Telluride: A Well-Meaning But Admittedly Overdue Reflection

1

The Telluride Film Festival is not a press festival. Periodically throughout our frantic orientation one of the haggard, baggy-eyed volunteers running the Telluride Student Symposium would proudly mention the lack of press in town. They treat it as an unequivocable laurel — as if the lack of commoditized coverage elevates Telluride to a covetable position on the film festival prestige-scale. Or, more accurately, as if the lack of pestering film critics and highbrow culture-column mavens preserves Telluride from that sort of nosy, voyeuristic reportage that usually accompanies red carpets and celebrity panels. The general gist of our responsibility as Symposium Students to uphold this rarefied, a-journalistic environment can be best summed up by a semi-contradictory mandate relayed to us by one of the Symposium directors: “Feel free to take pictures of Michael Keaton and Meryl Streep on stage during a panel-discussion, but do not ask them for selfies in the streets.”

The press did subsist in Telluride, however, slinking about unassumingly within the packs of cinephilic philanthropists and slack-jawed tourists. The Guardian was there, given they were the primary sponsor of the event. IndieWire was there — their articles offering up some groggily-cobbled bit of critical discourse concerning the last night’s premiere, published at the break of dawn ex post, were stark if somewhat unimpressive evidence of their presence.

But Telluride never felt like a critic’s Eden in disguise — never even offered a hint of some ulterior motive involving press-exclusivity vis-a-vis a cliquish docket available only to those select few members of Arts & Culture press fortunate enough to be offered an invitation. Nothing ever so elitist or esoteric, no… Telluride was every bit the discerning festival that’s blanched across all the brochures and promotional articles and alumni testimony; a true torch-bearer for that pretentious little suffix — really putting the ‘ic in filmic. It was a fustian playground for those absurdly rich and pompous folks who might be called “magnates” in their respective socio-economic circles and possess the sort of ravishly disposable income that enables their false sense of intellectualism, that fills up their Saturday-night event planners with independently-produced operas and gallery openings and feminist film screenings, that shoots them off on portentous, insufferable soliloquies about “the state of things.”

The festival happily spoiled nouveau riche ex/wannabe-hippies with artsy film rhetoric — assuaged their self-absorption by whisking them away to a mountain-commune within which they all flexed their lofty sponsorship of artistic creation. It encouraged the smug masturbation of cultural certitude, the gentle massaging of those mental muscles that assure us all of our pre-ordained place high above the rest of the inconsequential world. On paper and occasionally even in practice, the Telluride Film Festival is the sort of place “big-spenders” visit whenever they start to feel guilty about conflating fast-food-service employees with trained chimpanzees — it’s cyclical, nihilistic art-therapy for the stupidly rich and falsely cultured.

Truth be told, we students never really noticed or cared about this fatuous aristocracy putting on their self-indulgent little show. Partly because they were all so uniformly benign, and they cloaked all their lordly blithering with cheery greetings beneath overcast sunrises and casual small-talk on gondola rides — like one of those cookie-cutter TV-set ads from the High Fifties when everyone wore poodle skirts and pinstripes and smiled at you through their white teeth and white skin and made you feel like you too could join their sick club, if only you bought in. But our affection for the town and the people arose not just from their kindness, but also from the beauty of the place. Cynicism and disaffection sort of evaporate in the high-altitude, and the thin oxygen racing through your ravenous lungs only has so much room to carry negative thoughts, and you find yourself expending your dwindling energies on sensory-absorption — on really eating up the cliffscape and the cloudbox and the wonder.

2

When I went I did not go alone. Maybe there would have been some romantic, Jack Kerouac / Jack London / Jon Krakauer / H.D. Thoreau-y aspect to my trudging my lonely way up the Rocky Mountains to romp dreamily through the worst-kept little secret in the film-festival circuit. And surely if I returned with untold leather notebooks filled with prosaic musings about the whole sabbatical it would have made for a sentimental little tale, the kind read by bored baristas and overly-caffeinated gentry in claustrophobic cafes — the sort of florid, bombastic treatise that swanky East Coast magazines would love to publish in an effort to make their jaded bourgeoises readership feel better about themselves. It’s a nice dream. But no, I did not go alone.

