I’m staying up until 2am, waking up five hours later, making mad dashes between one place and another with no room for error, and taking along food and clothing to sustain me for what might be a full day away from home-base with temperatures that soar up into the 80′s in the afternoon and then plunge on down to the thirties very late at night. These are certainly not the hardships of Siberian trappers who hunt what they eat, build their own shelters and tools, all while carving out their existence in very isolated terrain where the weather sometimes drops down to fifty below, and which is also the subject of Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (the latest documentary presented by Werner Herzog using footage from Dmitry Vasyukov). No, this is, after all, the lap of luxury; Telluride, Colorado. Here, the magnificent views have ensured that one of the cheapest houses listed for sale, some 1,600 square feet of real estate, goes for about two million dollars. Such extravagances certainly help add to the view that the film festival is an elite affair but, to give credit where credit is due, the Telluride Film Festival, now in its 37th year, makes many of its movies available for free screenings, has created an affordable Cinephile pass (one that’s true to its name), and also invites students up every year as part of a symposium that provides them with a pass and a stipend of food and money to compliment an aggressive schedule of wonderful cinematic events to attend.

For me, things started out beautifully on Thursday night with a restored 35mm print of Once Upon the Time in the West, presented outside under a star-lit evening and introduced by Jill McBain herself (Claudia Cardinale is a tributee at this year’s festival and the subject of yesterday’s blog by R.H. Smith). During the climactic scene where Harmonica’s flashback is fully revealed I tried to soak in the full scope of both the image onscreen and the stars above, and was rewarded with the sight of a shooting star zipping across the sky as one of Ennio Morricone’s most enigmatic scores blasted the sound-system. True bliss. (Well, almost… the opening night free-screening was plagued with some focus issues. But these were ultimately addressed.)

Friday I decided to kick off the first official evening of the TFF schedule with A Tribute to Peter Weir. Geoffrey Rush (who stars in Weir’s latest, The Way Back, screening as part of the festival) sat to my right. Ed Harris (from Weir’s The Truman Show) was one row behind me. Laura Linnea (also from The Truman Show) introduced the director. Clips averaging five minutes in length where shown for: Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Green Card, Fearless, The Truman Show, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Dead Poet’s Society. What? No Cars That Eat People? Well… at least Telluride is screening another early Weir favorite of mine in it’s entirety: The Plumber. (Caveat: I had to ask Weir himself what format the film is in, as the programs no longer carry that information – a regrettable mistake that TFF will hopefully correct in the future.)

For me, a TFF highlight is always the Guest Director program – and this year the key collaborator is Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient. Thanks to Ondaatje, I finally got to see a film that I’ve always wanted to see on the big screen and on celluloid: Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977). Mind you, my day job is that of being a film programmer, but even so I remember trying to get this film years ago and being unable to secure the rights. I point this out to emphasize how many of the prints these Guest Directors select are so obscure and rare, that it is only through the collective muscle of the well-connected folks at TFF and the Guest Director that some of these things can hit the screen at all. Indeed, of the six films Ondaatje has selected, five are archive prints and one (Here’s Your Life) is a new restoration from Sweden. The Ascent was definitely my cinematic highlight for Friday. Despite its bleak subject matter (Soviet partisans wading through snow during a horrible winter in Belarus around 1942, only to get caught and brutally interrogated by Nazis and given death sentences), the startling black-and-white compositions and unique eye of the director all added to its searing visual quality. An unsettling film, The Ascent is full of religious allusions that are both complex and haunting. I topped off my Friday night with a screening of Tabloid, the latest Errol Morris documentary. A highly entertaining film, its subject is Joyce McKinney, a former beauty-queen who achieved notoriety in the 1970′s when she allegedly kidnapped her Mormon boyfriend and… suffice to say that all manner of sexcapades follow, and just when you think the story can’t get stranger, the subject of cloning is introduced.

Wanting to make sure I got in at least one silent-film fix, Saturday had me enjoying this years pick by Paolo Cherchi Usai (from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival): Mario Camerini’s Rotaie (1930). In English the title is Rails, and trains do indeed play a pivotal role in this film of two poor lovers who narrowly escape a suicide-pact when they come across a lost wallet of money. This money allows our lovers access to the gated communities of the idle rich where our male lead develops a gambling problem that allows for a very memorable montage. The program says that “Rotaie offers us everything: Soviet-style montage, a rich texture of German expressionism, nationalist propaganda, the intimacy of post-WWII neorealism, and the most unlikely of all love stories…” If you come expecting something on par with Eisenstein or Murnau, you’ll be disappointed. But a scene showing a mother breast-feeding her child, coupled with the “happy ending” of working at a factory, definitely dove-tail together the neorealist and nationalist propaganda in a way that pops out. The great piano work by Judith Rosenberg got a well-deserved standing ovation.

My last film for Saturday night was Inside Job, the latest documentary by Charles Ferguson (who was nominated for an Oscar for No End in Sight). Here, Ferguson tackles the daunting job of trying to lay out how the global financial problems we now face all came to fruition. Ferguson introduced the film with an apologetic statement of sorts, warning the audience that they might find some parts boring due to the fact that he really couldn’t get around presenting a dizzying number of facts and figures that might cause the mind to stray. To this I say: hogwash! Ferguson is to be commended for sifting through a forest of details about a very complicated subject in a clear and chronological way. By the end of it, as a popular bumper sticker would say, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

Now, here it is: Sunday. Skipping breakfast I raced off to the Galaxy theater to see the Retour de Flamme in 3D program, which promised to be another one of those “only in Telluride” events. The show was presented by Serge Blomberg and featured stereoscopic 3D discoveries that span the history of cinema. Did you know that Méliès unknowingly made stereoscopic cinema? Neither did I, but it turns out that due to a desire to nip bootlegging of prints Méliès would shoot the same movie with some form of conjoined film camera that allowed for two film strips to record the same image, so that one could be used for a U.S. release, and another in Europe. Through the marvels of our digital age, those two prints can be married together and thus produce a stereoscopic 3D image. This was just the tip of the iceberg, with Blomberg a charming guide who would not only provide context and history, but also accompany silent film images on the piano. It was an absolutely amazing program, my favorite so far. But with so many more films to see, I’m reminded that time is short – so why am I still typing? I’ve got a gondola ride to catch, and a date with an archive print of Fat City followed by a Q&A with author Leonard Gardner.