Festival
Instances: The Cannes Film Festival - The London Film Festival - The Brussels Film Festival - The International Film Festival Rotterdam - The Venice Film Festival - The Sundance Film Festival
EXPRMNTL was the largest festival dedicated to experimental cinema. It was conceived and curated by Jacques Ledoux and the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique in Knokke-le-Zoute. It was organized five times between 1949 and 1974. Attendees included Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka, Yoko Ono and Jean-Jacques Lebel, Jack Smith and Martin Scorsese, Holger Meins and Pierre Vermeylen. And Marguerite Duras, Marcel Broodthaers, Roman Polanski, Mauricio Kagel, Michael Snow, Hugo Claus, Pierre Clémenti, Martial Raysse, Nam-June Paik, P. Adams Sitney, Jean-Luc Godard and many other "flaming creatures".
Film festival
A film festival is a mostly annual festival showcasing films, usually of a recent date, sometimes with a focus on a specific genre (e.g. animation) or subject (e.g. gay and lesbian film festivals).
The world's first major film festival was held in Venice in 1932; the other three major film festivals of the world (Cannes, Berlin and Locarno) date back to the 1940s and 1950s.
The festivals in Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Karlovy Vary and (since 2002) Locarno are listed as so-called "A festivals". New films may be screened at only one of these festivals. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_festival [Sept 2004]
Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (2002) - Kenneth Turan
Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (2002) - Kenneth Turan [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
From Publishers Weekly
In this lively blend of travelogue and film history, Los Angeles Times film critic Turan details the inner workings of 12 of the world's 400-plus film festivals, capturing the essence of each. More broadly, he shows how festivals have become a "growth industry" providing filmmakers with an "an alternate p.r. universe" and fans a symposium on the "nature of the cinematic experience." For standard bearers like Sundance and Cannes, the thrust is, despite the hype, to uncover new films that surprise audiences and make "dreams come true" for filmmakers. Aesthetically driven festivals, like Italy's silents-only Pordenone, run on the commitment of organizers and patrons who believe in a given film genre or set of artistic tenets. But most indicative of film's life-affirming power are the festivals set in poor or war-torn lands, such as Burkina Faso or Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, organizers and audiences take many risks to ensure that a film is available, for to them it marks a "determination not to be alone in the world." Add to these aesthetic overviews Turan's well-observed social tableaux the "pleasantly schizophrenic interaction between the minions of Hollywood and the scruffy independent world" of Sundance, the flashy yet "privileged look behind the scenes at the interlocking gears of the theatrical experience" at Vegas's ShoWest and the film festival portraits are complete. Turan's easy erudition and wholehearted pleasure in the film experience infuse the book, making it, like a good movie, a multilayered delight.
From Library Journal
In this slim volume, Los Angeles Times film critic Turan surveys a variety of film festivals in terms of importance and scope, giving a brief overview of the famous (Cannes) and the more obscure (Lone Pine). Four sections discuss different festivals in terms of business (Cannes, Sundance, and ShoWest), geopolitical issues (Fespaco, Havana, Sarajevo, and Midnight Sun), aesthetics (Pordenone, Lone Pine, and Telluride), and the politics of festivals in general. Turan observes, "Though the gathering... read more
Book Description
27 b/w photographs Almost every day of the year a film festival takes place somewhere in the world--from sub-Saharan Africa to the Land of the Midnight Sun. Sundance to Sarajevo is a tour of the world's film festivals by an insider whose familiarity with the personalities, places, and culture surrounding the cinema makes him uniquely suited to his role. Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, writes about the most unusual as well as the most important film festivals, and the cities in which they occur, with an eye toward the larger picture. His lively narrative emphasizes the cultural, political, and sociological aspects of each event as well as the human stories that influence the various and telling ways the film world and the real world intersect. Of the festivals profiled in detail, Cannes and Sundance are obvious choices as the biggest, brashest, and most influential of the bunch. The others were selected for their ability to open a window onto a wider, more diverse world and cinema's place in it. Sometimes, as with Sarajevo and Havana, film is a vehicle for understanding the international political community's most vexing dilemmas. Sometimes, as with Burkina Faso's FESPACO and Pordenone's Giornate del Cinema Muto, it's a chance to examine the very nature of the cinematic experience. But always the stories in this book show us that film means more and touches deeper chords than anyone might have expected. No other book explores so many different festivals in such detail or provides a context beyond the merely cinematic.
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