I went with my buddy Ethan, and we drove all of I-70 from Denver to Telluride,CO, turning my otherwise proto-transcendentalist beatnik sojourn into the classic American road-trip; thunderous Classic Rock filtered through spotty FM coverage culminating in a home-stretch karaoke rendition of Boston’s 1976 classic “Piece of Mind.” And yes, my preliminary excitement for this 24-hour long stretch of the journey definitely equaled, if not exceeded, my anticipation for the festival itself. But much of this imbalanced enthusiasm was owed to my not knowing what to expect from the Telluride Film Festival.

I’d received some lengthy email-attachments concerning lodging and travel and scheduling and check-in and codes of conduct and food-costs and cetera…but no amount of practical instruction could prepare me for the feeling of the place. And so much of Telluride, in hindsight, depended on the feeling — the atmosphere, the mien, the vibe, the aura, the spirit or soul or what have you. It’s the sort of ephemeral phenomenon that cannot be codified or rationalized or explained. So I went on a whim and a wind, spurned forward by an essay contest I had won some six months prior, having spent all twenty-five of those anticipatory weeks carefully planning, scheduling, booking, emailing…physically but not mentally preparing for my week in the mountains. In hindsight, this lack of concern for the actual particulars of my impending adventure wasn’t really much of a mistake after all — even if I had tried, I couldn’t have possibly put together an accurate portrait of what was to come.

Ethan and I agreed early on we would drive. We had to drive. Ignoring for a second our mutual affection for finding cinematic quality in everyday moments, a la roadtrips through the American heartland and midnight rides down unlit gondolas, both Ethan and I felt it would have been spurious to fly straight to some remote airport in the mountains and take a shuttle to Telluride. There was something unsportsmanlike about letting machines carry us autonomously to our destination. If we were going to do it the ur-Americana way, then we were going to drive. Our itinerary had us landing in Denver around 12PM, Mountain Time, picking up our rental-car, and driving almost five hours West to Grand Junction, CO, where we would spend the night before rounding out the last three-hour leg of the trip South-by-Southeast to Telluride.

Ethan and I stumbled insouciantly out of bed at some ungodly hour on Wednesday, September 2nd. We stumbled sleep-drunkenly into a squeaky-seat town-car cab I somehow had the faculty to call at 3:30AM. And yes, even at 4:00AM, there was traffic on the Belt Parkway.

The overwhelming age-demographic aboard the flight from New York to Boston must have been, and I do not exaggerate, 3–6. Never before have I been simultaneously endeared and irritated by the incessant clamour of dozens of toddlers crying, puking, cooing, laughing, screaming, pouting, whooping, coughing, biting, kicking and punching at once. I slept all of twenty minutes before one of the aforementioned infantile exhibitions woke me violently in my seat, and I spent the last twenty-five minutes of descent down into Logan International feeling harried and tight-eyed.

After a brutal two-hour holdover in Logan, we rose one more to the picturesque American skyways and ruddered due-West.

I woke up once more about halfway through our four-hour flight time. We were over Nebraska. I recalled this pipe-dream I had not long ago about really pulling a Jack Kerouac and bailing on this fancy college education I’ve been digesting just long enough to vanish off into the Nebraska prairies and work on a ranch for awhile — gauge the weight of the salted Earth and bleed my sweat into the topsoil to make it bend and bow before me. To get a taste of the same Nabokovian romanticism that long-dead poets wrote about, back when people weren’t cynical enough to realize what fools they were for trying to get out of paying their taxes.

As we catapulted across Nebraska at 35,000 feet, and the ribbon roads danced stiffly with elliptic fields of prairie-corn and wheat, I felt a small stirring inside; a resurgence of half-faded wanderlust. But then the landscaped below pulled a complete Dr. Jekyll. The grass died and the roads dead-ended and all the farmland petered out into barren Earth-crust. Below yawned a turgid expanse of red-brown rock and sediment-sand and forsaken flora. Vast stretches of void drummed on below our flimsy little aircraft, and I was struck by the horrifying thought of crash-landing in that desert — of being marooned and forgotten and abandoned to the cruel wasteland of America’s Dark Heart. We sped on hastily from that place, fighting fiercely against the Rockies’ hardy West-wind. I remembered an old joke I once heard, about purgatory looking a lot like Kansas. And I thought, that’s why God made Nebraska. Kansas got too full.

