Subject: Sept. 2: Still following the river, watching people on rafts. The current is swift and the river is high, but not flooded. The hills here are ocher instead of sienna or white and the banks of the river are green with willow, poplar and sage. The color of sage is the most beautiful color in America. In the distance is a vermillion hill dotted with pinyons. I have not been thinking much about my former love affair with the west, partially because everything is so different. I was in the mountains, in a town at 9,000 ft, not in the desert, and George has brought me here, because we are friends, because he likes me. But I do love the arid Western slope landscape, the same way I love the Mediterranean and the north Atlantic. It is such an odd thing, but it calls to me, not as something to be possessed or even attained or understood. To move through it feels so pleasurable, and I suppose because it is hostile basically, we are lucky to move through it with ease, and a reverent sense of wonder, it is the great empty sacred heart of the continent. Full of mysterious contours, the flows of time captured in earth and space.

Now we are moving into the red rock mountains again. These colors are even more vivid, and drenched with sun. They look impossible to climb, and there are palisades and pinnacles. Pine (or is it spruce), pinyon and juniper intermingle.

The train is a kind of dream state. I love it.

This is the first large film festival I have attended, and possibly, because I was brought to the festival by George, who has been involved with it for years and years, I feel exactly no sense of exclusion. No one is haughty, everyone seems to be working hard, and there is no sense of intrigue or plots which might entangle and bring you down. There was one spot of tension, but it did not seem contagious. It feels nothing like the art world, but then in some sense I have no future, no ambition, so I am not in anyone's way. But there is this cinephilia that seems to be important in a way that a love of art is not. Or, perhaps I just don’t know enough yet. So, I will enjoy my innocence.

We work in a simple but completely necessary department: shipping. There are hierarchies, one has a glimpse of that with Rushdie and his glamorous high-heeled companion, or Herzog and his very well-dressed muse. But people like Annette Insdorf form Columbia in NY, who orchestrates the noon seminars, are unrelentingly warm.

The festival is truly a celebration of film. I often wonder what happens to people who lose their celebrations, rather as I have, sitting alone on Christmas and Easter, remembering the small happiness of the old holidays. But here is something, which works for George, who returns every year, like any cyclical festival or holiday, to stem what Gross-Louis called the terror of time. The Saint is cinema.  

Ida, a black and white film by Pawel Pawlikowski (UK 2013), is another portrait d'une femme. This time a novitiate who is sent away before her vows to find a lost relative. She arrives in Warshava, is greeted by an ironic aunt who gives her a family photograph and leads her back to the bus. Later the aunt retrieves her as she is about to leave and informs her about the truth about her birth: she is an orphan because her Jewish parents were killed.

Later in the Moffet tunnel heading toward the eastern slope, now in granitic rock, in the black heart of the mountain, in the right light there might be glittering viens of quartz.

Back to Ida. She and the aunt, who drinks and smokes too much, a wonderful dark complex character, set off to find where the parents are buried. They visit the house that had belonged to them and track down the people involved. Behind this is the truly awful thought that your neighbors will kill you and bury you in the forest and take your house, if they get the chance. We learn that the aunt was a Stalinist state prosecutor, who has sent people to death; there is a chance meeting with a Coltrain-loving jazz musician and finally recovery and reburial of the relative’s bones. There is more to this, and I don’t want to retell the story, which is told with a minimum amount of dialogue, and with an eloquent use of available light. The director talked about his young cinematographer, clearly a student of Henri Decae and Raul Coutard. He picks up like Cousins, the shabbiness of Eastern Europe, the sadness and desolation, although in a more classical and lyric manner, I am speaking of the composition of the shots, that Cousins does in his film about Albania.

I found the narrative, the plot, to be brilliant, everything falls together like a complex, finely crafted puzzle and yet rings true to the Polish post-war setting. It seems all the more so in the context of some of the poorly made, rambling (I do not mean associative here) and semi-coherent narratives in the festival. But the real beauty of the film is the powerful sense we get from the story that we are inextricably entangled with the other. We are the other, in the way that Ida is a nun, but is Jewish. I want to show it to Sunnis and Shiittes and say look, look how your internecine grievances and struggles and anger will only bind you more closely to one another in the end.  

While Ida is very far from Bunnel’s Viridiana, they both gain some rather terrible knowledge of the fallen secular world when they go to visit relatives before taking their vows. The actress in Ida—Pawlikowski said when he spoke before the film that he found her in a cafe, so he cast in typage , the style of Bresson's Michel in Pickpoket, another character on a spiritual search who undergoes a transformation. Although she might have been an actress he found in a cafe. At the end of the film Ida walks down a long road back to the convent gazing into the future or back toward the Christ-figure the nuns were replacing on his plinth at the beginning of the film. One assumes this was a post-Communist gesture, bringing the icons out of hiding. More Icons are brought to light in Albania in Cousins' film.

Sometimes I look at the landscape sliding into the past and I feel a pain of separation from George. I want to be away from him, I want us to rest from one another, but I also feel this pain of separation, as if we are not supposed be apart.

On to Denver: Outside it is still summer. It has been cool at 9,000 feet and it has rained every day.

