The Telluride Film Festival doesn’t separate older films from the new. They’re all part of cinema, just the way the book world doesn’t banish Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf to the back yard shed. Silent films at Telluride play at prime time in the main theaters.
So the great French film restorer Serge Bromberg presented an astonishing program of work by the French pioneer Georges Méliès, who started making films in 1899. Méliès was a magician who saw film as an extension of his magic act, and wound up discovering the foundations of contemporary special effects – the dissolve, stop-action photography and superimpositions. He’s the subject of Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Hugo.
Méliès’ career ended early, and broke and in despair in the 1920s, he burned his roughly 500 negatives. But as Serge Bromberg exclaimed, Méliès didn’t burn them all. For complicated copyright reasons, Méliès had a camera that filmed on two reels. Two negatives came out of the camera, and many of those second negatives survived. Bromberg realized that film from each side of the lens was something like human binocular vision. If he printed a positive from one side of the camera on top of a positive from the other side, he had – lo and behold! – 3D. Méliès did not intentionally invent 3D, and he never did what Bromberg did, yet inadvertently Méliès created the raw material for 3D. And so Serge Bromberg put on an hour of Méliès in 3D, which was beautiful and great fun.
Méliès' rollicking films are full of characters jumping around, appearing and disappearing. He loved explosions with characters and objects flying out of boxes – and many of the films are hand-painted in vivid colors. In 3D, the Méliès films are a blast, and, frankly, far more playful than many of the somber 3D movies of recent years.
A newer film at Telluride was a beautiful restored version of Sally Potter’s 1992 Orlando. Tilda Swinton plays Orlando, a young man in the court of Queen Elizabeth I in the late 1500s. She admonishes Orlando: "Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old."
Orlando lives for the next 400 years or so, but midway, Orlando becomes a woman. The picture feels thoroughly up to date in its look at questions of shifting genders. It’s also, in its costumes, sets and cinematography, stunning to look at.
I generally pass up some of the new films at Telluride, especially if they’ll be in theaters in a month or so. I choose what I might not have the chance to see again. But a new film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, I won’t miss. Kore-eda has made a bunch of films about children, and often children who need care. Nobody Knows is about four children abandoned by their mother. In After the Storm, a divorced and irresponsible father must learn how to help care for his son. Shoplifters shows a group of people of all ages who form themselves into a family — and the crux of the film is the care of the kids.
Kore-eda’s new movie Broker is about adoption in a way one might not expect. In Japan and in Korea, where the film takes place, mothers can drop off their newborn children anonymously in what are basically deposit boxes. The film centers on two men who broker these babies — they sell them — to adoptive parents.
Kore-eda, though, is constantly aware that things are more complex and nuanced than anyone likes to admit. The men are not brutish criminals; they love the children, and the film presents a constellation of these men, couples who hope to adopt, the police and the young mother who regrets dropping off her baby. And, as usual with a Kore-eda film, you’re left trying to understand how people can best live in this world of ours.
