Final cut.

Susan Sontag's 1996 pronouncement of cinema's "ignominious, irreversible decline" seems especially obtuse in light of the 36th New York Film Festival (Sept. 25-Oct. 11), where widely publicized American films like Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine and Todd Solondz's Happiness (both reviewed in AF, Oct. 1998) played alongside promising debuts from younger filmmakers and strong contributions from the likes of Shohel Imamura and Eric Rohmer. While there were disappointments (Alain Resnais's lugubrious Dennis Potter tribute, Same Old Song, comes to mind), the festival boasted more outstanding films than it has in years. The indispensable avant-garde sidebar suggested intriguing affinities between the more inventive features and their experimental cousins.

Dreamlike, fiercely inventive, often horrific, Khroustaliov, My Carl is the first work by Russian director Alexei Guerman since My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982). Guerman fills the frame with clutter - from toilet seats to crystal chandeliers - or shoots through smoke, steam, and grimy windowpanes (the high-contrast black-and-white image is at times entirely bleached), recalling the veils and fog in the films of Josef von Sternberg. Focusing on a Red Army general victimized during the 1953 "Doctors' Plot," Svetlana Karmalira's dense screenplay features a Dostoyevskian double, tot* lure and rape, Stalin's anticlimactic death, and a parade of grotesque characters, materializing like ghosts against a backdrop of falling snow.

The festival's most remarkable debut, I Stand Alone, by the young Frenchman Gaspar Noe, chronicles the rage mounting in an unemployed butcher - a latter-day Robespierre who fondles raw meat in his dreams - as he searches fruitlessly for work. Noe, who openly quotes from films as diverse as Taxi Driver and La Jetee, has been criticized for using shock tactics and gimmickry (before I Stand AIone's most brutal sequence, for example, viewers are warned they have thirty seconds to leave), but it may be a measure of his sincerity that he set the story during the '80s in part to avoid glorifying the National Front.

Heavy as a corpse - and effective because of its artificial framing - Noe's approach is the antithesis of the lightness animating Olivier Assayas's elliptical narrative Late August, Early September, a story about a novelist's premature death loosely wedded to the filmmaker's signature cool palette and restless camera work. One of the few warm notes, a Beuys stag drawing, is a metaphor for the "grace" that, according to Assayas, his thirty- and forty-something characters seek. The personal fallout of creative work is rendered on a more intimate scale than in his 1996 movie-aboutmoviemaking, Irma Vep. Late August, Early September will be released by Zeitgeist this spring.

Assayas has long admired the similarly open-ended films of the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien (the Frenchman's 1997 documentary on Hou - perhaps best known for The Puppetmaster [1993] - appeared at the most recent Berlin Film Festival). If any of this year's entries merits masterpiece status, it is The Flowers of Shanghai, Hou's exquisitely oblique adaptation of a nineteenthcentury Chinese novel detailing the travails and obsessions of a series of Shanghai prostitutes, shot entirely in interiors with an inexorably gliding camera. The desperation underlying an accumulation of seemingly minor events is captured in a gesture - a hand reaching for a hookah, glimpsed like a candle flame in a slow fade to black.

With You're Laughing, another adaptation, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani return to Pirandellian sources. Flooded with De Chirico's blue shadows, the first of the film's two fables involves a failed baritone whose uncontrollable nocturnal laughter stirs up troubling unconscious impulses, which he incorporates into one final performance. A chorus from Mozart's Figaro mocks the singer's bourgeois marriage while bringing him delirious pleasure; in the film's second half, two characters face an ambiguous martyrdom for art and knowledge. (What is ignominious is the current state of American film distribution: You're Laughing - like Khroustaliov, My Cad, I Stand AIone, and The Flowers of Shanghai - did not have a US distributor at the festival's close.)

The Celebration (already in release), by Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, presents a more unorthodox Christ figure - a beloved son who denounces his father at a Last Supper-ish party and is beaten and tied to a tree. Vinterberg's updated Passion mirrors his approach to the medium: he preaches the gospel of cinema by defying its conventions (see AF, Nov. 1998). Shot in Hi-8 video with a handheld camera, The Celebration (like Velvet Goldmine) brought the festival a refreshing experimental edge.

The multidimensional avant-garde program ranged from Nocturne, Peggy Ahwesh's 16mm and Pixelvision meditation on desire and violence, to Anne Robertson's Super-8 diaries documenting her battles with psychic instability. In An W + B (1976), Kurt Kren (the late collaborator with the Vienna Actionists) distilled the lyricism he often brought to scatological subject matter in a shimmering blue image of trees; while a retrospective of the late Arthur Lipsett's hauntingly mordant collage films (admired by Stanley Kubrick) was nothing short of a revelation. Like a number of other festival offerings, Noema, Scott Stark's rechoreographed porn, and Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy, Ken Jacobs's new "Nervous System" performance, unsettle cinematic codes with an intensity that revitalizes the medium's past as well as its future.

Kristin Jones is a writer living in New York.