Film Festivals

History, Theory, Method, Practice

Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, Skadi Loist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317267201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in film festivals, with the field growing to a position of prominence within the space of a few short years. Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice represents a major addition to the literature on this topic, offering an authoritative and comprehensive introduction to the area. With a combination of chapters specifically examining history, theory, method and practice, it offers a clear structure and systematic approach for the study of film festivals.

Offering a collection of essays written by an international range of established scholars, it discusses well-known film festivals in Europe, North America and Asia, but equally devotes attention to the diverse range of smaller and/or specialized events that take place around the globe. It provides essential knowledge on the origin and development of film festivals, discusses the use of theory to study festivals, explores the methods of ethnographic and archival research, and looks closely at the professional practice of programming and film funding. Each section, moreover, is introduced by the editors, and all chapters include useful suggestions for further reading.

This will be an essential textbook for students studying film festivals as part of their film, media and cultural studies courses, as well as a strong research tool for scholars that wish to familiarize themselves with this burgeoning field.

Part I History

DOI: 10.4324/9781315637167-2

Introduction

Brendan Kredell

DOI: 10.4324/9781315637167-3

Appropriately, this book begins with the history of film festivals—both as events and as objects of study. At a time when festivals number into the thousands, seemingly filling every imaginable niche and day on the calendar, it is easy to take for granted that the modern film festival was always so. Of course, it was not. In the decades since what we now regard as the first film festival, held in Venice in 1932, festivals have grown exponentially in both scope and scale, and they now command a place of central importance in global film culture. How exactly we got from there to here remains a complicated question; as we shall see, what exactly we mean by “here” is all the more vexed.

In this part, our authors approach the history of film festivals from a variety of vantage points, yielding different insights into the development of festivals over time, and the impact of that history on the contemporary festival ecosystem. In the first chapter, Dorota Ostrowska considers the history of the Festival de Cannes, which despite not being the world’s oldest (a title it cedes to Venice), remains its most iconic. Ostrowska argues that by closely scrutinizing the history of Cannes, we can identify distinct patterns in the films that have been selected there, leading her to conclude that the Festival de Cannes has played an outsized role in the development of the aesthetics of the contemporary festival film.

Julian Stringer focuses his attention on the history of film festivals in East Asia. He argues that only by considering spatial relations can we properly understand both the regional history of film festivals and also the way that East Asia is situated with larger global flows of power. Resisting essentialist discourses that would seek to clearly define “Asian festivals” and mark them as other to the dominant festivals of the West, Stringer instead focuses our attention on tensions within the history of film festivals in Asia. What is more, he contends, the existing model of global festival regulation has been organized in such a way as to reinscribe the hegemony of European film festivals; his chapter closes with a call for more sustained research into the relationship between global festival regulator FIAPF and the newer, non-European festivals of the world.

In her chapter, Skadi Loist takes the long view, considering the organizational logics that we have applied to the study of film festival history themselves. In particular, she is interested in the notion of a circuit, and its many connotations; at a minimum, as she explains, festivals represents circuits of films, money, and people, and the “wiring” of those circuits varies tremendously. As Loist traces out in her chapter, these circuits are overlaid upon and integrated into existing structures of the media industries and of society more generally; as broader structural change in turn affects the workings of festival circuits, we witness one of the ways in which cinema culture is directly impacted by social forces.

Of course, it goes without saying that this part is necessarily incomplete in its overview of film festival history. A critical historiography of film festivals is still very much a work-in-progress; Marijke de Valck (2007) offers a three-part periodization of festival history that has been influential in this regard. Operationalizing the notions of flow and circuit described in Loist’s chapter here, Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong’s account (2011) of the historical evolution of festivals is especially valuable insofar as it highlights the interconnectedness of large and small festivals within a global exchange of cinema.

As Stringer suggests, there remains an implicit Eurocentrism to film festival history, and thus recent histories of festivals in Africa (Dovey 2015), Asia (Iordanova and Cheung 2011; Chan 2011), and Latin America (Barrow and Falicov 2013) have helped decenter our understanding of film festival studies, opening new avenues for inquiry in the process. Equally welcome in this regard are histories that focus our attention on festivals beyond the so-called “Big Three” of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin; this would include recent histories on Leipzig (Kötzing 2004; Moine 2014), Edinburgh (Stanfield 2008; Lloyd 2011), and Busan (Ahn 2011), among others.

And yet, despite these and many other examples of festival histories too numerous to cite here, the overwhelming conclusion one must reach after considering the state of historical research into film festivals is that much research remains to be done—that for every question answered, several more present themselves anew. As Francesco Di Chiara and Valentina Re (2011) argue, the stakes are high not only for the burgeoning field of film festival studies, but for our broader understanding of cinema history. In a real sense, festivals are to cinema what journalism is to history: a “first rough draft,” in Philip Graham’s famous phrase, a real-time effort to make some sense of the cinemas of the world. Here, I would go one step further: not only do festivals serve as cinema history’s first rough draft, but they are the sites where its forgotten treasures are given new life, and the public squares in which its hidden audiences gather. By studying the history of film festivals, we gain insight into how cinema history comes to be.

