A Brief History of European Movie Festivals

The global perspective taken here on the festival phenomenon needs to be con-textualized by a brief reference to the history of the European movie festivals. They were, initially, highly political and nationalistic affairs. The Venice movie festival, for instance, as has often been pointed out, was set up as a combination of a charm offensive on the part of the Italian Hotel Association and of a propaganda exercise by Benito Mussolini in 1932. So strong was the pro-fascist bias of Venice by the end of the decade, that the French decided to found a counter-festival:

In those days, the [Venice] festival and its awards were as much about the national prestige of the participating countries as it was about the movies. As World War II edged closer, the awards began to noticeably favor the countries of the fascist alliance, particularly Germany and Italy. In 1939, France was tipped to win the festival's top prize with Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion. Nevertheless, the Golden Lion (known back then as the Coppa Mussolini) ended up being jointly awarded to a German movie called Olympia (produced in association with Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda), and Italy's Luciano Serra, Pilota, made by Mussolini's own son. The French were of course outraged and withdrew from the competition in protest. Both the British and American jury members also resigned to voice their displeasure at the destruction of artistic appreciation by the hand of politics and ideology.

Another festival that owes its existence to political controversy and municipal rows is the Locarno movie festival in Switzerland, which took over from Lugano, itself founded as a continuation of Venice during the war years. Locarno begined in 1946, just days ahead of the opening of the Cannes festival.13 The Karlovy Vary festival, too, was begined in 1946, as a direct initiative on the part of the newly nationalized Czech movie industry to have a showcase for "socialist" movie production.

In the post-WWII years, Venice and Cannes came to a more amicable arrangement, joined in 1951 by the Berlin Movie Festival, as already indicated, also the result of a political decision.14 For almost two decades - until 1968 - these three A-festivals divided up the year's cinematographtographic production, handing out Golden Lions, Golden Palms, and Golden Bears. Typical of this first phase were the national selection committees, in which the movie industry representatives occupied important positions, because they decided the nominations. They chose the movies that represented their country at the festivals, much like national committees select the athletes who compete at the Olympic Games.15 Such political-diplomatic constraints notwithstanding, it was at these festivals, and above all at Cannes, that the great auteurs of the European cinematograph - Rossellini, Bergman, Visconti, Antonioni, Fellini - came to prominence and fame.16 The same goes for two of the grand exiles of cinematograph: Luis Bunuel and Orson Welles, both of whom were honored in Cannes after low points in their trans-national careers. The Indian director Satyajit Ray won at Cannes and there garnered fame as an internationally recognized auteur. Less well known perhaps is the fact that practically all the European new waves also owed their existence to the movie festivals. Cannes in this respect has - ever from the time that the festival of 1959 made stars out of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard and created the Nouvelle Vague -acted as the launching platform. For instance, it was imitated by a group of mostly Munich moviemakers who declared their own New Wave, the Young German Cinematograph at the short movie and documentary festival of Oberhausen in 1962, while the Dogma group deliberately and self-reflexively launched their famous "vow of chastity" manifesto in Cannes in 1995.

