Richard Herskowitz waves goodbye with his last Houston Cinema Arts Festival
This is a big year for the Houston Cinema Arts Festival.
Not only is it the 10th anniversary for the event — which will screen more than 70 features, shorts and documentaries from Thursday through Nov. 12 at various venues around town — but it’s also the swan song for artistic director Richard Herskowitz, who has been shepherding the programming since the first festival in 2009. Herskowitz, who also is the executive and artistic director for the Ashland Independent Film Festival in Oregon where he resides, says he’s not leaving because of any dissatisfaction but because of time. In short, he doesn’t have enough of it.
“I’m stepping down because I’m concentrating my energies exclusively in Ashland,” says Herskowitz, who also directed the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville from 1994 to 2008 and Cinema Pacific at the University of Oregon in Eugene from 200915. “For years, I was able to juggle. I called myself a carny; I would pitch a tent and show movies in many cities, and I tried to keep that going. But, in Ashland, my job grew from just artistic director to executive director. It just became impossible for me to keep leaping across different cities.
“But I also thought 10 years was a good number to go out on,” he continues. “I’ve had a very satisfying run, and I’m really going to miss this gig.”
Keeping focus on the arts
One of the reasons Herskowitz is going to miss Cinema Arts is its mission. Whereas many other festivals, including Ashland, have a more wide-ranging, generalist purpose, Cinema Arts specifically emphasizes projects about the arts. Though some might find such a requirement limiting, he feels it’s what makes the event unique in a world of look-alike regional film festivals.
That’s partly why he agreed to work with the festival initially. “I like the idea of a thematic, focused film festival,” he says. “I always liked that it would be curated instead of open calls for submissions like other festivals, including Ashland.”
That means he’s on the lookout for such multimedia productions as last year’s “Singin’ in the Rain” film-music-dance extravaganza with hip-hop performer Bun B and others at White Oak Music Hall and this year’s “A Thousand Thoughts,” featuring a live performance from contemporary classical group Kronos Quartet paired with a documentary about them. It also means visual artist Julian Schnabel’s latest feature, “At Eternity’s Gate,” starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh as well as a salute to the music in the films of director Richard Linklater called “A Dazed and Confused Cinema Arts Celebration: The Soundtracks of Richard Linklater.”
“When I started my job as artistic director, Julian Schnabel was an example of a painter turned filmmaker who was making great films about artists, like ‘Basquiat’ and ‘Before Night Falls.’ That was the role model,” Herskowitz says. “Julian Schnabel is kind of a model filmmaker, a crossover artist/filmmaker who was an inspiration to the founding of our festival.”
Yet even the headlining films on the schedule represent this aim. In some cases, such as the “Maria by Callas” documentary about opera singer Maria Callas, it’s obvious. In other cases, the ties to the arts seem more tenuous. Take “Widows,” the new thriller from “12 Years a Slave” director Steve McQueen starring Viola Davis.
“It’s not about artists, but Steve McQueen is a famous British visual artist who became a filmmaker. He remains somebody who is collected by museums, and his media installations are generally shown in galleries. He crosses over,” Herskowitz says. “‘Vox Lux’ with Natalie Portman, she plays a musician who becomes a star. ‘Green Book’ is about a black classical pianist named Don Shirley who traveled around the South and the Italian bouncer who acted as his bodyguard and driver.
“Maybe the one that doesn’t explicitly have an art theme or connection is (Alfonso Cuarón’s) ‘Roma,’ and then I always would make an occasional exception when a film came along that was clearly such a work of art,” Herskowitz says. “There’s hardly a review that doesn’t use the term ‘masterpiece.’ ”
The arts not only give this festival its hook but also reflect what Houston is about.
“Here in Ashland, people particularly love social justice and environmental documentaries. That’s just the sensibility of the Northwest,” Herskowitz says. “Not that that stuff wouldn’t go over (in Houston), but really people in Houston just care about the arts. From the beginning, we said we were a cinema arts festival, not a film festival.”
He points to “The Price of Everything,” a documentary being shown this year about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans in the high-dollar world of art collection. “I don’t think I would attract very much interest in Ashland for a film about the art market,” he says, “whereas in Houston, it’s a big deal.”
Looking back to look ahead
For his final year, Herskowitz says he wants to represent what the past decade has meant to him.
“I really wanted it to have a retrospective quality to it,” he says. “We were able to do that by bringing back many of the most memorable guests of the past 10 years and have them present new work.”
So documentarian Sam Green, who presented his “Utopia in Four Movements” in 2010, is back with “A Thousand Nights.” Linklater, who showed his “Me and Orson Welles” at the first Cinema Arts Festival, is being feted for how he uses music in film.
One of the opening-night films is the documentary “Citizen Blue,” about James Blue, who founded Rice Media Center, a Cinema Arts Festival venue that also has a strange connection with the closing-night film, Dennis Hopper’s legendary 1971 flick “The Last Movie.” In 1983, Hopper had fans taken in buses from a screening of his film “Out of the Blue” at Rice Media Center to Big H Speedway to see him perform “The Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act,” in which he sat in a chair strapped with six sticks of dynamite and lit the fuse. He survived, though he allegedly said it was weeks before he could hear again.
“Dennis Hopper is one of the most memorable figures in the history of the Rice Media Center,” Herskowitz said. “And, just another little side note, one of the people who was in the audience that night was a young Rick Linklater.”
What’s next?
One change from the past is that Herskowitz says it’s now easier for him to obtain films than 10 years ago, when nobody knew what the Houston Cinema Arts Festival was.
“When you’re a brand-new festival, you have to prove yourself,” Herskowitz said. “This year, the proof is in the pudding in terms of ‘Green Book’ and ‘Vox Lux,’ ‘Roma’ and ‘At Eternity’s Gate.’ These are going to be Academy Award contenders, and these were handpicked and nobody said ‘no,’ ” he said.
Herskowitz says leaving the festival is definitely bittersweet. He cherishes a potpourri of memories that include such visitors as Tilda Swinton, Isabella Rossellini, Kid N’ Play and a city he has grown to love. “I very rapidly became absolutely blown away once I was exposed to the Menil, the Alley Theatre, the Aurora Picture Show, all the different arts organizations and the Project Row Houses,” he said.
No replacement has been named, and a search won’t begin in earnest until after this year’s festival. “Following the festival, discussions will resume about finding the next Artistic Director for the organization,” the Houston Cinema Arts Festival board said in a statement. “The discussions were put on hold so as not to distract from preparations for the tenth edition.”
“I’ve told them that I’m happy to consult for my successor and also to keep coming back as an attendee,” Herskowitz says. “But it’s really one of the best gigs of my life.”