It’s the story of two worlds. The first is called cinema, where we find older people in matinee showings or kids in multiplexes. The second world is people in their living rooms with their 4K televisions, watching Netflix or streaming Game of Thrones from dubious web origins. In between these two worlds there is movement, for example when a new James Bond film is released.
But that’s about all the exchange there is between the two. The two worlds only come closer together again at festivals.
It’s not just a perceived reality that there are more and more festivals, but it’s unknown how many film festivals take place around the world every year. In 2013, one journalist counted 2,954. Three-quarters of the festivals he counted at that time were launched between 2003 and 2013. Why is it that today every arty hipster seems to be curating their own film festival in their free time? And why is it that the number of festivals is increasing simultaneously with the great migratory wave of films from the cinema to small screens and smartphones – from the first to the second world?
I reach out to Lars Henrik Gass on Skype. He must know the answers to these questions: he just wrote the book on the subject.
It’s called Film und Kunst nach dem Kino (
Film and Art Post-Cinema).
Gass has been running the Oberhausen Short Film Festival for twenty years. For him, it’s obvious that cinema is disappearing. “When you look at the figures, it becomes clear that the commercial evaluation of film does not need the cinema anymore,” he explains. For Gass, this is neither a eulogy nor cultural pessimism.
As a festival director, he sees practically every film he needs to see on the web. The decline of cinema is, however, accompanied by the loss of a cultural practice that is hard to replace, he says. “Cinema is characterized by forced perception. For a specific duration, you are exposed to an extraneous reality – beyond your own patterns of perception.”
Watching from the sofa, by contrast, we can simply pause a film and explore the fridge. “Even film is currently subjected to the general privatization of space. The way that people walk through the train station wearing headphones, now you can watch movies at any time on your smartphone.”
It is paradoxical that while the cinema is disappearing, the festivals are beginning to re-stage movie theatres all the more glamorously. In this way, festivals could make the cultural practice of going to the cinema tangible once again. Yet the cinemas where festivals can take place would disappear.
Historically, film festivals, like the one founded by Mussolini in Venice, were nationalistic projects. After the Second World War, Cannes was meant to cast the Western world in a modern light.
Many new festivals were founded in the 1960s and ‘70s as a result of the authorship concept emerging in cinema. Over the last twenty years, the situation changed again once again. “Festivals have basically become a component of location marketing.”
This is associated with a new film style that the festivals themselves helped to influence. “Festivals are now producing an aesthetic mean that is better suited to sponsors and to a large audience and that offers projection and presentation space.” In front of the movie theatre, analogue excitement prevails over the celebrities who are actually there, while the “festival film,” an average, harmless problem drama is running inside.
“Festivals not only attract films with no consternation potential, but also help to sell them.” In a few years, no one will be talking about many of the entries at Cannes, Berlin or Venice.
For Lars Henrik Gass, the festival boom is nothing more than symptomatic of the decline of cinema. In the background, the cinemas shut down, in the foreground, the audience – as it was once understood – is becoming fragmented. The new reality is the second world. It expresses itself in self-willed media consumption and accessibility to pretty much everything, ultimately in a new type of subjectivity. According to Gass, access to pictures, but also to opinions, has become highly individualized in our digitized leisure society. Today, we are not just able to watch; we can assert whatever we want.
The festival paradox therefore has a logical solution: the programmers of the festivals also live in the second world, have access to a huge amount of films on the web, create film series from them. It has become technically easier to put together a festival. The old cinemas are just where the festivals are held. The question is: for how much longer?
Abridged from: Pascal Blum, Tages-Anzeiger, 26 September 2017
