New channels for Venice's canals.

Oiscussions of new television technologies will take up two days of this year's Venice Film Festival, said Gillo Pontecorvo, the Festival's director.

Venice, the oldest film festival in Europe, unfolds this year from September 1 to 12, and Pontecorvo is expecting a record attendance. Certainly, a large number of international press are expected, along with the usual, sizable contingent of Italian journalists from both electronic and the print media.

Pontecorvo said that a total of 180 films will be shown, though only 18 are in the actual competition.

More than a hundred films will be screened within the Venice framework, but only 18 are in the actual competition.

Sources in Rome confirmed that the Venice selection was made very late this year. For instance, at press time, the opening and closing pictures had still not been determined, nor has the head of the Venice jury been set.

According to Pontecorvo, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and Alexander Rockwell's Taxi Dancer are among the Hollywood films in competition.

Out of competition, Venice will feature Woody Allen's new movie, Bullets Over Broadway and Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp.

Pontecorvo is hoping to turn Venice into a festival where significant new directors and important new trends in films will be highlighted.

As a result, there are nine new Italian features which will make their bow at Venice.

In addition, Pontecorvo has set a retrospective of King Vidor films, ranging from 1917 to 1931.

French and films from other countries to be introduced at Venice include Pigalle, A La Folie, a Diane Kurys picture, Heavenly Creatures (New Zealand); The Tit and the Moon (Spain); Una Sombra Ya Pronto Seras (Argentina); On Shiny Days (Taiwan) and a number of others, several of which are coproductions.

Pontecorvo, a film director and writer, has been widely commended for his abilities.

He has found himself besieged with financial and personal problems as well as structural difficulties. The Venice Film Festival is organized under the auspices of the Biennale, an organization sponsored by the City of Venice, which also sponsors a modern art exhibit held on a bi-annual basis.

That Venice has gone as far as it has this year is considered something of a miracle. Reports on the Festival in various Italian magazines have tended to be positive. In the U.S., and other parts of the world, Venice these days isn't counted among the major European film festival events, having been overshadowed by Cannes and Berlin.

As a matter of fact, the rivalry between Cannes and Venice has grown recently simply because Cannes would like to shift its Festival into the September slot, which is far better from strictly a film-release point of view. Ironically, Cannes was created primarily to allow the French to compete with the Mussolini-sponsored Venice Festival back in the thirties.