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It wasn't the sort of place people usually see a movie in. No boorish Moorish architecture, no chewing gum under the seats. Instead, the hall was a deep blue nave, immensely high and still, looped gracefully with golden galleries. And the images on the screen were not the sort one sees at the average alhambra. No Tammy, no Debbie, no winning of the West. Instead, a bear roamed and roared in a Mexican mansion and a regiment of French actors fought the American Civil War and a samurai disemboweled himself right there in front of everybody.
The first New York Film Festival, now at Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, must confess its infancy compared to Cannes and to Venice, which had its first film festival in 1932. But by its taste and high excitement, by the quality of its films and the intelligence of its sellout crowds, it may well mark for Americans a redefinition of what movies are and who it is that sees them. For in the decade since Hollywood came unstuck and television became the reigning medium of mass entertainment, the movies have suddenly and powerfully emerged as a new and brilliant international art, indeed as perhaps the central and characteristic art of the age.
All the World's . . . The new status of cinema has largely been achieved by movies from abroad, by an array of vigorous and original creators who live and work in every quarter of the globe. At the heart of the new movement is a hardy little band of inspired pioneers: Japan's Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon); Sweden's Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries); France's Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Man Amour) and Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows); Italy's Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita), Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura) and Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers); England's Tony Richardson (Look Back in Anger); Poland's Andrzej Wajda (Kanal) and Roman Polanski (Two Men and a Wardrobe); Argentina's Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (Summerskin); India's Satyajit Ray (Father Panchali).
Their imitators are legion. All over the world—in Canada, Greece, Brazil, Japan, Israel, Hungary and both Germanys, even in Moscow and immoderately in Manhattan—cinemania has descended upon the rising generation. Young men at all hours of the day and night stalk through the streets clutching fleaweight cameras and proclaiming prophetically a new religion of cinema. Its creed has been passionately enunciated by Director Truffaut.
"It is necessary," he once cried, "to film another thing in another spirit. It is necessary to abandon these expensive, disorderly, insalubrious studios. The sun costs less than a battery of lights. A borrowed camera, some cheap film, a friend's apartment, friends to play the parts, and above all the faith, the rage of the cinema—the rage to storm the barricade, to use this way of expression—the way of the future, the art of the future. A revolution of intentions is beginning. No longer do we trust in the old labels, the established themes. To express ourselves! To be free, free of prejudice, free of the old cult of technique, free of everything, to be madly ambitious and madly sincere!"