Film Festivals as Artistic Exhibitions

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 exhibit of paintings in a museum and a film festival. Each is a curating exhibition of various artwork, chosen by either an individual or a panel for public consumption. That’s also what separates film festivals from, say, a multiplex theater or a midnight screening series: they are collections of works compacted into a small space, for an equally small period of time.

Festivals are, of course, primarily about the films. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong writes that films, in the film festival circuit, “are linked in special ways to the filmmaker, who is identified as the primary artist/creator within this world” (65). Within the context of a film festival, films take on traits of classical forms of art; namely, the films are compositions by a sole auteur. It’d be difficult to say the same about a film like Captain America: Civil War (2016) or Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), as big budget blockbusters typically have a large group of people behind the scenes with differing concepts that collectively change the path of production. Festival films, on the other hand, tend to have a more self-contained image, formed through a solitary auteur’s vision. Now, that’s not to say that the production team is any less important, but in the grand scheme of things, festival films fall under the director and/or producers vision, more so than a collective.

Doug Aitken's "Altered Earth"

In that sense, the curation of a festival mirrors the curation of an art exhibit or gallery. The curator must choose between hundreds of films, deciding on what films fit with the overall image of a festival. In the case of Mountainfilm, those films must be documentaries, and typically fall under the topics of nature, society, and political issues. A film like Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno (2016) is a natural fit for the festival, while something like Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) would have been a more difficult sell. Both from a topical and aesthetic basis, the curation of both festivals and exhibits must stick close to the concept of their respective commercial identities.

Topics and tone are one aspect that a curator must look into, but it’d be unwise to discount the importance of name recognition that falls on the film selection. Even at a documentary festival, where the creators are less recognizable than those in the narrative industry, past works do go a long way into getting films into festivals. Part of that is the responsibility of the festival to reach audience expectations. If every film is from an unknown, than anticipation would be lower and so would the overall attendance. Films like this year’s film from Laura Poitras (of Citizenfour fame), Risk, or the documentary on Bill Nye go a long way in convincing audiences of the worth of attendance. Just like in the art world, where a work by Andy Warhol or Francis Bacon would merit a closer look for the larger populace than something by Killian Eng or Moebius, name recognition helps a festival gain critical interest.

Of course, one can’t disregard the role of quality in a film’s successful submission. The better a film is, the more likely it will be accepted as a key piece in the festival’s lineup. An unknown director producing a subpar film will more than likely find some major setbacks in the submission process, while a superb film from a newcomer may slide quickly in. Different festivals will have different processes in this regard, with some erring on the side of introducing the inexperienced to the masses, but in general, the works must be of a high quality to make the cut. As Roya Rastegar states in his essay Seeing Differently: The curatorial potential of film festival programming, “Festival programmers are the ones who identify groundswells of filmmaking styles and storytelling practices by shining a light on representative films in the festival line-up” (De Valck 183). The importance of producing a collection of varied, impactful, yet wholly well-constructed films is of tantamount importance, just as the quality of a museum’s collection determines the strength of the museum as a whole.

Festivals are, of course, different from simple exhibits. They also operate directly within the industry sphere. Wong explains that, over time, festivals “have become multilayered global industrial events that link different players and entities in getting films made and shown by assembling necessary financing, nurturing talents, facilitating coproductions and finding global distributors” (130). Since the early success of the independent film industry with Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Soderbergh, 1989), the festival circuit has become a crucial part of industry growth and innovation. Yet, without a keen curatorial eye and solid collection year after year, a festival would be doomed to fade into obscurity.

[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.