Other films of note were: The Lunchbox, which I have already written about and The Past by the Iranian filmmaker who made A Separation, Asghar Farhadi. It is another complicated view of relationships, of children and adults and the harm they inflict on one another. There were more incredible performances and eloquent, understated cinematography of everyday locations, the disheveled places where people really live. This is a beautiful and complex film that I need to see again.

The most charming man in the film, the one who is good with the children (I was yearning for him to take the unhappy teen-age daughter away, but then is Iran a good place for an unhappy teen-age girl?) was the one who chose not to stay and raise the children. The one who chose to stay was completely overwhelmed as was the mother…

La Maison de la Radio. (Nikolas Philibert) Probably only unredeemable Francofiles and radio-heads will like this film. A day in the life of French state radio, we get to see the programs in production, even the coverage of the Tour de France, and the invisible people whose voices are part of our lives. The French was clear and crisp, so I understood more than usual. 

Just before five a glimpse through the mountains of the plains of Eastern Colorado and Nebraska in a haze. I have spent some time remembering a trip I took to Utah in the very late '70s with David Carpenter. We spent hours one day riding the back roads of eastern Colorado. We saw antelope and strange formations of stone or earth out there, but mostly we drove through the grasses, the hills like dusty ocher flesh and the scents of scrub. It was one of my first experiences of the earth there, fragrant and dry.

Out of the mountains back to the troubled world.

Leaving Denver the yellow grass, savoring the last of the mountains with  a splendid sunset farther north than I would  imagine—shocking pink and scarlet clouds outline the purple mountains. Will watch the night fall from the observation car. There are Russian olives but the carpets of sage have ended. People talking while the sun's last evidence is a drawing of the iridescent pink on the blue clouds, and then a blue murk against the western horizon and soon they will be gone. We begin to speed through the plains and the whistle blows at every grade crossing.

I wish these trains were nicer, they are shabby and smell of urine. I think of Europe and the immaculate first class accommodations and the often comfortable, sometimes not comfortable, lower class. At least you get your own space in the couchettes. Here you have to sleep next to a stranger in coach. The man who sat down next to me had a positively formidable tubercular cough. How bourgeois I have become.

 More plains of grassland, sage, mountains and mesas on the other side.

After Blue… we saw Mark Cousins' film about Albania: Here Be Dragons. The title refers to a legend on old maps where great swaths of Eastern Europe were unknown territory. Cousins went to Albania in order to work with archivists to save old films, but he makes the point that Europeans know little of the place, which was cut off by the reign of a strange hybrid toxic communist dictator named Enver Hoxha. Cousins photographs the dilapidated capital, discusses the problem of how we remember history, or rather of our responsibility to history. A pyramid built by the dictator’s daughter, a strange modernist building, now stripped of its tiled surface, covered with graffiti, with plants and wildflowers growing in the neglected plaza around it becomes a symbol for this problem. Hoxha isolated the country, had no idea how to handle the economy, had secret police and then built a monument to himself. Some people want to tear it down. Cousins thinks it should be preserved, even though it represents something problematic, something people might not want to remember.

Cousin’s allusive associative style is marvelous, he brings in William Hazzelit, which he happens to be reading, Angelopoulous’ Ulysses Gaze with its terrible images of Albanians trying to climb a very high fence to Greece when their economy collapsed, who hang in the murky shot on the high fence as Cousins observes that they look like they are crucified.

At one point in a rather free-flowing but ultimately brilliantly coherent and even pointed set of arguments and images, Cousins has an argument in the voice-over, while the camera rests in a shabby nowhere, speaking directly to Hoxha, Stalin (was Lenin in there too?) and Mao and accusing them of "ruining it for the rest of us.” Cousins’ voice—beyond the charm of his Irish, Scottish accent is soothing and stimulating at the same time. He articulates question after question, points out resemblances—this often from film stills of sequences—and connections constantly with an intellectual richness and elegance that is unparalleled except in the best film historians like Jim Naremore. Marc Cousins is the undisputed heir to Chris Marker.

 One quote from an Albanian flew by: “a camera is a fruitful and sacred thing.”

 A Story of Children and Film was also playing at what the festival calls the Backlot. We had seen it secretly at Traverse City. It is likewise a superb questioning, critical, reverent examination of the topic of children in film. I can’t remember Cousin’s classifications, his taxonomy (where are my notes?) but they were notable. I hope to see the film again. Cousins' survey of the history of representations of children in film is framed by some somewhat elliptical ruminations on his niece and nephew. It is as if he cuts away to images of children in film to understand his family. We implicitly understand this cinephiles' gesture: we can learn about the world from the cinema. As I said, it is a topic that is interesting to me and I once gave a paper on it. I should also say that we were streaming his 15-hour montage history of film in the Shipping Office while we worked.

A week after leaving Telluride: I am thinking about Cousins’ voice: there is so much hope and tenderness in it, it supports the visuals perfectly. He works in the Realist tradition: Courbet, Manet, Rosellini, Loach (who I believe he referred to with an epithet: the great Ken Loach) De Sica, Scorsese etc. Realists find hope in the world itself, and in art or in this case, cinema. But as always, hope exists only in sadness.  Then again, perhaps, it is just the rise in his voice at the end of a sentence, which we Americans, read as a question.