Festivals

A film festival is an event designed to exhibit, celebrate, and promote a selection of motion pictures chosen according to the particular aims and ambitions of the event's organizers and sponsors. Although the exact origin of the term "film festival" is difficult to determine, its near-universal use probably stems more from its alliterative lilt than from its precision as a descriptive tool. Most film festivals do have characteristics that can be described as festive, such as gala opening ceremonies and guest appearances by directors and celebrities. Still, the events are generally taken quite seriously by the movie buffs, film-industry insiders, and journalists who attend them. Many find festivals to be occasions for prolonged and intensive activity including long hours of screenings, press conferences, question-and-answer sessions, and networking with like-minded professionals and fans.

Beyond these aspects it is hard to generalize about film festivals, which vary widely in their purposes and goals. Some are regional, focusing on productions with limited budgets and ambitions and appealing primarily to local audiences. Others are national or international, drawing attendees from near and far by showcasing a diverse array of movies from many countries. Some have expansive programs with hundreds of titles, whereas others limit their slates to a modest number of rigorously selected entries. Some are eclectic and all-embracing in scope; others have specific interests with regard to genre or format, specializing in such areas as animation, documentary, short films, gay and lesbian films, and films for children. Some give prizes to films, filmmakers, and performers; others deliberately avoid this practice. Few rules for film-festival organizing exist beyond knowing what might currently attract cinema enthusiasts.

HISTORY OF FILM FESTIVALS

The origin of film festivals can be traced to the rise of film societies and cine-clubs, which sprang up in various countries during the 1920s, often as a reaction to what many regarded as the dominance of the newly powerful Hollywood film industry over the cinemas of less well-endowed nations and over noncommercial movements devoted to such causes as documentary and avant-garde film. Such clubs and societies flourished in countries as different as France, where they fostered the emergence of the historically important impressionist and surrealist cinemas, and Brazil, where they provided the only consistent outlet for domestically produced movies. Although most film clubs and societies were in Western Europe, some were established in Latin America and the United States as well. As such groups grew and spread, they started to arrange international conclaves where their members—many of whom were practicing or aspiring filmmakers—could share ideas and inspirations without regard to national borders. Activities like these were the predecessors and prototypes of film festivals per se.

The first true film festival came into being as a direct result of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's (1883–1945) enthusiasm for motion pictures as a tool for political public relations and propaganda. Eager to spur the development of state-run Italian cinema in the face of competition from Hollywood and elsewhere, he spent lavishly to build up the native film industry while imposing heavy taxation on the dubbing of foreign-language movies, thus hampering their distribution and exhibition. Among the cultural projects he chose to support through his Ministry of Information was the already existing Venice Biennial Exhibition of Italian Art, which gave birth to the International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art in August 1932 as part of an effort to make the Biennial more varied and multidisciplinary in content. The first cinema program commenced with the premiere of the horror classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) and included twenty-four other entries from seven countries. The declared purpose of the exhibition was to allow "the light of art to shine over the world of commerce," but it soon became clear that power politics were a major subtext of the event. In 1935, its first year as an annually scheduled festival, it marked the ongoing rise of European fascism by instituting official prizes in place of the popularity poll and "participation diploma" of the 1932 program. This paved the way not only for a yearly Best Italian Film award but also for productions of Nazi Germany, an Italian ally at that time, to win the Best Foreign Film laurel four times between 1936 and 1942. The arrangement also allowed Leni Riefenstahl's (1902–2003) two-part Olympia (1938), a paean to Aryan supremacy in the 1936 Olympic Games, to share the highest prize (the Mussolini Cup) in 1938 with an Italian drama about a fascist soldier in the Ethiopian campaign. It seemed hardly coincidental that Mussolini's oldest son, Vittorio, appeared in the credits as "supervisor" of the latter film. American and British members of the festival jury resigned as soon as these awards were made public.

French participants in the festival also walked out, protesting the Mussolini Cup decisions and expressing belated anger over the 1937 veto by festival authorities of a top prize for Jean Renoir's great war drama La grande illusion (The Grand Illusion, 1937), the much-admired French entry. This proved to be an unofficial first step toward the establishment of a French film festival designed to outdo and overshadow its Italian counterpart, which was now politically and morally tainted in the eyes of much of the cultural world. The cinema authority Robert Favre le Bret and the historian Philippe Erlanger, who was chief of an organization called Action Artistique Français, headed the committee charged with creating such a festival, and pioneering filmmaker Louis Lumière (1864–1948) served as the group's president. Overcoming fears that such a move would provoke Mussolini's anger, the French government declared its willingness to provide necessary funding, and a few months later the Riviera city of Cannes—having staved off competition from sundry French, Belgian, and Swiss cities—started planning a state-of-the-art Palais des Festivals to house the new event.

