Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities

by Adam Nayman

In On Film Festivals–—the third edition of the Dekalog series guest edited by Cineaste staffer Richard Porton—the venerable Canadian programmer James Quandt kids the growing number of international film festivals by referring to an old New Yorker cartoon: two men stranded in rocky, inhospitable terrain look around and surmise that it would be a good location to start one up.

Prior to 2009, the field of film festival studies may have struck some observers as a similarly empty landscape. In the penultimate chapter of Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit (hereafter referred to as FFY1) Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist say as much, writing that “although plenty of individual festival histories and anniversary books have been published and the topic of film festivals has occasionally been addressed in academic studies…the phenomenon of film festivals was, until recently, rarely the main focus of scholarly study.”

The existence of these two texts—and also the just-released Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities—suggests that this paradigm may be shifting. Certainly, the Film Festival Yearboooks will prove valuable resources for film studies departments: besides containing a detailed, annotated bibliography of extant film festival scholarship, de Valck and Loist’s essay endeavors to narrow down a workable methodology for aspiring scholars proposing festivals as sites of interaction between different discourses. Their humble attempt at mapping this field encompasses six distinct axes: film, economics, institution, reception, location, and “the extra level of the network and history,” which they concede is too neat a schema but serves as a fair starting point.

Besides, neatness is preferable to clutter, and one of the great strengths of the FFY publications (both edited by Diana Iordanova, with Ragan Rhyne and Ruby Cheung, respectively, as co-editors ) is a general absence of any murky, self-parodically academic writing; the newness of film festival scholarship means that these writers are less inclined to use jargon as a theoretical crutch. Even more valuable is the series’ commitment to the viewpoints of the “on-the-ground” contingent –experienced travelers on the circuit whose observations resonate beyond the mere accumulation of data. Hence the inclusion in FFY1 of a chatty, colloquial writer like Nick Roddick (compiling his Sight & Sound festival dispatches into a consideration of digital cinema) alongside academics like Kay Armatage, (who writes specifically about the seminal 1973 Women and Film Festival in Toronto) or Ruby Cheung (who treats the gradual corporatization of the Hong Kong International Film Festival).

This plurality of voices extends also to FFY2, which gestures towards the margins of the international film festival network, focusing on festivals geared towards different ethnicities and social groups. It’s heartening, for instance, to see a piece written by somebody best known as a blogger—Twitch.com critic Michael Guillen, whose “Diasporas By the Bay” patiently explicates the ways in which two San Francisco-based initiatives – the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the San Francisco South Asian International Film Festival—have thrived by matching “content to constituency.” Roy Stafford’s “Bite The Mango: Bradford’s Unique Film Festival” unfolds as a case study of a (South) Asian film festival flourishing in slightly less likely location—Northern England—while Isabel Santaolalla and Stefan Simanowitz’s essay “A Cinematic Refuge in the Desert: The Sahara International Film Festival” brings to mind that old New Yorker cartoon before pointing out the singularity (and evident social value) of a festival that operates inside what is essentially a Saharawi refugee camp.

There is a dryness to both volumes of the Film Festival Yearbook, but also a few welcome instances of humor. Iordanova’s FFY1 contribution “The Film Festival Circuit” in a circular, almost Beckettian exchange between “two men, usually bespectacled and with longish grey hair” to put forth the idea of her eponymous subject as a “treadmill,” rolling on beneath the “class of cinephile freelancers” without whose presence it might cease entirely.

Many of these old rollers are featured prominently in the Dekalog volume, including Jonathan Rosenbaum (cited by Iordanova in her discussion of “festival-hopping”). His contribution to On Film Festivals, entitled “Some Festivals I’ve Known: A Few Rambling Recollections,” is unfortunately an example of truth in advertising, containing the author’s affectionate reminiscences of his visits to a variety of international film festivals, often in the company of influential filmmakers and film critics. Unlike Roddick’s piece, which uses personal anecdotes to develop an argument, Rosenbaum offers anecdotes seemingly for their own sake. Some of them are vivid, like his memory of the New York Film Festival Selection Committee attending (and fleeing) Cannes screenings en masse, but overall, the essay feels like a bit of a dodge.

 Quintín’s “The Festival Galaxy” fixes its gaze similarly navel-ward, but the former director of the Buenos Aires International Film Festival (BAFICI) also makes an urgent point about how the rise of film festivals in cities across the world coincided with the slow erosion of repertory and independent cinema exhibition, with festivals becoming the only places to see certain kinds of art cinema even as said titles became marginalized within their promotional and marketing schemes. Quintín doesn’t attempt to disguise his pride at having cultivated an atmosphere of film-critical solidarity during his tenure at BAFICI. He says that one of his main goals was to make the festival hospitable to what he calls a “nice mafia”—a united front of critics, programmers and filmmakers with like-minded concepts of cinephilia who can act as a buttress against the encroachment of “body snatcher” cinephiles – “one of those persons who appears agreeable and knowledgeable, but who turns out to regard cinema with the mentality of a Harvey Weinstein.” This attitude of “us versus them” runs through many of the entries in On Film Festivals, which doesn’t give “them” any sort of platform within its pages (this is not a criticism, merely a statement of fact). Many of the contributors could be described as members – or at least affiliates – of Quintín’s “nice mafia,” including Robert Koehler, Olaf Möller and Christoph Huber, all of whom happen to be regular writers for the Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope (a.k.a. Mafia Headquarters).

That publication’s editor, Mark Peranson, diagrams a different (though interrelated) schism in his essay “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals,” which was originally published in Cineaste in the summer of 2008. After acknowledging the “false dichotomy that exists between the multiplex and the film festival world”—echoing Quintín’s point about the disappearance of a viable year-round art-house culture – Peranson analyzes the very real dichotomy between “business festivals” and “audience festivals,” inventorying points of convergence and divergence across a field of economic and artistic imperatives. Far from concluding that business (or “behemoth”) festivals are corrupt and that audience festivals (like his home base of Vancouver) constitute some sort of cinephilic oasis, he claims instead that both models have their place within the larger system – and that both models are at the mercy of sales agents (Wild Bunch, Fortissimo, Celluloid Dreams, etc), whose whims dictate festival lineups more powerfully than the wishes of even the most dogged programmers. It’s a rather pessimistic assessment, but it also occasions a call for critics to do their part by writing more authoritatively about the systems and structures of film festivals in lieu of standard reportage. The question, of course, is where said critics might write such a piece outside the confines of a magazine like Cinema Scope— or a rarefied volume like On Film Festivals.

To buy Dekalog 3, click here

To buy Film Festival 1, click here

To Buy Film Festival 2, click here

Alternatively, you can buy FF1 and  FF2 through the University of St. Andrews by clicking here.

Adam Nayman, a film critic working in Toronto, writes for Cinema Scope, Montage, Elle Canada, The L.A. Weekly, and Eye Weekly

Cineaste,Vol.XXXV No.3 2010

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