Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2024
Summary
Abstract: The Introduction discusses the main relationships this book investigates: art cinema and film festivals, film festivals and Europe, and Italian cinema and film festivals. I consider the various terms through which we might taxonomise films celebrated at festivals—world cinema, global art cinema, peripheral cinema—before outlining the Eurocentric histories of the film festival network and dominant canons of art cinema. I show how the meaning of terms such as art cinema is contingent upon the flows of prestige, geopolitical relations and economic structures in which film festivals participate. The introduction then focuses on Italian cinema's status as emblematic of filmmaking dependent on festivals for circulation and its centrality to the historical development of the European film festival circuit.
Keywords: art cinema, film festivals, Italian cinema, film circulation, European cinema
The central premise of this book is that art cinema does not exist. It is a fantasy that is brought into being again and again through rituals that take place at film festivals—rituals such as film selections and screenings, prize-giving, red carpet parades, as well as the production of endless pronouncements on each film, from festival programmes to jury statements, interviews, critics’ reviews, social media posts and, of course, the excited exchange of opinions between audience members after (and sometimes during) a screening.
Yet these rituals, and the sites in which they take place, are not pure: they are constituted by and reproduce economic and geopolitical interests. Film festivals’ construction of that which we call art cinema not only serves the dictates of some rarefied aesthetic value, but, to bring things abruptly back down to earth, it also serves “the interests of nation states and global capital” (Rhyne, 2009, p. 10). Art cinema is a fantasy, yes, but one produced under material conditions, and with material consequences. This book is an investigation of those conditions and consequences—in other words, the ideology of art cinema reproduced through film festivals.
Through the case of new millennium Italian cinema, this book seeks to develop our understanding of which films are permitted international attention and legitimation at European competitive film festivals.
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- Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art CinemaPolitics, Histories and Cultural Value, pp. 13 - 36Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023