La Femme Infidel, about the husband of an adulterous wife with the older story of King Minos and his wife Pasiphae of Crete who spawned the monster, hidden in a labyrinth, that devoured young men. While Zvyagintsev stays close to the Chabrol script, his allusions to the story of the Minotaur are loose, but the insatiable Minotaur is clearly the war with Ukraine. The portrait of the amoral narcissistic businessman who finds a corrupt and deceitful way to supply men to feed the monster, his wife and his wealthy and equally appetitive and empty friends and their luxurious digs, is brilliant and scathing. The film has been called noir, but I have trouble with that; these people live in a bleak tainted daylight, not shadows. There is no moral ambiguity; they are just completely ruthless.
The strength of Zvyagintsev’s critique of the Russian oligarchy and the war has sent him into exile in Paris. Those of us who grew up during the cold war were showered with frightening warnings regarding the evils of communism. The one I remember most vividly was that children could not have their own toys. And then there was that stuff about dominos falling which launched a war. The series of betrayals which has led to the society depicted in Minotaur does ask the classic noir question: “ what are men capable of?”
For reasons that are unclear, but could be the temper of the times, I have been asking questions about the nature of a humanistic society. A humanistic society values human life, the autonomy and dignity of the individual, over any abstraction or material goods. Democracy, of course, is humanistic, because it places value on the human ability to govern the community rather than seeking some divine providence or direction. I would venture to propose that neoliberalism, which is shifting into something else now, puts the value of the market over the value of the individual in society and that our tech gods care little for our miserable lives.
But film and art are my subject. Last night of the Festival I saw Mile Leigh’s eminently humanistic film Tender Loving Care. Leigh, whose process is improvisatory, working with a tight ensemble of actors, began the film with a close-up and a gentle argument between a social worker and a homeless man who was being turned out of a hospital. She was probably going to find some housing for him, but he did not want to cooperate and left on his own. The film then turns to the life of two women social workers, follows their interactions, their struggle with the frustrations of trying to help forlorn and very troubled people. We are given vignettes of the people they help, like an old lady whose walkway was overwhelmed by junk, another woman whose kitchen was overwhelmed by a horrible mess, both of whom argued futilely with the social workers. The central drama then moved to one of the girl’s family—her mother and father–kind and supportive and happy. The father articulates what might be Leigh’s point of view, or the actor’s when he deplores the deterioration of Britain’s public services, which demise he located in the reign of the ruthlessly neoliberal Margret Thatcher.
There is more, but it’s the manner in which Leigh keeps the camera on his ensemble which allows or asks you to accept them in all their humanity: their flaws, their beauty (and no one is what the movies usually call beautiful), their sorrows, their ability to love, that is the subject of this film. Like the work of the Italian and later European Renaissance and into the time of Courbet whose observation of the human countenance surveyed the scope of emotion from nobility to abjection, Leigh’s film holds a mirror up to nature. Tender Loving Care’s final shot, giving the film an elegant and meaningful coherence, fills the screen like a Rembrandt portrait, and not only because Rembrandt was able to portray the dignity and pathos of age. Unlike Rembrandt’s portraits, the shot is not in half-light or chiaroscuro, but is fully lit, held for us to contemplate.
Absent from the action in Elsinor, but lurking unfortunately in our memory of the time, Margret Thatcher, like her friend Ronald Reagan, did little in response to the AIDS epidemic. There is a scene in which Ian Charleson, a prominent British actor who dies of AIDS, played by Andrew Scott, argues with Filmmaker Derek Jarman ( David Dawson) about whether or not he should go public with his AIDS diagnosis. “They will know about it when I am dead,” Charleson declares.
Jarman was a prominent activist. His extravagant and beautiful Caravaggio (1986), launched Tilda Swinton. Other films included Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second, a queer Wittgenstein bio-pic and Blue (1994). This exchange is important because one of the themes in Hamlet is the failure of the older generation with respect to the young. Ian Charleson, whose career had flagged since starring in Chariots of Fire, is offered the role of Hamlet at the National Theater when Daniel Day-Lewis walks off the stage and does not return. The castle of Elsinore is the setting for the play: when Charleston comes to his first rehearsal, the director says: “Welcome to Elsinore.”
The film follows the actor’s struggle to rehearse and perform the emotionally and physically arduous role while he is very sick with AIDS. Scott has played Hamlet on the stage, and possibly because he is gay, brings an extraordinary depth of feeling to the role of Ian Charleson. I was riveted by his performance, so intimate and fraught and far from the cool evil Moriarty he played in the BBC Sherlock. I may have said this last year, but I studied the play in graduate school and taught and saw it a number of times, so I have an insight into both Charleson’s and Scott’s desire to embody this darkly fated prince. The fragments of the main soliloquies made me want to hear and see more. With the help of his doctor who prolonged his and other patients’ lives during the epidemic, played ably by Olivia Coleman in the film, Charleson was able to perform the play 24 times; he died 6 weeks after it closed.
Despite the wrenching subject matter, the progress of noble Hamlet toward his death, overlapping with the tragedy of Charleson’s (and many others’) fate in the epidemic, the film was as smooth and glossy as a teacup. The British are so good at this sort of thing. Elsinore premiered at TFF.
