Films and the History of Film Festivals

Film, being only about 100 years old, is a young medium. The film festival, a medium for exhibiting and celebrating film, is likewise,
still in its youth.

While the date of the very first film festival may be lost to antiquity, the oldest still in business is the Venice Film Festival founded in the 1930’s by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

The Cannes Film Festival was also conceived in the 1930’s. Set to debut on September 1, 1939, such Hollywood luminaries as Mae West, Gary Cooper, and Tyrone Powers traveled to the French seaside community for the festivities. Establishing a Cannes tradition of excess, a replica of the Notre Dame Cathedral was built on the beach to promote “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” the only film presented at the fledgling festival.

The third of the old-line European festivals, The Berlin Film Festival, was established in 1951 as an outpost of post-war culture sanctioned by the occupying Allied Forces in West Berlin. Initially slighted by the commission that tried to oversee and coordinate the European festivals, Berlin eventually rose to its current position as one of the top ranking European Film Festivals.

And so it went during the early years. Organizations like the Society for Cinephiles established festivals that were quietly run by aficionados and favored older films. Film festivals were not a rarity, but on the other hand, you didn’t find them everywhere you turned. Ironically, rather than one of the big international film festivals, it was the Society for Cinephiles’ Cinecon, which traveled to different cities each Labor Day to view rare silents, that was the forerunner of the festival that ushered in the modern era.

Like Cinecon, The Telluride Film Festival was created as a film buff’s festival. It even involved some of the same fans, such as the late William K. Everson. But unlike the humble Cinecon, Telluride was a pricey and exclusive affair held (also during the Labor Day holiday) in the privacy of a remote area of Colorado. When the Sundance Film Festival was founded, it used Telluride as a model.

The Sundance Festival, devoted to independent films, was founded in 1978 as the United States Film Festival. The first two session were in Salt Lake City; in January 1981, the festival moved to its current home in Park City, Utah. Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute (founded in 1983) took over festival operations in 1984. The name was formerly changed to The Sundance Film Festival in 1989, the year “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” put the festival on the map as a place where young directors could achieve commercial breakthrough. Bloated and weighted by success, Sundance eventually became its own kind of establishment film festival and a concurrent festival of Sundance rejects, the Slamdance festival, debuted in 1995, also in Park City. (The Sundance organizers reportedly admired their pluck.)

With the success of Sundance, the floodgates had been well and truly opened. Aspiring filmmakers who couldn’t make the cut at Sundance might instead opt for Cleveland, Ohio’s film festival. In the realm of tourist-bait, there was the late Sonny Bono’s Palm Springs Film Festival. Over the years, significant film festivals have established themselves in all major cities; Chicago, Denver, and Portland (Oregon) and all over the globe; Edinburgh, Krakow and Hong Kong.

Today, if you are a professional or a lover of film, you can go to Santa Barbara. If you want to see naked starlets, you can go to Cannes. If you’re into animation, you can go to Annecy or Ottawa. If you like edgy and inexpensive, there is the New York Underground Film Festival. There are also the film buyers markets such as those held in Milan and Los Angeles.

Film festivals have both proliferated and changed. Once upon a time, festivals were mostly creatures of the arts which are in turn powerfully connected to politics. In 1986, the Cannes film festival was shut down. In 1968, the Cannes film festival was shut down as a result of French student riots. Similarly in 1970, the Berlin festival was cancelled as a result of controversy over a German film titled “O.K,” about an American rape and murder in Vietnam. This kind of excitement is lacking at the more modern film festivals, which seem to be built around the entertainment / business model rather than the art / politics combination. As entertainment has become the central element of our culture, film festivals have become a veritable market of celluloid wherein dreams are bought and sold; lives made and destroyed. On that very human level, they are exciting as hell!