Names and faces

LITTLE ROCK — David Lynch has segued from making moviesto showing them. As the first guest artistic director of the AFI Fe st, the Blue Velvet director has programmeda mini festival within the film festival, which begins this week in Hollywood. His selections: director Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968), Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950). Whittling his list down to just a half-dozen was “impossible in a way,” Lynch noted. “These are films that really inspired me and films I love.” Lynch and the festival have a long history, dating back to his first feature, Eraserhead (1976).Eraserhead would become a cult classic and the film that launched Lynch’s Hollywood career, which also includes The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91), and Mulholland Drive (2001), for which he received one of his four Oscar nominations.

Martin Scorsese hailed La Dolce Vita as changing world cinema forever as he presented the restored version Saturday of Federico Fellini’s black-and-white classic. Scorsese, who was 18 when La Dolce Vita first came out in 1960, spoke of the effect the movie had on him and of the importance of preserving films for future generations. His institute for the preservation of film, the Film Foundation, helped restore it. “We have an obligation to the future, we have an obligation to our children to at least let them know this is here, this is what it was like,” Scorsese said at a news conference at the Rome Film Festival. “This is grand opera from Italy in the late 19th century.” Scorsese described La Dolce Vita as a landmark work. The movie broke narrative rules in that “there’s no story, there’s no plot, and the film is an epic length - three hours,” Scorsese said.