Imagine driving hundreds of miles to a tiny town in West Texas, USA, for a film festival.
Marfa, Texas, population 2121, may be known best to some film fans as the town where George Stevens' Giant was filmed in 1955 (the one with James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson). More recently, it's the town where Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men were filmed.
Filming did not take place in the town itself on the latter two pictures, but in the dusty desert mountain country that surrounds Marfa. Located 200 miles from El Paso, 400 miles from Austin (from where fellow Twitch writer Blake drove) and 500 miles from Dallas (from where I drove), Marfa seems an odd spot for a film festival. When you take into account modern-day Marfa, as well as other festivals taking place in small towns, it's not so odd after all.
Artist Donald Judd chose Marfa as the place where he began to work on his permanent sculptural installations in the 1970s. He bought the bulk of the former Fort D.A. Russell and turned it into an art installation. Kindred-souled artists moved to the area, and today various artists have opened galleries and call Marfa home.
Marfa's population is about equal to Telluride, Colorado, whose size has not kept cinephiles from flocking to town for the Telluride Film Festival every Labor Day weekend. The organizers of the Marfa Film Festival are just getting started, of course, so comparisons to the Telluride program would be extremely premature, but it does show that a film festival can succeed if it has the support of the local community and can convince a sufficient number of out-of-towners that it's worth the effort to get there.
The festival opened last night with an outdoor screening of There Will Be Blood on what remains of the set, built on a ranch located a few miles out of town. The Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow in Austin trucked in their fabulous pop-up screen, sound system, and projection equipment. It was a spectacular start to the festival, watching Anderson's magnificent drama played out under thousands of stars on a clear, cool night.
Regular screenings got started this morning with Crawford, David Modigliani's documentary on another small town that was transformed by the arrival of a US President, and will continue throughout the day at a venue converted into a screening room. The program features a mix of narrative features, docs, and shorts. I'll try to get to one or two screenings this afternoon before catching a nighttime outdoor showing of Charles Laughton's great The Night of the Hunter on the Marfa Golf Course.
The festival runs through Monday, May 5.