“I lived in the shadow of it,” Scott said, “and the insidious nature of the prejudice against people, and the opportunity, perhaps, that something that I’ve related to, of being in the movies if you were a gay person, there was shame. I couldn’t say that was particularly spoken about, but there was something underneath. There weren’t many examples of people in the industry that were allowed to be there.” (Indywire interview)
The story in Gentle Monster is not just a pretext for the portrayal by Léa Seydoux of the agony and anguish of separation from a beloved spouse but her emotions are at the center of the film. Her character is, by turns, shocked, in denial, and finally distraught as she discovers her husband’s participation in child pornography. She has a son whom she must protect from this man, his father, who she thought she knew, and for whom she has lost all trust.
The story, here shifted and fictionalized, originates in director Marie Kreutzer’s 2022 film Corsage about Empress Elizabeth of Austria. An actor in Kreutzer’s film, Florian Teichtmeister was charged with possession of child pornography and a flurry of controversy ensued. In Gentle Monster the police come to the house to seize the husband’s computer. The husband, Phillip (Lawrence Rupp), seems helpless and confused, as well as deceitful as he tries to deny his involvement in pedophilia. The ending of the film is beautifully done, focusing on an object which carries all the sadness, sense of loss and ambivalence of the wife, mother and the son. Catherine Deneuve makes an appearance as Lucy’s mother—she looks great. Seydoux as in Abdeliatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), Mia Hansen-Love’s Un beau matin (2022) delivers another complex, sensitive, and stirring performance. Close-ups bring us into the character’s inner life and we share their state of mind and torments. Elsinore, and the Last Living Pick Pocket in New York with John Turturro, likewise turn on this eminently cinematic sense of intimacy and identification.
These two films, Elsinore and Gentle Monster, center on the struggle of their main characters, and the actors’ ability to convey their state of mind. The word agony came to me in both cases and I remembered that Agon, is a god in Greek mythology whose name became the root of protagonist and antagonist in the theater. The Agon is the struggle, the conflict and the contest. The word is particularly apt for the character of Ian Charleston who was in a contest and certainly a struggle with the disease to live long enough to play the part of Hamlet. The Agon applies to sport as well as theater. Lucy struggles against her love for her husband whom she must reject for the protection of her son.
Cristian Munglu’s Palm d’Or winning Fjord is another film which concerns the intervention of the state on behalf of the safety of children, but in a very different key. Norwegian child welfare officials investigate the condition of five children in a family who have returned to Norway, to the mother’s home town, from Romania where the father was born. Europe seems to take the welfare of children very seriously, possibly because children are considered citizens, not private property, as they tend to be here, so their welfare is public concern. I won’t say anything more about Fjord because Munglu told us what he was about with it in the noon seminar moderated by Columbia professor and Telluride regular, Annette Insdorf. He said wanted to make a film that portrayed a stalemate. He depicts two groups who were simply and completely at odds and not able to listen to one another.
The two groups are the Norwegian child welfare officials and the family, the father in particular, who are very strict Evangelical Christians. The Evangelicals’ rigid ideas conflict with the community in Norway that thrives on parties and festivals. The setting was beautiful, but didn’t seem to have much to do with the story, unless he meant the Fjord to represent a deep fissure? Monglu also made reference to the problems in Europe regarding assimilation of immigrants, but I am not sure this film shed much light on that problem, it was too specific to these two conflicting groups.
Yet another film where child welfare officers make an appearance, Club Kid, traced the emotional life of a young gay man in New York who was part of a drug and sex drenched Queer club scene in the 2000s. Peter, played by director Jordan Firstman, suddenly finds out that he has a 10-year-old son and slowly warms to the possibility of taking care of a person outside of himself. In a charming scene where he tells the kid, Arlo, that he doesn’t like himself they have a discussion about low self-esteem.
I would say, don’t try this at home.
His continued immersion in the club scene jeopardizes his role as a parent and complications ensue. I found the film to be clumsy, but the glimpse of love between a parent and child that the film offers is uplifting. Club Kid was probably pitched toward a young American audience, so some of its excitement might have been lost on me. A film about the club scene in France, Eden (2015), by Mia-Hanson Love is a tribute to her brother and the music, EDM, is better, as is the film style. The characters in the film actually make a stop in Chicago to check up on the House Music scene here, although I think they may have used stock footage. The Ur-film about a child transforming a dissolute adult is Wim Wenders’ Alice in den Städten (1974).
New York City is likewise the location of the House of Criticism. The two inhabitants of the house, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, are art critics who have shared their lives and their work over time. Saltz is a somewhat outrageous critic, who put years in as a long haul trucker, before he became chief critic for New York Magazine. He likes to shock, but usually makes a valid point: “pretend Jeff Koons is an artist.” He called Brice Marden’s highly regarded paintings “Snakes in Box.” His wife, Roberta Smith was a long-time thoughtful and very influential critic for the New York Times. I read her Friday columns for years.
The film is a kinetic portrait of an affectionate, supportive and productive marriage. At one point, one partner referred to the other as their “infrastructure.” Unlike Saltz, who grew up in Chicago and was part of the alternative gallery scene here, Smith apprenticed in New York as an assistant to the A-list minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. Photographer Cindy Sherman made an appearance in the film as did Lena Dunham, their goddaughter, of Tiny Furniture and Girls fame. Toward the end of the film Smith, while giving a lecture to students tells them: “Art is the most advanced operating system for explaining human consciousness.”