The angle of approach traced by a Westbound 737 descending into Denver International Airport from the Northern Continental route basically guarantees that anyone seated on the starboard side of the aircraft has a 0% chance of seeing the Rocky Mountains before the plane lands. We performed some acute aerial gymnastics to coast safely down on the Denver tarmac, located on the very Westernmost part of Colorado’s “flat” half — the planar Eastern side of the state drearily ramping up to the base of the mountains. I kept craning my head painfully against the polymer little window, as if angling my eyes properly in relation to my smushed nose would allow me to catch sight of that landmark vista I had been so amicably conditioned to by photographs and American film. No dice; the mountains remained frustratingly out-of-vision, stamped somewhere off the portside, exclusive to only those plane passengers prescient enough to book seats “A,B,C” as opposed to “D, E, F.”

Of course, Ethan and I wouldn’t see the mountains until we made it through disembarkment. We blustered confusedly through the Denver airport, waddled timidly into the roaring-dry heat, and waited forty-five minutes for the shuttle to arrive and take us to our car. Only then did we finally catch sight of that long-awaited scenic pay-off. One quick left-turn onto the freeway brought the distant Rockies barrelling into view — a vicious wave frozen mid-crest, with the swirling sharp chop biting sable chunks out of the azure sky.

The salesman at Denver International Airport’s on-site rental-car agency suggested I upgrade to a V6. “If you’re going up the mountains,” he drawled, with accent insoluble, “you’d be better off in an SUV. I have some great deals on Ford Explorers…”

“No thank you,” I butted in. “We’ll stick with the sedan.”

So Ethan and I whipped jubilantly out of the parking lot in our salt-stained Kia Optima, and I did my best to ignore every cautionary tale I’d ever heard about Kia during my brief-but-storied career as a licensed driver.

I’ve driven long through small spaces. I’ve been pressed beneath the concrete thumb of urban development. No thought was so foreign as driving through uncorked streets. The prospect addled me right up to the point when and where I first caught sight of the mountain; accelerating up the freeway entrance, revving South toward the heat-bathed shimmer of Denver skyline painted paltry against the unbelievable breadth of the Rocky Mountains.

These were those great tectonic spires of the land, I thought. Thick ropy scars upon America’s back — evidence of those great Pangean continental shifts that had torn apart the world millennia ago. I’d hiked some mountains in New England, sure, Mt. Washington and all that… but I suddenly felt more compelled to call them “hills.” We were a far cry from the luscious green grade of Vermont’s White peaks. At the base of the Colorado Rockies I turned my eyes upward and watched the treeline die.

Interstate 70 unfurled before us, pitching steeply up into the hills.

I slammed the accelerator.

We did forty-five.

The merry ghost of a hypothetical Ford Explorer chased us all the way to Telluride — big ol’ phantom V6 cackling as we fought fruitlessly against gravity.

3

The town of Telluride tucks neatly into the crook of a box-canyon, thousands of feet skyward and thousands of miles Westward, entrenched within and ensconced by the craggy weight of the Rockies, cordoned off from the Low-Society peasantry like some half-eroded castle, buried as socially deep as those very mines which it was originally constructed upon. This ethereal fog descends upon the encroaching peaks at least once a day, leaving the ambling townies adrift in gaunt waves of wisp. Telluride in Fog is the frayed pupil of a blind man’s eye — cloudy and somber and tearful, cold-wet and deadened to the raging world. Within this little parabolic paradise hides a temporary microcosm for postmodern socialites and artsy braggarts. A weekend-long theme park for those wealthy and pretentious enough to curate and hoard hours upon hours of freshly-squeezed cinema and bask arrogantly in their “exclusive access.”

Into this den of affluence some academic samaritan thought it would behoove to drop seventy-two students — steal them away from their financial burdens and subsistence-jobs and saccharine dramatics — right into the heart of it all. It seemed a little banal to stake such an illustrious opportunity on the results of an essay contest, but the quality assurance algorithm applied to Telluride Student Symposium applicants was likely as simple as lightly vetting anyone who would even be interested in such a thing. And we were such a motley bunch: aspiring filmmakers, biochemists, political scientists, international students of all disciplines, those frustratingly degressive types of minorities who automatically identified as such when asked, “Who are you?” and yes, there was even one accountant. And for one fantastical weekend we were loaned a set of keys to this clandestine little kingdom in the mountains.

