The annual international movie festival is a very European institution.

The annual international movie festival is a very European institution. It was invented in Europe just before the Second World War, but it came to cultural fruition, economic stature, and political maturity in the 1940s and 1950s. From the time that then, the names of Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Rotterdam, Locarno, Karlovy Vary, Ober-hausen and San Sebastian have spelled the roll call of regular watering holes for the world's movie lovers, critics and journalists, as well as being the marketplaces for producers, directors, distributors, television acquisition heads, and studio bosses.

The locations themselves have to be read symptomatically in relation to their history, politics and ideology, that is, in their typically European contexts of temporal layers and geographical sedimentation. Many of the best-known venues are sited in cities that compete with each other for cultural tourism and seasonal events. In evidence are old spas that have lost their aristocratic clientele, and now host a movie festival as a rule just before or after the high tourist season: Venice, Cannes, Locarno, Karlovy Vary, and San Sebastian are the obvious off-season on-festival sites. Other festival cities are indicative of more explicitly political considerations, such as the Berlin Movie Festival. It was a creation of the Cold War, and planned as a deliberate showcase for Hollywood glamour and Western show business, meant to provoke East Berlin and to needle the Soviet Union. The documentary festival in Leipzig was the GDR's counter-move, featuring movies from Eastern Europe, Cuba and Latin America. It tried to consolidate the "socialist" movie front in the anti-fascist/anti-imperialist struggle, while selectively inviting left-wing moviemakers from Western countries as token comrades. Outside Europe, similar kinds of analyses could be made: Pu-san, the main movie festival in South Korea, was also the result of a "political" gesture in that it began by copying the very successful International Hong Kong movie festival, and then subsequently played a major role in reviving Korean moviemaking as a national cinematograph. Yet for many Western visitors, put off by the sheer size of the Hong Kong festival, Pusan also became the portal for a first contact with the other "new" Asian cinematographs in the 1990s. The Toronto festival, too, was a smartly calculated move to consolidate a "national" beachhead that could brave the cultural barbarians south of the border, while rallying Canada's divided Francophone and Anglophone moviemaking communities around a common enemy, Hollywood. Other European festivals are located in industrial cities, some of whom over years, have been trying to reintention and re-invent themselves as cultural centers: such is the case of the short movie festival in Ober-hausen which brought movie culture to a mining and heavy industry region, while the International Movie Festival Rotterdam has greatly contributed to changing this city's image, too: from being identified mainly with its giant container port and a harbor that brings ashore goods from China and Asia while servicing Europe in the past as the point of embarkation for hopeful New World emigrants, Rotterdam has become a center of media, cinematograph and architecture. It now is an equally important hub and node for other, more immaterial aspect of the experience economy, building bridges between Asian cinematograph and European audiences, a specialty of the Rotterdam festival for nearly two decades.

The tendency for formerly industrial cities to try and re-launch themselves as capitals of culture is, of course, a much broader trend. It exceeds the phenomenon of movie festivals and the continent of Europe. But precisely because of the powers at work all over the developed world to renew inner cities and to infuse new life into the urban fabric (often neglected over the previous half century, or victim of the private motor car, the suburbs and centralized planning), the strategic importance of cultural events in general, and of movie festivals in particular for city-branding can scarcely be overestimated. At least two distinct developments overlap and intersect to re-valorize location and emplacement (the "neighborhood" factor) in urban culture. Firstly, there is the phenomenon of "cultural clustering." Following Jane Jacobs' studies of neighborhoods and Sharon Zukin's work on the interplay of cultural and economic factors around New York's loft culture in the 1980s, economists, urban planners and ethnographers of the contemporary city have begun to look at the "locally specific appreciation of the changing interaction between culture (place) and commerce (market) in now's mixed economy of leisure, culture and creativity".3 As a consequence, companies in the information, high-tech and knowledge industries, now seek "culture-rich environments" for their operational bases, in order to attract the skilled workers and retain the discriminating staff they need to stay competitive and innovative.4 To keep these companies and their employees, cities feature their perceived location advantages (housing, transport, amenities, infrastructure) by extending them into a total city-concept, in which locality and neighborhood play a special role. Secondly (and not without a certain tension with this idea of the local) the most economically attractive part of the population are not the ethnic clusters of traditional urban neighborhoods, but the yuppies, dinkies, empty nesters, bobos and their likes. Their collective leverage is such that key service industries rely on their purchasing power, leading to something known as the "Bridget Jones economy".5 To cater for this new economic class, municipal or metropolitan authorities try to endow their city with the sense of being a site of permanent, ongoing events. Complementing the architecturally articulated urban space with a temporal dimension, the built city turns thus into, and is doubled by, the "programmed" - or programmable - city In this endeavor, major temporary exhibitions and annual festivals are a key ingredient in structuring the seasonal succession of city events across the calendar year. Among different kinds of temporary events and festivals, a special role accrues to the international movie festival, at once relatively cost effective, attracting both the local population and visitors from outside, and helping develop an infrastructure of sociability as well as facilities appreciated by the so-called "creative class" that function all the year round.6 Small wonder then, that the number of festivals has exponentially increased in recent years. There are now more movie festivals in Europe alone than there are days in the year. No longer just major capitals, off-season spas or refurbished industrial towns are in the running. Often medium-sized cities, verging on the nondescript, decide to host a movie festival in order to boost their tourist attractions or stake a claim as a regional cultural hub (e.g., Brunswick in Germany, Bradford in Britain).