Other, smaller festivals had sprung up in the wake of Venice's early success, but it was the advent of Cannes that established the film festival as a staple of the modern cultural scene. Formally dubbed the Cannes International Film Festival, it debuted in September 1939, a time of year selected so as to extend the traditional tourist season by a couple of weeks. The program included The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Only Angels Have Wings. Gary Cooper, Mae West, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Shearer, and Tyrone Power were on the "steamship of stars" dispatched to Cannes by Hollywood's mighty MGM studio. A cardboard model of the Cathedral de Nôtre-Dame was erected on the beach, heralding William Dieterle's (1893–1972) version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as the festival's opening-night attraction. In a shocking twist, however, the opening film was the only film to be screened: Germany's invasion of Poland on the same day (1 September) led the festival's leaders to close its doors only hours after they had opened. The doors would not reopen until September 1946. (Ironically, the Venice festival also reopened in 1946 after three years of suspension due to the chaos of World War II.) Despite technical problems—projection glitches interrupted the opening-night screening, and reels of Alfred Hitchcock's (1899–1980) thriller Notorious (1946) were shown out of order—the Cannes program of 1946 was a great success. Still, the 1947 edition was diminished by the absence of such major countries as England and the Soviet Union, and the 1948 program was canceled. Not until 1951 did Cannes become a dependable yearly event, changing its dates to the spring, when more major movies are available. Since then it has reigned as the world's most prestigious and influential film festival, attracting thousands of journalists to its daylong press screenings and armies of industry professionals to both the festival and the Film Market held concurrently in the Palais and theaters scattered throughout the city.

Festivals proliferated at a growing rate in Europe and elsewhere during the 1950s, affirming the ongoing artistic (and commercial) importance of film at a time when global warfare was becoming a memory and world culture was energetically entering the second half of the twentieth century. Politics played a far smaller role in this phase of festival history than when the Venice and Cannes festivals were founded, but political considerations did not entirely vanish from the scene. The large and ambitious Berlin International Film Festival, for example, was established in 1951, presenting itself as a geographical and artistic meeting ground between East and West as the Cold War climbed into high gear. This was not an easy position to assume, given that socialist nations of the Eastern bloc did not participate officially until 1975, although individual films did represent such countries in the program from time to time.

The most important new festival to emerge in the 1960s was the New York Film Festival, founded in 1963 at Lincoln Center, one of the city's leading cultural venues. Modeled to some extent after the London Film Festival, the New York festival took advantage of Lincoln Center's enormous prestige in the artistic community—as home to such various institutions as the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, among others—to underwrite the aesthetic pedigree of the art films, avant-garde works, and documentaries that dominated its programs. Such cinema found an enthusiastic (if limited) audience at a time when sophisticated spectators were unusually receptive to innovative foreign movies (from Europe and Japan especially) presented in their original languages with subtitles. Unlike the heavily programmed festivals at Cannes and Berlin, the New York festival showed a limited quantity of films—about two dozen features and a similar number of shorts, chosen by a five-member selection committee—and it declined to give prizes, asserting that its highly selective nature made every work shown there a "winner."

Two key events in film-festival history took place in the 1970s. The first was the 1976 debut of the Toronto International Film Festival, originally known as the Festival of Festivals, a name that underscored its commitment to importing major attractions from other festivals for Canadian audiences. Its first year was marred by the withdrawal of expected contributions from some Hollywood studios, apparently because its Toronto audience base was considered too parochial. Still, in subsequent years it has grown into one of the most all-embracing festivals in the world, with an annual slate ranging from domestic productions to international art films and (ironically) more Hollywood products than are likely to be found at any comparable event. Canada also hosts two other major festivals, the Montreal World Film Festival and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The other major development of the 1970s was the founding of the United States Film Festival in Salt Lake City in 1978, devised by the Utah Film Commission as a means of spotlighting the state's assets as a site for film production. After concentrating its energies on retrospectives and discussion-centered events for three years, during which it also sponsored a nationwide competition for new independent films, the event moved to the smaller community of Park City in 1981 and began to seek a higher profile. It was acquired in 1985 by actor Robert Redford (b. 1936) and the four-year-old Sundance Institute, which Redford had established to foster the growth of "indie" filmmaking outside the Hollywood system. Renamed the Sundance Film Festival in 1989, it has become an eagerly covered media event as well as a wide-ranging showcase for both independent and international productions.

