If you hadn’t seen Con Artist,  Michael Sladek’s “docu-comedy” on 80s art star Mark Kostabi, but walked blindly into the theater in the middle of the film’s Q & A last Tuesday, you’d have a fair sense of the dynamic between filmmaker and subject. When asked to account for the film’s playful, comic tone, Sladek said, “I had no intention to make a serious film about the art world. I had no intention to make a documentary, frankly.” At this point, Kostabi, standing next to Sladek, turned his side to the crowd to whisper conspiratorially, apparently offering directions to the director. Sladek did his best to ignore them. “I prefer to make narratives, because I can control them.”

Sladek entered Kostabi’s world (and Kostabi World - the studio where dozens of assistants have for years conceived and executed Kostabi’s paintings, which are not quite synonymous with his art) years after his 80s heyday and 90s reversal of fortune. With steady income flowing in from sales of his art artifacts on the Italian auction circuit, by the mid-00s Kostabi refashioned his performative assault on the art market into a cable access and web-distributed game show called Title This (which I wrote about in 2007, accidentally angering its fans with my use of the word “himbo”). Con Artist mostly offers evidence that Kostabi has devolved into a sad joke in the context of the art world, but sad jokes are all the rage online and on low-rent TV. In positing Title This as Kostabi’s barely-noticed comeback gambit, it reveals the show’s birlliance as a kind of natural evolution of Kostabi’s schtick for the proverbial Internet Age. In paying art world figures, including critics, to title his paintings, Kostabi outsources the labor of meaning-making to those who’d do it after the fact anyway, and updates his performance of total detachment into a DIY episodic spectacle in the process.

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It was sold weeks in advance as the sure-thing controversy of the Tribeca Film Festival. Outrage, Kirby Dick’s follow-up to This Film Has Not Been Rated, would surely apply that documentary’s tactics of unapologetically biased filmed detective work to a far more incendiary and potentially politically relevant collusion of power: the “brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy” of secretly gay Republican politicians, “self-hating gay people” all who secretly, shamefully practice the same acts for which they seek to punish others via discriminatory policy. But as it turns out, Outrage is less a work of original, intrepid muckraking than a ride-along with a few full-time muckrakers of the blog and satellite radio spheres, one that considers arguments for and against involuntary outing on the road to defending the responsibility of the public servants to practice what they preach.

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The Tribeca Film Festival has often shown a predilection for a certain type of New York feature and filmmaker — see this year’s Woody Allen-directed opener, or last year’s opening night film Baby Mama, or the many virtually interchangeable Ed Burns pictures that have played the festival in previous years –– all reflecting a version of the city so plasticine that their use of actual locations seems to offer no more authenticity than a Hollywood soundstage.  But within 2009’s pared-down, recession-conscious lineup, a number of titles call back to a very different, dirtier aspect of the hometown’s filmmaking legacy, one which seems all the more ripe for a revisit in this climate of financial pain and industrial upheaval. Bette Gordon’s 1984 postfeminist noir Variety is the centerpiece of this unofficial strain, and it finds cousins in at least three program mates: Gordon’s latest feature Handsome Harry (starring Steve Buscemi), as well as the documentaries Blank City (in which both Gordon and Buscemi appear, discussing the downtown filmmaking scene of the late 70s-early 80s) and Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB.

If Celine Danhier’s Blank City plays as an anthropological study of the interconnected community of downtown artists shooting transgressive provocations for no budget on low-gauge media, Variety is the prototype of a product of that community; co-written by Kathy Acker, featuring appearances from Nan Goldin, a young Luis Guzman and Spalding Gray, produced by Gray’s girlfriend Renee Shafransky, co-lensed by Tom DiCillio and scored by John Lurie. The two latter names would shortly move on the Stranger Than Paradise.

Sandy McLeod stars as Christine, a wannabe journalist who takes a job selling tickets at a Times Square porno house to pay the bills. She soon finds herself caught in an economic, moral and generational limbo, surrounded by women who are driven, by some combination of liberated curiosity and economic panic, to explore the sex industry, and yet find themselves in beyond-traditional, passive-aggressive relationships with their boyfriends. Increasingly fascinated with the tension between watching and being watched, Christine begins tailing a regular visitor to the theater, ultimately playing with the option of choosing her own sexual objectification. All of it unfolds in grainy 16mm against the backdrop of a pre-gentrified Manhattan where, as John Waters puts it in Blank City, “just walking home was like going to war.”

