Crimes of Admission

Highlights of this year's pricey-but-potent Tribeca Film Festival.

by Sam Adams

LINE IN THE SAND: Alex Gibney's powerful Taxi to the Dark Side received "Best Documentary" honors, but left Manhattan without a distributor. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Eighteen bucks a ticket. Going into this year's Tribeca Film Festival, all anyone was talking about was the 50 percent admission increase, which left the six-year-old event a cut above most major gatherings of its kind. In a talk before the festival, director Peter Scarlet compared staging a film festival to other forms of pricey public art. "People don't realize what it costs to put on a film festival in New York City," he said. "They don't think twice about paying for grand opera."

This year had its operatic moments, notably the screenings of Passio, Paolo Cherchi Usai's silent tribute to cinema's first century, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. With live accompaniment by the Trinity Choir, it was the sort of once-in-a-lifetime event for which most cinema-goers would gladly chip in a little extra. But at most screenings, the price hike meant nothing more than an increase in the minimum bet, which, given the festival's size and omnivorous tastes, was often far from a sure thing.

Of course, there's no putting a price on great art, especially when it might not come around again. Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, which took the festival's documentary prize, seems a surefire candidate for national release. But as of yet, no distributor has taken the plunge, and the film's subject matter makes waiting to see it an unaffordable luxury. It's not the first film to ponder abuses committed by American soldiers, but it's the most comprehensive, and, so far, the best.

Jumping off from the case of Dilawar, a 22-year-old cabbie who was beaten to death in a U.S.-run prison in Afghanistan, Taxi systematically dismantles the notion that such acts can be seen as isolated aberrations. Rather, Gibney sees the soldiers' behavior as the inevitable result of an official policy that pays lip service to human rights while deliberately resisting any attempt to codify them. The lack of moral leadership combined with the intense pressure of combat creates a scenario in which abuse is all but guaranteed. As one former soldier puts it, "You put people in a crazy place, they'll do crazy things."

The latest from critical favorite Jia Zhang-ke, Still Life is a dazzling addition to a series of films contemplating the state of contemporary China. Shot in crystalline high-def, the movie tracks the progress of two lost souls through the rapidly altering landscape of Fengje, a town that has literally been swallowed up by progress. A coal miner searching for his long-lost wife arrives to find that their home is underwater, flooded as part of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, a structure so massive it obviates any need for special effects (although Jia, evidently unwilling to be pigeonholed as a social realist, provides a few all the same).

Tribeca's organizers style the festival as the biggest of big tents, able to accommodate the premiere of Spider-Man 3 and the rarest art-house gems. So it's fitting that the four-hour Marlon Brando documentary was matched by an equally generous portrait of a far less well-known individual: 1960s filmmaker Peter Whitehead. Paul Cronin's capacious overview could easily be called self-indulgent: Whitehead is hardly a prominent figure. But the film clearly aspires to more than standard biography, especially given that half of its considerable length is devoted to Whitehead's life after he gave up film for painting and assorted other methods of truth-seeking.

Tribeca's scope allows for a myriad possibility of self-curated mini-festivals, and you certainly could have put one together focusing only on documentaries about misfit visionaries. The lineup included profiles of Scott Walker (30th Century Man), who went from being a '60s pop star to a reclusive, doomy art rocker, and artist Will Eisner, who more or less invented the graphic novel. But none was quite as poignant as the story of Danny Williams, the onetime Warhol collaborator who disappeared at age 27.

Directed by Williams' niece, Esther Robinson, the movie presents him as a casualty of fame, just one more artistic resource and ex-lover left to founder in Warhol's wake. Robinson instills her uncle's story with a sense of mystery, not just that of his disappearance, but the difficulty of historical reconstruction itself. There's a fascinating back-and-forth dealing with Williams' role in designing the lights for the famed Exploding Plastic Inevitable show; filmmaker Paul Morrissey denies Williams had any significant role, but then the movie reveals that the two once came to blows in the middle of a show. Biography becomes a matter of conflicting agendas, always with a gaping hole at its center. Whether that insight is worth the price of admission is open to question, but it's not the kind of thing you're left pondering every day.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)