What defines a successful film festival? Judging by the noises the media make about this topic, a successful festival is one that launches some Hollywood producer’s latest studio release–and allows him to expand his swimming pool. Anything that might get in the way of such a project–the art of film, say, or the curiosity of a festival audience about what’s happening elsewhere in the world–is to be discouraged in the pages of the trade papers, which generally set the tone for the mainstream.
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To be fair, one of the nicest things about the Toronto festival–still one of my two favorites, along with Rotterdam–is that it remains broad enough to accommodate all sorts of interests. Even so, films that appeal to less mainstream interests tend to get more and more marginalized every year, not because there are fewer of them or because audiences for them are dwindling–on the contrary, they seem to be growing–but because industry bullies with outsize wallets are shoving the rest of us out of the way, buying up all the members of the press who are for sale to use as battering rams. Edward Yang did win the prize for best direction at Cannes, but any audience member there who saw his Yi Yi (showing this Sunday at the festival) could have told you that there was no contest between the virtuoso way he handles a comic Taipei wedding and the jazzier but less skillful and less nuanced way Robert Altman handles a comic Dallas wedding in Dr. T and the Women (the opening-night film, which showed on Thursday and will open soon commercially). But characteristically, the media decided to treat the Altman farce as important and the Yang family saga as esoteric–partly because Altman has Richard Gere as his star, partly because of ethnocentric bias, partly because of the bucks at the disposal of Hollywood publicists. Of course money can’t perform the actual work of criticism, but it sure can function as propaganda, steering critics and audiences toward and away from products.
There’s a grotesque discrepancy nowadays between the number of films made each year and the infinitesimally small number that get screened at festivals. (Which makes it absurd and presumptuous when critics hold forth on the state of world cinema–how could they possibly know?) Yet the number of screenings can still be overwhelming; looking at a festival catalog is not unlike spending an afternoon at the stock exchange. So low-budget filmmakers who manage to get their work shown are under immense pressure to compete with the publicity machines of the big-budget directors. It’s dismaying that some filmmakers I admire have started insisting that I look at their rough cuts or tactfully informing me that their lives are in my hands just before (or sometimes just after) I look at their pictures–tactics that differ only in scale from those of the studios and a sign that the malaise is reaching epidemic proportions. (This time of year, the busiest, I also get tapes every week from unknown filmmakers who expect me to neglect my ordinary reviewing duties to look at them; I wish each of these directors knew about all the others.)
A corollary of the news of an Iranian new wave was the dawning discovery that, like Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, it’s best understood in collective terms rather than as the product of a few auteurs. Of the ten or so new Iranian features I’ve seen this year, only a couple–Majid Majidi’s fairly traditional tearjerker The Color of Paradise and Mohammad Ali Talebi’s The Willow and the Wind (a simple but effective thriller written by Kiarostami, playing next week at the Film Center)–seem relatively untouched by the social upheaval one finds reflected in diverse ways in all the others. In addition to Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, I highly recommend Circle, Blackboards, and Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine–my three current favorites, in order of preference, none of which happens to be showing at the Chicago festival, though the latter will be at the Film Center next week–as well as The Day I Became a Woman, Tales of an Island, and A Time for Drunken Horses, all of which are showing at the festival, along with Djomeh, which I haven’t seen.
That these movies can be seen in relatively relaxed and congenial circumstances is something to cherish and celebrate–a great contrast to the boorish press screenings at Cannes, where loud hissing greets many of the greatest films shown there. The Chicago festival is splintered this year between three parts of the city, which can make it harder to hang out with other festivalgoers and harder to get to some films. But it also may give some people access to films in their own neighborhood–and you can be sure the strategy wasn’t designed to create the kind of snobbish mob scenes typical of “successful” festivals.
