Matic Majcen

The importance of going to film festivals

A film critic without a film festival is no film critic at all, insists Matic Majcen, film
editor for the Slovenian journal "Dialogi". To be completely alone with the film and
one's opinion of it is a unique experience in a film world where advertising and
promotion are becoming increasingly invasive.
Three years ago, in the spring of 2011, I read at home the reports my
colleagues in journalism and criticism filed from the biggest European film
festivals, and I felt it was entirely unnecessary for me to attend these hugely
important film events on the old continent in order to gain firsthand
experience myself. Why should I? All the films that are significant in any way
whatsoever sooner or later find their way to our cinemas, and any that elude
Slovenian distributers I can in any case learn about online if they are really that
good. Ultimately everything will be available within a few weeks of the
premiere. And frankly speaking the majority of critics do not attend festivals,
because it costs too much. So I also didn't feel the need to go, and there was
nothing at all that would have shaken this firm conviction of mine.
Screen on the beech, Cannes Film Festival, 2012. Photo: yaprak kyd. Source: Flickr
Today, only three years later, after having attended three Venice Film
Festivals, two in Cannes and one Berlinale, I can hardly believe I once thought
in such a cloistered way.
What exactly is so invaluable about this experience for critics and journalists?
If I were to say that it completely changed my way of looking at the world of
film, that would be just one side of the story. My critical and theoretical
apparatus, which was developed alongside structuralist literature, has of course
remained more or less the same and it would be difficult to replace it quickly
even if I wanted to. There is a perk of a different order here: as a critic at a
festival you are placed in a situation in which you must write a review just a
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few minutes after leaving the theatre where you watched the world premiere of
a film, of which you knew nothing beforehand. No advertising and
promotional messages that and from today's perspective I see this even
more clearly constantly bombard us from all sides and influence in so many
ways the formation of opinions about films. To be completely alone with the
film and one's opinion of it is something radically different, and a film critic
who lacks that experience is, to put it plainly, not a film critic.
But no I also have in mind some completely different things, which cannot
be seen from a domestic perspective. In Slovenia, a person does not have a
sense of the size and importance of these twoweek events, in which the whole
of the global film industry is involved. These are events at which more films
are screened in two weeks than in Slovenian cinemas in a whole year. The
variety of film in all sections at festivals is astounding. Such a festival puts you
in a completely different frame of mind to events in the home environment.
Quite simply, there is no greater event elsewhere, it is this place that is the very
centre of the film world. If today I were to say that I can follow such an event
via Internet news and that I'll be kept informed of everything that happens
there, this is purely a media illusion, and one that is damaging but at the
same time clearly in the interest of some.
Both the art of film and the film industry, despite their youth, are well beyond
the phase of being the purview of individual enthusiasts; rather, they are
embedded in institutional frameworks at all levels and involve significant
amounts of private and public capital, such that they constitute an important
part of the social system. What I began to see from the perspective of this kind
of festival event is that a nationally insulated media space such as Slovenia's
has its own strategy of building interpretations, which occurs independent of
the global space. Not just the Slovenian but every national public discourse is a
sort of parallel world that develops independently of the global. The more
distant it is from the centre geographically, culturally, ideologically the
more different it is. But what concerns me here is that writing about film in
Slovenia is in large degree subjected to advertising and that this fact is in large
degree undisclosed. Due to the weak financial and consequently also ethical
position of the media, many journalists who write about film are embedded in
advertising, while also increasingly absent from these festivals. Instead,
financiers, producers, distributers and cinemas build a powerful advertising
apparatus that is exclusively affirmative and favourably disposed only towards
those films that these institutions launch to the public.
In practice it looks like this: in the nationwide daily newspaper Delo in
midMarch, Irena Staudohar's article entitled "Home alone and alone in the
cinema" explains what an exciting time we live in since there are good quality
films all around us. In the author's view, the number of older filmgoers has
greatly increased, which has contributed to the production of good quality
films. And this year's Oscars are in her opinion evidence of this. Even more, in
Slovenia, too, everything is blooming. Cinema in her view is moving from the
suburbs back into the cities. She says that this is shown by Kinodvor, the
biggest art cinema in the country, with its "excellent program", and full praise
also goes to the multiplex company Kolosej, which has again opened up a
theatre in the centre of the city. "Multiplexes are gradually waning, and once
again ideas are what count", she writes in conclusion.
That today this sort of writing, which sounds like an institutional
advertisement, is accepted in Slovenia's largest print media by editors as well
as readers as an example of journalism at the national level, is very sad.
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Intuitively this writing appears truthful but in truth it has no contact with
reality and indicates the total lack of knowledge of the author, who yields to
conceptions of film art as some sort of romantic art. Every word conceals the
actual state of affairs, every claim ends affirmatively, in praise of the
filmmakers as well as the cinemas.
In the real world trends are occurring which are strongly negative, but these are
barely cited, let alone examined in the media that would not be in the
interests of the institutions praised by this Delo journalist. That we do not by a
long shot live in an exciting time for the art of film but rather are experiencing
just a repetition of things already seen, I merely mention by the way. More
important in the context of the author's words is that at this moment in
Slovenia city cinemas are being strongly commercialized. Digitalization,
which in recent years has also reached cinema in Slovenia, instead of providing
cultural, aesthetic and historical diversity, has given way to the unexpected
trend of the commercialization of films on offer, governed by a strategy of
seeking out a target audience which now also includes older viewers.
There is no longer space for masterpieces such as Wiseman's Berkeley or
Lanzmann's The Last of the Unjust. Previously, in addition to a range of
thoroughly mediocre quasiintellectual European films, we could also see a
cycle of Oscar winners in city cinemas. These at least bring a profit but, of
course, all of this uses public money in one way or another. And the criteria
that was once implied by labelling a cinema an art cinema today no longer
applies: city cinemas have become twinned with the multiplex commercial
discourse and are no longer its opposite, providing an alternative film
experience. Of course the author completely overlooks the fact in the
characteristic centralist light that is typical for the Ljubljana "national" media
that city cinemas outside Ljubljana are facing entirely different problems
and that the wave of commercialization has come in extremely useful for them,
instead of providing for the expansion of film culture in the full sense of the
word.
From my own experience, I can assert that film criticism writing frequently
discredits the representatives of institutions when they try to show that you are
an illinformed quasiexpert spouting nonsense and criticizing things that
everybody else in fact praises. It seems that this state of unwillingness to leap
outside established frameworks merely reflects the current social mentality in
Slovenia. This state of being trapped between the routine of established
meaning and the search for shortlived happiness raises a topic that is
distinctly filmic. We are missing reality, we have many illusions, and the best
way of breaking them down is the relativization of majority values through
greater inclusion in the international space. But as long as what capitalist
jargon, which extends to the field of culture as well, calls competitiveness
and this competitiveness is not only material but also intellectual represents
a threat to the majority conception of things, then things will not change. So
long as journalists even in a marginal area such as film fail to see their task as
describing the actual state of affairs and critiquing the dominant institutional
discourse, then the broader lay public will continue to be satisfied with what it
has grown accustomed to.
Published 20140528
Original in English
Translation by Dialogi
Contribution by Dialogi
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First published in Dialogi 12/2014
Matic Majcen / Dialogi
Eurozine
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