“Half of all the films even made are docs–at least a million so far. Fiction films are great of course, but documentaries value the everyday more, the numinous unpredictable moment.” Mark Cousins from the Telluride Watch
I was a few minutes late to The Story of Documentary Film, so when the doors opened to the huge Chuck Jones theater, the workers were emerging from the Lumière factory in 1895, a strip of film which always makes me catch my breath, and then there was a cut to modern dancer Loïe Fuller, whirling amid her flowing skirts in hand-painted color from 1896, accompanied by writer-director Mark Cousins’ sonorous voice-over.
Clips from the German Ruttman, known for Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927); the Brazilian/French Calvacanti who documented Paris in 1926: and Russian Dziga Vertov, known for Man With A movie Camera (1926) and his editor wife, Yelizaveta Ignatevna Svilova followed. These directors and their well-known documentaries were among many other very early documentary films and filmmakers about whom I had never heard. I was mesmerized.
What is remarkable, aside from the global scope and depth and this wondrously vast collection of clips, is the way Cousins has put them together. Sustaining interest in a catalog of clips requires editing skills of the first order, while making sense of the collection has to do with illuminating the social and political contexts of the films. The director organized the docs according to the tempers of the times: early films showed the world places they might never go and he characterized this society as living under a bell-jar. Later periods were called Romantic and Existential. Since I was not able to watch the entire film, I only had a glimpse of the architecture of its structure.
Documentaries about working conditions which had an impact like Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple 1973) were shown with Minimata: The Victims and Their World, (Noriake Sujimoto 1971) the story of Japanese fishermen and their communities poisoned by mercury released by a fertilizer factory. There were clips of docs made by filmmakers in Africa and the Middle East, rather than just films made from the point of view of colonizers or anthropologists. Many films by women, the subject of another of Cousin’s exhaustive world film histories, added to the mix. The hours flew by but I was only able to catch about 7 hours to the 16-hour film that was shown in three segments.
I rejoined the screenings when we were viewing the early part of the 21st century, when Philippe Petite balanced on a high-wire between the twin towers, and Michael Moore released Bowing for Columbine (2002). Documentaries about the destruction of the World Trade Center, then the war in Iraq and the complex story of the hijacking of a bus in Brazil. Bus # 174 (Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda 2002) and the slaughtering of whales in Japan flew by. The impact of the dark events was lessened by influential docs about food: Agnès Varda’s groundbreaking subjective The Gleaners and I (2000) and Supersize Me (Morgan Spirlock 2004) about the impact of junk food on the human body. I want to go on listing the docs, but my list would not be anywhere near complete: Cousins has collected such a wealth of celluloid and digital documentation of the world, events, persons and places.
The story of documentary film is the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, although I think Cousins is making a point about the manner in which history is written by avoiding the word. What struck me as I watched, particularly the later films, was the courage that it took think through, revisit and discuss the events that have taken place in the early years of the new century. Other necessary qualities like dedication, immense curiosity and knowledge of film and history, an ability to collect, find and illuminate the coherence among the moving images of this immeasurably valuable archive, make the telling of this story possible.
La Bola Negra was long and complex: two interwoven stories regarding the Spanish Civil war unravel and come together over 155 minutes. The main character, a boy named Sebastián, escapes the bombing of his village, ends up being pulled out of a truckload of dead and wounded soldiers and sent to guard a Republican prisoner. This story is entangled—the tumultuous visual field is so full and rich and often violent events—with a play that had been written by the poet Garcia Lorca about being blackballed (Bola Negra) from a club for being gay as a youth. The frame story is from the point of view of a contemporary gay playwright and historian, who would like to recover queer histories— his grandfather was Sebastián. At the center of these flashbacks and flash forwards are scenes, stunning in their emotional power and complexity between Sebastián and the prisoner who is waiting to be executed, he has been told to guard. The prisoner, Rafael, is the secret gay love of Garcia Lorca and in possession of the manuscript of the play. The poetry of Lorca was woven into the rich fabric of the narrative. “You will never know how much I love you,” a poignant line in a poem from Lorca to Rafael was repeated many times.
Sebastián is completely confused by his desire for the Republican soldier, and perplexed by his position as a fascist. “They just put a gun in my hands” Sebastián tells a beguiling cabaret singer who is entertaining the soldiers when she asks him what side he is on. She —played by Penelope Cruz, performing a number in a soldier’s dress – tells him that “transvestitism is full of possibility and is the opposite of war.” This statement about sexual or gender freedom feels so resonant just now when we have violent, bizarrely homophobic men in high places and thugs in the streets. Glen Close puts in an appearance as a historian of the Civil War. The film was co-produced by Perdro Almadovar whose 2021 Parallel Mothers also concerned forgotten histories of the Civil War.
It is probably significant that Kleber Mendonça Filho was on the panel at Cannes which awarded La Bola Negra the best director. The Secret Agent (2025) is a long complicated political film, uncovering history despite the rule of an authoritarian regime which thrives on silence. The editing of La Bola Negra did not just toss you around but had clear narrative and temporal motivation. Cuts were often abrupt and suspenseful. Sequences of traditional continuity alternated with shocks—Eisenstein’s term for montage editing. Close-ups alternated with dynamic crowd scenes, an approach which seemed perfect for the long Faulknerian sweep of the story. At some point, a character (the grandson of Sebastián, the historian?) made a remark about history being told by common people. I would like to think this film has an appeal that will take it beyond the usual suspects.
