Film Festival Fever: Recent Testimonials

FILM FESTIVAL FEVER: RECENT TESTIMONIALS SUNDANCE TO SARAJEVO: FILM FESTIVALS AND THE WORLD THEY MADE Kenneth Turan Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002, 180 pp. FILM FESTIVAL CONFIDENTIAL William Marshall Toronto: McArthur and Company, 2006, 115 pp. QUEER FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL FORUM. TAKE ONE: CURATORS SPEAK OUT, Moving Image Review Edited by Chris Straayer and Tom Waugh GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Cay Studies 11:4 (2005): 579-603. In the past decade the academic gaze in film studies has extended to cover institutions of cinema, particularly exhibition, as part of the cultural analysis of the medium. A mounting number of publications are dedicated to the culture of film festivals, in the light of trends in cultural globalization and the advent of postnational world cinemas. The three texts that I survey here speak to overlapping and sometimes different aspects of this phenomenon and in varying modes, from investigative journalism to insider memoir, but always engaging the first-person experience. This survey anticipates more such work to come.1 Sundance to Sarajevo is a splendid work of journalism by the well-known film critic Kenneth Turan at the L.A. Times. He weaves together autobiographical accounts and anecdotes, often supplemented with interviews. It is certainly not an ethnographic study and lacks a bibliography, notes and index. Turan begins with the curious claim that [n]o one wants to speak against the Bible, but the sentiment in Ecclesiastes famously insisting 'to every thing there is a and a time to every purpose under heaven' in no way applies to the universe of film While film festivals generally may not indeed have any one season, successful individual festivals find their appropriate time and place in the global calendar, a fact Turan establishes, against the grain of his claim above, through his journey to a dozen international film festivals. Turan writes a survey of select film festivals with which he has become acquainted to varying degrees since he began his career as a film critic in 1971 at Cannes. He observes the prolific extent of film festivals worldwide today with, for instance, over one hundred and fifty in Europe and thirty in New York City alone. Their numbers mirror their diversity, exemplified by festivals with specialized themes of spoof films, comedies, mental illness, sexuality, films refused by other festivals, and so on. In his discussion of how the culture industry uses film festivals, Turan refers to Piers Handling's insight that festivals serve as an alternative distribution network. SONY, for example, makes use of festivals as alternative opportunities for advertising and public relations, as they are often far less expensive than more conventional means of promotion. Turan starts with a description of Cannes' urban context, thirty-five thousand guests, the streets, parties, restaurants, the banality of glamour, its notorious hierarchy of press passes, with gossip providing an important social glue next to extreme publicity for those producers that can afford the display. Back in the U.S.A., Turan rightly names the Sundance Festival the flagship of the burgeoning American independent film movement while recounting its history and current setting of Park City, the mountain resort village of six thousand inhabitants that welcomes twenty thousand festival-goers annually. At Sundance cultural capital is formidable, and directors can become famous immediately. Alternatively, Las Vegas's Sho West is the film trade show festival extraordinaire at which Jack Valenti gives his annual state-of-the-industry address, and where audience taste trends are anticipated and marketing strategies honed. Its primary aim, according to Turan, is to bring together exhibitors and distributors in one event. Turan also outlines the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the Havana festival. …

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