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Film Festivals as Artistic Exhibitions

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Last month at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I attended an exhibit titled Guillermo Del Toro: At Home With Monsters . The traveling exhibit contained multiple rooms with countless objects, film props, toys, sketches, drawings, and paintings from Del Toro’s Bleak House. His own actual art made up an astoundingly small part of the exhibit, instead encompassing hundreds of years of fantasy and horror imagery and literature. In essence, the exhibit was an intensely curated exhibit of artwork that acts as a reflection into Del Toro’s specific style, and gives audiences a better understanding of what makes the auteur tick. The reason I bring up this exhibit in particular is the vast swath of different works that were selected by Del Toro merge together to make one individual, exclusive event that – in my case – merited a three-hour drive and major planning to get a group of interested artists to come check it out. In reality, there’s not much separating an ...
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Festival Audiences as Pocket Cultures

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One of the more interesting aspects of festivals, as I noted in the previous blog, would be a festival's unique audience and how they represent the style and goals of the festival they are attended. Each festival caters to a different unique crowd of people based on their individual interests in cinema, whether its based on genre, topic, style, or format. Those audiences converse and debate based around predetermined values, which according to Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong in her essay Festivals as Public Spheres,  makes then both exclusionary yet offers the "freedom to represent and even debate marginal, sensitive, and difficult subject matters" (164). In this blog, I will examine several film festivals as independent pocket cultures based around shared ideas, aesthetics, interests and goals. Austin, Texas's South by Southwest  is a far cry from a typical film festival. Over a period of two weeks every March, the city of Austin is filled with events based on film, music,...
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Festivals as Social Events

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Cinema, at its core, is a passive form of entertainment. Much like listening to music or mindlessly clicking through facebook, watching a film is an act that is often solitary and (at least for the average viewer) mindless. A spectator sits down, either at home or at the theater, and spends roughly two hours consuming a piece of entertainment. The film rarely asks much from the viewer, and vice versa. Since the early 1900s, that has been the founding aspect of film. However, film festivals do something completely different: They are a form of active entertainment, a social event constructed around the interactions of a multitude of people and demographics. In his essay Looking for Sundance: The Social Construction of a Film Festival, Daniel Dayan states, "Any social encounter involves at least two complementary performances, coordinated by social rules. Any gathering involves multiple performances, coordinated by collective rules" (Iordanova 45). In that sense, festival...
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Aestheticism in Film Festival Sets

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Film festivals, in comparison to other forms of film exhibition, has a unique capability for aesthetic-based curation and selection. A festival's collection of films is often a reflection of the curator's taste, and in turn can follow a style closely. Aestheticism, in its original form, was an art movement based around looking at and creating art based on the aesthetic value, not for any meaning or sociopolitical commentary. Today, it's more of a catch-all term to describe the viewing of visual value and construction as a higher importance than other ideas. While I wouldn't go so far as to state that films should be valued only for their visual quality, to avoid pure style-over-substance type filmmaking, I believe that the idea of aestheticism is crucial to understand and craft successful film festivals. Each festival has their own distinct audience and ideas for curation, which is important for the rapidly expanding festival environment. The quicker a festival ca...
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