The Circuit

by Timothy M. Gray
You gotta love any fest that schedules "The Baader Meinhof Complex,"  "High School Musical 3,"  and Michael Cimino lecturing about dance sequences in movies.

The Rome Film Fest, running Oct 22-31, is spread throughout the city and one of the centers is the Auditorium,  at the site of the Olympic Village built for the 1960 Games. On a Sunday morning the place was buzzing, filled with something you don't see at every festival: "real" people. The fest takes care of the industry folk nicely, but one of its goals is to bring cinema to the locals. So you see families (there was a morning screening of the French-language "Magique" as part of the fest's sidebars of kids films), young couples, and adults of all ages mixing it up with industry types. A film festival for audiences: what a concept!

As I said, it's really smoothly run, which is especially impressive this year. The fest was begun two years ago by the former mayor, and Rome's newly elected mayor vowed to cancel this year's edition. The fest folk weren't sure until late summer if this event was a go. It's hard to pull a fest together in a 12 months so this gang gets high marks for doing it in a fraction of the time.

Rome itself is unique. You walk down any street and pass a leather shop, women's fashion store, 2,000-year-old ruin, restaurant ... You can see office workers sitting in excavated ruins, eating their lunch. It's pretty amazing for someone from Los Angeles, where a building from the 1920s is considered a historic landmark.

In the Olympic Village area are makeshift restaurants. There's also a fest shop where you can buy umbrellas, caps, sweatshirts and typical fest souvenirs. But this shop also offers something that should be mandatory at all fests: Red Bull.

One of the highlights of Rome these days is "Chromosomes," a project by David Cronenberg (pictured) at the city's prestigious Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Italian company Volumnia worked with the filmmaker for two years on the project which is presented in association with the fest. In a huge space, there are 60 blown-up frames from his films, printed on canvas. It's impossible to identify the film in most cases, which is the point. It's not intended to remind you of the movies but to create a cinematic experience in a new format. So there are shots of hands, feet, interiors, decay, fire, destruction... all of his obsessions. Every picture tells a story, as they say, and two small monitors show fragments of the films, while electronic music and Puccini play almost inaudibly. This is a totally original work and should find a home at other museums around the world.

On Oct 25, Scott Kirsner (gentleman, scholar and occasional contributor to Variety) presented "Innovation and the Cinema," a witty and fun look at the tech changes (and resistance to them) in the past 100-plus years. He used slides, posters, clips and quotes and included everything from Thomas Edison through YouTube, including Bing Crosby, William Castle, Walter Murch, Jack Valenti and the gang from "Monsters, Inc." Scott has a new book out, "Inventing the Movies," and the session made me want to read it. Shameless plug, I know, but his hour presentation was really fun.


Exterior photos by Timothy M. Gray, Cronenberg photo by Elisabetta Villa/Wireimage.com.