E-Mail This Article to a Friend Don’t cry for Argentina The avant-garde moves to the Buenos Aires Film Festival BY GERALD PEARY

More than any major fest on earth, the Rotterdam International Film Festival has been where avant-garde cinema flourishes, where subterranean filmmakers are regularly screened, including talented Americans little recognized at home. So it’s understandable that the international film community was shaken when the contract of Simon Field, the much-respected Rotterdam director, was not renewed. The worry is that those pulling the strings at Rotterdam are itching for an "A"-level glamorous event. Hollandwood.

There’s hope: the Rotterdam æsthetic continues, though with a change of geography, from Europe to South America. I look to the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, which is tiptoeing through Argentina’s economic collapse. This April marked the fourth year the festival has been run by Eduardo Antín, a brilliant, combatative Argentine film critic known to all as "Quintin."

Before he took charge, Quintin told me, Francis Ford Coppola, "a mythical figure," had been a guest of the fest, setting a precedent for Buenos Aires to import the glitzy and the world-famous. In his four years, Quintin has managed, he believes, to transform his audience’s desires. "Now they say, ‘What unknown people are coming this year who we can discover?’ "

Attending Rotterdam annually, Quintin became a close protégé of Simon Field. This year, Field was brought to Buenos Aires as a guest programmer, and he arrived with typical Rotterdam fare: an extraordinary "Jonas Mekas: Film Poet" series, honoring the Lithuanian immigrant who became the guru of ’60s American underground cinema. The program included not only Mekas’s joyful diary films but his tongue-in-cheek short "Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol" (1966-1982), which was done Warhol-style, in which Andy and sundry Factory superstars cat-nap for Mekas’s camera while slo-mo-eating cucumbers and other phallic produce.

"I feel touched if there is a connection, if Buenos Aires is inspired by Rotterdam in any way," Field said over coffee between movies. "Quintin is very bold, willing to go the limits with his programming and choice of filmmakers, and with his keeping on the agenda the history of independent cinema. Also, he has a commitment to young Argentinian cinema. Quintin has picked up the Rotterdam baton and is running with it."

In 2004, Buenos Aires offered retrospectives of Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, France’s Eduardo de Gregorio, Chile’s Raúl Ruiz, and Argentina’s Martín Rejtman, four serious filmmakers who are not exactly paparazzi favorites. The American choices were equally enlightened and offbeat. New York filmmaker Sara Driver’s subtle, magical narrative features (Sleepwalk, When Pigs Fly) have been seen a thousand times less than the movies of her 25-year companion, Jim Jarmusch. James Benning is a grizzled maverick who teaches at California Institute of the Arts and who constructs his non-narrative features (El Valley Centro, Los) by linking mesmerizing long takes.

Quintin saw Benning’s work for the first time at the 2003 Vancouver Film Festival, and he described the films in his Buenos Aires catalogue essay as "an æsthetic shock." For Quintin, that was a positive, as was Benning’s non-film background, the same as his own: math instructor.

Another guest at Buenos Aires 2004 was Benning’s Cal Arts colleague documentarian Thom Anderson, who brought a couple of truly buried treasures. The first was Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961), a low-budget indie feature made in LA starring a cast of non-actor Native Americans, a West Coast equivalent of John Cassavetes’s Shadows. Amazing! The second: Once a Thief (1950), a tiny, unheralded "film noir" directed by W. Lee Wilder (1904-1982). Billy Wilder’s unknown older brother! For Anderson, this movie is a corrective to the "male as female victim" sexism of most noirs, including Billy’s Double Indemnity. But Billy was unimpressed with W. Lee, a handbag merchant in New York who followed in Billy’s Hollywood footsteps. Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Wilder quotes him as saying that W. Lee "was a fool. . . . He sold his business, he bought a house here, and started making pictures, one worse than the next, and then he died."

Anderson doesn’t agree with this negative read on W. Lee, who quietly managed 16 Hollywood films. "Early in his life, Billy Wilder was a gigolo. In the gigolo character played by Caesar Romero in Once a Thief, W. Lee made a portrait of his brother. W. Lee’s films are a reproach to those of Billy."