OPENING CEREMONIES | May 5th 2008

Half Chinese/flickr

In an era of DVDs, Netflix and digital home projectors, why show films in public at all? Royal-purple ticket in hand, Alex Travelli investigates the crowds and pageantry before the theatre lights dim ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

Robert DeNiro and several other New York cinema luminaries launched the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002. It began as a response to the trauma of September 11th and out of concern for the viability of lower Manhattan as a place to live and for New York as a place to make films (TriBeCa stands for “triangle below Canal”, Canal being one of southern Manhattan's main roads). Those fears have since been laid to rest. Tribeca has grown—last year's festival brought $106m of economic activity to the city—and sprawled: I am waiting to see a film on 57th Street, a long way uptown.

Tribeca still shows a lot of movies about New York, but there are a lot of movies about everything else too. Last year 157 feature films were screened; this year almost 5,000 were submitted. Still, it is striking, and a bit odd, that a festival founded on such a sombre note only six years ago now features big-market fluff like “Baby Mama” and “Speed Racer”.

But the frantic atmosphere inhibits questioning. Too many people want to see too many films in too little time. In this Tribeca typifies film festivals and the city it celebrates. In the programme guide a colour-coded confusion of overlapping time-blocks cries, “Hurry, hurry! You're missing something urgent, right now!”

Between picking up my royal-purple ticket for tonight’s event and plopping into my seat, I spend a few moments wandering through the crowd. I wonder: why show films in public at all? In an era of DVDs, Netflix, digital home projectors and underpopulated multiplexes everywhere, travelling thousands of miles (or even a couple hundred feet, in my case: the screening is just across the street from my office) to see a film with a crowd of strangers seems antiquated.

One answer is that the crowds themselves are important. Not just civilian cinéastes, journalists and sundry nudniks, but “industry people” too--directors, producers and other film-makers, but most importantly, buyers: executive producers and distributors, even hedge-fund investors. Seeing a film on a big screen amid a faint buzz of excitement lets them better imagine its commercial prospects, a few months down the line.

The pageantry can look silly from a distance--so many strutting peacocks--but within the industry it is deadly serious. Important contacts are made here in passing. In the film world--as in perhaps no other industry--relationships that blend work and friendship are the norm.

“Which parties are you going to?” is asked here like “Did you see Perdue's new chicken wringer?” at a poultry-processing convention. A friend, a young Iberian film-maker, jokes that she always wears her shortest skirt to parties at Tribeca because the fundraisers are there. She’s not joking. Overheard from the row behind me, as the lights dimmed, tonight: “Oh yeah, you think so? Someone told me the same thing at Sundance.” “That was me. But it was Cannes, last year.”

Dashing my own hopes of fitting in, I gasp and blink when I realise Ricky Jay--a character actor in David Mamet's films who happens to be the world's greatest and humblest magician and card-slinger--is standing right behind me. Reportedly this shambolic pachyderm can throw a playing card through the rind of a watermelon at a distance of ten paces.

“Redbelt”, Mr Mamet's new film, premieres tomorrow night. Maybe that’s what roused Mr Jay down into the world of moviegoing mortals. If he noticed my awe he was kind enough to camouflage it. His is the kind of cool we came to see. If Lou Reed were your grandfather, he’d be Ricky Jay. Let the Olsen twins turn heads in Toronto, or Austin or even LA. Here they are the fake-tanned NYU undergrads who unwittingly deliver the news that your favourite bar is over the hill.

We knew the cool would come out tonight because we are here to see Errol Morris. Not just Mr Morris's latest film--“Standard Operating Procedure” (pictured, right), which is about Abu Ghraib—but the man himself, doyen of the documentary set. His day job is making Americans think Macs are cool and George Bush is not.

By night, well, we're about to see: he will talk to this audience for 90 minutes after his film. I have come suspecting that “S.O.P” is going to be a film about film. So far as I have an organising principle in my whirl through this year's Tribeca, I want it to be following film-makers through the subject they know best.

The lights go down and for a moment I forget this blur of real-world excitement—mere minutes after I've spotted Ricky Jay and Errol Morris embracing each other before a bank of flashing cameras. The screen is black, my pupils begin their slow dilation; the notepad on my lap has disappeared.

(*This is the first instalment of a diary on the Tribeca Film Festival published on Economist.com, where Alex Travelli is a senior editor.)

Film still, tribecafilmfestival.org