Reframing Film Festivals: Politics, Histories and Agencies

Reframing Film Festivals: Histories, Economies and Cultures is an international film studies conference organised by the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Aldo Moro University of Bari, in collaboration with the the Apulia Film Commission, the Consulta Universitaria Cinema and the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema and is supported by the Centro Studi Apulia Film Commission, Science Gallery Venice and Hostelsclub. This double-event conference seeks to contribute to the so-called film festival studies through a series of roundtables and debates involving film critics, practitioners and scholars. In this vein, Reframing Film Festivals seeks to foster an interdisciplinary and intersectional reading of film festivals, here conceived as a historiographic “dispositive”, as cultural formations and as financial institutions. Within a single and cohesive research framework, the Ca’ Foscari strand (11-12 February) will be devoted to the critical-historic and historiographic dimension of film festivals, while at the University of Bari (25-26 March) the focus will be placed on their cultural and economic dimension.

PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2019

This thesis aims to answer the question: is there an ideology conditioning European A festivals’ awarding and representation of Italian cinema in the years 2000-2017 and, if so, how does it function? The project presents a systematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of such awarding and representation, examining a corpus of Italian films that have won Best Picture at a European A festival in the years 2000-2017. Its methodology is grounded in Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology, which it maps on to three aspects of European A festivals: the A circuit apparatus – its histories, organisational structures and practices; festival paratexts – film synopses in festivals’ official programmes; and film texts – aspects of films that confound their institutional representation. Comparing each level, the thesis identifies and critiques the explicit ways in which European A festivals represent Italian cinema, and the implicit laws that govern such representation. The Introduction discuss...

Reframing Film Festivals (conference), 2020

During one of the first international workshops for film festival studies (University of St Andrews, 2009), scholars highlighted the importance of researching film festivals’ ideological aspect. Dina Iordanova suggested that programming may reflect a particular ideological standpoint, while Maty Ba and David Slocum highlighted the relationship between this ideological standpoint and film festivals’ service of economic and political interests. Since then, a number of studies have engaged with facets of these institutions’ reproduction of such interests through their programming, promotion and prize-giving. Meanwhile, the question of how to analyse the ideology of film festivals – be they individual festivals or ‘parallel circuits’ (Iordanova, 2009) – remains an open one. This paper presents outcomes from a recently completed project which sought to address such a question. I propose a methodology for the systematic analysis of film festivals’ ideological functioning, and give an overview of the findings that this methodology has generated thus far. Adapting Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology critique and applying it to the analysis of institutions, I argue that film festivals are sustained, in part, by an ‘institutional unconscious’ – a series of unwritten rules and hierarchies that underpin their public activities and proclamations. I outline a tripartite approach to delineating this unconscious and identifying its effects on programming and representation. This approach takes into account: (1) the festival ‘apparatus’, made up of its history, organizational and economic structures, pronouncements and practices; (2) festivals’ paratextual representation of the films they exhibit; (3) the ‘texts’ of the films themselves. Putting these three elements of film festivals into dialogue, I trace the reproduction of dominant power structures through both the festival apparatus and, in particular, its paratexts. Meanwhile, I position the film text as a site of resistance – a text that can assist us in both highlighting and critiquing film festivals’ ideological functioning. Finally, the paper demonstrates the application of this method to a specific case: European A festivals’ awarding and representation of Italian cinema in the years 2000-2017. In doing so, I am to show that the findings produced by analyzing such a case has implications not only for the study of film festivals as such, but of their place in relation to power structures such as patriarchy, neo-colonialism and capitalist globalization.

2023

Free preview of the full length monograph, available to purchase from Amsterdam University Press. Use code AUTH20 for a 20% discount. Abstract: Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema is the first systematic study of the role ideology plays in film festivals’ construction of dominant ideas about art cinema. Film festivals are considered the driving force of the film industry outside Hollywood, disseminating ideals of cinematic art and humanist politics. However, the question of what drives them remains highly contentious. In a rare consideration of the European competitive film festival circuit as a whole, this book analyses the shared economic, geopolitical and cultural histories that characterise ‘European A festivals’. It offers, too, the first extensive analysis of such festivals’ role in the canonisation of select Italian films, from Rome, Open City to The Great Beauty and Gomorrah. The book proposes a new approach to ideology critique, one that enables detailed examination of how film festivals construct ideas about not only contemporary art cinema, but assumptions about gender, race, colonialism and capitalism.

Cinergie, 2022

Film festivals play an important role in the construction and circulation of not only individual films but entire taxonomies of cinema, from their "discovery of new waves" (Elsaesser 2005: 99) to their production of "hegemonic …canons" (Vallejo, 2020: 158). The effects of this taxonomical power are felt across filmmaking, criticism, and scholarship, foregrounded in renewed calls to decolonize film festivals and film culture more broadly (Dovey and Sendra 2022[forthcoming], Shambu 2019). This article mobilizes and adapts "New Lacanian" theories of ideology critique to propose a methodology for studying the ways in which film festivals construct meaning for films and, cumulatively, entire canons. Outlining concepts such as the festival apparatus, the festival paratext, and the cinematic Real, I trace the coordinates of a three-tier critical procedure that brings into dialogue festivals' operational and material contexts, their representation of themselves and their films, and the unruly, aesthetic qualities of the films that festivals exhibit. I demonstrate the application of this approach to a recent cause célèbre of Italian migration cinema, Fire at Sea, its awarding and representation at the 2016 edition of the Berlin International Film Festival instantiating the enduring legacy of Neorealism and a "brutal humanist" stance directed towards refugees in the new millennium (Schoonover 2012). Moving between theoretical discussions and the application of this method of ideology critique, I demonstrate how we might interrogate structures of meaning implicit within film festivals' rhetorical operation, offering a ground from which to better understand film festivals and, if desired, advocate for change.

This paper is concerned with the way in which the form of the film synopsis reifies both the film itself and the processes at work in its production, distribution and recognition. In line with recent Lacanian film theory (inter alia, Žižek, McGowan, Vighi), I treat film as a site of excess meaning, or antagonism, and therefore argue that we need to look to extra-filmic material if we are to understand the ideological process of resolving antagonism. I examine synopses of films given by international, competitive (“A list”) film festivals, and consider how they condense the meaning of an award-winning film in order to present a sellable product: the “festival film”. In doing so, I aim to show three things. First, the process of reification – “taming the excess” – at work in the film synopsis form. This can be understood by the ideological process of inclusion and exclusion at work in film synopses – their attempt to fix, or quilt, the meaning of a film. Second, the way in which this process is conditioned by a particular set of values, in this case the values associated with and reproduced by the film festival brand. This is a necessary aspect of the circulation of symbolic capital on which film festivals and award-winning films depend (Elsaesser, 2005, De Valck, 2014). Finally, I aim to indicate the possibility of considering the international film festival network as part of the cultural state apparatus, which has taken on a transnational dimension.

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2016