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The Man Who Viewed Too Much
Special Edition: Fall 1998

The 36th annual New York Film Festival

Lincoln Center, New York City
25 September - 11 October, 1998



Yeah, I know, every column's a goddamn special edition this year. But hey, it's still free, right? No annoying ads to get in the way of my boldfaced bracketed proclamations of impending content, yes? Count your blessings.

Ordinarily, I'd use this space to wax lyrical and/or rhapsodic about the glory that is the annual New York Film Festival -- the charged atmosphere; the spectacular venue (especially considering the crummy shoeboxes that most of these films will grace in NY commercial release); the muscular, no-nonsense program in which virtually every picture is a must-see, said program carefully distilled from the numerous alumni of Cannes and Sundance and Venice and Toronto and Berlin (with a few premieres thrown in for good measure). This year, however, I gotta get a move on, so instead I'll simply direct you to last year's wax job and proceed directly to Mssrs. Nitty and Gritty. As I write these words, I've already seen seven of the twenty-four "new" features (not counting Bergman's video feature In the Presence of a Clown, which I intend to skip because I can't abide projected video; also, I won't be reviewing the festival's three retrospectives -- Pabst's The Joyless Street, Eisenstein's Strike, and Boorman's Point Blank -- though I plan to see all three), and so far there's been a conspicuous and disheartening paucity of brilliance. But as a spurned Southern belle once remarked, tomorrow is another day...and with auteurs like Rohmer and Haynes and Kusturica and Assayas still waiting in the wings, how downcast can a fellow really get? Leastways, that's what I keep telling myself...

(NOTE: One of my cats was ill on Friday, and the trip to the vet made it impossible for me to get to that day's press screenings, for Alexei Guerman's Khroustaliov, My Car! and Samira Makhmalbaf's Th

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    • In formal methods, there has been a recent surge of interest for the design of symbolic controllers that would be obtained 'ab nihilo', from the sole observation of data harvested from the system, without the help of a mathematical model. The observed data would allow to build an abstraction of the actual system, in such a way that a controller designed for the abstraction would automatically be valid for the actual system. If the industrial motivations are obvious and promising, the question of whether such a technology is possible at all is still not well understood. In short, what type of formal guarantees can we give about a system which is known only through a finite number of observations?

    In recent years, some partial answers have been obtained: among others, the scenario approach and interval markov decision processes have provided tools that partly allow to reconcile this oxymoron: one can indeed learn the system from data, in a monte-carlo fashion, and provide statistical guarantees on the quality of the abstraction. In this talk, I'll first survey these recent breakthroughs. Then I'll depart from that approach (by assuming that the monte-carlo sampling provides infinite accuracy), and will investigate another challenge inherent with data-driven abstractions: these techniques implicitly make an assumption of Markovianity, which may be violated on the true system. I will show how this assumption can ruin the approach if improperly handled, and will propose ways to mitigate and control the induced error, by leveraging concepts from ergodic theory, symbolic dynamics, and probability theory.

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    Raphael Jungers is a Professor at UCLouvain, Belgium, currently on sabbatical leave at Oxford University. His main interests lie in the fields of Computer Science, Graph Theory, Optimization and Control. He received a Ph.D. in Mathematical Engineering from UCLouvain (2008), and a M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics, both from the Ecole Centrale Paris, (2004), and f

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    Treasurer: Sreelal R
    Deputy Director (Festival): H Shaji
    Deputy Director (Programmes): N P Sajeesh
    Programme Manager (Festival): Rijoy K J
    Programme Manager (Finance): Sajith C C
    Programme Manager (Programmes): Vimal Kumar V P
    Print Unit Coordinator: P S Sivakumar
    Technical Coordinator: Gopeekrishna S
    Programme Assistant: Bharath Jayakumar
    Festival Assistants: Saiyed Farooq, Sreevidya Nair
    Programme Assistant (Programmes): Nitin R Viswan
    Research Assistant: Amrutha Sudarsan
    Archives Assistant: Muhammed Sajeer A V
    Accountant: Sarath M
    Festival Cell: Mary Ninan, Unnikrishnan, K Harikumar, Sandhya B,
    John Kurian, Nishanth S T, Anu B S, Kannan R S, Jaya L,
    G Sasikala, Abdulla A, Arun B L, Manu M, Shamlal S, K Venukuttan
    Nair, Vijayamohan B, Arun R, A Maheshkumar, Lizy M,
    Omana J, Jayakumari D, Sahadevan R, Rahul Vijayan, Joydas
    Website: Deepthi N H, Sabitha G, Pranav V V, Girish Kumar V S, Chithra Reshmi S
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    Project Coordination: Biju S B, Jayaraj N, Ashish P S, Sumesh J S
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    Programmer, Associated Programmes: Arjun Ayillath
    Filmmakers’ Liaison & Guest Relations: Bandhu Prasad-Aleyamma,
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    Mohit R and Vishnu V I (Trivi Art Concerns)
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    Praveen B S, Chindu S K
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    Subuhi Shamrooq V (Team Member - Design and Page
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    FESTIVAL BOOK
    Chief Editor: C Ajoy
    Executive Editor: Rahul S
    Associate Editors: Nowfal N, Sruthi A Sreekumar
    Editorial Team: Kaikasi VS, Dhanya Maria Babu, Anugraha Shaji,
    Sooraj S, Thapasya Ashok, Sreaya Sreekumar, Thapasya Thankaraj,
    Abh

    And now…once again…the last few movies I saw in the order of how good I thought they were. Please, correct me.

    The Insipid:

    For girls who don’t want to experience actual silent film comedy.

    I don’t care how loved this movie is. Benny & Joon (1993) is pandering schmaltz. Having said that, it’s much better than you’re average schmaltz. Johnny Depp plays an eccentric man-pixie whose off-beat whimsy showcases an almost unreasonable obsession with silent film comedies. He falls in love with a woman who is actually crazy (played by Mary Stuart Masterson). Instead of wacky hijinks, we actually get a more believable confrontation with some of the consequences of mental illness—including a brother (Aiden Quinn) who loves both of them, but above all wants to protect his sister. Why do I put this so low on the list? Admittedly, it’s not terrible (and who doesn’t love The Proclaimers?), but for me it runs afoul of Patch Adams-ifying mental illness as well as drama. I didn’t hate it, but there wasn’t much there to begin with for me to have any feelings about one way or the other. It’s ultimately a little too neat, despite some of the risks it gets really close to taking.

    Dawn of Gross:

    These next two films I actually actively dislike. Which is to say I feel far more strongly about them than Benny & Joon, but Benny & Joon was innocuous and forgettable, and there’s something weirdly appealing about devastating, grotesque misfires that burn holes in your memory. I’ll come clean though. After seeing one of these (you’ll know which one), I may not be in my right mind.

    “And that was only one of the many occasions on which I met my death, an experience which I don’t hesitate strongly to recommend.”

    Alan Parker (Pink Floyd The Wall, Angel Heart) isn’t a bad director. And part of me admires the ambition and potential behind this pro

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