| home > undercurrent > issue 6 > The Big Circus |
|
|
about the writer Born in Chicago, Jon Jost is a veteran film and video-maker who has made more than thirty feature-length works, more than thirty short films, and several installations. While his films are screened regularly in major festivals and small ones too, they fail almost all criteria for the present day market-economy value system and are more or less not shown outside the festival circuit. You can read about these films and order DVDs of them at www.jon-jost.com. He presently lives with his wife, Marcella, in Seoul, Korea, where he teaches as a professor at Yonsei University. |
The Big Circus
By Jon Jost
I guess I'm now an old-timer for the festival world. I've been going to them since 1977 I think. Berlin and Edinburgh, Deauville and Taormina. Way back then there were only a dozen or so festivals worth the name, each with its own characteristic value. Today there seems to be a festival for every day in the year, a grand "International Film Festival" of whatever obscure place you can imagine, for whatever genre and taste.
When I first went to festivals there was a practical purpose to it: festivals would get you exposure, they would provide a springboard to make a sale, for those with more commercial work it was a form of advertising. Some of this still holds true in Cannes, and perhaps a few more places. But in reality those functions have stopped. For commercial films, festivals are now a marginal matter, a little icing on the PR cake; but for non-commercial films they are almost the only matter.
Way back then there were arthouses, and little boutique (they didn't use the word back then) distributors to serve them. Now there are virtually no arthouses and no such distributors. What once existed as a market, however small, no longer exists.
Instead what exists is an exhibition system that doesn't pay, or in reality requires the producer/artist to pay. Most festivals require a submission fee and in effect work as a vanity press combined with Lotto. You pay to roll the cultural dice and if you win, your film gets shown at your expense. Those who can play this game - art films are still made, but they are made in the cultures which subsidize these films in the name of making their culture known on a global scale - are those able to pony up the entrance fee, make prints, crank out a bit of promo material, and exhibit at festivals. In general that's it unless the film is basically commercial in quality, and has some effective hook - a star, a star director, a good genre story - that lets it escape the festival zoo and find a broader public. Few and far between.
So festivals have changed from being one step toward an audience to being the audience, and hence they have become a kind of cinematic ghetto, where a certain kind of film obtains a fleeting life - a page or less in a catalog, an audience of twenty or 2000, perhaps a festival circuit shooting-star life of another ten lesser festivals, and then a year later, oblivion.
The blame for this can be attributed to a number of things, the main one being the victory of Market Economy Capitalism (otherwise known as globalism), in which the primary measure of value is money, the more the merrier. According to this system there really are no other values. Crammed down the world's throat by the IMF, World Bank, and other American-controlled entities, this has resulted in the jettisoning of any cultural values that don't equate to the maximum profit. Another likely cause is the organic nature of culture, that it grows and dies like any living thing. Cinema seems peculiarly transitory this way, just as the flicker of 24 fps of light is, with cinema cultures flourishing briefly - Italy, France, Germany, Portugal - and then quickly falling into decadence. Currently the most vital cinematic cultures seem to be in Asia, particularly the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and some places in South America. In this floating world of cinematic flashpoints, it is natural that festivals flare and fade in synchronicity with the cinematic cultures which surround them. Where once Italy had a vital film culture, Venice played a second fiddle to the grand old lady of Cannes. Now Venice is a glitzy momentary blip on the festival calendar, forgotten the week it concludes. Cannes has a half-life slightly longer, but not much.
Ironically, being one of the few places where one can see serious, non-commercial cinema, festivals are utterly mis-tuned for such work. Festivals are circuses, places of non-stop partying and low attention spans, with a plethora of too many films to be seen; places where a film is sized up in minutes, and abandoned if it hasn't hooked - after all there's another one starting in ten minutes 100 meters down the street. Lots of serious cinema doesn't work that way. And then serious cinema, like any serious art, requires attention, concentration, and time to absorb after the fact. Festivals are the opposite, a massive flush of films, one after the other, simultaneously, each shouting for attention, with no time for reflection. If this sounds like the jaundiced view of a burned-out festival participant, it is.
And yet, at least for this cultural cycle (I'm privileged to see things in a somewhat long range - if not so long as Manoel de Oliveira), festivals are about all we've got - to show my films, or see those of others in the same predicament. So a few words on one recent one with which I'm now quite familiar - Jeonju.
Located here in Korea in a small city a bit south-central on the peninsula, I've been to it since its inception in 2000. First time out it was a beautifully organized festival with a swarm of ever helpful student volunteers, who kept inquiring, "Are we doing good enough?" Their anxiety betrayed a provincial sense of inferiority that was utterly unwarranted. Even in their first year they had a very good selection of films, real audiences, and ran circles around the organization of a lot of festivals I'd been to. Since then Jeonju has blossomed into a really impressive festival, with consistently high audience levels for a range of interesting filmmaking from around the globe, with retrospectives accorded to the likes of Béla Tarr and Jerzy Skolomowski, Alexander Kluge and Pedro Costa. Naturally, Jeonju has become a beacon for Asian filmmakers, and seems increasingly recognized in the wider world.
In addition, for some years they've sponsored a digital filmmaking project, handing out a very good budget to three filmmakers each year to make a half-hour long film. Putting their money where their mouth is.
Naturally such a gathering brings in a good number of critics, mostly Asian-based, and the festival has provided space for serious discussion from the critical standpoint. In 2009 there were "master classes" by Raymond Bellour on "Trafic and the films of Philippe Grandrieux" and "Chris Marker and Level Five"; by Richard Porton on "WR: Mysteries of the Organism - Anarchist Realism," and by Adrian Martin on "Manny Farber: Creative Criticism."
So while the general picture from the festival world deserves a cynical eye (are some of these festivals I've sent DVDs to and never heard from again merely rackets for making a weird collection of DVDs to crank out locally and sell?) and perhaps from a filmmaker's viewpoint a bit of caution, there remain some bright spots, where film is taken seriously and space is given outside the glittering glamor-struck spotlights of Cannes and Venice and Berlin. Short-lived but lively festivals come and go, and others like Rotterdam and now Jeonju, which have staked their ground and grown, still maintain an integrity which for the most part seems absent elsewhere. And perhaps, before I drop dead, the cultural cycle will roll over and film/video of a certain serious kind will again find a place in the larger world, one that might even offer the hope of making a living! Until then it's a handful of festivals, and in my case, a belated teaching gig.