Speaking over the phone last week, Gordon described the means and tools of production that made Variety possible, considers why the film had an impact then and why its assessment of the choppy waters of female sexual empowerment is perhaps even more relevant now, and explains why she doesn’t want to be a “woman filmmaker.” A restored print of Variety screens on Wednesday at 5pm at SVA on 23rd Street; it’s also available on DVD.

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Covering the Tribeca Film Festival in toto can be a challenge even with a full staff; this year, I’m going it alone, and in order to do so I’ve had to rethink the way I think about film festival coverage. Obviously, I can’t do it all alone, so why waste time on films in which I have no interest just because so-and-so publicist says it’s a “must see”? And so though you may find that my coverage of this festival skews greatly towards films that match up somewhat to my personal proclivites (slow and character based, or ostentatiously weird). I’m also not going to worry too much about cranking out discreet reviews of every film I see. Though there may at some point be stand-alone posts about films that merit them, in general my plan is to do this in a more diary-like style. If I devote only 200 words to something on which you’d like to read 2,000, let me know and I’ll elaborate if I can when time permits.

And so Thursday marked the first full day of official festival screenings, after an opening night gala for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, to which I was not invited. I spent the day at the AMC Village, one of the Tribeca venues that lies far outside the titular neighborhood’s boundaries, a seven-screen skyscraper multiplex which has been fully commandeered by the Festival this year for screenings for both press and the public. I saw two films, one technically, formally outstanding but not entirely narratively satisfying; the other, thrillingly ambitious but only in its riskiest moments able to justify its daring with conceptual clarity and technical chops.

A film that can change tone on a dime and sell each transition as though its natural is to be respected. About Elly, which won big in Berlin, is a tightly constructed verite relationship dramedy which, with a sequence that’s genuinely gripping, first turns into a you-are-there thriller, then into a very talky mystery, then into a tragic melodrama of morals. A group of college friends travel with their spouses and children from Tehran to “the north”, to spend a long weekend at a crumbly villa on a desolate shore. Sepide (Golshifteh Farahani), simultaneously well-meaning and careless, invites her son’s nanny Elly (Taraneh Alidousti) to come along with the intention of fixing her up with Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini, offering ample evidence that he’s Iran’s version of Mark Duplass), a young looker recently divorced from a German woman, who Sepide is determined to lure back to Iran by pairing him off to a member of the home team before vacation ends. Elly is bashful and reticent, and when she disappears one afternoon, the friends aren’t sure if she drowned, or just left the villa without saying goodbye. As the weekend wears on and the vacationers struggle with how to proceed, it’s revealed that Sepide brought Elly along under false pretenses, and has continued to weave a web of lies in order to protect both the missing woman’s honor and her own culturally unacceptable intentions.

It’s an update/translation of sorts on L’Avventura, but About Elly has a limited interest in Antonioni’s evocative questioning. Its refashioning of the missing woman as MacGuffin works up to the point where it abandons existentialism to deliver a religiously and culturally correct moral lesson on honor and fidelity. Its glimpse into the lives and moral quandaries of modern, cosmopolitan Iranians fills a valuable niche, but the film’s insights on the general human condition don’t go much farther than to suggest that meddling matchmakers should be punished with unthinkable tragedy.

Less successful a tonal juggling act is Damien Chazelle’s Discovery sidebar feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. I had heard about this film months ago — someone called it the “mumblecore musical” — but I wasn’t prepared for the extremes to which Chazelle would take either m-word. Shot on black and white 16mm film and beautifully transfered to pixelly video, Guy and Madeline shifts wildly between sub-Cassavetes exploration of three young, musically inclined Bostonites –– trumpet playing Guy; Madeline, a shy jazz fan who becomes obsessed with the single kiss she shares with Guy in a park; and Elena, a woman who dances her way into Guy’s bed and subsequently declares herself his girlfriend –– and full-on musical numbers, some obviously inspired by old MGM musicals, others more Jacques Demy in structure and feeling. The numbers, most of which comment on the narrative but rarely actually move the story along, are pulled off beautifully; imagine living in a world where most if not all aimless twentysomethings who display little to no charisma in conversation make up for it by being virtuoso tap dancers!

