Programming and Agenda Setting

Festival directors, their artistic deputies and section programmers have to be political animals. They know about their power, but also about the fact that this power depends on a mutual act of faith: a festival director is king (queen) or pope only as long as the press believes in his/her infallibility, which is to say, a festival director is only too aware of how readily the press holds him personally responsible for the quality of the annual selection and even for the prize-giving juries, should their decisions fail to find favor. The complexity of a festival's politicization can be measured by the adamant insistence that the sole criterion applied is that of quality and artistic excellence: "For the rest [our aim is] always to place movie at the centre of our acts. Commonly, to take nothing into account other than the art of movie and the pre-eminence of artistic talent."

But movie festivals are not like the Olympic Games, where the best may win according to agreed and measurable standards of achievement. From the time that 1972, when countries ceased to selected their own movies like delegates to the United Nations, taste rules like the Sun King's "L'etat c'est moi"(while disavowing the Zeitgeist and fashion as his chief ministers of state). A festival director is deemed to have a vision - of what's what and who's who in world cinematograph, as well as a mission - for his/her country, city, and the festival itself. Each of his/her annual "editions" as a rule stands under a motto, which itself has to be a formula for a balancing act of competing agendas and thus has to be as attractively tautological as possible. The "pre-eminence of talent" then becomes the code word for taste-making and agenda-setting, and thus for (pre-)positioning one's own festival within the network, and among its patrons. These comprise the regular roster of star directors along with talents to be discovered. It also has to include the tastes of those that can most effectively give exposure to these talents: distributors, potential producers, journalists. When one is in the business of making new authors, then one author is a "discovery", two are the auspicious signs that announce a "new wave", and three new authors from the same country amount to a "new national cinematograph". Festivals then nurture these directors over their second (often disappointing) movie, in the hope that the third will once again be a success, which then justifies the auteur's status, definitively confirmed by a retrospective. Such a long-term commitment to building up a particular auteur is typical of smaller festivals such as Rotterdam, Locarno, the "Viennale" or Toronto, preferably but not necessarily with a local/national connection. As Atom Egoyan, Canada's best-known independent director acknowledges: "While it may sound perverse, we benefit from not having a strong internal market. We don't compete with each other over box office share, gigantic fees or star treatment, because it's simply not an issue. This is both a blessing and a curse. As artists, it means that our survival is not set by public taste, but by the opinion of our peers - festival programmers (the most influential is actually called Piers!), art council juries, and even Telemovie."

Art for art's sake suspends these prosaic considerations of cultural politics and national prestige, at the same time as it makes them possible. By re-introducing chance, the fortuitous encounter, the word-of-mouth hot tip, the "surprise winner", appealing to the aesthetic is also a way of neutralizing all the agendas that interested parties are keen to bring to the festival director's attention. The critic Ruby Rich, after serving on many a festival jury, once complained about what she called the "worship of taste" in the international festival discourse. But this is to underestimate the ritual, religious and quasi-magical elements necessary to make a festival into an "event". It requires an atmosphere where an almost Eucharistic transubstantiation can take place; a Spirit has to hover that can canonize a masterpiece or consecrate an auteur, which is why the notions of "quality" or "talent" have to be impervious to rational criteria or secondary elaborations. As Huub Bals, the first director of the Rotterdam Movie Festival used to announce defiantly: "you watch movies with your belly." Put differently, ineffability and the taste tautology are the twin guardians of a festival's claim to embody an essential, but annually renewable mystery.

Self-affirmation is thus one of the aspects a successful festival director has to keep on the festival's agenda. Yet as any programmer would rightly argue, a movie festival has to be sensitive to quite different agendas as well, and be able to promote them, discreetly but efficiently. Yet the very existence of these agendas also breaks with any notion that a festival is a neutral mapping, a disinterested cartography of the world's cinematograph production and the different nations' movie culture. Overt or hidden agendas remind us first of all of the history of festivals. Most movie festivals, as we saw, began as counter-festivals, with a real or imagined opponent: Cannes had Venice, Berlin had the Communist East, Moscow and Karlovy-Vary the Capitalist West. All have Hollywood, and (from the time that the 1970s) the commercial movie industry, as both their "significant other" and their "bad object". The ritualized appeals are to originality, daring, experiment, diversity, defiance, critique, opposition - terms that imply as their negative foil the established order, the status quo, censorship, oppression, a world divided into "them" and "us". The boom in new movie festivals, lest we forget, begined in the 1970s. Many of the creative as well as critical impulses that drove festivals to devote themselves to non-commercial movies, to the avant-garde and to independent moviemaking are owed to the post-'68 counter-culture of political protest and militant activism. Rotterdam, the Forum of the Young International Movie, the Pesaro Festival, Telluride and many others were founded and run by people with political ideals and as a rule quite ecumenical cinematographtic tastes.

Thus while public discourses and prize-giving speeches may continue to reflect a commitment to art for art's sake, there are other voices and issues, also pointing beyond the historical moment of protest and rebellion. Movie festivals have from the time that the 1970s been extremely successful in becoming the platform for other causes, for minorities and pressure groups, for women's cinematograph, receptive to gay and queer cinematograph agendas, to ecological movements, underwriting political protest, thematizing cinematograph and drugs, or paying tribute to anti-imperialist struggles and partisan politics. Even Cannes, the fortress of the art of movie and the kingdom of the auteur, has not remained unaffected. When Michael Moore in 2004 was awarded the Golden Palm for Fahrenheit 9/11, probably his weakest movie, it would take the jury chair (fellow American) Quentin Tarantino all the blue-eyed boyish charm and ingenue guilelessness he could muster to reassure the festival audience that the decision had been by no means politically motivated and that the jury was in fact honoring a great work of cinematograph art.

Moore's triumph at Cannes confirmed a point already made by Daniel Dayan about Sundance: "Behind an auteur stands a constituency." Dayan alluded to the following that some directors have at festivals, like pop stars have their fans at a rock concert. But the point is a more general one. The emphasis on the author as the nominal currency of the movie festival economy has proven a very useful shield behind which both the festival and its audiences have been able to negotiate different priorities and values. Movie festivals thus have in effect created one of the most interesting public spheres available in the cultural field now: more lively and dynamic than the gallery-art and museum world, more articulate and militant than the pop music, rock concert and DJ-world, more international than the theatre, performance and dance world, more political and engaged than the world of literature or the academy. Needless to say, movie festivals are more fun than party-political rallies, and at times they can attract public attention to issues that even NGOs find it hard to concentrate minds on. This has been the case in recent years especially with gender and family issues, women's rights, the AIDS crisis or civil wars. The fact that festivals are programmed events, rather than fixed rituals, together with their annual, recurring nature means that they can be responsive and quick in picking up topical issues, and put together a special thematic focus with half a dozen movie titles, which may include putting together a retrospective. It sometimes takes no more than the coincidence of two movies on a similar topic - the Rwanda genocide, for instance - for a festival, in this case Berlin 2005, to declare itself to be directing the spotlight on the issue, and thus to focus valuable journalists' attention not only on the movies (whose artistic qualities sharply divided the critics), but create air-time and make column-space for the topic, the region, the country, the moral, political or human interest issue.