Thrilling scenes of war in the Arabian desert, actually California, are part of the excitement in Beau Geste, this year’s newly restored silent film (1926, Herbert Brenton). Once you can get past the orientalism, the racism, the silly fantasy of military exploits in foreign lands, and see them as artifacts of their time, it is a charming story of loyalties formed in childhood play. There is a burning castle, men in capes, a fierce and abusive captain, a Viking funeral and a huge jewel. All this unrolls to the sound of Donald Sosin’s appropriately melodramatic piano accompaniment. Four cousins fled England to serve in the French Foreign Legion—“exile of the self-condemned”– the one named Beau made a selfless and elegant gesture before he was killed.
The last film I saw at TFF was Burgundy (Micheal Dweck, Gregory Kershaw), about a group of people connected with a vineyard in the South West region of France. At the center of a series of portraits of headwaiters, vineyard owners, their scion, and a wine critic, was a young man, hired to tend the vines, who claimed that he was a fan of Jean Gabin. Gabin acted in a series of Popular Front films in the 30’s—amongst them Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows and The Grand Illusion and many other classics. Gabin was more than a working class hero, he was possibly an embodiment of France. In any case, the young man is sadly awakened to the reality of the 21st century when he comes to understand that he will most likely never be able to own his own vineyard. He leaves Burgundy and goes to work seeding and harvesting oysters, but returns. A series of parallel edits shows his girlfriend, who was training to be a sommelier for the restaurant at the vineyard, but wanted to live in Paris, also sadly awakened to the dreariness of unskilled labor. They are both returning to Burgundy on separate trains. A lilting piano score moved along the subtle love story and brightened the study of the French countryside. Things as they are these days are not often treated with gentle humor.
All in all, a wonderful festival, restorative in the sense that art and thought and craft are flourishing despite it all–but still no land acknowledgement regarding the Utes from whom the beautiful box canyon was stolen.
Photo: Silver slippers in the Free Box. The Telluride Free Box has noting to do with the festival, except that staff members enjoy poking around and coming up with something cahsmire, a frying pan, or a bike helmet or a new pair of jeans. The Town supports this set of cubby holes used for recirculating stuff. You are always likely to meet someone there and have a conversation. It's the perfect third space.
#53
“Art is the most advanced operating system for explaining human consciousness.”
Roberta Smith in House of Criticism.
Rose, by Director Marcus Schlieizer, was the first film I saw this year at TFF. Sandra Hüller plays Rose, who does not divulge her name until late in the film because she tries to live her life as a man in a small village in Germany in the 17th century. Like Arnaud in the Return of Martin Guerre, she assumes the identity of another man, here a fallen comrade. Having taken possession of the farm with his papers and then finding acceptance in the village by shooting a bear that was threatening the sheep, she revives the neglected farm. However, her success brings her the offer of a wife. One of the outstanding moments in the film occurs after her young wife discovers she is a woman: they discuss Rose’s leaving the farm she has built up and Rose tells Susanna that if she leaves, Suzanna will just be subject to a husband who will be her master.
The word “master” is used again and again, as is the idea that in living as a man, Rose has freedoms she would not otherwise have had in the 17th century. Susanna accepts Rose’s offer—she has her own reasons, as she is pregnant–and the two women form a sort of partnership and in that they find freedom for a while. Then the village turns against Rose and Susanna, and they are ultimately tried and severely punished for their subversion of social norms. Hüller stares into the lens of the camera, her face distorted by a scar, roughened by war and farming. She is full of power and strength, although she is carrying the burden of a huge secret. After she is caught, Rose tells her prosecutors: “I did what I could,” in another stark full frontal close–up that sears her countenance into our minds.
I think this may be the most or one of the most powerful films I have ever seen regarding what we used to call (when we were woke) the social construction of gender. Hüller said the film made her think about “ what it means to perform a gender, which makes the film very modern and a film for today.” “I wasn’t aware,” she went on, “of how difficult it was to perform a male life—maybe even for a man.” The village leaders literally determine who can act like a man or a woman and their power is carried out with appalling violence. It might be worth mentioning that the village adhered to a strong patriarchal protestant sect.
The sound design was subtle, mysterious and melancholy with a voice-over lending a sense of intimacy with a reflective tone. These elements combined with black and white photography to create a haunting sense of place and time. The film “was like a long poem” Hüller told France 24 interviewer Eve Jackson.
I mentioned that Schlieizer’s film brought to mind another film regarding outsiders in an agricultural community, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982). It stars a young Gérard Depardieu and takes place in France in the 16th century. When an imposter returns from the Hundred Years’ War, with knowledge of the village and farm, his wife may or may not know that he is not Martin Guerre. In other words, she makes a choice. Like Rose, Arnaud is unmasked and tried, but our sympathy lies with him completely, rather than the actual Martin Guerre who does eventually show up. Although the man whose identity and land Rose adopted was killed, and the key difference has to do with gender (a woman wearing pants), there are deep resonances between the films.
Martin Guerre the film was based on a true, albeit folkloric story; it was not written by historian Natalie Zemon Davis, but she did write a book of that name. She also wrote a key essay entitled “Women on Top” exploring the active social and economic roles of women in the 16th century when they had much more agency than one might think. Martin Guerre’s wife made the choice of the kind hearted and industrious outsider/imposter. Rose, another imposter/outsider, was determined, capable and hardy; she turned an abandoned farm into a prosperous enterprise. Is it too woke to ask if there is not great goodness within the outsider?
