The Woodstock Film Festival: A (Subjective) Overview

Blue Moon (directed by Richard Linklater) is a delectable movie! I invented the word “claustrophilic”; at least I think I did. It’s the opposite of claustrophobic: it’s the love of enclosed spaces. This is a claustrophilic film, conveying the burnished domesticity of a barroom, especially for an alcoholic like Lorenz Hart (played by Ethan Hawke), one of the great American songwriters—who wrote “Blue Moon.” Except for a little scene at the beginning, the whole film takes place at Sardi’s, famous watering hole of Broadway stars of the 1940s (though it still exists). The year is 1942, and it’s the opening night of the musical “Oklahoma!”

It happens that I have been writing a great many songs—in fact, I wrote one today—which is perhaps just a fragment. Here it is:

The Ladder
Let us climb the ladder, up to the tree,
the broad oak tree, that rises above us.
Let us climb until the leaves surround
us: green, green, green!

So I am fascinated with the romance of songwriting, particularly the lyrics—which Hart wrote; Rogers handled the music. The songwriters of that era had perfect meter, clever rhymes, fertile ideas—they weren’t burdened by the necessity for rebellion that haunts all rock music.

Hart is exquisitely tuned to the nuance of an adjective: the difference between, let’s say, “difficult“ and “arduous.” And the word “heart” comes up a lot in Blue Moon, a homonym for his name. Hart was all heart, and like many heartfelt men, died miserably of drink—at 48, the age one generally dies of one’s vices—anyway, that was the age my poetry mentor, Ted Berrigan, expired in an ambulance from hepatitis C, six weeks after I studied with him (at City College).

It’s better to see mediocre movies, because then the next movie doesn’t seem so bad. But Blue Moon is too fine; in comparison Train Dreams (in the same theater, the next day) seemed insipid and pretentious. Though I did have tears in my eyes at parts, and I loved the innocent childlike wife of the protagonist (Felicity Jones), and the actual child they produced. I suppose I resented the title for being so inaccurate. The movie is not much about trains, nor about dreams. It should’ve been called I Like to Carry an Axe, because the hero, Robert Grainier, was a sturdy lumberjack.

I did approve of the film’s politics, however. The theme of Train Dreams is that if you mistreat immigrants, your life is thereafter doomed.

I don’t normally pan films, or pan anything, but this narrative annoyed me—perhaps simply because I prefer movies set at Sardi’s to those taking place in the woods of Washington state. And I will always choose a drunk telling hundreds of jokes over a manly man mumbling.

“You’re a poet! Didn’t you like the poetry in the movie?” Author Gail Straub asked me afterwards.

“What poetry in what movie?” I caustically replied.

But with Straub was Nancy Collet, a woman with an occupation I’d never encountered: “festival strategist.” She worked for a film called Floaters. “It’s produced by three siblings who all went to summer camp together—and their parents met at the same camp. And they send their kids to the same camp! It’s in the Catskills,” the strategist explained. “And the movie was filmed in that camp!”

“Well, I’ll try to see it,” I replied.

Ms. Collet sent me the phone number of one of the siblings, Shai Korman, whom I called as I rode the bus back to Phoenicia. The name of the summer camp, I learned, was Tel Yehudah, located in the Sullivan County hamlet of Barryville. Korman and his siblings were born in Philadelphia, but grew up in Montreal. We discussed the merits of Montreal bagels for a while, then my bus drifted out of cell range.

If you go to enough movies, the world starts looking like a movie. A boyfriend and girlfriend walk down the street whispering to each other. It’s like the first scene of a romcom! Eventually they’ll break up, but probably reunite before the final credits, bruised but wiser.

The next day I saw Floaters, a film with a lot of heart, the only problem being that it reminded me of my more humiliating moments at summer camp, plus my own ambivalences about being Jewish. (The title, incidentally, refers to campers who don’t choose a particular sport or craft, and end up in the “miscellaneous” group, led by Nomi, played by Jackie Tohn, a failed emo songwriter.) Perhaps no other movie has captured the utopian ethos of summer camp, the feeling that if all campers work together, they can reshape the world.

