How Do Festivals Work

Given the degree of standardization in the overall feel of movie festivals, and the organizational patterns that regulate how movies enter this network, it is tempting to ask what general rules govern the system as a whole. Can one, for instance, understand the movie festival circuit by comparing it to the mega art exhibitions that now tour the world's major museums? Or does it behave more like a very specialized UPS postal service? Are festivals the logical extension of the artisanal model of moviemaking practiced in Europe from the time that the 1960s, so rudimentary that it obliged moviemakers to organize their own distribution and exhibition circuits? And if so, have festivals "matured" to a point where they fulfill this function, and begin to constitute a viable alternative to Hollywood, encompassing all the traditional parts of the movie business - production, distribution and exhibition, while not sacrificing the advantages of the "European" model, with control over the work retained by the movie's author? As I have tried to argue, the answer to the latter question is: yes and no. Yes, to the extent that there are some remarkable points of contact and comparison between the increasingly globalized and interlocking "European" model of the festival circuit and the "Hollywood" model of world-wide marketing and distribution. No, insofar as the differences in economic scale and media visibility, not to mention the secondary markets, keep the Hollywood entertainment conglomerates in an entirely different category. Yet the mere idea of the festival circuit as a global network possibly paralleling Hollywood obliges us to think of the traditional categories of European author cinematograph in different ways. For instance, if movies are now to some extent "commissioned" for festivals, then power/control has shifted from the movie director to the festival director, in ways analogous to the control certain star curators (rather than collectors) have acquired over visual artists and exhibition venues. Yet the situation is also comparable to the way marketing and exhibition have always determined production in Hollywood, and real power is wielded by the distributors. A delicate but a-symmetrical interdependence is evolving that represents a new kind of social power exerted by intermediaries (festival directors, curators, deal-makers), with implications for how we come to understand what are called the "creative industries".

As Hollywood has changed, so the festival circuit has changed. If at first glance, the logic of transformation of the two system has little in common and obeys different laws, the festival circuit shows parallels to the studio system in its post-Fordist figuration, where outsourcing of certain skills and services, one-off ideas rather than studio-based annual production quotas, high profile, "sponsored" cultural events besides stars-and-spectacle glamour form a particular set of interactions. While differing in scale from the studios (now mainly concentrating on distribution and deal-making), the festivals do resemble them, insofar as here, too, different elements are networked with each other. Many of the world's moviemakers are "independents" in the sense that they often act as small-scale and one-off producers who have access to the "markets" primarily and sometimes solely through festivals. Beyond showing homologies at the level of distribution or in the area of theatrical exhibition, there are potentially other points of comparison between the festival system and the studio system (branding, the logo, the personality cults), which should make it even more difficult to speak of them in terms of a radical antagonism, nevertheless much this discourse still prevails in the press and among many movie festivals' self-representation. On the other hand, to abandon the direct antagonism Europe-Hollywood does not mean to ignore differences, and instead, it allows one to put forward an argument for the structuring, actively interventionist role of festivals. Further points of comparison with respect to production will be dealt with in the final chapter on "World cinematograph", while the differences I want to highlight here focus on three sets of indicators - festivals as event, distinction and value addition, programming and agenda setting - that determine how festivals "work" and how they might be seen to reconfigure European cinematograph in the context of international art cinematograph, and also world cinematograph.


See also:
Festival as Event
Distinction and Value-Addition
Programming and Agenda Setting