Distinction and Value-Addition

But this "rhizomatic" view probably paints too vibrant a picture of anarchic self-organization. Many invisible hands steer and administer the chaos of a festival, making sure there is flow and interruption, and making visible yet another architecture: that articulated by the programming of the movies in competition and built upon across the festival's different sections, special events, showcase attractions and sidebars. Cannes, besides the sections "In Competition" (for the Palme d'Or), "Out of Competition" (special invitation), "Un Certain regard" (world cinematograph), "Cannes classics" and "Cinefondation" (short and medium length movies from movie schools) also know the "Quinzaine des realisateurs" and the "Semaine internationale de la critique". Venice offers similar categories: "Official Selection", "Out of Competition", "Horizons" (world cinematograph), "International Critics' Week", "Venice Days", "Corto Cortissimo" (short movies). Berlin has "Competition", "Panorama", "Forum", "Perspective German Cinematograph", "Retrospective/Homage", "Showcase", "Berlinale Special", "Short Movies", "Children's Cinematograph." The effects of such a proliferation of sections are to accelerate the overall dynamics, but these extensions of choice do not happen without contradictions. Over the years, festivals, as we saw, were either powerd by protests to add these new categories (Cannes, Venice during the 1970s), or they did so, in order to take account of the quantitative increase in independently produced movies, as well as the swelling numbers of special interest groups wanting to be represented at movie festivals. The rebels of Cannes were accommodated; counter-festivals, such as the Forum in Berlin, were incorporated; and emerging movie nations were carefully nurtured, as in Rotterdam, which from its inception in the 1972 began specializing in New Asian cinematographs.

In the process, one of the key functions of the international festival becomes evident, namely to categorize, classify, sort and sift the world's annual movie-production. The challenge lies in doing so not by weeding out and de-classifying, or of letting the box-office do its brutal work, but rather by supporting, selecting, celebrating and rewarding - in short, by adding value and cultural capital at the top, while acting more as a gentle gate-keeper than a bouncer at the bottom. A festival's professed commitment to artistic excellence and nothing else positively demands a reading in terms of Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the social mechanisms behind taste and distinction. By broadening the palette of competitive and non-competitive sections festivals are not only democratizing access. New power-structures are introduced and other differentials operate: for instance, delegating the selection for certain sections to critics or to other bodies inevitably creates new forms of inclusion and exclusion, and above all new kinds of hierarchies, hidden perhaps to the spectators, but keenly felt by producers and makers:

If critical capital is accrued from being selected for a prestigious festival, further distinctions are determined through the movie's placement within the festival structure. In the case of the non-competitive Toronto festival, the Opening Night Gala slot is often considered one of the prime slots of the festival, and programs such as Galas, Special Presentations, and Masters are eagerly sought by distributors, producers, and moviemakers for the positioning of their movies. In this hierarchy, regionally defined programs such as Planet Africa and Perspective Canada are often perceived as ghettos for under-performing work.

There is only so much cultural capital to go round even at a festival, but as we have seen, accumulating it, in the form of prizes, press-coverage or other windows of attention is a matter of life and death for a movie. A movie comes to a festival, in order to be catapulted beyond the festival. It wants to enter into distribution, critical discourse and the various exhibition outlets. They alone assure its maker of going on to produce another movie, be it on the strength of the box office (rarely) or by attracting (national-governmental, international television co-production) subsidy. Movies use the festival circuit as the muscle that pumps it through the larger system.

Nevertheless, value addition operates also as another form of self-reference. As Bourdieu might have put it: All the players at a festival are caught up in the "illusio" of the game. They have to believe it is worth playing and attend to it with seriousness. In so doing, they sustain it.29 With every prize it confers, a festival also confirms its own importance, which in turn increases the symbolic value of the prize. Cannes, for instance, is not only aware of the seal of excellence that its Palme d'Or bestows on a movie thus distinguished. It also carefully controls the use of its logo in image and print, down to typeface, angle, color coding and the number of leaves in its palm branch oval. To vary the metaphor yet again: a festival is an apparatus that breathes oxygen into an individual movie and the reputation of its director as potential auteur, but at the same time it breathes oxygen into the system of festivals as a whole, keeping the network buoyant and afloat. Movie festivals act as multipliers and amplifiers on several levels: first, they provide a privileged public, the press, as arbiters and taste-makers. An ad-hoc stock exchange of reputations is set up, efficiently distributing information with a very short feedback delay. Secondly, with festivals that are open to the general public, such as Berlin and Rotterdam, Locarno or San Sebastian, audiences, whether tourists or locals, act as a control group for testing the movies according to very diverse sets of parameters, ranging from ci-nephile expertise to sensual stimulation for a couple's night out and equally important for a movie's eventual identity in the public's mind. Festival visitors, while perhaps not representative of general audiences, are valuable for the gathering of this sort of data, beyond boosting or deflating artistic egos when performing before a "live" audience. Festivals act as classic sites for the evaluation of information, taking snapshot opinion polls and yielding a market research instrument.

Yet because festival audiences are not necessarily representative of the general public, their volatility and collective enthusiasm can also make the unexpected happen. As Chicago movie guru Roger Ebert once pointed out, "You can go to Toronto with a movie nobody has heard of and you can leave with a success on your hands."31 The same is true of Rotterdam, which carefully polls its spectators after each screening and publishes an "audience's choice" chart throughout the festival. The results often differ markedly from that of the critics and jurors. Festivals, finally have a crucial role of value addition for movies from their own national production, notably in countries whose output does not always meet the international standards. With special sections, such as the "Perspective German Movie" in Berlin, or the "Dutch Treats" at Rotterdam, festivals provide ambassadorial or extra-territorial showcases for domestic moviemakers' work. Offered to the gaze of the international press and visitors, whose response in turn can be fed back into the national public debate, in order to shape the perception a specific country has of its national cinematograph and standing "abroad," such movies travel without leaving home. Finally, festivals act as multipliers in relation to each other: most B-festivals have movies that are invited or scheduled because they have been to other festivals: the well-known tautology of "famous for being famous" applies here too, creating its own kind of amplification effect.