NYFF 08, 9/16.

The New York Film Festival's press screenings began on Friday. In a way, then, there are two NYFFs, the first being a sort of extensive virtual preview, as online critics rush their reviews to an eager readership, while the second - running September 26 through October 12 - is the more traditional affair, the one open to the public who may or may not be choosing which films to see based on what they've read in the morning papers (whose editors have held their writers' reviews in accordance with the official NYFF calendar) or on what they remember reading two weeks before or on what they've read online just a moment ago - in collections such as Slant's, which, of course, will be complete and handy and still online.

Updated through 9/22.

Does this mean there'll be two rounds of entries here at the Daily for each and every film screening at NYFF this year? Probably not. I'll be playing it by ear. But this entry's for gathering NYFF overview-like items, such as noting that Vadim Rizov is off and running at the House Next Door or that Daniel Kasman, who's already seen several of this year's crop in Berlin, Cannes and Toronto, nevertheless has a fine list of what he's looking forward to in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Updates, 9/18: "[B]ecause of the festival's anemic stats of exclusive films and the elitist trappings, I have begun to wonder: Who is the New York Film Festival - the city's most prestigious film fest - really for? And does it even need to exist?" Simon Abrams asks around for the New York Press.

ST VanAirsdale revives the Reeler to voice his well-argued objections to Abrams's piece in the NYP. Also, Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door: "Had I known the thrust of Simon's piece (which is provocative, surely, but which I largely disagree with), I wouldn't have responded the way I did; the festival is a good thing."

Update, 9/19: Filmmaker's postedJamie Stuart's teaser for the series of shorts he'll be working on this year - and a piece by Karina Longworth:

If traditional videotaped entertainment coverage tries to foster the illusion that the end user of an entertainment product has been invited to an intimate conversation with a filmmaker or star, Stuart's NYFF coverage constantly reminds us that there is an architect behind that fake conversation. It takes the all-seeing but allegedly impartial press conference eye and restores to it the intellectual agency and emotional response of the interested but skeptical viewer. Stuart’s NYFF dispatches are not quite filmmaking, not quite video blogging and not quite journalism, but transmissions from one brain inside the press hive, without phony objectivity, without bought-and-paid-for favor, without filters.

Update, 9/21: Not Coming to a Theater Near You opens its special section.

Update, 9/22: The Auteurs' Notebook indexes nine reviews of the festival's films.

Posted by dwhudson at September 16, 2008 11:31 AM