Day 1 – From Durango to dinner to darkness.

Note to Google Maps: When giving directions in the Rockies, try to avoid telling people to take off-road turns through mountain passes. Sure it may save some time, but Avis won't appreciate coming to collect their trapped Aveo.

The road from Durango to Telluride is a treacherous thing, especially in the wee hours of the morning when the foxes, skunks, deer, rams and giant, massive, slow-moving elk like to have their little in medias road pow-wows. Also, the hairpin turns, blind curves, 10 MPH switchbacks, falling rocks and sheer drops off the side of the mountains are awesome. At least there weren’t many people stupid enough to be on the road with me as I took all these at higher than advised miles per hour. Again, Avis, sorry about the Aveo, but that thing ain’t meant for steep inclines.

Seems I really didn’t miss much in not attending the free outdoor screening of Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, but I was good and prepared for the official first day of the fest. Ralph cooked up some excellent scrambled eggs and sausage and Jana, Connor, Ralph, and I talked about movies (duh) for a good three hours before heading down for the unveiling of the schedule at noon. A lanyard, beef jerky & cashews (thanks Omaha Steaks!), Altoids, many fruit & nut bars (thanks Larabar!) and TCM keychain flashlight (swag!) later, we paused to look over the schedule and plan the weekend. I’d initially wanted to attend Disco and Atomic War, but the venue was full upon arrival, so my first schedule change of the fest was logged. Note: this is something to get used to. So, I dropped by the second part of a noir trilogy from the BBC.

Red Riding is set over three time periods (‘74, ‘80 & ‘83), coinciding with an ongoing investigation of a series of Jack the Ripper type murders taking place in West Yorkshire. The script for the trilogy is wholly penned by Tony Grisoni, but each segment has a different director at the helm. That position in Red Riding: 1980 is filled by none other than James Marsh, fresh off the Oscar wining doc Man On Wire. He applies a measured hand with the film's pacing to extract every last drop of tension, while his camera constantly places characters in corners of the frame's edge. Red Riding: 1980 is visually engrossing, not just on a technical level, but with the way Marsh lets the camera veer off to capture the grey dinge of this environment. Paddy Considine gives a strong performance as the lead detective brought in from another city to take over the local investigation, but the sinister machinations of his fellow law enforcers make the going rougher than he’d planned. As is the case with most middle films, this doesn’t have the happiest of endings, but given what’s come before in its brief 93 minutes, it’s not at all unexpected. I met with Jana and Connor on the way out, and they assured me that the first film (they had scheduled all three) in the trilogy has an entirely different visual style and filled in some of the back story (not that this one cannot stand alone), so I look forward to seeing parts 1 and 3… though maybe not this weekend.

Having over an hour between films, it was time for the Opening Night Feed wherein festival patrons are uh… fed. The food & wine were stellar and, apparently, pinot noir goes GREAT with churros. (Editor's Note: Easily the most important information provided within.) The mariachi band kicked ass as well, but I needed to queue up for my next picture, so it was off to the uncomfortably warm Le Pierre Theater.

From British TV, to Mexican music, to French docs: film festivals can be so worldly. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is a documentary about a spectacular failure of one of cinema’s most revered directors. In 1964, Clouzot was given an unlimited budget by Columbia Pictures to create his masterpiece any way he saw fit. He wanted to create a film in a new cinematic language, to construct obsession and maddening jealousy. He spent months on camera, lighting, costume and color tests, as well as sound experiments, to visually and aurally sweep the audience away. Once principal photography began, his own obsession with his leading lady and his perfectionist nature lead to the total collapse of an eighteen week shoot in less than three weeks. Since then, the footage has been locked in an archive while a forty year law suit between Clouzot’s widow and the films’ insurance backers raged. The footage of the film itself isn’t all that impressive, though only a scant thirteen hours were ever filmed. What's more interesting is the visually arresting test footage. The doc itself tries to reconstruct parts of the film using the three-hundred page script and two actors used to bridge some of the gaps in the recovered footage, alongside weaving in some of the test materials. There is A LOT going on in this doc and I think something gets lost, but it’s certainly worth a look to see what a beautiful disaster-in-the-making looks like. The animated doc short that played before this, Pictures of Jesus, about the troubles faced by film archivists, was a nice companion piece and quite funny on top of it.

The final film of Day One was Miscreants of Taliwood, an Australian produced doc set in Pakistan’s lawless Northwest Frontier Province. Filmmaker George Gittoes went into this tribal strong-hold on his own to investigate fundamentalist Muslims' rejection of art, music, film and culture. But what he found coexisting with this was a vibrant enclave of guerilla filmmaking artists who churn out low budget, grindhouse-style films for many eager viewers. Along the way, he is cast in one of these films and “acts” alongside the subjects of his documentary. When the local mullah’s force shuts down the industry, Gittoes actually bankrolls a new film (four grand is the typical budget for a two hour Taliwood film) to keep the artists working. This is a really wonderful post-modern adventure, filled with joyous highs and terribly frightening lows (a collective groan escaped from the audience), with a bit of social commentary on the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of these lands.

Coming tomorrow: Day Two coverage from Telluride.