Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan

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СКАЧАТЬ Utah: The First Annual Guerrilla International Film Festival.” Helped by the scorn of Sundance Institute president Robert Redford, who grumbled about “a festival that's attached itself to us in a parasitical way,” Slamdance has grown into something of a venerable institution itself, with over 2,000 films applying for slots and road show versions traveling to New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., London, and even Cannes. Not bad for a fest that was, to quote Redford again, “born out of rejection.”

      Aside from Slamdance, some of the more prominent rivals include No Dance, “acclaimed as the world's first and only DVD-projected film festival,” and Slamdunk, which made a name for itself showing Nick Broomfield's Kurt and Courtney documentary amid the mounted heads at the local Elks Hall after Sundance canceled its screening due to threats of legal action. More amorphous but very much present are such entities as Lapdance, DigiDance, Dances with Films, and Son of Sam Dance, which turned out to be a Toyota van with a projector attached to its roof. Even author Ken Kesey got into the act, claiming tongue-in-cheek that he was “going to organize the Slim Chance Festival. You will have to have received a number of rejections to qualify.”

      Though it lasted only one year, Slumdance is one of the more fondly remembered alternatives. Set up in a 6,000-square-foot basement that was once a Mrs. Fields cookie factory, Slumdance was started by a hang-loose group who called themselves Slumdance Programming Vagrants and managed 150 submissions before opening night. As their press release headline nicely put it, “Slumdance Stuns Movie World by Existing.”

      The Slumdance gang literally outfitted their basement like a mock slum. You entered through a mission area that served free soup, past a Tent City (individual video areas designed like hobo housing) and entered the Lounge, the main screening area outfitted with projectors, couches, and sleeping bags. Around the corner and behind a curtain was a set of concrete steps leading nowhere in particular. Not surprisingly, it was dubbed the Stairway to Acquisitions.

      Equally inventive were the mock festivals dreamed up by the local alternative newspaper, the Park City Ear. One year it was Sleazedance, “a combination of exhibitionism and porn,” which planned to show features like Jeremiah's Johnson in “a lime-green Volkswagen Vanagon with tassels on the headlights.” This gave way to Skindance, the name changed for “credibility,” which highlighted Anna Lands the King, Adult Toy Story 2, and The Talented Mr. Strip-Me. With Sundance showing films like American Pimp and Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, there were days when you couldn't tell Skindance from the real thing.

      What all this means is that Sundance has become more than just the mother ship for the American independent movement, more than the premier showcase for films that don't march to Hollywood's drum. Because the festival and the independent scene grew up together, because they nurtured each other and made each other strong, Sundance has become America's preeminent film event and, says Lory Smith in his Party in a Box history of Sundance, “arguably one of the most influential film festivals in the world.” This is a highly unlikely situation for a part of the world where ten feet of snow can accumulate in ten days and a town that had hardly any movie theaters and none within walking distance of each other. Though careful planning has allowed the festival to pretty much keep pace with its growing importance, it was happenstance more than anything else that put it in Park City in the first place.

      If anything made this town a good match for the festival, it's a rambunctious history as what “Walking through Historic Park City” calls “one of the largest bonanza camps in the West,” the source of enough silver, lead, and zinc to create the fortune of William Randolph Hearst's millionaire father George. At its zenith Park City boasted sixteen houses in its Red Light District as well as twenty-seven saloons, one of which was robbed by George “Butch Cassidy” Parker. And from 1926 on, it had its own movie theater, the Egyptian, apparently a replica of Warner's Egyptian in Pasadena and, to quote “Walking through” again, “one of only two Egyptian revival-style buildings in Utah.”

      Though I experienced a lot of Sundance history, I wasn't there at the beginning. As detailed in Smith's book, the festival started in 1978 in Salt Lake City and, though immediately interested in films made regionally outside the studio system, it had to go through several incarnations and numerous name changes — from the U.S. Film Festival to the Utah/U.S. Film Festival to the United States Film & Video Festival to the Sundance/United States Film Festival to Sundance — to get to where it is today.

      It was director Sydney Pollack, or so the story goes, who suggested to the powers that be in 1980 that “you ought to move the festival to Park City and set it in the wintertime. You'd be the only film festival in the world held in a ski resort during ski season, and Hollywood would beat down the door to attend.”

      Involved in the festival, almost from the beginning, was local resident Robert Redford, who had purchased land in the Wasatch Mountains as far back as 1969. Redford, related by marriage to Sterling Van Wagenen, the festival's first director, was chairman of its board of directors and the key figure in eventually having his cultural-minded, multidisciplinary arts organization, the Sundance Institute, take on the festival in 1985 and eventually change the name in 1991. Lory Smith, one of the festival's founders, claims in his book, “We were on the cusp of success whether Sundance had become involved or not,” adding “Sundance seemed determined from the outset to rewrite the festival's history as well as its own — to make it seem as if they had rescued a small-time festival from obscurity.” Still, it's undeniable, as Smith himself reports, that Sundance's involvement “catapulted the festival into the stratosphere of press and public attention,” which is where I found it.

      My first festival visit was in 1986, when I didn't know enough to bring a heavy coat, skiers still looked down their poles at outnumbered movie interlopers, and the state's beverage consumption laws, once almost Talmudic in complexity, had changed enough to allow the local Chamber of Commerce to boast that “Utah's newly revised liquor laws are almost normal now.”

      Though it had been in Park City for five years, the event itself still had some of the sleepy spirit that Errol Morris remembers from showing his pet-cemetery themed Gates of Heaven at the 1982 festival, only the second to be held in Park City. “There was a snowstorm, I was staying in a godforsaken condo and I only had a small idea where it was located,” Morris remembers. “I had to hitchhike back there, and I was picked up by people who'd been in the theater and had hated the movie. They asked me what I thought, and since I had no alternative means of transportation, I said I, too, was extremely disappointed.”

      I didn't attend Sundance on a regular basis until the 1992 festival, by which time I'd acquired a reliable winter coat, and American audiences, increasingly let down by the unadventurous, lowest-common-denominator nature of Hollywood production, were acquiring a taste for what Sundance was providing, films that the festival itself amusingly caricatured in a clever, albeit self-satisfied thirty-second spot that began every screening at the 1996 festival.

      A project of an ad/film class at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, the spot opened on a unusual assembly line, with impassive workers taking identical cans of film and pushing them through slots of the same size, again and again and again.

      But wait. Here's a film that doesn't fit. Alarm bells go off, a crack emergency team appears and thrusts the oversized can into a yellow box marked “Sundance International Film Festival.” “Where do they take it?” someone asks as the offending item disappears inside a departing truck. A coworker gives a laconic, one-word answer: “Utah.”

      Almost every year of its existence, Sundance has managed to discover at least one memorable dramatic film. Aside from the features already mentioned, debuts included The Waterdance, In the Soup, Four Weddings and a Funeral (its American premier), The Usual Suspects, Living in Oblivion, Big Night, Ulee's Gold, Girl fight, and You Can Count on Me. And that's only the dramatic features.

      On the documentary side, things СКАЧАТЬ