Rolling through a play-by-play of my itinerary at Telluride will likely end up amounting to pages upon pages of dry text, and it would all be moot anyway because in no way could I ever hope to capture that weekend in words. It felt just like that oldest of cliches — the “like-I-was-in-a-dream” type-feeling. Soporific. But from our introductory orientation the first evening all the way up through our final screening — Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog — outdoors beneath the shimmering breadth of the Milky Way, I felt so irrevocably present. I was in each moment as the moments passed, hyper-being. The rest of the world faded away at some point during our drive from Denver to Telluride; as we wound for hours upon hours through scenic vistas and picturesque tableaus, sputtering feebly up steep grades that our freshly-rented Kia Optima couldn’t hope to climb. It was an adventure; straight out of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theories that had been beaten into me throughout three years of film-theory and narrative analysis.

There are no mountains like Colorado mountains, at least not any I’ve ever seen. There are no film-screenings like Telluride film-screenings. It is a singular experience, utterly unique. It’s all at once intimate and overwhelming, small and imposing, elitist and welcoming. In Telluride, some 9,000ft above sea level, where deep-in-debt college students could schmooze with the ultra-rich and discuss film with cinema’s modern masters, I was given a second chance to remember how I felt when I was five years old, sitting in my darkened living room watching a VHS copy of Back to the Future for the first time and saying, Wow. This is it.

Telluride, CO boasts, arguably, the most unique public transportation system in the nation. Telluride and the nearby Mountain Village are connected by a series of gondolas, swaying little pods hovering thirty feet above the mountain’s grade, propelled upward along their lines by 100% clean electricity. So much of my best social experiences in Telluride were had upon these gondolas; talking with my fellow Students, meeting festival-goers from all around the world. I even met several filmmakers screening their work at Telluride on these very gondolas; sharing a cramped seat with the Sound Designer for a documentary on combat journalism, Only the Dead See the End of War. I happened to catch that documentary the next night, at 10:30PM, long after our Student schedule had wrapped up for the evening. Among the many perks for students at Telluride is an all-access pass; along with all the films prepared for us by the Symposium directors, we were offered the opportunity to see anything at the festival. Only the Dead was the first film outside of my schedule I watched. It was Sunday night, the third day of the festival. The film played, and I did my best to prop my sleep-deprived eyes up — not that I had much trouble. The film was brutal, visually intense — filled with combat footage and real-life accounts of wartime cruelty in Iraq. After the film ended, I looked down from the balcony and saw the Sound Designer, the same man I had met the evening before, snapping a photo. He was smiling long after the flash faded.

Charlie Kaufman has been my favorite screenwriter for the last five years. I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sometime in Junior year of High School, and ever since I wound my way through his all-too-brief filmography, which included Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002). His 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, is my favorite movie. The only reason I was able to attend Telluride in the first place was because I entered the Student Symposium essay contest with a paper on Synecdoche, New York. We were not given a list of the Telluride films until Thursday evening, the night we arrived in town. When I looked down at my freshly-printed schedule and saw “Kaufman” listed as a Symposium speaker, right after a Students-Only screening of his latest film Anomalisa (2015), I had to laugh. I’m not much of a believer in fate, but that’s some serious cosmic alignment. The Anomalisa screening and Kaufman’s subsequent talk was booked for Saturday evening. The film did indeed screen, and it affirmed all my reasons for choosing Kaufman as my favorite screenwriter in the first place — it was cynical and hysterical and pathetic and beautiful and utterly bizarre. It was shot in stop-motion, featuring anatomically-accurate puppets straight out of the uncanny-valley. They looked just human enough to elicit some empathy from the crowd, but not enough to make the one puppet-sex scene feel any less uncomfortable. Kaufman, reclusive misanthrope to the very core, never showed up to his Q & A. And as disappointed as I was, I think if he had showed up, it would have ruined what little magic remained for me. Telluride felt very much like a trip behind Oz’s curtain, but the enigmatic absence of Kaufman left me with a little taste of Disney-Land wonder, like I was still just another gullible member of the magician’s crowd, wondering where he vanished to and how he pulled off that trick.