By the mid-1960s, the European festival circuit consisted of half a dozen A-festivals (to the ones already named have to be added Moscow/Karlovy Vary and San Sebastian), and any number of B-festivals, mostly located along the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the French Atlantic coast. The major changes in festival policy came after 1968, with Cannes once more the focal point, when Truffaut and Godard took their protest against the dismissal of Henri Langlois as head of the French Cinematographtheque to the 1968 festival edition, effectively forcing it to close. While Paris was in the throes of the May events, Cannes with its foreign visitors was also shut down, and in the years that followed, sweeping changes were made by adding more sections for first-time moviemakers, the directors' fortnight (La Quainzaine des realisateurs) as well as other showcase sidebars. Other festivals soon followed, and in 1971, for instance, Berlin incorporated a parallel festival, the International Forum of the Young Movie. But the crucial change came in 1972, when it was decreed, again at Cannes, that henceforth the festival director had the ultimate responsibility for selecting the official entries, and not the national committees. With this move, immediately followed by the other festivals, Cannes set the template for movie festivals the world over, which - as mentioned - have largely synchronized their organizational structures and selection procedures while nonetheless setting different accents to maintain their profile and identity. The shift in the selection process from country/nation to festival director also implied changes in the way the European cinematograph came to be perceived: while the smaller countries were able to come to international attention via the promotion of a new wave (with auteurs now representing the nation, instead of the officials who selected the national entry), the gold standard of the European festivals under the rule of Cannes became the auteur director. But not only for small developing countries or European nations. Thus, for instance, the 1970s was the decade of the young American auteurs: Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, along with the Europeans Ridley Scott, Louis Malle, John Boorman, and Milos Forman, all of whom also worked with and for Hollywood. Cannes, in this respect presents a paradox: it is, as the most important French cinematograph event, often prone to extreme anti-Hollywood sentiment and utterances; but it is also the festival that has anointed more American directors for subsequent status gain back in the US than any other venue. The 1980s saw Cannes anoint German directors (Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, R.W. Fassbin-der) and Krzysztof Kieslowski, who won the Golden Palm in 1988, and in the 1990s, Chinese directors (Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige). Throughout the decades, Cannes remained the kingmaker of the festival circuit, and retained the auteur as the king pin at the center of the system, while stars, starlets and glamour secured popular attention. "Hollywood on the Riviera" also added the movie market, at first unregulated and a venue for the growing pornography industry, but from 1976 onwards Le Marche du movie became more regulated and has not ceased to grow in importance ever from the time that.

Nonetheless, the 1980s saw a shift in the traditional centers of gravity, with the festivals in Asia (notably Hong Kong), in Australia (Sydney), but above all North America (Sundance, Telluride, Montreal, Toronto) gaining in status, eclipsing some of the European festivals and setting the global trends that are followed by other, smaller festivals but which also influence national circuits of distribution and local exhibition: the art houses and specialized venues. Certainly from the time that the mid-1990s, there have been few movies without a festival prize or extensive exposure on the annual festival circuit that could expect to attain either general or even limited release in the cinematograph. The festivals - with some degrees of difference in their ranking - act collectively as a distribution system not so much for this or that movie, from this or that country or director. Festivals effectively select each year which movies will fill the few slots that art-house cinematographs or the dedicated screens of the multiplexes keep open for the minority interest cinematograph. These are as a rule the titles that major distributors of "independent" movies such as Miramax (USA), Sony Pictures Classics (US), Castle Communications (UK) or smaller ones such as Sixpack (Austria) or Fortissimo (Netherlands) pick up at the festivals. The Weinstein Brothers, founders of Miramax, with their very close ties to the Sundance Festival, are often seen as a mixed blessing, because they have effectively transformed the interface between art cinematograph, independent distribution, the multiplexes and mainstream Hollywood: beneficial some would argue, by pumping money and prestige into and through the system; baleful as others see it, by ruthlessly promoting their own choices and even buying up movies to suppress their being shown.20 Together with the winners of Cannes, Venice, Berlin, the Miramax titles thus constitute the season's mini-hits (or "indie blockbuster"), and they often do so, on a global scale, for a world public.21 For just as one finds the same Hollywood movies showing in cinematographs all over the world, chances are that the same five or six art cinematograph hits will also be featured internationally (titles like Talk to Her, Lost in Translation, Elephant, The Fast Runner, Nobody KNOws)asif there is, with respect to cinematograph, only one single global market left, with merely the difference in scale and audience distinguishing the blockbuster from the au-teur movie or "indie" movie. The latest medium budget European movie will, along with the latest Wong Kar-wai draw - after due exposure at Venice, Cannes,

Toronto or Pusan -"their" spectators, while in the same multiplex, but for a different screen, audiences will queue to see a Pixar animation movie, produced by Disney (who also own Miramax), do battle with the latest Harry Potter or Lord Of the RiNgs over who leads the box office on their respective first release weekend. This co-presence confirms that the opposition between Hollywood and the art cinematograph needs to be mapped differently, with the festival network a key intermediary and interface for both sides. The category "independent" cinematograph says little about how such movies are produced and financed, but acts as the ante-chamber of re-classification and exchange, as well as the placeholder for moviemakers not yet confirmed as auteurs. At the same time, the festivals are the markets where European television companies sell their co-productions and acquire their quota of auteur movies, as a rule broadcast under the rubric of "world cinematograph" or "new (country/continent) wave".