In another notable performance, Sandra Hüller plays the role of the dutiful daughter who escorts her father, famed German writer Thomas Mann back to Germany in 1949, after years of exile in California due to his protests against Hitler. Annette Insdorf referred to Pawel Pawlikowsky’s film, Fatherland, as the third in a trilogy of films regarding postwar WWII Europe: Ida (2013), Cold War (2018) and now Fatherland traverse the ruins, the complex destabilized aftermath of WWII both in Poland and here, Germany. Pawlikowsky studied German literature at Oxford, so the subject matter and wealth of allusions to people such as writers Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig (who, like Mann’s son, committed suicide, although there seems to be some disagreement regarding Klaus Mann) underlies the film.
It’s hard to say whether it was the director’s study of literature or something more that enabled him to make a film that feels like chamber music–possibly Beethoven’s somber string quartets–but it does. Each element of film—sound, script, camera, editing – work together with precision and grace: this formalism and restraint produce the emotional tenor of the film. The diegetic music in Fatherland moves from classical to post-war East German popular songs and ends with father and daughter listening to a man in an abandoned building play a piece on an organ by Bach.
I found myself noting the compositions and rhythm of the shots: close-ups alternated with shots where the action took place in the middle of a crowd, a variety of diagonals alternated with symmetrical compositions. Pawlikowsky’s cinematographer, Lukasz Zal worked with Jonathon Glazer on Zone of Interest (2023) as well as on Pawlikowski’s other films.
Erika Mann attends to her father’s every need, acts as public relations assistant, all the while she is grieving for the death of her brother Klaus Mann, also a writer who was critical of the fascists, but not very welcome in the U.S because he was a gay communist.
The Noble Prize-winning Thomas Mann, forced into exile in 1933 (first to Switzerland, then to L.A. in 1939), makes a return visit to a Germany still in ruins in post-War 1949. Erika ushers her father through cocktail parties, public addresses and meetings. The restraint shown by Hüller’s character and the thoughtful but terse Mann himself shows their feelings for the attempt by officials of the GDR (German Democratic Republic or Communist East Germany) to lure him back and lend them legitimacy.
There are many superb quotations in the film. One of my favorites is Oscar Wilde’s quote about Utopia: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” I took the director’s inclusion of this thought as an expression of the filmmaker’s ambivalence regarding the GDR, which is generally regarded as a failure and certainly lost its way, but began with idealistic hope for socialism.
Early on in the return visit, when he is still in West Germany, he is asked about his political preference, which is reduced to Stalin versus Mickey Mouse. The comment is straight out of Adorno, the philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who felt that there was no chance of becoming free when we are programmed by both the workplace and the entertainment industry to consume. (The Frankfurt School was a group of scholars and intellectuals known for the study of power relations in society, the foundation of critical theory.)
Casting all this aside, the Mann family was set adrift by the war, like so many other artists, filmmakers and writers, so the meaning of exile and home and in the German sense Heimat, (roughly where one truly belongs in terms of identity) is a central theme of the film. And Fatherland’s portrayal of a loving, resigned, protective relationship between a daughter and a problematic father is the heart of the film. Mann tells his daughter, “I don’t believe in anything anymore…it was always you and me against the world.”
https://www.wilde-online.info/the-soul-of-man-under-socialism-page11.html
For anyone not familiar with Thomas Mann who might not want to slog through his long novels, Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain (although I have friend who rereads it every so often) they might have a look at the film based on a Mann novella, Death in Venice (1971) directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Dirk Bogard. This actor, popular in the ‘70s made a celluloid (well, digital) appearance at Telluride in Joseph Losey’s (script by Harold Pinter) The Servant (1973) chosen by guest director, actress, Rebecca Hall. I wasn’t able to attend but I have seen it and recommend it very highly.
Moving from Germany and the 20th century to Russia in the present day, Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev weaves a script based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 La Femme Infidel, about the husband of an adulterous wife with the older story of King Minos and his wife Pasiphae of Crete who spawned the monster, hidden in a labyrinth, that devoured young men. While Zvyagintsev stays close to the Chabrol script, his allusions to the story of the Minotaur are loose, but the insatiable Minotaur is clearly the war with Ukraine. The portrait of the amoral narcissistic businessman who finds a corrupt and deceitful way to supply men to feed the monster, his wife and his wealthy and equally appetitive and empty friends and their luxurious digs, is brilliant and scathing. The film has been called noir, but I have trouble with that; these people live in a bleak tainted daylight, not shadows. There is no moral ambiguity; they are just completely ruthless.
The strength of Zvyagintsev’s critique of the Russian oligarchy and the war has sent him into exile in Paris. Those of us who grew up during the cold war were showered with frightening warnings regarding the evils of communism. The one I remember most vividly was that children could not have their own toys. And then there was that stuff about dominos falling which launched a war. The series of betrayals which has led to the society depicted in Minotaur does ask the classic noir question: “ what are men capable of?”
For reasons that are unclear, but could be the temper of the times, I have been asking questions about the nature of a humanistic society. A humanistic society values human life, the autonomy and dignity of the individual, over any abstraction or material goods. Democracy, of course, is humanistic, because it places value on the human ability to govern the community rather than seeking some divine providence or direction. I would venture to propose that neoliberalism, which is shifting into something else now, puts the value of the market over the value of the individual in society and that our tech gods care little for our miserable lives.