But there was one moment in particular, on Saturday afternoon, when I was able to recuperate; stand back from myself in this out-of-body sort-of way, look down at where I sat in the crowded Sheridan Opera House, and irrefutably recognize exactly how lucky I was to be sitting there. I wouldn’t call it my favorite moment at Telluride, but it was certainly the most lucid. Serge Bromberg, a famous film-restorationist and vintage showman, literally burst on stage (he lit a piece of old nitrate film on fire to begin his prelude) to introduce a series of lost silent comedies from the early 20th century. Bromberg had this inimitable little accent and a performer’s gait, loping around on stage cracking jokes and spinning yarns. During all of the comedy shorts, Bromberg sat stage-right and accompanied the films with improvised piano pieces, ensconced beneath the bold balconies of the classicalist Sheridan Opera House. If it hadn’t been for the credit cards in my pocket, I would have sworn I was back in 1917, watching the premiere of Buster Keaton’s latest joint. And then Bromberg revealed the crown jewel of his collection; a lost Laurel & Hardy film entitled Battle of the Century (1928), unseen in its entirety in over fifty years. Bromberg and his team had painstakingly searched for the missing Reel 2 of the film. This long-lost second reel contained a seminal piece of film history — the uncut “pie-throwing” scene, during which Laurel & Hardy launch a streetwide pie-war, replete with slapstick and crude humor and all those timeless forms of comedy that still had a 2015 audience in stitches by the end of it.

The unreality of the whole experience never truly dissipated. My eyes always felt just a tad glazed, like I’d been hypnotized in the Denver International Airport Wednesday morning and I’d wake up there, Tuesday evening, utterly convinced I had driven over 600 miles through the Rockies and attended one of the world’s most exclusive film festivals. It was unfailingly spectacular; during whatever-hours on whatever-day, the Student Symposium kids were ushered jovially into an intimate little theater and screened a premiere of one of modern-day cinema’s greatest auteurs. And the next day, at whatever-time, that same group of doe-eyed film-junkies sat beneath the pale, whetstone gaze of the screen and watched a flawless restoration of a seventy-years-lost silent comedy. And at that moment, sitting in raucous laughter amidst the kaleidoscopic crowd while Laurel and Hardy hurled pies at pedestrians on-screen, I felt the tremendous weight of history brush against me. It was the sort of history that has been made and will be made again, that brings the narrative passions of humanity together beneath a magnanimous screen, that stains our sight with coruscating colors of story and rhyme, that lovingly and personally reassures every member of the enraptured audience that, at least until the projector flickers off, “you’re all part of the show.”

Both the best and worst part of Telluride was meeting all the other Symposium students. Best because I spent a solid five days just learning from peers — whether we were sitting in a Symposium talk or eating lunch, we were learning. About each other’s lives, about our pursuits and our stories and our backgrounds and our ambitions — about which films we watched shamefully on the cover of darkness and which ones we obnoxiously raved about to anyone within earshot. At no other time in my life have I ever had the opportunity to share common-ground with everyone, in one place and at one time. It was academically illuminating, sure, but it was also life-affirming in this really experiential sort of way. Like a rolling epiphany that stretched across five half-slept nights and unlit days spent beneath the dim flicker of film projectors.

But the inescapable downside to all the stimuli was my realization of how little I knew. And how much I have left to learn. My peers and fellow Symposium-attendees were all unbelievably experienced. Some of them had run multiple screenings at their local film archives. Others had organized experimental film showcases, complete with musical performances. Still others had worked on major studio films, volunteered at other major festivals such as Palm Springs and Sundance. And all of them had such a vast repertoire of cinephilic knowledge; this was a crowd of 50 students who subsisted on a diet of one-to-two films a day, and there were points when I felt like I was running just a bit behind. But I was able to flex some theoretical muscles of my own; having shot multiple short films on 16mm stock, edited on a flatbed, assisted on the set of an independent feature film and worked in film distribution, I was no stranger to the practicals behind the art-form. And all I heard and witnessed I took with me, wrapped up in this little leather journal, to be eventually exhumed in some form.

Telluride still lies up there, like an old castle behind the craggy mountain walls. I hope to return one day, whether as a volunteer or maybe, if the sort of cosmic alignment I so often deny works in my favor, as a filmmaker. But even if I never do, even if my time at the Telluride Student Symposium ends up as a weekend-long dream I had when I was still half-a-boy, it will not be resigned to the annals of memory. It’s the type of experience that tracks along with you — spurs you to write and film and edit so that you too can grant people the type of experiences you received under the benign tutelage of the screen. Having just completed my undergraduate years at film school, culminating in a feature-length screenplay and accompanying thesis, I suppose that Telluride could not have come at a better time for me. Just as my foot was grazing the door, a hand shot out and grabbed me, pulled me into that Wonderland for just a short time and showed me all the great things I could accomplish, and then spat me back out into the world.

The Kia ran twice as fast down the mountainside — not in fearful flight, but on the winds of an eager dare — a dare to reclaim my ken, to take stock, and to make something worthy of return.