by HENRY SHEEHAN (Orange County Register)

Last week, the Hollywood Reporter ran an article on the woes of the Venice Film Festival. The longest-lived and, in some ways, maybe still the most prestigious of the world's major festivals, Venice (which ends its 12-day run Saturday) has fallen on hard times of late.

Mostly, its difficulties stem from the inability of its programmers to get that precise mixture of films that would attract Hollywood studios, the European masters, international film buyers, the press and a general audience. For the past few years, it seems every time Venice tilts one way to pick up one segment of the audience, it tosses another segment overboard.

The article contrasted Venice's woes with the success of the Toronto International Film Festival, which, it said, "outside of Cannes, has emerged as the most important international festival."

Toronto opened Thursday and runs through Wednesday, and looking at its lineup, it's hard to disagree with the above assessment. The studios are represented in force (Robin Williams in "Jakob the Liar," and "Shine" director Scott Hicks' "Snow Falling on Cedars"); the world's art-house brand names are abundant (Iran's Abbas Kiarostami, China's Chen Kaige); and even newsworthy films (Kevin Smith's irreverent, religious-themed "Dogma") dot the program.

What's remarkable about Toronto, though, is that it might not even really need the lure of these big names to thrive. More than Venice, and certainly much more than Cannes, Toronto can count on a loyal audience of film lovers who seem willing to take a chance on nearly any exposed strip of celluloid.

This allows the festival to not only schedule a generous selection of multiple public screenings, but to offer filmmakers a chance to move and affect the public as well as hawk their wares to industry professionals.

Ask Charles Burnett if that makes a difference. Burnett is one of the stalwarts of American cinema, a true independent who has had a film, 1977's "Killer of Sheep," selected for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, and whose 1990 "To Sleep With Anger" won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics.

"Toronto is more of a people's festival, whereas in Cannes it's more of a buyer and specialist group," says Burnett, 55. "There's less pressure; you're here to enjoy watching films. I don't know exactly how to describe the atmosphere in Cannes, but it's rather bizarre.

"There's this concern on the part of the buyers in finding the right movie. You have people in your screening and if it's not the film that they want, you hear the seats being flopped up and everyone is rushing to the exit. This is after five minutes.

"Here you have people coming to see a film at 9 o'clock in the morning. There are people out there all day watching movies, and I mean the public. They stay and watch the movie and enjoy."

BURNETT'S BIG YEAR

This is something of a banner year at Toronto for Burnett, who will have three films scheduled. "Killer of Sheep" is being shown in a section dedicated to the programmer, David Overby, who first selected it for Toronto. The short "Olivia's Story" will be shown in the Planet Africa section, an annual showcase given over to films from "Africa and the Africa diaspora," in the words of programmer June Givanni.

But the big entry for Burnett is "The Annihilation of Fish," a recently completed feature film starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave and Margot Kidder, being shown in the Contemporary World Cinema section. It's a love story involving some eccentric over-60s, and its distribution rights will be for sale.

Burnett has shot with and without distribution in place, and he seems to prefer the latter, though he recognizes the risks.

"You don't have to deal with what stars the distributors need; you can cast it the way you want to," he explains. "You can edit it the way you want to. The risk is you make a film a distributor can't sell. Hopefully, with James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave that's not a problem."

As far as the short, Burnett knows the chances of it reaching a large audience, despite the fact that its subject — relations between black Americans and Korean immigrants — is of undoubted interest to many. But the form itself had its rewards.

"I think when you make a film it's not so much an issue of showing it so much as it is that it's something you really like," Burnett says, unconsciously defining the independent spirit. "We understood that there wasn't a market for it. It's something you like doing; you've got an urge. For me, it was therapeutic after working on (feature) films that are very controlled, to be able to relax and make an enjoyable film. It's really pleasurable."

Still, it does seem odd that Burnett — who recently may have reached his largest audience yet with the cable film "Nightjohn" — would settle for the limitations of short filmmaking.

"When you think of a filmmaker of Charles' accomplishments, you might think so," agrees Givanni, who programmed both "Annihilation" and the short. "I tend to value the shorts program because you can use it to introduce new talent. But very often there's a subject that has an unusual treatment or the subject itself is unusual or it's being done by a filmmaker who has a particularly good eye. There is no obvious market for it.

"But I think that sometimes some of the smaller films that are destined for smaller distribution circuits can be just as valuable when seen in the commercial environment, because they represent what is coming up or another way of putting a subject on film."

Thus, even in the most modest circumstances, it's hard to draw a line between art and commerce, the artistic and the popular, at the Toronto Film Festival. The same, of course, can be said of cinema itself when it's at its best: That it can have no ambition too high or no reach too wide.