Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Precisely because of its low-key, it's-all-about-the-movies vibe, the Telluride Film Festival has long been Hollywood's unofficial curtain-raiser to the fall moviegoing (and Oscar campaigning) season. In 2005, Brokeback Mountain and Capote both held their North American premieres here, while Walk the Line held its world premiere in Telluride a full week ahead of the Toronto Film Festival. This year, Secretary director Steven Shainberg is in town with the Nicole Kidman vehicle Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, a radical upending of bio-pic conventions that envisions the early years of the controversial photographer's career as something like Alice in Wonderland as staged by Luis Buñuel; the acclaimed Australian director Philip Noyce is premiering Catch a Fire, a true story cut from the cloth of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, starring Derek Luke and Tim Robbins; and actor-director Todd Field is unveiling Little Children, his first feature since the Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom, based on a novel by Election author Tom Perrotta.

But the best new film I've seen in Telluride this year isn't new at all — or, rather, it isn't all new. It's called Directed By John Ford and it's a revision by director Peter Bogdanovich of his 1971 documentary of the same name, about the life and work of the great American filmmaker. The original version of the film has long enjoyed a somewhat mythic status among cinephiles, in part because, following a smattering of festival and television screenings, it was essentially withdrawn from circulation and hasn't been seen since. (The film's producer, the American Film Institute, neglected to obtain copyright clearances for any of the dozens of clips from Ford films, therefore making commercial distribution nigh impossible.) But by Bogdanovich's own admission, he was personally unhappy with the first incarnation of Ford, which, out of deference to Ford himself (who was still alive at the time), glossed over any discussion of the director's famously unhappy private life. So earlier this year, Bogdanovich went back into production, shooting new interviews with such avowed Ford admirers as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg and retooling the more essayistic portions of the film to deepen their portrait of Ford's off-screen character. (Among the choicest new bits: audio of a conversation between the dying Ford and his one-time lover, Katherine Hepburn.)

Prior to Telluride, I'd never seen Directed By John Ford before in any version, and my impression is that, now or then, it's a deeply impressive work of filmmaking and film criticism. Even at its most conventional, when Bogdanovich relies on talking-heads appreciations (retained from the 1971 version) from veteran Ford collaborators John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, the film has an extraordinary vitality and intimacy, whereby you feel its subjects really opening up to Bogdanovich (who, by that point in his career, had already conducted long interviews with many of the same Hollywood icons for his famous series of Esquire profiles) about their brilliant but irascible director. That in itself is fairly remarkable in a day and age when most celebrity interviews seem the product of so much well-oiled publicity machinery and nobody has a critical or unkind word to say about anybody else. The most revealing section of Directed By John Ford comes later, though, when Bogdanovich, through a deft montage of film clips and lyrical voiceover narration (read by Orson Welles), offers up a profoundly moving survey of Ford's career-long juxtaposition of American family life against the turning tide of American history. When it's over, you leave the theater buzzing with renewed enthusiasm for the work of an American master artist. Ephemeral filmmaker tribute documentaries are a dime a dozen in the age of DVD extras and Turner Classic Movies, but Directed By John Ford is as massive and lasting a monument as the ones dotting Ford's indelible Western vistas.