Alongside the attention-getting world-class festivals, over a thousand more modest events have cropped up. Some have tried to establish uniqueness by using a word other than "festival" in their names, such as the French-American Film Workshop held in New York and Avignon, France, and the Lake Placid Film Forum in upstate New York, which emphasizes relationships between cinema and the written word. Major festivals also exist outside the United States and Europe, such as the Ouagadougou Festival in the African nation of Burkina Faso and the Shanghai and Tokyo festivals in Asia.

LEADING FESTIVALS: NEW YORK,
CANNES, TORONTO

Festivals vary in how they choose their films and what types they show, in the degree of geographical diversity they seek, in their willingness to give prizes, and in many other respects. The New York Film Festival presents films chosen by a five-member selection committee—two permanent members who are full-time employees of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and three rotating members (film critics or scholars) who serve terms of three to five years. The event has broadened its scope over the years, adding more special screenings and sidebar programs, including an annual weekend of avant-garde cinema that is unique among major festivals. It remains noncompetitive, however, and considers itself a "public festival" where the intended audience consists primarily of movie buffs, in contrast to the large contingents of film professionals who attend larger-scale North American and European festivals.

By common consensus, Cannes is the single most important film festival in the world. This is partly because of its age, partly because of its size, and partly because success tends to breed success—in other words, the festival traditionally thought of as the most influential is indeed the most influential for that very reason. The Cannes program is chosen by the festival director with the advice of assistant programmers assigned to specialized fields (documentary, Asian cinema, short films, and so on). Robert Favre le Bret, Gilles Jacob, and most recently Thierry Frémaux have had final say over the selection since 1972, when the festival eliminated its policy of allowing each participating country to choose its own presentations. Cannes divides its programs into several categories. The most highly visible is the Competition, usually comprising two features for each day of the twelve-day event, many of them directed by established auteurs of world cinema. Films directed by favored newcomers, including actors with Cannes credentials like Johnny Depp (The Brave, 1997) and Vincent Gallo (The Brown Bunny, 2003), also make their way into the Competition from time to time, although in the eyes of most critics the results in these two cases were disastrous. The main sidebar program, Un Certain Regard ("A Certain Look"), focuses on movies by newer or less-known talents whom the festival considers worthy of attention and support.

ROBERT REDFORD
b. Charles Robert Redford Jr., Santa Monica, California, 18 August 1937

Robert Redford is an internationally known actor, producer, and director who has become an influential festival impresario via the Sundance Film Festival, until 1991 known as the United States Film Festival. Redford acquired the seven-year-old festival in 1985 as an adjunct to the Sundance Institute, which he founded in 1981 to encourage filmmaking outside Hollywood by supporting new directors and screenwriters, and by facilitating the exhibition of independently made fiction and documentary features. The institute now sponsors film-development workshops, a film-music program, and theater projects as well as the festival and the television outlet (the Sundance Channel) for which it is most widely recognized. It has also established the Sundance Collection at the University of California at Los Angeles, an archive that acquires and preserves independent films.

Screening movies is still the institute's most prominent activity: in 2005 the Sundance festival showed more than 200 films for almost 47,000 spectators, three times the attendance of a decade earlier. It also serves as an important marketplace for American and international cinema, attracting distributors and exhibitors on the lookout for fresh, offbeat work. Its reputation for such fare was sparked largely by the 1989 premiere of Steven Soderbergh's debut film sex, lies, and videotape. The festival's openness to a wide range of fiction, nonfiction, and international movies has also helped Sundance programmers retain a commitment to "indie" filmmaking while sidestepping issues related to the increasingly blurred boundaries between mainstream (i.e., Hollywood) and independent styles and modes of production.

As a youth Redford studied painting in Europe and attended New York's prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts to hone his acting skills. He is also a longtime environmental activist. Such activities signal an artistic ambition and social awareness that run against the grain of Redford's commercially driven Hollywood career, perhaps explaining his decision to put so much money and muscle into organizations dedicated to independent cinema. His performance in the hugely popular western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) made him a top-ranking celebrity. He also starred in such box-office hits as Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Sting (1973), The Natural (1984), and Indecent Proposal (1993). The more thoughtful side of his creative personality has surfaced in films such as All the President's Men (1976), in which he played one of the Washington Post reporters who exposed the Watergate political scandal, and Ordinary People (1980) and Quiz Show (1994), which he directed.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

As Actor: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President's Men (1976); As Actor and Director: The Horse Whisperer (1998); As Director: Ordinary People (1980), The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)

FURTHER READING

Anderson, John. Sundancing: Hanging Out and Listening In at America's Most Important Film Festival. New York: Avon Books, 2000.

