Festival Round-Up: New York

The power of the film camera, both salutary and ominous, was much in evidence at this year's New York Film Festival. Video technology was the theme of the festival's best American film, Paul Schrader's Auto Focus. This unlikely epic tells the story of Bob Crane, star of the wholesome American TV series Hogan's Heroes. Bob, (played by Greg Kinnear), starts out as a practising Catholic in a cardigan with three kids. Then he's a still-married TV actor given to orgies and making his own amateur porn "films" with early home-video equipment. Then he's a habitué of dank bars in two-bit cities, hitting on the bustiest local girls. Finally, he's killed by his own camera's tripod, à la Peeping Tom.

Like most of Schrader's work, Auto Focus is obsessed with hubris and its outcome – the fall from grace. Between a lurid succession of bobbing breasts, grainy early video images and clinking highball glasses, there are the inevitable Schrader-style depredations of the pleasures of the flesh. The real Crane may well have been a bland sicko, a filthy footnote in television history, but Schrader has crafted a story of biblical proportions out of his Playboy-era perversity and compulsive quest for sensation. Crane's techie pal John Carpenter, or Carpy (Willem Dafoe), a loser who uses his knowledge of Sony to latch on to celebrities, is in Schrader's hands a gargoyle of lust and technology, driven by erotic desires for Crane and a desperate need to be near a celebrity. In order to do so, Carpenter sells Crane some of the earliest portable video equipment, and takes Crane to strip joints and films their orgies, making himself indispensable.

Kinnear plays Crane as a man of vacuous, affable selfishness interlaced with grotesque sexism and mind-numbing hedonism. He's sterling in the role, which is simply the most rancid rendition of Kinnear's customary self-regarding geniality. Dafoe plays Carpenter, who, the film indicates, murdered Crane after Crane finally rejected him, as a craven weakling rather than an ominous baddie. With their shared motto, "a day without sex is a day wasted", and their penchant for masturbating alongside one another to the pornographic images of their own creation, Schrader's Crane and Carpy as fleshed out by Kinnear and Dafoe, are poster boys for the value of sexual repression. They are also the embodiments of the darkness of celebrity. While fame provided Crane with access to girls and thus to his sybaritic pastimes (and celebrity incited Carpenter and innumerable bimbos to want to have access to him), it ultimately destroyed him.

Recently, Crane's second ex-wife, Patti, and their porn-entrepreneur son Scotty, have been trying to grab themselves some publicity by advertising the "Bob Crane porn website" and filing lawsuits (Scotty is particularly outraged by the suggestion that Crane had a penis implant). Far more startling (and poignant), however, is the fact that Bob Crane Jr, the "good son", consulted by the film-makers, insisted at the festival that Auto Focus was just half of the story: Bob Crane was also a good father and family man. It's those sort of delusions that are truly in keeping with Bob Crane Sr.

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, a documentary by the Austrian performance artist André Heller and film-maker Othmar Schmiderer, sees the camera not as a tool for destruction but for absolution. The film's subject is 81-year-old Traudl Junge, hired by Hitler in 1942 to take dictation. She also dined with him and heard his suicide shot from within the bunker. Her decision to be interviewed for the film after a 50-year silence, once she knows that she is dying, can therefore be read as her faith that a recorded confession might help to restore her good name.

We hear of Hitler's love of dogs and disinterest in personal happiness, and also her own reactions to Hitler. Her discussion of her subservience and her desire for a father is fascinating, as is her admission that she wished to be Hitler's secretary to be near stardom and certitude and power. One imagines that Junge's personal lack, a lack that she filled with worship for Hitler, was shared by the other German youth who participated in the machinery of evil during the Third Reich. It's powerful stuff.