The 33rd Telluride Film Festival

Telluride is a state of mind - witness how many Telluride people actually live someplace else, although they used to live in Telluride, for a decade, or more, back in the 80s. Hence Telluride is Shangri-La.

I was in Colorado August 30 - September 6, and the festival ran September 1 - 4, 2006.

See also non-blog (compendium of emails sent to a few family and friends) at www.troutlily.net/mblog

  1. Realize Imagination's Highest Peak (side of the Abel Gance Outdoor Air Theater wooden projectionist booth)

  2. Little red, big blue

  3. A not uncommon sort of color scheme

  4. Brigadoon - the anti-Information Center. You could go there to pick up the preliminary program, a magazine on newsprint that contains many excellent articles by and about film makers, as well as a frustratingly incomplete program. I didn't cop to the TBA thing until Saturday.

  5. Odd place to put a semi-hexagon. Clashes with the mountains if you ask me.

  6. Aspen trees have the prettiest bark

  7. Late summer, and the flowers are blooming

  8. The official city tourist bureau is bedecked with Tibetan prayer flags

  9. My sumptuous room at the Wildwood Canyon Inn

  10. The Abel Gance Outdoor Air Theater. They project from inside the wooden booth, down into Elks Park and a screen set up there. Every night they screen something or other that is (obviously ...) open to one and all, not just passholders. The street is blocked off during screenings.

  11. The festival is known as Show

  12. Looks like a live-work sort of building

  13. Yellow interrupts the shades of lavendar

  14. The first night's outdoor film: that blueish spot to the upper left is the screen in the distance, and you can make out a ground-level marquee to the left of the Abel Gance booth

  15. This street's name is Colorado St., but it's known as main street

  16. This painter is a fixture. I am embarrassed I can't recall his name - have to research that. He's very good. Here he's set up a large canvas in the middle of the road, in the extra third lane they have that runs down the center of the road. You can only park there by permit. Probably you need a permit to set up your painting studio there.

  17. 50 cents for a cookie. The girls made them.

  18. Two Irish film makers, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, talk about the process behind their film "Civic Life".

  19. The Feed, 5 p.m. Friday, more or less kicks things off. I never noticed till too late that one movie actually started at 5 - that would have been the first movie of the weekend. I was focused on food.

  20. A perfect little blue house in a perfect place?

  21. Telluride Town Hall and neighbors

  22. Maybe it's more accurate to say the Telluride Town Hall is a neighbor of this old brick building

  23. Faded Tibetan prayer flags flutter in the morning open air

  24. Madonna in the high-end Mexican restaurant, La Cocina de Luz

  25. BIOTA water is an experiment: uses "biodegradable" bottles made somehow of corn. Or something. BIOTA == Blame It On The Altitude

  26. Above the Italian restaurant Rustico's yellow umbrellas, a fabulous arrangement of four windows

  27. Looking east

  28. The rabbit ears mark the entrance to the Chuck Jone's Cinema in Mountain Village, at the end of the gondola

  29. L.A. is the other way

  30. A condo development in Mountain Village is reflected in the carp-pond-with-ducks (probably not the wildlife you'd generally run across at 9,000 feet)

  31. A long line to see Episode One of Ken Burn's new documentary, "The War", about WWII

  32. The view from the gondola deck

  33. The angel that greets you when you get off the gondola

  34. The Nugget Theater. This is Telluride's year-round movie theater.

  35. The street artist has moved to the sidewalk, and sized down his canvas

  36. Entrance to the Sheridan Opera House (smallest venue)

  37. The home of the Galaxy Theater

  38. is perhaps the old high school building?

  39. Stark lines are drawn between light and shade

  40. Were the two giant palms here before the Palm Theater was here, or is it the other way around?

  41. Walking along the San Miquel river on my way to the Labor Day picnic

  42. Picnic: mixed green salad, ceasar salad, potato salad, pasta salad, grilled steak, grilled chicken.

  43. Leaving Station Telluride in the gondola

  44. Aspen trees line the gondola path

  45. The mountains seem blue and red, hugely swelling up over the tiny town

  46. Once you get half-way to Mountain Village, on the gondola from Telluride, you see the peaks on the southeastern side


Marianne Mueller
Last modified: September 6, 2006