Movie Festival Networks

In the previous chapter, I argued that the "national" in European cinematograph has become a second-order concept ("post-national"), in that it is now commonly mediated through the legislative and economic measures taken by the European Union to stimulate the audiovisual industries and promote their role in the preservation of its heritage and patrimony. In the movies themselves, references to the nation, the region and the local have also become second-order realities, whenever they function as self-advertisements for (the memorializable parts of) the past, for lifestyle choices or for (tourist) locations. Movies made in Europe (and indeed in other smaller, movie-producing nations) tend to display the markers of their provenance quite self-consciously. The emphasis on region, neighborhoods and the local in recent successes such as THE FULL MONTY, BILLY ELLIOT, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, CINEMATOGRAPH PARADISO, GOODBYE LENIN, AMELIE, provides access-points for the international and global cinematograph markets, which includes the national audience, thoroughly internationalized through the movies on offer in cineplexes and videotheques. The movies' attention to recognizable geographical places and stereotypical historical periods thus begin to echo Hollywood's ability to produce "open" texts that speak to a diversity of publics, while broadly adhering to the format of classical narrative.1 Two further genres could be called post-national, but for opposite motives. One are movies that appeal to a broad audience, but whose references are not to place or region, nor to the national past. They locate themselves in the hermetic media space of recycled genre formulas from 1960s commercial cinematograph and 1970s television, spoofed and satirized by television personalities who are popular with domestic audiences but difficult to export across the national or language borders: the French TAXI movies or LES VISITEURS would be examples, paralleled in Germany and Austria by the "Bully" Herbig movies (DER SCHUH DES MANITJJ, UNSER TRAJJMSCHIFF). The other post-national tendency would be the cinematograph du look, adopting the style norms of design and fashion. Different from classical art cinematograph in that it breaks with the conventions of realism, this cinematograph is not embarrassed by its affinities to high concept advertising (J. Beneix' DIVA, Tom Tykwer's RUN LOIA RUN), nor does it shun accusations of pornography (movies like Patrice Chereau's INTIMACY, the work of Catherine Breillat, Michael Winterbottom's NINE SoNgs). Style and subject matter ensure that the movies travel more easily across national boundaries, and by appealing to universalized Eurochic values of erotic sophistication, adult emotion and sexual passion, they even have a chance to enter the American market.

But there is another way of transcending the national for European movies, while at the same time reinstating it as a second-order category, and thus becoming post-national: the international movie festival. With respect to Europe, the festival circuit, I want to claim, has become the key power and power grid in the movie business, with wide-reaching consequences for the respective functioning of the other elements (authorship, production, exhibition, cultural prestige and recognition) pertaining to the cinematograph and to movie culture. If, as will be argued in the subsequent chapter, television from the time that the 1960s has largely taken over from cinematograph the task of "gathering" the nation, addressing, as well as representing it, the question broached in this chapter is how the festival circuit, in its turn, holds some of these manifestations of post-national cinematograph together, giving them a European dimension, at the same time as it makes them enter into global symbolic economies, potentially re-writing many of the usual markers of identity. As such, the movie festival circuit presents both a theoretical challenge and a historical "missing link" in our understanding of European cinematograph, not just from the time that 1945, but from the time that the demise of the historical avant-garde in the 1930s. On the theoretical plane, the answer may well lie not with the traditional concepts of movie studies, but in some version of modern system theory. On offer are the auto-poetic feedback loops as proposed by Niklas Luhmann, Manuel Castells' theory of the "space of flows", the "actor-network-theory" of Bruno Latour, or the theories of complex adaptive systems, centered on "emergence", "attractors" and "self-organization."2 Nevertheless, here I shall mainly concentrate on the history of the phenomenon and examine in passing some of its systemic properties.

Festivals have always been recognized as integral to European cinematograph, but they have rarely been analyzed as crucial also for the generation of the very categories that here concern me: the author, national cinematograph, opposition to (or "face to face with") Hollywood. Characterized by geographical-spatial extensions (the sites and cities hosting such movie festivals) and particular temporal extensions (the sequential programming of the world's major festivals to cover the calendar year across the whole twelve-month annual cycle), the international movie festival must be seen as a network (with nodes, flows and exchanges) if its importance is to be grasped. Could this network and its spatio-temporal circuits be the motor that keeps European cinematograph at once stable and dynamic, perpetually crisis-prone and yet surviving, frustratingly hard to understand for the historian and so self-evident for the cinephile?