Difference, aesthetics and the curatorial crisis of film festivals

Abstract

This essay builds on debates from Screen's recent dossier on film festivals1 in order to promote discussion of the significance of film festivals in cohering communities around nationalistic identities and in shaping contemporary film culture. Drawing on my professional experience as a festival practitioner in the USA, I shall consider curatorial strategies that make space for audiences and cinematic practices otherwise marginalized or invisible within established film institutions and canons. Film festivals are one of the foremost dynamic curatorial mechanisms in our film culture. Festival programmers can use their role as gatekeepers to strategically challenge dichotomous valuations of film as either art or commerce, and to facilitate ways of looking that allow for difference rather than enforce nationalistic models of homogeneity. As digital technologies have provided greater access to the means of film and media production for those historically disenfranchised from the process, thousands more films are being made each year than can be catalogued or archived. This increase has created a crisis in curating – an urgent need to filter through these productions and connect films with audiences. The investments in this filtering process are relative. Some film critics claim that of these thousands of films, only a few (between twenty and sixty) are ‘outstanding’ or ‘good-to-great’ films that have value to cinema culture.2 The impulse to preserve cinema as an elite art form is understandable when conversations around film are overrun by regurgitations of box-office figures and an obsessive quest for smaller, more mobile delivery formats. Studio executives, on the other hand, approach film in terms of its profitability as a product, determined by a calculus of production budgets, print and advertising expenses, and distribution revenues. When the independent film industry in the USA collapsed in the spring of 2008, marked by the closure of film studios Picturehouse and Warner Independent, some blamed not only the number of film productions saturating the market but also the lack of quality (articulated as a consequence of poor taste) overseeing this production overflow.3