These two components, the cultural clustering of the Bridget Jones economy, and a determination to consider the urban space as programmable and cyclical, provide salient elements for understanding the sheer quantity of movie festivals. They do not explain the network effects that international movie festivals now realize for the global media markets. Here, the quantity produces consequences that are at first glance contradictory: host cities compete with each other regarding attractiveness of the location, convenience for international access and exclusivity of the movies they are able to present. The festivals also compete over the most desirable dates in the annual calendar. But at another level, they complement each other along the same axes. Competition raises standards, and adds value to the movies presented. Competition invites comparison, with the result that festivals resemble each other more and more in their internal organization, while seeking to differentiate themselves in their external self-presentation and the premium they place on their (themed) programming. They also need to make sure they follow each other in a pre-established sequence, which allows their international clients - producers, moviemakers, journalists - to travel comfortably from one A festival to the next.

Optimizing its respective local advantages, each festival thus contributes to the global network effect, offsetting the negative consequences of competition (over the finite number of movies and timing) with the positive effects of familiar format and recognition value, while giving innovative programmers the opportunity to set trends, or to come up with concepts taken over by others. From the perspective of the movies (or rather, their makers) these properties of festivals constitute essential elements in the grid of expectations: movies are now made for festivals, in the way that Hollywood during the studio era made its movies for the exclusivity release dates of first run picture palaces. Considered as a global network, the festival circuit constitutes the exhibition dates of most independent movies in the first-run venues of the world market, where they can gather the cultural capital and critical prowess necessary to subsequently enter the national or local exhibition markets on the strength of their accumulated festival successes. No poster of an independent movie can do without the logo of one of the world's prime festivals, as prominently displayed as Hollywood productions carry their studio logo. Movie festivals thus make up a network with nodes and nerve endings, there is capillary action and osmosis between the various layers of the network, and while a strict ranking system exists, for instance between A and B festivals, policed by an international federation (FIAPF), the system as a whole is highly porous and perforated. There is movement and contact between regional and international ones, between specialized/themed ones and open-entry ones; the European festivals communicate with North American festivals, as well as Asian and Australian ones. Some festivals are "outsourced", such as the one in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, largely organized and financed from Paris and Brussels, but which functions as the prime space for defining, endorsing and displaying what counts as legitimate African cinematograph, Anglophone as well as Francophone. Other festivals are festivals of festivals ("bests of the fests"), such as the London Movie Festival that brings to the city's moviegoers the pick of the annual festival favorites, but attracts fewer journalists and international visi-tors.

So tightly woven has this web become, so spontaneously organized are the interactions between the various "network actors," that in its totality the movie festival circuit provides the structures and interchanges permitting both chance and routine to operate. Taken together and in sequence, festivals form a cluster of consecutive international venues, to which movies, directors, producers, promoters and press, in varying degrees of density and intensity, migrate, like flocks of birds or a shoal of fish. And not unlike these natural swarm phenomena (closely studied by theorists of complex adaptive systems), the manner in which information travels, signals are exchanged, opinion hardens and, consensus is reached at these festivals appears at once to be thrillingly unpredictable and yet to follow highly programmed protocols. The criteria governing selection, presentation, news coverage and awards, for instance, may seem arbitrary and opaque, but patterns are quickly perceived. It suffices to take half a dozen catalogues from different festivals, read the description of the movies, or the speeches that go with the prizes, and do a semantic analysis: no more than a dozen or so words make up the evaluative and classificatory vocabulary needed to categorize the vast majority of festival movies. This informal lexical stability complements the ever-increasing organizational similarity between festival, and both counteract the temporary nature and variable locations of festivals.

As one of the baselines that allow one to reconstruct the dynamics that now govern the production, distribution and reception of independent movies, the festival circuits hold the keys to all forms of cinematograph not bound into the global Hollywood network. But one can go further: the festival circuit is also a crucial interface with Hollywood itself, because taken together, the festivals constitute (like Hollywood) a global platform, but one which (unlike Hollywood) is at one and the same time a "marketplace" (though perhaps more like bazaar than a stock exchange), a cultural showcase (comparable to music or theatre festivals), a "competitive venue" (like the Olympic Games), and a world body (an ad-hoc United Nations, a parliament of national cinematographs, or cinematographtic NGO's, considering some of the various festivals' political agendas). In other words, festivals cluster a combination of economic, cultural, political, artistic and personality-based factors, which communicate with and irrigate each other in a unique kind of arena. It explains why this originally European phenomenon has globalized itself, and in the process has created not only a self-sustaining, highly self-referential world for the art cinematograph, the independent cinematograph and the documentary movie, but a sort of "alternative" to the Hollywood studio system in its post-Fordist phase. It first and foremost sets the terms for distribution, marketing and exhibition, yet to an increasing extent it regulates production as well, determined as this is in the non-Hollywood sector by the global outlets it can find, rather than by the single domestic market of its "country of origin". Seeing how they compete for and are dependent on a regular annual supply of interesting, innovative or otherwise noteworthy movies, it is no wonder that the more prestigious among the world's festivals increasingly offer competitive production funds, development money as prizes, or organize a "talent campus" (Berlin), in order to bind new creative potential to a particular festival's brand image. It means that certain movies are now being made to measure and made to order, i.e., their completion date, their opening venue, their financing is closely tied in with a particular festival's (or festival circuit's) schedules and many moviemakers internalize and target such a possibility for their work. Hence the somewhat cynical reference to the genre of the "festival movie", which names a genuine phenomenon but also obscures the advantages that the creation of such a relatively stable horizon of expectations brings. It ensures visibility and a window of attention for movies that can neither command the promotional budgets of Hollywood movies nor rely on a sufficiently large internal market (such as India) to find its audience or recoup its investment.