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Telluride Film Festival: Geoff Dyer, Tarkovsky\'s \'Stalker,\' Chaplin and More

September 2, 2012, 4:57 pm

By A.O. SCOTT

Late Saturday night, near the end a lively dinner at a local restaurant, Tom Luddy, one of the Telluride Film Festival's triumvirate of directors, was lamenting that journalists covering the festival focus too much on the Oscar race. Timing has something to do with this. Telluride, synchronous with Venice and just ahead of Toronto, is inevitably one of the first steps on the long march to the Kodak Theater. For the past two years it has presented the eventual Best Picture winner. The presence of movie stars stopping through to receive tributes, answer audience questions and humbly promote their new movies may also contribute to the hype. Bill Murray, Ben Affleck, Dennis Quaid and Marion Cotillard are all here doi ng just that, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning at Elks Park in the center of town.

But Mr. Luddy had a point. “This started out as a festival of cinephiles,” he said, and the program has always included restored and rediscovered older films-classics as well as curios-alongside the newest Cannes prize winners and Academy Award aspirants. This year, the writer and critic Geoff Dyer is serving as guest director, which means he has been invited to program a half-dozen of his favorite films. Unsurprisingly, one of them is “Stalker,” Andrei Tarkovsky's slow and enigmatic 1979 science fiction allegory, the subject of Mr. Dyer's new book “Zona.” The chance to see all 160 minutes of this film projected from a celluloid print is a rare opportunity in North America, and one that enough festival-goers were eager to seize that a second Telluride screening was added.

Alexander Payne, who was here last year with “The Descendants,” returned to show “I Knew Her Well,” a 1965 Italian melodrama directed by Antonio Pietrangeli and starring Stefania Sandrelli as a young woman who moves to Rome to make it as an actress. Roger Corman, the prolific exploitation producer and director who jump-started half the careers of the New Hollywood in the 1970s, was honored with a tribute and screenings of two of his 1960s masterworks, “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Intruders.” Devotees of silent cinema could seek out restored Charlie Chaplin shorts and “Hands Up!,” a 1926 comedy directed by Clarence G. Badger with a few jokes that seem to anticipate “The Book of Mormon.” The Oscars can wait. At least until my next dispatch.

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