Festival Audiences as Pocket Cultures
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, interactive installations, and comedy. In 2016, there were more than 2,200 music performers, 250 films and shorts, and dozens of comedians and physical artists. Unlike other film festivals, SXSW is a juggernaut of modern counterculture, building a massive repertoire of events across the artistic realm. It's a mecca for the hipsters and oddballs, both being the camera and in front of the screen, to see all kinds of unconventional pieces. Its audience is a melting pot of fans of different genres and even festivals (as you'll see both music and film fans together under the same roof) who have come together for the sole purpose of experiencing a vast array of content.
The Women's International Film Festival of Miami, Florida was formed in 2005 to bring an important aspect of the film industry to the forefront: A lack of female creatives. Beginning with a mere five films, the festival now takes place over the course of five days and features dozens of shorts, documentaries and feature films produced by and featuring women. WIFF is an example of a film festival built around a solitary cause, in this case women's issues in the film industry. As such, its audience shares the collective idea that women are underrepresented in the industry, both in terms of production and narratives, and WIFF gives audiences a chance to see films that address those issues head on.
Austin is also the home to Fantastic Fest, which is considered to be the largest genre festival in the United States. Occurring yearly during September, FF features a variety of film spanning genres such as Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Action. In 2016, the festival featured more than 120 films including everything from big budget films like Denis Villeneuve's Arrival to microbudget shorts by directors fresh out of film school. Unlike the former two examples, the audience at Fantastic Fest shares a core interest in genre films, which is now one of the biggest money-making sectors of the industry. By putting all of the heavy hitters under one roof, fans of all kinds of nerdy flicks can mingle and discuss the creatures and heroes they'll be seeing over the next year.
Mountainfilm, in comparison, has a much smaller demographic: fans of adventure films and documentaries. Aside from a few animated shorts shown in the child-centric "Kids Kino" set, every film at Mountainfilm is non-fiction, with a hard focus on modern social issues and explorations of the natural world. It's by no means the largest documentary film festival in the world (that distinction belongs to the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam) but it does have a much more refined focus, centered on issues that audiences would have likely been discussing over the past year and, probably more notably, documentaries about the natural world. Sharing their love for both documentaries and the nature that surrounds them, the Mountainfilm audience is a socially-conscious bunch.
According to Toby Lee in his essay Being There, Taking Place: Ethnography at the film festival, he describes festivals as a form of "collective engagement," going on to write, "As festivals continue to proliferate and to resemble each other (...) it becomes all the more important to take a close look at the concrete ways in which this global network actually takes place, in particular places and at particular times" (Valck 136). Film festivals are both small, self contained communities and a part of a larger festival culture. Much like cliques or small counterculture you'd see in a college cafeteria, film festivals cater to specific demographics while presenting one small piece of a much larger puzzle.
[1] Valck, Marijke De, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist. Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice.
London: n.p., 2016. Print.
[2] Wong, Cindy H. Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers UP, 2011. Print.
Austin is also the home to Fantastic Fest, which is considered to be the largest genre festival in the United States. Occurring yearly during September, FF features a variety of film spanning genres such as Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Action. In 2016, the festival featured more than 120 films including everything from big budget films like Denis Villeneuve's Arrival to microbudget shorts by directors fresh out of film school. Unlike the former two examples, the audience at Fantastic Fest shares a core interest in genre films, which is now one of the biggest money-making sectors of the industry. By putting all of the heavy hitters under one roof, fans of all kinds of nerdy flicks can mingle and discuss the creatures and heroes they'll be seeing over the next year.
Mountainfilm, in comparison, has a much smaller demographic: fans of adventure films and documentaries. Aside from a few animated shorts shown in the child-centric "Kids Kino" set, every film at Mountainfilm is non-fiction, with a hard focus on modern social issues and explorations of the natural world. It's by no means the largest documentary film festival in the world (that distinction belongs to the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam) but it does have a much more refined focus, centered on issues that audiences would have likely been discussing over the past year and, probably more notably, documentaries about the natural world. Sharing their love for both documentaries and the nature that surrounds them, the Mountainfilm audience is a socially-conscious bunch.
According to Toby Lee in his essay Being There, Taking Place: Ethnography at the film festival, he describes festivals as a form of "collective engagement," going on to write, "As festivals continue to proliferate and to resemble each other (...) it becomes all the more important to take a close look at the concrete ways in which this global network actually takes place, in particular places and at particular times" (Valck 136). Film festivals are both small, self contained communities and a part of a larger festival culture. Much like cliques or small counterculture you'd see in a college cafeteria, film festivals cater to specific demographics while presenting one small piece of a much larger puzzle.
[1] Valck, Marijke De, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist. Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice.
London: n.p., 2016. Print.
[2] Wong, Cindy H. Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers UP, 2011. Print.
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