Six months after the first New York Film Festival — held in Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall in September 1963 — this newspaper observed the event “showed that New York has a large audience for new, unheralded and sometimes unusual foreign films.” Much has changed since then (including the names on the buildings), but the festival, whose 56th edition begins Friday, still rests on a bedrock of faith in that audience and those films.

Back in the ’60s, moviegoers obsessed with — or merely curious about — what was happening beyond Hollywood pursued that interest in conditions of relative scarcity. The masterworks of postwar auteurs were not easy to see, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center provided a beachhead and a clearinghouse, an alternative to network television and Times Square. Now the problem facing audiences is one of superabundance. There are so many platforms, so many screens, so much choice facing the cultural consumer. How could a few dozen movies, screened in cavernous rooms on the Upper West Side, matter much in those circumstances?

But the glut of moving-picture content that inundates our consciousness — to say nothing of the unending gale of news alerts and the squall of social media — makes local film festivals like New York more important than ever. Not only because they offer a reason to get out of the house and participate in a durable communal ritual, but also because the unheralded, the unusual and the foreign are especially fragile commodities in the current marketplace. We are too easily lulled into complacency by pretentious prestige television, Oscar-thirsty biopics and presold franchises. We need reminders of strangeness and daring, films that don’t just confirm what we already thought we knew. Above all we need to be inoculated against the temptations of nostalgia, to recognize the golden age of right now.

What I’m saying is that the presence in the New York festival lineup of new work by Claire Denis, Jia Zhangke, Alfonso Cuarón, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong and Olivier Assayas is news. I’m aware that those are not necessarily household names, and I’m not trying to brandish my film snob credentials (which are of doubtful authenticity in any case) by invoking them.