Contingency, time, and event: An archaeological approach to the film festival (original) (raw)
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Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism
Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism
nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. The Open Access publication of this book is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg, German Research Foundation)-Projektnummer 502058482. This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https:// crea tive comm ons.org/ licen ses/ by-nc-nd/ 4.0/ Contents Acknowledgments xi List of Figures and Tables xiv Introduction 1 Film Festivals, Introducing a Global Population 18 Part 1 Affordances 1 Film Festivals and Festivalization 35 1 Film Festival Research in the Cinema Field 35 1.1 Propositions for Film Festivals 36 1.2 Historical Origins 37 1.3 Contemporary State-Festival Relationships 39 1.4 Within-Population Differentiation 39 1.5 Center/ Periphery in the Cinema Field 41 1.6 Festivals as Counter-Culture and Sites for Identity-Politics 42
Reframing Film Festivals: Politics, Histories and Agencies
Cinergie. Il Cinema e le altre Arti, 2022
Film festivals brand themselves as yearly rituals that set out to glorify the seventh art along with its makers. Blended in a rhetoric of universalist humanism, such a self-branding discourse has often concealed the actual variety and outreach of their agencies. Throughout their global and individual histories festivals have, in fact, done more than celebrating films, and have had significant impact in film culture as well as beyond, tapping into the domains of international diplomacy (Pisu 2013, Kötzing et al. 2017), cultural exchange (Razlogova 2020, Gelardi 2022) and local development policies (Fehrenbach 2020, Rasmi 2022), for example. It is because of their crucial role within the cultural histories of cinema that festivals have attracted critical attention since their outset, observed and theorized from different standpoints as sites of intersection, negotiation, circulation and sociability. In this vein, one can consider some of the early commentaries on these institutions, such as André Bazin's short essay (1955), in which he observed and questioned the sacred rules underpinning Cannes' religious "order" and its prestige, or the (little known) speeches by Tommaso Chiarini and Mino Argentieri (Anonymous 1966), who engaged with the controversial proliferation of festivals in Italy and Europe in the 1960s and argued for the "public value" of festivals' programming and discoveries. 1 Attention on festivals has not waned ever since and, throughout the last twenty years, it has become central to scholarly discussions on film and of its social, cultural, political and economic contours, including the historical developments of film aesthetics (
Reframing Film Festivals: Histories, Economies and Cultures is an international film studies conference organised by the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Aldo Moro University of Bari, in collaboration with the the Apulia Film Commission, the Consulta Universitaria Cinema and the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema and is supported by the Centro Studi Apulia Film Commission, Science Gallery Venice and Hostelsclub. This double-event conference seeks to contribute to the so-called film festival studies through a series of roundtables and debates involving film critics, practitioners and scholars. In this vein, Reframing Film Festivals seeks to foster an interdisciplinary and intersectional reading of film festivals, here conceived as a historiographic “dispositive”, as cultural formations and as financial institutions. Within a single and cohesive research framework, the Ca’ Foscari strand (11-12 February) will be devoted to the critical-historic and historiographic dimension of film festivals, while at the University of Bari (25-26 March) the focus will be placed on their cultural and economic dimension.
Across and in-between: Transcending disciplinary borders in film festival studies
Fusion Journal, 2018
Since the mid-2000s film festivals have emerged as a distinct area of critical academic inquiry. While originating within a film studies framework, the study of film festivals has developed its own character as a sub-field that moves well beyond the traditional boundaries of screen and media studies. The study of film festivals is inherently transnational, transmedia and interdisciplinary in its approach. Borrowing from cultural studies, anthropology, business and technology studies, event management and curatorship studies, alongside media studies, screen studies and the emergent area of media industry studies, film festival research transcends traditional disciplinary frameworks. This article traces the emergence of film festivals as a critical area of study and its evolution towards its status as a distinct sub-field. In exploring how the study of festivals and screen events connects with and extends traditional film and media studies frameworks, this article also makes a case for what is gained (and what is lost) through the intersections and interrelations of these two areas of study.
Taming the Excess: Ideology and the Festival Film Synopsis
This paper is concerned with the way in which the form of the film synopsis reifies both the film itself and the processes at work in its production, distribution and recognition. In line with recent Lacanian film theory (inter alia, Žižek, McGowan, Vighi), I treat film as a site of excess meaning, or antagonism, and therefore argue that we need to look to extra-filmic material if we are to understand the ideological process of resolving antagonism. I examine synopses of films given by international, competitive (“A list”) film festivals, and consider how they condense the meaning of an award-winning film in order to present a sellable product: the “festival film”. In doing so, I aim to show three things. First, the process of reification – “taming the excess” – at work in the film synopsis form. This can be understood by the ideological process of inclusion and exclusion at work in film synopses – their attempt to fix, or quilt, the meaning of a film. Second, the way in which this process is conditioned by a particular set of values, in this case the values associated with and reproduced by the film festival brand. This is a necessary aspect of the circulation of symbolic capital on which film festivals and award-winning films depend (Elsaesser, 2005, De Valck, 2014). Finally, I aim to indicate the possibility of considering the international film festival network as part of the cultural state apparatus, which has taken on a transnational dimension.