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  • Forty-Ninth New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center, September 30-October 16, 2011
  • Martha P. Nochimson

The 2011 New York Film Festival continued its practice of the past few years of expanding the number of its offerings. It included, in addition to its main slate of twenty-two new fi lms, a greater number than ever before of avant-garde selections, retrospective series, and director's dialogues. It also included six special anniversary screenings, of which the most important was Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962); ten special documentary presentations; and a potpourri of fi lms listed as "masterworks," which included such disparate offerings as thirty-seven Nikkatsu fi lms noirs from 1927 to 1999 grouped under the title "Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses," William Wyler's 1959 epic remake of Ben-Hur, and Sara Driver's 1981 forty-eight-minute classic indie fi lm You Are Not I. The NYFF offered quality as well as quantity, including a fi lm brought back from the dead; a documentary directly responsible for the reversal of a miscarriage of justice; and a number of main-slate, masterwork, and documentary fi lms centering on recovery and depletion.

Lost and Found.

One of the most dramatic stories of the festival was the resuscitation of Driver's You Are Not I, which was shot by Jim Jarmusch and based on Paul Bowles's short story of the same title.1 Driver believed the fi lm to be irrevocably lost when a warehouse fl ood destroyed what appeared to be the last copy, but a work print was miraculously found in Tangiers by fi lm archivist Francis Poole, who happened upon it accidentally, and Poole worked with Driver to restore it at the University of Delaware. Those who enjoy cinematic [End Page 155] experimentation with the visual portrayal of interior states of being will agree that the film was well worth saving. The film centers on the hopelessly insane Ethel (Suzanne Fletcher), as she escapes from a mental institution, invades her long-suffering sister's home, and is finally recaptured. As Ethel is apprehended by two orderlies, she distorts events so completely that, as we see the scenario through her eyes, she switches places with her sister (Evelyn Smith) and takes over the house while, as Ethel perceives it, she fools the orderlies into taking her sister away. Driver masterfully restricts us to Ethel's disturbed perspective yet makes it clear that our soon-to-be-reincarcerated heroine has willed herself into believing that she is free.

Another highlight of the festival was Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. This documentary is the third film in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's trilogy about the West Memphis Three, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin, three misfit kids from West Memphis, Arkansas, who were worngly convicted of the horrific mutilation and murder of three little boys. In August 2011, after seventeen years of fruitless appeals to the same judge who had overseen their trial, a second judge finally agreed to re-open the case and consider the new DNA evidence that exonerated Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin.

Berlinger and Sinofsky skillfully connect Purgatory with their first two Paradise Lost films, braiding into their account of tireless efforts to bring new evidence to light reminders of the immediate, hysterical reactions of the inhabitants of the Arkansas town depicted in the earlier films. Because the three suspects are oddballs—Misskelley is somewhat simpleminded, and Echols and Baldwin are rebels—once they were accused they were linked in the minds of the townspeople and the jury to Satanism on the barest shreds of evidence. The filmmakers' dedication to this story over almost two decades pays off not only in the part they played in the release of Misskelley and Baldwin from prison, and in Echols's rescue from death row, but also in their impressive depiction of an American community under pressure. The filmmakers' relentless focus on the case allows hidden truths to emerge, as some of those who had initially (and openly) espoused immediate street justice for the accused become their most passionate adherents, and, little by little, the stepfather of one of the murdered boys...

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