by Walter Chaw I took a trip down Denver's revitalized Blake Street (baseball field on one end, Auraria Campus of the University of Colorado at the other) last week to meet with the Denver Film Society's Creative Director and whirlwind Ron Henderson, the brilliant and capable Director of Media Relations Britta Erickson, and dedicated Program Director Brit Withy to talk about the cancellation of the "Critics' Choice" program from the roster of the 26th Starz Denver International Film Festival. A mainstay of the event for the last quarter-century, I was told in sombre tones–or was that relief?–that the availability of prints on platters was getting increasingly scarce and the program had become unfeasible. Honoured last year as the first Internet-based ink-stained wretch to be asked to present a film at the festival, I was disappointed to have my sophomore bow (I planned on bringing McCabe and Mrs. Miller and then Fat City) erased by circumstance and the fickle tide of technology.
The disappointment was short-lived. See, my first baby is set to be born about a week after the end of the event, and last week, on September 19th, my father died almost four years after a massive heart attack that left him frail and suddenly mortal. It wasn't unexpected, I guess, but he was active and happy until the end–he fell, and less than five minutes later, they think, he was gone. Nothing like death to make one wonder about the living of it. My mother called me at 6:30pm, but I was on my way to a screening and had abandoned my cell; I got the message a little after 9:00pm and was there at last after my mother had been alone with the hospital chaplain and my father's body for almost three hours. So there's guilt, and there's self-recrimination for a great many things. There's the unexpected crying jag when something reminds me of time spent and time should have spent. And there's the wondering if watching movies for a living is life at all, or half-life.
I saw a movie this week called Rhinoceros Eyes that is just fabulous–another, Lost in Translation, the same–and suddenly, in one night, these films were relevant to me in an entirely different way. Good art, good film, is protean. It fills the cracks in a person's life and psyche in a way that is illuminating, searing, soothing: it is the understanding that art is sprung from a human hand and interpreted by human consciousness, that informed by common experience it becomes quicksilver–alive and vital.
It can, anyway.
And the grief of a father's death, the joy of a daughter's birth, the amazement that the world can be so rapacious and bleak in one moment and so alive with potential and joy in another is enhanced, made impossibly vibrant, by the self-understanding that comes through an active participation in film. Movies aren't a half-life, nor are they life, but they can provide that sublime connection that only good art can provide. They are a comfort and a spur, and a festival is a celebration of the fire of creation and the love of the experience offered, whether by accident or by design, by an artist's hand. So for the 26th Starz Denver International Film Festival, the honour of bringing a film to the event was taken away in the eleventh hour, replaced by a place on a critics' panel discussing journalistic ethics (inspired by the film about disgraced journalist Stephen Glass, Shattered Glass), an opportunity to introduce and discuss Keith Gordon's take on Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, and a jury spot to decide the festival's Kieslowski Award. It's an affirmation of one constant in the entropy of life's bed, that hard work and tenacity and the intent in all things to first be honest to myself, results in the only comfort that life might offer the survivors: a lessening of regret.
So it's a landmark for me, this DIFF. A personal one. I'm looking forward to meeting William H. Macy, in town for The Cooler, and Campbell Scott, in town for many things (his film Off the Map, for one), but mostly in my mind for one of the best films of the year, The Secret Lives of Dentists. I'm looking forward to swallowing this experience and opportunity whole, in great draughts, stuffing myself full with lunar misery, love, life, death, and the potential in every film for the opportunity to know myself, and the world, better.
What better way than in an emerging festival, among friends, in the company of elephants and mayors of the sunset strip. I'll miss you, dad. Wish you could've met my little girl. I'll see you in the movies.