Dyer, Richard, and Paul McDonald. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1998.

Friedenberg, Richard, and Robert Redford. A River Runs Through It: Bringing a Classic to the Screen. Livingston: Clark City Press, 1992.

David Sterritt

Two other series operate outside the formal boundaries of the festival: the International Critics Week, where selections are chosen by a panel of film critics, and the Directors' Fortnight, founded in 1969 as a competitor to the official festival, which was interrupted in the politically charged year of 1968 by disruptive protests involving such major directors as François Truffaut (1932–1984) and Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), leading figures in France's revolutionary New Wave filmmaking movement. All of these programs coexist peacefully with the festival and with the concurrent Film Market, established in 1960 as a place where producers, distributors, exhibitors, and

others involved in the circulation of new movies can meet, network, and do business with one another. Features shown in the festival may have additional exposure in the market's eighteen screening rooms, although priority for entry to these showings is given to film-industry professionals who purchase market credentials in advance. The market's program for 2004 included approximately fifteen hundred screenings of more than nine hundred films, more than five hundred of them world premieres and the great majority not included in the festival itself. The market also sponsors a Short Film Corner that typically screens hundreds of shorts. In all, these programs attracted more than eight thousand participants in 2004, representing seventy-four countries. The market is thus considered a key interchange for international acquisition and distribution of movies made around the world.

Overall attendance at Cannes is skewed heavily toward film professionals, including film journalists and critics, who see the major entries in regularly scheduled press screenings beginning at 8:30 every morning and proceeding until late evening. The prizes at Cannes are awarded by a jury with a different membership of notable film-world personalities (directors, producers, performers, screenwriters, etc.) each year. At times jury decisions diverge greatly from the impression made by a given film on festival-goers in general, as when Bruno Dumont's ambitious French production L'Humanité (1999) won the Grand Prize of the Jury as well as best actress (shared) and best actor awards after being jeered at during its press screening. The prizes given at Cannes vary a bit from one year to another, but always include the top Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) award as well as a Grand Prize, a Jury Prize given to a technician, and prizes for best actress, actor, screenplay, and director. In addition, honors are given by a separate jury to three short films; the Cinéfondation of France bestows three awards; and the Caméra d'Or prize is given to the best Competition or Certain Regard film directed by a first-time filmmaker. The highest prizes at Cannes, especially the Golden Palm, are considered the most prestigious of all motion-picture honors with the possible exception of the Academy Awards^®.

The Toronto festival awards several prizes, but the practice has a lower profile than at Cannes. The People's Choice Award is determined by audience ballots after each public screening; the Discovery Award is voted on by members of the press, representing several hundred international media outlets; and juries select the recipients of awards for best Canadian feature, best Canadian feature by a first-time director, and best Canadian short film. In addition, an independent jury administered by the International Federation of Film Critics gives an award for the best feature by an emerging filmmaker. (More commonly known by its European acronym, FIPRESCI, this organization establishes prize-giving juries, composed of film critics, at many festivals around the world.) Toronto is generally seen as the most important North American festival and a close second to Cannes in terms of global influence. Its wide-ranging program is divided into numerous categories including Galas and Special Presentations for high-profile features, Masters for works by recognized auteurs, Director's Spotlight for works by especially adventurous or under-recognized filmmakers, National Cinema for features from a particular country selected for attention that year, Wavelengths and Visions for experimental and avant-garde works, and until 2004, Perspective Canada for domestic productions. As at Cannes, film professionals make up much of the audience, but many local moviegoers can be found in the public screenings (as opposed to the press screenings) as well.

LESSER-KNOWN FESTIVALS

Festivals with lower profiles, from the interestingly specialized to the obscure, abound. One film critic has estimated that New York City alone has no fewer than thirty. Iowa has the Hardacre Film Festival, North Carolina the Hi Mom Film Festival. Other festivals signal their specialties via their unusual names. Examples include the Rendezvous with Madness Film and Video Festival in Canada, organized around works about mental illness and addiction; the Madcat Women's International Film Festival in California, featuring independent and experimental work by women; and the Tacoma Tortured Artists International Film Festival in Washington, devoted to independent filmmakers.

