Wild Time in Tours

Abstract

For the past five years an energetic group of young Frenchmen, with financial support from the government, have organized an increasingly popular and successful short-film festival in the pleasantly provincial city of Tours, a three-hour drive from Paris. Unlike the summertime feature-film festivals which devote a great deal of time to marginal if agreeable frippery and folderol, Tours is strictly for film-makers, critics, and a sprinkling of concerned producers. Here, lodged together in the suitably named Hotel de l'Univers, 150 young directors and film critics from some 20 countries meet; they exchange ideas and methods for attacking film problems during three congenial, intensive days, while all manner of shorts are being screened from ten in the morning through midnight in two of the local theaters. Most of the showings-top prices $4-are sold out to the townsfolk. This year's festival was marked by plenty of hullabaloo in the best French tradition of vocal manifestations of displeasure to art. Audience reaction had been relatively peaceful during the first two days except for occasional good-natured sniping from the Cahiers-Cinema 60-Positif gangs (these are the leading French intellectual film publications) in the first three orchestra rows during pretentious or religious films (French movie critics are resolutely anti-clerical). But on the afternoon of the last day, A Dancer's World, by Peter Glushanok, made a few years back for U.S. television, hit the well-fed, well-wined Sunday provincial audience quite wrong. Not understanding what Martha Graham was saying, they could only see a strangely got-up woman speaking in a clearly mannered way. Some hoots went up, then loud unkind laughter. As the dancers appeared on the screen in a style thoroughly alien-modern dance has never caught on in France-the laughter got very loud, and the jibes mounted. The critics-most of whom, despite their unfamiliarity with the style of dance, saw the merit of the film-began shouting for quiet and exchanging insults with the local townsfolk.