But film and art are my subject. Last night of the Festival I saw Mile Leigh’s eminently humanistic film Tender Loving Care. Leigh, whose process is improvisatory, working with a tight ensemble of actors, began the film with a close-up and a gentle argument between a social worker and a homeless man who was being turned out of a hospital. She was probably going to find some housing for him, but he did not want to cooperate and left on his own. The film then turns to the life of two women social workers, follows their interactions, their struggle with the frustrations of trying to help forlorn and very troubled people. We are given vignettes of the people they help, like an old lady whose walkway was overwhelmed by junk, another woman whose kitchen was overwhelmed by a horrible mess, both of whom argued futilely with the social workers. The central drama then moved to one of the girl’s family—her mother and father–kind and supportive and happy. The father articulates what might be Leigh’s point of view, or the actor’s when he deplores the deterioration of Britain’s public services, which demise he located in the reign of the ruthlessly neoliberal Margret Thatcher.
There is more, but it’s the manner in which Leigh keeps the camera on his ensemble which allows or asks you to accept them in all their humanity: their flaws, their beauty (and no one is what the movies usually call beautiful), their sorrows, their ability to love, that is the subject of this film. Like the work of the Italian and later European Renaissance and into the time of Courbet whose observation of the human countenance surveyed the scope of emotion from nobility to abjection, Leigh’s film holds a mirror up to nature. Tender Loving Care’s final shot, giving the film an elegant and meaningful coherence, fills the screen like a Rembrandt portrait, and not only because Rembrandt was able to portray the dignity and pathos of age. Unlike Rembrandt’s portraits, the shot is not in half-light or chiaroscuro, but is fully lit, held for us to contemplate.
Absent from the action in Elsinor, but lurking unfortunately in our memory of the time, Margret Thatcher, like her friend Ronald Reagan, did little in response to the AIDS epidemic. There is a scene in which Ian Charleson, a prominent British actor who dies of AIDS, played by Andrew Scott, argues with Filmmaker Derek Jarman ( David Dawson) about whether or not he should go public with his AIDS diagnosis. “They will know about it when I am dead,” Charleson declares.
Jarman was a prominent activist. His extravagant and beautiful Caravaggio (1986), launched Tilda Swinton. Other films included Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second, a queer Wittgenstein bio-pic and Blue (1994). This exchange is important because one of the themes in Hamlet is the failure of the older generation with respect to the young. Ian Charleson, whose career had flagged since starring in Chariots of Fire, is offered the role of Hamlet at the National Theater when Daniel Day-Lewis walks off the stage and does not return. The castle of Elsinore is the setting for the play: when Charleston comes to his first rehearsal, the director says: “Welcome to Elsinore.”
The film follows the actor’s struggle to rehearse and perform the emotionally and physically arduous role while he is very sick with AIDS. Scott has played Hamlet on the stage, and possibly because he is gay, brings an extraordinary depth of feeling to the role of Ian Charleson. I was riveted by his performance, so intimate and fraught and far from the cool evil Moriarty he played in the BBC Sherlock. I may have said this last year, but I studied the play in graduate school and taught and saw it a number of times, so I have an insight into both Charleson’s and Scott’s desire to embody this darkly fated prince. The fragments of the main soliloquies made me want to hear and see more. With the help of his doctor who prolonged his and other patients’ lives during the epidemic, played ably by Olivia Coleman in the film, Charleson was able to perform the play 24 times; he died 6 weeks after it closed.
Despite the wrenching subject matter, the progress of noble Hamlet toward his death, overlapping with the tragedy of Charleson’s (and many others’) fate in the epidemic, the film was as smooth and glossy as a teacup. The British are so good at this sort of thing. Elsinore premiered at TFF.
“I lived in the shadow of it,” Scott said, “and the insidious nature of the prejudice against people, and the opportunity, perhaps, that something that I’ve related to, of being in the movies if you were a gay person, there was shame. I couldn’t say that was particularly spoken about, but there was something underneath. There weren’t many examples of people in the industry that were allowed to be there.” (Indywire interview)
The story in Gentle Monster is not just a pretext for the portrayal by Léa Seydoux of the agony and anguish of separation from a beloved spouse but her emotions are at the center of the film. Her character is, by turns, shocked, in denial, and finally distraught as she discovers her husband’s participation in child pornography. She has a son whom she must protect from this man, his father, who she thought she knew, and for whom she has lost all trust.
The story, here shifted and fictionalized, originates in director Marie Kreutzer’s 2022 film Corsage about Empress Elizabeth of Austria. An actor in Kreutzer’s film, Florian Teichtmeister was charged with possession of child pornography and a flurry of controversy ensued. In Gentle Monster the police come to the house to seize the husband’s computer. The husband, Phillip (Lawrence Rupp), seems helpless and confused, as well as deceitful as he tries to deny his involvement in pedophilia. The ending of the film is beautifully done, focusing on an object which carries all the sadness, sense of loss and ambivalence of the wife, mother and the son. Catherine Deneuve makes an appearance as Lucy’s mother—she looks great. Seydoux as in Abdeliatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), Mia Hansen-Love’s Un beau matin (2022) delivers another complex, sensitive, and stirring performance. Close-ups bring us into the character’s inner life and we share their state of mind and torments. Elsinore, and the Last Living Pick Pocket in New York with John Turturro, likewise turn on this eminently cinematic sense of intimacy and identification.
These two films, Elsinore and Gentle Monster, center on the struggle of their main characters, and the actors’ ability to convey their state of mind. The word agony came to me in both cases and I remembered that Agon, is a god in Greek mythology whose name became the root of protagonist and antagonist in the theater. The Agon is the struggle, the conflict and the contest. The word is particularly apt for the character of Ian Charleston who was in a contest and certainly a struggle with the disease to live long enough to play the part of Hamlet. The Agon applies to sport as well as theater. Lucy struggles against her love for her husband whom she must reject for the protection of her son.