After the film, I interviewed Korman and the music supervisor for the film, Matthew Hearon Smith—who also chose the music for Anora, which won the Academy Award for best movie this year. “My favorite get-to-know-you question for anyone is, ’What’s your favorite music moment in a movie?’” Korman disclosed. “And I have an answer.” (It turned out to be when the band in That Thing You Do hears their song on the radio for the first time.)

I decided to see a short film program called “Nice to Meet You,” and rushed off to the Woodstock Community Center. But four women were protesting Trump at the Village Green, so I stopped for a moment to support them. “I made a sign for tomorrow’s No Kings demonstration,“ I told them. “It says ‘Melt ICE.‘” They all laughed.

“I’m late for these films, but I wanted to stand with you,” I explained.

“Go, go!“ one of them commanded. “Movies are more important than democracy.” (She actually said that.)

So I continued on my way.

I loved those little films! Are shorts getting better, or is my attention span—like those of my fellow North Americans—shrinking? My favorite, and the most visually satisfying film I saw at the festival, was Gloria (directed by Kim Blanck). It had almost no plot. An elderly Chinese woman fears that she’s getting dementia. She sees an article: “To Prevent Dementia, Learn a Second Language.“ She goes to her bookshelf and pulls out an old copy of Spanish for Beginners, and begins sounding out the words on the first page. On one of her daily walks, she enters a Latino grocery store, and meets Carlos, the young man who works there. She says, “Buenos dias,” and he replies, “Buenos tardes,” and she’s embarrassed. They exchange names, and he asks Gloria her real Chinese name. She tells him, and Carlos, it turns out, knows a few words of Chinese.

That’s the whole movie. No big “payoff,” just a moment of sympathy between strangers. That’s enough for a film, if you ask me.

Another of the shorts, Disc (directed by Blake Winston Rice), was the most emotional experience of the weekend. A woman and a man are sharing a hotel room, they’re at a business convention and just met and hooked up the night before. The woman is about to leave in the morning, when she goes to the bathroom, and begins to call for help. “Are you OK?” the man—who’s still in his underwear—asks, through the bathroom door.

“No,” she answers. “I have an alternative tampon, and it’s stuck in my vagina. I need your help to get it out.“

Thus begins a protracted battle between the man and the modernistic tampon, which is comical, suspenseful, and truly excruciating. Of course, there are parallels with childbirth, though this is, in a sense, birth’s opposite.

Eventually, the bloody disc is extracted, and the man and woman gaze at one another with relief, exhaustion, and mutual embarrassment.

Actors tend to overact or underact. When they overact, they smile too much; they look too surprised when they’re supposed to be startled. They don’t trust the audience to infer their emotional state; they overstate it, and then overstate it again. Underactors mumble and slouch. They look like the person sitting next to you in the theater. Great actors find that middle ground between over- and underacting.

Franz is a real movie, a “biopic“ of Franz Kafka (filmed in Prague, Berlin, and Vienna) that’s also a Kakaesque nightmare, culminating in the Holocaust, which might have destroyed our hero (and certainly did murder his three sisters) had not tuberculosis done the job earlier, in 1924. Kafka’s absurd health regime—chewing each mouthful of food 50 times, doing exercises that look like mime improv—is more disturbing than his fiction.

The last movie I saw, Yes, was almost a continuation of Franz: A gruesome oversexed phantasmagoria about life in Israel today, centering around a couple who perform near-suicidal dances at elite Israeli parties. (Problems begin when they have a kid.) In Israel today, Nadav Lapid (the director of Yes) implies, there are just two options: frenzied dancing and deep depression. The film’s surrealism is so carefully calibrated, it’s inseparable from “normal” neo-disco/cocaine culture.

I see very few movies in my normal life. Rarely do I have the urge to sit before a glowing screen in darkness (except, of course, to watch dumb TV shows with my wife on her laptop). But at the Woodstock Film Festival—and I have gone every single year, even during the pandemic—I bathe in the visions of today’s auteurs. Now, two days later, my mind is collaging everything I saw into one big film: Yes Franz Gloria Disc Floaters Train Moon Blue Dreams.