Searching for Sundance
Festival attempts to reinvent itself as indie films evolve to include major stars
By DUANE DUDEK
Journal Sentinel film critic
Posted: Jan. 14, 2004
Like a mountain trail that rudely meets the falling skier, this year's Sundance Film Festival, beginning today and running through Jan. 25, will be in your face.
While the festival and its filmmakers shared the nation's cautious mood, tempering the tone and rhetoric of the films presented at the festival post-Sept. 11, 2001 - and with its own identity becoming buried by the avalanche that success can bring - the 20th anniversary edition of Sundance attempts to jump-start the festival's role as the loyal opposition.
Founded by Robert Redford as an alternative to the Hollywood studio system but showing some of the atrophying qualities of an institution itself, Sundance looks to reinvent itself again with a slate of probing, challenging and even defiant films.
Whether they find success like some films that emerged from last year's festival - "The Station Agent," "American Splendor" and "Capturing the Friedmans" are all getting awards-season acclaim - remains to be seen. But if art in any way reflects the national climate, this year's entries show contrarian tendencies.
"This generation of films is definitely a response to September 11," said festival director Geoffrey Gilmore. "The arrogance of American insularity and self-centeredness is gone. There are a number of films in which there's a search for knowledge. A search for something, a memory, information about something that occurs, that reminds you of the" way films from the 1950s "reflected the insecurity and anxiety about the atom bomb and the changing political climate."
In the same way, Gilmore said, "the changing political climate and in some sense the specific threat to American homogeneity . . . is finally being reflected in some of this work."
Narrative features such as the fragmented "November," about a shooting death; "Primer," about a device that could change the world; and "Below the Belt," about workers at a toxic factory that uses live action and animation, are aesthetically adventurous experiments. Documentaries such as "Heir to an Execution," about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; "Persons of Interest," about Arab or Muslim immigrants detained after Sept. 11; "The Hunting of the President," about Clinton-bashers; and "The Yes Men," by Milwaukee filmmakers Chris Smith and Sarah Price, about anarchists who taunt the World Trade Organization, put their finger on hot-button issues.
And films by and about women, African-Americans and the aboriginal experience abound.
Next stage of indie evolution
Set in the tiny Wasatch Mountain range crevasse known as Park City, Utah, the film festival began as a sleepy ski resort showcase for what what author Peter Biskind, in his book "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film," dismisses as politically correct "granola" cinema.
But after the success of "sex, lies and videotape" in 1989, this gave way to a bazaar-like frenzy of cell phones, limos and ill-conceived million-dollar deals. Over time, the independent and mainstream movements merged in a way that makes it hard to tell them apart, and the films at the festival reflect this changed aesthetic.
"The whole spectrum of independent filmmaking is bigger than it was," Gilmore said. "The fact that we have films in competition this year with major stars in them, that talks about the evolution of independent film."
And while there are few stars this year to compare with last year's Al Pacino, Nicole Kidman and Bob Dylan, this year's entries feature Hilary Swank ("Iron Jawed Angels"), Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick ("Marie and Bruce"), Jamie Foxx ("Redemption"), Ray Romano ("Eulogy"), Kevin Bacon ("The Woodsman") and Redford himself, who stars in "The Clearing" and who produced "The Motorcycle Diaries." It is the first time Redford has ever starred in a film presented at the festival, Gilmore said.
Stars are drawn to independent fare "because they want to expand creatively," said Greg Harrison, director of "November," with Courteney Cox. "They want a completely different acting experience."
"November," in which Cox plays a woman coping with the shooting death of her boyfriend, "was completely guerrilla filmmaking," said Harrison, who directed the all-night rave film "Groove." "We had no trailers. We had no amenities. She did her own stunts. She fell. She hit her head. She laid on the dirty floor of an actual location.
"It was a real eye-opener to her. She's in every frame of the movie. And because we were shooting in 15 days and shooting so quickly, she might have three or four intense emotional scenes in one day. It really pushed her, but she totally responded and put in a performance no one has seen from her before."
E-mail Duane Dudek at ddudek@journalsentinel.com.