Cristian Munglu’s Palm d’Or winning Fjord is another film which concerns the intervention of the state on behalf of the safety of children, but in a very different key. Norwegian child welfare officials investigate the condition of five children in a family who have returned to Norway, to the mother’s home town, from Romania where the father was born. Europe seems to take the welfare of children very seriously, possibly because children are considered citizens, not private property, as they tend to be here, so their welfare is public concern. I won’t say anything more about Fjord because Munglu told us what he was about with it in the noon seminar moderated by Columbia professor and Telluride regular, Annette Insdorf. He said wanted to make a film that portrayed a stalemate. He depicts two groups who were simply and completely at odds and not able to listen to one another.
The two groups are the Norwegian child welfare officials and the family, the father in particular, who are very strict Evangelical Christians. The Evangelicals’ rigid ideas conflict with the community in Norway that thrives on parties and festivals. The setting was beautiful, but didn’t seem to have much to do with the story, unless he meant the Fjord to represent a deep fissure? Monglu also made reference to the problems in Europe regarding assimilation of immigrants, but I am not sure this film shed much light on that problem, it was too specific to these two conflicting groups.
Yet another film where child welfare officers make an appearance, Club Kid, traced the emotional life of a young gay man in New York who was part of a drug and sex drenched Queer club scene in the 2000s. Peter, played by director Jordan Firstman, suddenly finds out that he has a 10-year-old son and slowly warms to the possibility of taking care of a person outside of himself. In a charming scene where he tells the kid, Arlo, that he doesn’t like himself they have a discussion about low self-esteem.
I would say, don’t try this at home.
His continued immersion in the club scene jeopardizes his role as a parent and complications ensue. I found the film to be clumsy, but the glimpse of love between a parent and child that the film offers is uplifting. Club Kid was probably pitched toward a young American audience, so some of its excitement might have been lost on me. A film about the club scene in France, Eden (2015), by Mia-Hanson Love is a tribute to her brother and the music, EDM, is better, as is the film style. The characters in the film actually make a stop in Chicago to check up on the House Music scene here, although I think they may have used stock footage. The Ur-film about a child transforming a dissolute adult is Wim Wenders’ Alice in den Städten (1974).
New York City is likewise the location of the House of Criticism. The two inhabitants of the house, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, are art critics who have shared their lives and their work over time. Saltz is a somewhat outrageous critic, who put years in as a long haul trucker, before he became chief critic for New York Magazine. He likes to shock, but usually makes a valid point: “pretend Jeff Koons is an artist.” He called Brice Marden’s highly regarded paintings “Snakes in Box.” His wife, Roberta Smith was a long-time thoughtful and very influential critic for the New York Times. I read her Friday columns for years.
The film is a kinetic portrait of an affectionate, supportive and productive marriage. At one point, one partner referred to the other as their “infrastructure.” Unlike Saltz, who grew up in Chicago and was part of the alternative gallery scene here, Smith apprenticed in New York as an assistant to the A-list minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. Photographer Cindy Sherman made an appearance in the film as did Lena Dunham, their goddaughter, of Tiny Furniture and Girls fame. Toward the end of the film Smith, while giving a lecture to students tells them: “Art is the most advanced operating system for explaining human consciousness.”
“Half of all the films even made are docs–at least a million so far. Fiction films are great of course, but documentaries value the everyday more, the numinous unpredictable moment.” Mark Cousins from the Telluride Watch
I was a few minutes late to The Story of Documentary Film, so when the doors opened to the huge Chuck Jones theater, the workers were emerging from the Lumière factory in 1895, a strip of film which always makes me catch my breath, and then there was a cut to modern dancer Loïe Fuller, whirling amid her flowing skirts in hand-painted color from 1896, accompanied by writer-director Mark Cousins’ sonorous voice-over.
Clips from the German Ruttman, known for Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927); the Brazilian/French Calvacanti who documented Paris in 1926: and Russian Dziga Vertov, known for Man With A movie Camera (1926) and his editor wife, Yelizaveta Ignatevna Svilova followed. These directors and their well-known documentaries were among many other very early documentary films and filmmakers about whom I had never heard. I was mesmerized.
What is remarkable, aside from the global scope and depth and this wondrously vast collection of clips, is the way Cousins has put them together. Sustaining interest in a catalog of clips requires editing skills of the first order, while making sense of the collection has to do with illuminating the social and political contexts of the films. The director organized the docs according to the tempers of the times: early films showed the world places they might never go and he characterized this society as living under a bell-jar. Later periods were called Romantic and Existential. Since I was not able to watch the entire film, I only had a glimpse of the architecture of its structure.
Documentaries about working conditions which had an impact like Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple 1973) were shown with Minimata: The Victims and Their World, (Noriake Sujimoto 1971) the story of Japanese fishermen and their communities poisoned by mercury released by a fertilizer factory. There were clips of docs made by filmmakers in Africa and the Middle East, rather than just films made from the point of view of colonizers or anthropologists. Many films by women, the subject of another of Cousin’s exhaustive world film histories, added to the mix. The hours flew by but I was only able to catch about 7 hours to the 16-hour film that was shown in three segments.