One of the most respected specialized festivals is Pordenone-Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, established in 1982 by the Cinemazero Film Club and La Cineteca del Friuli, a film archive. Focusing entirely on silent cinema, this event in the north of Italy draws an international audience of archivists, scholars, critics, and adventurous movie fans to a wide range of programming that has included everything from Krazy Kat cartoons and Cecil B. DeMille melodramas to century-old kinetoscopes and comedies with forgotten American entertainers. Also highly regarded is the Locarno International Film Festival, launched by its Swiss founders in 1946 and celebrated for its attention to films by first- and second-time directors, and for its screenings of underrated movies chosen by currently well-known filmmakers. The hugely ambitious Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands has earned high marks for its commitment to avant-garde cinema as well as children's films, new features by innovative directors, and an Exploding Cinema sidebar devoted to multimedia projects. This festival also presents film-related lectures and gives monetary grants to promising directors from developing nations through the Hubert Bals Fund, which it administers. The San Francisco International Film Festival, established in 1957, helped blaze various trails for the growing American festival scene with its eclectic blend of major new productions, classics restored to mint condition, and retrospectives devoted to filmmakers better known by art-film enthusiasts than by the general public.

Among the more unusual American festivals is the Telluride Film Festival, founded in 1974 in a small Colorado town—once a mining community, now a popular skiing site—and considered by many to be one of the world's most intelligently programmed cinema events. It refuses to divulge its schedule until ticket-holders arrive at the festival gate, making attendance less a matter of access to particular premieres than of overall faith in the programmers. Telluride ensures the presence of celebrities—a diverse lot ranging from the actress Shirley MacLaine to the novelist Salman Rushdie—by holding tributes, complete with screenings of relevant films and the awarding of medals, to three film-world notables each year. Screenings are held in several venues including a community center and an intimate opera house where Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) and Jenny Lind (1820–1887) performed during the mining-boom era; the original marquee of the opera house, displaying the word "SHOW" in large letters, is still standing and serves as the festival's trademark. The legendary Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones (1912–2002), a frequent attendee until his death in 2002, once paid his respects to Telluride's nine-thousand-foot elevation by saluting the festival as "the most fun you'll ever have without breathing."

THE FUTURE OF FILM FESTIVALS

Film festivals will most likely retain their popularity. However, they are also likely to change their selection standards and exhibition formats as technological developments in cinema—such as the increasing use of digital systems in cinematography and projection processes—alter the nature of cinema itself. Most festivals have already shown an increased willingness to judge films for potential selection on the basis of video copies rather than 35 mm prints, and many have opened the door (in some cases grudgingly) to public screenings using video-projection systems, especially when the movie was originally shot on video. Another question that confronts the program directors of many general-interest festivals is whether they should focus primarily on the best of cinematic art—which may include obscure, difficult, and esoteric works—or turn in more commercially oriented directions. By courting movies with trendy themes, palatable styles, and major stars who may agree to make personal appearances, festivals could potentially draw larger audiences, attract greater press attention, and satisfy financial sponsors banking on association with celebrities and their projects.

The staying power of film festivals will continue to depend, in part, on providing an alternative to the multiplex. The shrinking number of art-film theaters, owing to competition from cable television and the home-video industry, also lends increasing importance to festivals. Exhibition patterns have always influenced cinematic styles, and the festival phenomenon has given indispensable exposure to new and unconventional works that might not otherwise be seen by the producers, distributors, exhibitors, and others who largely control the financial infrastructure of theatrical film. Also invaluable is many festivals' practice of spotlighting overlooked or forgotten movies from the past that would otherwise remain unknown to—or at least unviewable by—scholars and critics as well as curious movie fans. Ever since Venice commenced its festival activities in the 1930s, such events have amply proven their merit as what Richard Peña, the New York Film Festival program director, describes as "a refuge from the vicissitudes of the marketplace." Film festivals are indeed one of the vital signs of a thriving cinema.

SEE ALSO Academy Awards®;Prizes and Awards

FURTHER READING

Anderson, John. Sundancing: Hanging Out and Listening In at America's Most Important Film Festival. New York: Avon Books, 2000.

Beauchamp, Cari, and Henri Béhar. Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival. New York: Morrow, 1992.

Gaydos, Steven. The Variety Guide to Film Festivals: The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Film Festivals around the World. New York: Perigee, 1998.

Langer, Adam. The Film Festival Guide: For Filmmakers, Film Buffs, and Industry Professionals. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000.

Stolberg, Shael, ed. International Film Festival Guide. Toronto: Festival Products, 2000.

Turan, Kenneth. Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

David Sterritt