References

• Ahn, S. (2011) The Pusan International Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalization, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
• Barrow, S. and T. Falicov (eds.) (2013) “Latin American Cinemas Today,” special issue of Transnational Cinemas, 4(2).
• Chan, F. (2011) “The International Film Festival and the Making of a National Cinema,” Screen, 52(2), pp. 253–260.
• De Valck, M. (2007) Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
• Di Chiara, F. and V. Re (2011) “Film Festival/Film History: The Impact of Film Festivals on Cinema Historiography. Il cinema ritrovato and Beyond,” Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques | Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, 21(2/3), pp. 131–151.
• Dovey, L. (2015) Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals: Film Festivals, Time, Resistance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Iordanova, D. and R. Cheung (eds.) (2011) Film Festivals and East Asia, St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies.
• Kötzing, A. (2004) Die Internationale Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwoche in den 1970er Jahren, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
• Lloyd, M. (2011) How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh: The Impact of Cinéphilia on the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1968–1980, St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies.
• Moine, C. (2014) Cinéma et guerre froide: Histoire du festival de films documentaires de Leipzig (1955–1990), Paris: Publications Sorbonne.
• Stanfield, P. (2008) “Notes Toward a History of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1969–77,” Film International, 6(4), pp. 62–71.
• Wong, C. H.-Y. (2011) Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

1 Making film history at the Cannes film festival

Dorota Ostrowska

DOI: 10.4324/9781315637167-4

Introduction

Among A-list film festivals the Festival de Cannes has been unchallenged as the key event in the film festival calendar since its inception in 1946. Cannes’ role in shaping canons of arthouse cinema contributed to the festival’s enduring importance. This chapter explores the history of the Cannes film festival in relation to arthouse cinema across four periods when particular types of films were recognized as innovative for a combination of aesthetic, critical, industrial, or political reasons. The chapter starts with the exploration of the idea of “humanist film” which was linked with the pacifist goals embraced by Cannes in its early days and a result of specific programming policies of the festival; it then moves on to explore “critics’ film” associated with the increasingly important role of critics and producers at the festival in the early 1960s; it proceeds to explain the emergence of the “director’s” or “auteur film” throughout the late 1960s and 1970s; and finally, the chapter focuses on the idea of “Cannes film” which is the result of recent changes in production practices whereby film festivals both are a meeting place for the industry, and also act as creative film producers themselves through the festivals’ film development initiatives and funds. This chapter will chisel out the enduring characteristics of these historic Cannes film categories, which are compounded in today’s category of a festival film.

Humanist films

The idea to create an international film festival in Cannes emerged in France in 1937–1939 as a direct response to the political change in Italy, home of the first film festival, La Mostra di Venezia (Venice Film Festival). In the late 1930s, in line with Mussolini’s government, La Mostra was becoming more politically radicalized toward Fascism with countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and France no longer willing to attend the Italian event (Mazdon 2007: 16). This was in stark contrast to the early days of the Venice Film Festival, whose first two editions in 1932 and 1934 were organized in association with the International Educational Cinematographic Institute,¹ which itself had been established in 1928 by the League of Nations in response to the carnage of World War I and in the wake of various pacifist movements of the nineteenth century. This Institute was housed in Rome at the expense of the Fascist government.

The first Cannes film festival was planned for September 2, 1939 but the German invasion of Poland on September 1 brutally interrupted the festival after the screening of the opening film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, dir. William Dieterle) (Jungen 2014). When the festival finally took place for the first time in 1946 it was driven by the vision of a cosmopolitan event underpinned by the ideal of humanist, populist, and pacifist cinema. The earliest regulations of the Cannes film festival stated clearly that “the aim of the festival is to encourage the development of the cinematic art in all its forms and to establish a spirit of collaboration among film producing countries” (Festival regulations 1946). The actual process of film submission and film selection supported the festival’s “spirit of collaboration” which determined the character of the festival more than aesthetic concerns. The films were selected and submitted by the national boards or national producers’ associations. The festival organizers were not able to see the films until just a few weeks or sometimes even days before the festival. These viewings were focused on confirming that the technical quality of the copy was adequate rather than to pass any aesthetic judgments. Often the copies were coming very late, which precluded the festival organizers from engaging in any meaningful curatorial activity.

The festival regulations focused on encouraging the participation from the main film-producing countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom to boost the importance of Cannes from the industry’s point of view, and on maximizing the number of countries that were invited to participate. The level of film production in every country determined the number each could submit, and only countries with which France had diplomatic relationships could be invited. This was a particularly sensitive issue in the immediate postwar period, which took a few years to resolve in relation to the former Axis powers of Germany and Japan. Overall, the festival organizers together with the French foreign office were focused on assuring that no participant felt offended or sidetracked. The direct result was that quite regularly films were forced to be withdrawn from the festival in response to the protests from different countries, and the air of political scandal usually accompanied the Cannes festival editions. The producers, who were members of the national producers’ associations in different Western countries, mattered for the way in which the festival was programmed. These associations, such as the British Film Producers’ Associations (BFPA), were responsible for selecting which films were submitted for competition at the Cannes film festival and for bearing some of the costs associated with the submission. For socialist countries, where the state took over the role of the producer, the selection and submission was done by the specially set-up national boards and committees. Commercial interests and Cold War politics were the flavor of the month in the early years of the Cannes film festival.

The idea of cinema as a vehicle for universal peace can be traced back to the nineteenth-century belief in the power of the new means of transportation such as railways and new media of communications, in particular the telegraph, to bring peace and progress (...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword: the film festival and film culture’s transnational essence
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: what is a film festival? How to study festivals and why you should
• Part I History
• Part II Theory
• Part III Method
• Part IV Practice
• Index