It’s the narrative threads that tie the dances together that constitute the problem: Chazelle doesn’t give us nearly enough of Guy and Madeline’s encounter for us to care about whether he ends up with her or Elena, whose own adventures outside that relationship are initially intriguing but finally interminable. It’s frustrating; when Guy and Madeline is firing on all cylinders, as it does every time Jason Palmer picks up his trumpet or Desiree Garcia bursts into song or out into dance, it’s one of the most thrillingly innovative American indie I’ve seen in a long time, but the tenuous character drama threads that tie together each musical number increasingly try patience.

About Elly is a “better” film than Guy and Madeline, but its the latter film’s inclusion in this festival that, at the end of the day, is more encouraging. About Elly’s formal exellence is beyond question, but its form and general theme (ie: the realist approach to melodrama, its insight on the contemporary progressive Muslim experience offering a Culture of the Week twist for American audiences) marks it as a very “now” work of international art cinema, so trendy that it’s almost cookie cutter. Guy and Madeline is full of failure, but its willingness to experiment, and particularly the alchemy that Damien Chazelle hits on within the musical numbers, is actually exciting. And excitement is in short enough supply that this has got to be worth something.

It’s not unusual for young filmmakers to experience some sort of pain and frustration in making the transition from DIY no-budget feature making, to working with other people’s money and within higher profile marketing and distribution strategies. What is unusual, is for said filmmakers to talk about that pain and frustration candidly with journalists. Before I saw The House of the Devil at a Tribeca pre-festival press screening, its writer/director Ti West contacted me and told me that he wasn’t sure which version of his fourth feature would be screening for the press. There’s what he calls his director’s cut, which he says was finished last December; then, there’s a version with a four minute chunk shorn out of the film’s middle, an edit which West says was mandated very recently by Devil’s producers, the Chicago-based MPI subsidiary Dark Sky Films, in the hopes of enlivening the prospect of a Tribeca sale. When I did see the film I couldn’t see any obvious slash marks, and I was looking. Still, it wasn’t hard to see how a financier could jump to the conclusion that The House of the Devil could be a hard sell.

Though a huge step up in terms of image quality from his 2006 festival hit Trigger Man (the director spent the intervening years between this and that working on a comparatively high-budget Cabin Fever sequel, with which he’s no longer directly associated and which has still not been released; more on that later), Devil employs a similar pacing and narrative approach to West’s earlier work made with the support of producer Larry Fessenden. West seems to be developing a patented style: long stretches of quiet creep, so intensely controlled that only the cultural references distinguish it from a European art film, giving way to unforgiving violence which unsettles while still avoiding the show-it-all sadism of torture porn. If the performance-driven Devil (which stars Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov and Greta Gerwig) is an indication of where he wants to go and what he’s capable of, this seems like a worthwhile artistic pursuit; unfortunately, as West is well aware after losing some degree of control over two consecutive directorial efforts, worthwhile artistic pursuits don’t have much of a place in the contemporary horror climate.

I called the director after seeing the film and told him that I liked what I saw, even if I wasn’t sure which version of the film had been shown.

“Did she play the piano?” West asked.

“No.”

“Then it’s not my version.”

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With The Exploding Girl, director Bradley Rust Gray has picked a title that’s so evocative, it’s almost tasteless. The film focuses on Ivy (Zoe Kazan), home in Manhattan for a one-week break from her first year of college and uneasily negotiating the tricky transition from shy teenager to functioning adult. If Ivy’s burgeoning womanhood is the figurative explosion the title references, her epilepsy and its effects are the literal reference. Slowly, virtually subliminally but with a determinism reminiscent of a horror film, Gray builds up a sense of dread, but ultimately picks mystery over money shot. In the end, the title is by far the most explosive element (pun intended) of this beautifully restrained film.

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The rest of the line-up of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival has been released — that is, the Encounters, Spotlight, Showcase, Restored/Rediscovered and Midnight sections. As expected, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience is there, as are quite a few Sundance holdovers, and the Oscar Winner That No One Has Seen, Departures. Earlier this week, I summed up the competitions; my picks for the most-promising-looking of the rest, with descriptions provided by the festival, follow after the jump.

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