The first international film festival was held in Venice in 1932. Its success, both in its artistic and touristic aspects, led other cities and governments to pay heed to this new form of publicity. The original date for the first Cannes festival was September 3, 1939 - thanks to World War II, it was postponed until 1946. The Cannes festival grew up fast - what was originally a French cultural exposition soon became the key event of the year's film calendar. Just as an Oscar or two will add to the box office appeal of an American film in this country, a prize at Cannes will add to a film's marketability - in Europe, at least. Regrettably, Cannes has recently become something of a monstrous bazaar - the dumping ground for hundreds of trashy movies, where the art of selling is more important than the art of filmmaking.
All Movied Out
Most film festivals, like the movies themselves, are a mixture of art and commerce, innovation and hucksterism. They come in all sizes and shapes. There are festivals where the viewing load is light, and others where comatose critics stagger out of screening rooms sprocket drunk and all movied out after four or five features. At Cannes, for instance, you can view eighteen hours of films a day. There are now about three hundred film festivals, and hardly a day of the year goes by without a film festival somewhere. You could conceivably spend all of the waking hours of the rest of your life attending festivals, slaking your lust for new, old, rare, and specialized movies. At the Antipodes Film Festival you can see Greek films in Melbourne, Australia; in Perugia, you can see African films in Italy; for five days of agrarian films, get yourself to Zaragoza in Spain; for a week of mountain films, go to Trento, Italy; Cognac, in France, provides four days of thrillers; for a week of quiet, try the festival of silent films at Pordenone in Italy.
For the cinephile, festivals provide an opportunity to meet directors, performers, technicians, and critics from all over the globe - and to get acquainted with unfamiliar national schools. Most Westerners for instance, were unaware of the existence of Japanese cinema until Rashomon, scorned by critics at home, was sent to Venice by a fluke in 1951 and won the top prize there. Ideally, festivals provide a showcase for experimental works that may in the long run exert a seminal influence on the industry as a whole. However, with the proliferation of festivals and the recent decline of quality in films from most countries, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain standards. Many film festivals are now like prolonged nightmares - excruciating trips through endless tunnels of images. I have come to prefer the smaller and more off-beat festivals, where there may be less to see, but that less is often of greater quality.
During the early 1960s, in Czechoslovakia, before the arrival of Soviet tanks put an end to the "Prague Spring," I greatly enjoyed the festival at Karlovy Vary, a lovely Bohemian spa town set in a deep valley, where a good many films by talented young Czech filmmakers were on view, until an entire generation of cineastes were exiled, dispersed, suppressed, destroyed, nipped in the bud. One year during that decade, in a fit of what must have been unbridled masochism, I spent the Christmas holidays at the experimental festival at Knokke, Belgium, where in a rococo gambling casino near an eternally fogbound beach, I viewed over one hundred avant-garde films and nearly lost my eyesight from the thousands of gratuitous zoom shots.
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