I rejoined the screenings when we were viewing the early part of the 21st century, when Philippe Petite balanced on a high-wire between the twin towers, and Michael Moore released Bowing for Columbine (2002). Documentaries about the destruction of the World Trade Center, then the war in Iraq and the complex story of the hijacking of a bus in Brazil. Bus # 174 (Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda 2002) and the slaughtering of whales in Japan flew by. The impact of the dark events was lessened by influential docs about food: Agnès Varda’s groundbreaking subjective The Gleaners and I (2000) and Supersize Me (Morgan Spirlock 2004) about the impact of junk food on the human body. I want to go on listing the docs, but my list would not be anywhere near complete: Cousins has collected such a wealth of celluloid and digital documentation of the world, events, persons and places.
The story of documentary film is the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, although I think Cousins is making a point about the manner in which history is written by avoiding the word. What struck me as I watched, particularly the later films, was the courage that it took think through, revisit and discuss the events that have taken place in the early years of the new century. Other necessary qualities like dedication, immense curiosity and knowledge of film and history, an ability to collect, find and illuminate the coherence among the moving images of this immeasurably valuable archive, make the telling of this story possible.
La Bola Negra was long and complex: two interwoven stories regarding the Spanish Civil war unravel and come together over 155 minutes. The main character, a boy named Sebastián, escapes the bombing of his village, ends up being pulled out of a truckload of dead and wounded soldiers and sent to guard a Republican prisoner. This story is entangled—the tumultuous visual field is so full and rich and often violent events—with a play that had been written by the poet Garcia Lorca about being blackballed (Bola Negra) from a club for being gay as a youth. The frame story is from the point of view of a contemporary gay playwright and historian, who would like to recover queer histories— his grandfather was Sebastián. At the center of these flashbacks and flash forwards are scenes, stunning in their emotional power and complexity between Sebastián and the prisoner who is waiting to be executed, he has been told to guard. The prisoner, Rafael, is the secret gay love of Garcia Lorca and in possession of the manuscript of the play. The poetry of Lorca was woven into the rich fabric of the narrative. “You will never know how much I love you,” a poignant line in a poem from Lorca to Rafael was repeated many times.
Sebastián is completely confused by his desire for the Republican soldier, and perplexed by his position as a fascist. “They just put a gun in my hands” Sebastián tells a beguiling cabaret singer who is entertaining the soldiers when she asks him what side he is on. She —played by Penelope Cruz, performing a number in a soldier’s dress – tells him that “transvestitism is full of possibility and is the opposite of war.” This statement about sexual or gender freedom feels so resonant just now when we have violent, bizarrely homophobic men in high places and thugs in the streets. Glen Close puts in an appearance as a historian of the Civil War. The film was co-produced by Perdro Almadovar whose 2021 Parallel Mothers also concerned forgotten histories of the Civil War.
It is probably significant that Kleber Mendonça Filho was on the panel at Cannes which awarded La Bola Negra the best director. The Secret Agent (2025) is a long complicated political film, uncovering history despite the rule of an authoritarian regime which thrives on silence. The editing of La Bola Negra did not just toss you around but had clear narrative and temporal motivation. Cuts were often abrupt and suspenseful. Sequences of traditional continuity alternated with shocks—Eisenstein’s term for montage editing. Close-ups alternated with dynamic crowd scenes, an approach which seemed perfect for the long Faulknerian sweep of the story. At some point, a character (the grandson of Sebastián, the historian?) made a remark about history being told by common people. I would like to think this film has an appeal that will take it beyond the usual suspects.
Thrilling scenes of war in the Arabian desert, actually California, are part of the excitement in Beau Geste, this year’s newly restored silent film (1926, Herbert Brenton). Once you can get past the orientalism, the racism, the silly fantasy of military exploits in foreign lands, and see them as artifacts of their time, it is a charming story of loyalties formed in childhood play. There is a burning castle, men in capes, a fierce and abusive captain, a Viking funeral and a huge jewel. All this unrolls to the sound of Donald Sosin’s appropriately melodramatic piano accompaniment. Four cousins fled England to serve in the French Foreign Legion—“exile of the self-condemned”– the one named Beau made a selfless and elegant gesture before he was killed.
The last film I saw at TFF was Burgundy (Micheal Dweck, Gregory Kershaw), about a group of people connected with a vineyard in the South West region of France. At the center of a series of portraits of headwaiters, vineyard owners, their scion, and a wine critic, was a young man, hired to tend the vines, who claimed that he was a fan of Jean Gabin. Gabin acted in a series of Popular Front films in the 30’s—amongst them Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows and The Grand Illusion and many other classics. Gabin was more than a working class hero, he was possibly an embodiment of France. In any case, the young man is sadly awakened to the reality of the 21st century when he comes to understand that he will most likely never be able to own his own vineyard. He leaves Burgundy and goes to work seeding and harvesting oysters, but returns. A series of parallel edits shows his girlfriend, who was training to be a sommelier for the restaurant at the vineyard, but wanted to live in Paris, also sadly awakened to the dreariness of unskilled labor. They are both returning to Burgundy on separate trains. A lilting piano score moved along the subtle love story and brightened the study of the French countryside. Things as they are these days are not often treated with gentle humor.
All in all, a wonderful festival, restorative in the sense that art and thought and craft are flourishing despite it all–but still no land acknowledgement regarding the Utes from whom the beautiful box canyon was stolen.
Photo: Silver slippers in the Free Box. The Telluride Free Box has noting to do with the festival, except that staff members enjoy poking around and coming up with something cahsmire, a frying pan, or a bike helmet or a new pair of jeans. The Town supports this set of cubby holes used for recirculating stuff. You are always likely to meet someone there and have a conversation. It's the perfect third space.
