..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Canned, Packaged and Shrink Wrapped...

The start of the TriBeCa Film Festival and the looming presence of Cannes had a palpable effect on me this week. I couldn't quite put my finger on the emotions they evoked. What swept through me were a lot of memories of festivals large and small that I've attended over the past three decades. Some stray screenings popped to mind but the predominate memory was of rushing from one screening to the next - the times between movies - and the late nights when I was either writing or filing stories or decompressing from the image overload associated with a daily diet of four or five films.

Film festivals have always had multi-faceted agendas. Venice, the granddaddy of movie showcases, was part of Mussolini's bellicose vision of Italy and a new artistic renaissance. Cannes seized an opportunity to extend its tourist season. And by the time Johnny Come Latelys like Toronto entered the fray, just having a festival was sufficient reason to stage one. After all, what self-respecting metropolis would deprive itself of such an important cultural display as part of its social calendar?

Despite all these mercenary motives, the programs in Berlin, San Francisco, New York, Rotterdam, Locarno, Sydney and other venues shared something in common. Not to be overly highfalutin, they were about quality and discovery. The selection committees traveled the globe to uncover distinctive films that spoke to audiences well beyond their natural borders that might otherwise remain house bound. Then, as now, commercial cinema was dominated by American movies but festivals paved the way for the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray and Michelangelo Antonioni to develop an international art house following.

I suppose I'm most nostalgic about the 1950s because I had to experience it second hand. In the rubble following the Second World War, there was an incredible explosion of cinematic creativity in Europe and Asia and the beginnings of an art house movement whose chief proponents dominated the arena for 25 years.

The Pace Cinema in my hometown was where you went to see the latest films by Bergman, Fellini, Ichikawa, the Czech New Wave and movies with Belmondo, Monica Vitti and Toshiro Mifune. It was only later that I had an appreciation of how they got there. The film books and periodicals I devoured were rife with photos of Truffaut being shepherded into the Cannes Palais by Jean Cocteau and Antonioni dodging angry crowds following the screening of L'Avventura.

The holy trinity was comprised of Cannes, Venice and Berlin and the favored films emerging from those events would invariably wind up at the San Francisco festival and with the passage of time New York and Chicago.

It seems rather quaint today that these honored hallmarks of cinema often took two or three years to wend their way from gala premieres to commercial runs in North America. There were occasionally acquisitions made almost impulsively on the Croisette or Lido, like A Man and a Woman, but for the most part U.S. distributors took their time when it came to premiering such films as La Dolce Vita.

Even during the heyday of Triumph, UA Classics and other studio operators back in the early 1980s there wasn't the sort of cutthroat competition that's evolved today in venues as diverse as Cannes, Sundance and Toronto. I remember reviewing an obscure French film called Diva at the time that was unspooling in an unprepossessing market venue for a crowd of seven people including one lonely American buyer. I went back to the office and wrote up a four star review but that buyer waited almost six months for its screening at the Toronto festival before making a deal and there was no sense that the filmmaker had to ward off competitive bids.

It would be too cavalier to say that the arrival of Miramax was the primary factor in changing the landscape of niche movie distribution for good and ill. The company unquestionably had a palpable effect on every aspect of the sale, exposure and marketing of films from abroad and the American independent movement that evolved in the 1980s.

However, there were telltale signs of change long before Harvey Weinstein parked himself outside Jane Campion's editing room during the cutting of The Piano for just a peak of the highly anticipated movie. Almost a decade earlier I can vividly recall going to the Cannes screening of Brother from Another Planet and being taken aback by a near capacity audience. As I climbed into the gods I could see every last American acquisition executive in the audience with that lean and hungry look one associates with a wolf on the prowl. Filmmaker John Sayles had cleverly employed the festival as a launch pad for a bidding war and it worked very well … perhaps too well.

Cannes is unique from brethren events in that it's not truly open to the public. Conversely Toronto has such rabid local audiences that it had to create a parallel track exclusively for the industry and press. Toronto is very high on the list when it comes to receptive crowds and over the years sales folk have been in awe that it can draw morning sell outs for obscure Lithuanian movies. Acquisition execs have been burned often enough at Toronto, Seattle and Rotterdam by enthusiastic local reaction to set the bar higher in making sales decisions.

Since those early days of discovery there's been a proliferation of movie showcases that also include arcane and specialized agendas. In the past month alone Los Angeles has had film weeks devoted to movies from France, India and the Asia Pacific rim not to mention programs of special interest via such outlets as the American Cinematheque, UCLA's James Bridges Theater and Filmforum.

But there aren't many cities that can compete with L.A., Paris, London and New York when it comes to seeing films from around the world (and the next corner) on the big screen. The industrious cinephile can also resort to the web to find the wonders of the Far East, Europe and South America on DVD.

Those and other options were bound to have an effect on the evolution of the film festival. However, the resulting changes of the past couple of decades aren't necessarily the result of logic, necessity or altruism.

The bottom line is that film festivals are commercial ventures. While it varies from one event to the next, I'm not aware of any festival that generates more than one-third of annual revenues from actual ticket sales. The biggest and highest profile of the breed get funding in large part from corporate sponsorships and (particularly outside of the United States) government grants.

It's fair to say that at any event with a reasonable profile devotes a significant amount of energy in pleasing and cultivating sponsors. Gala opening and closing nights exist primarily so that patrons can attend and rub shoulders with the more glamorous elements of the film industry. While it's not a hard and fast rule, the bookended selections tend to be compromises.

The thing about compromises is that they have a tendency to spread like a canny virus. Large events devour money like the morbidly obese. There are office costs, salaries, travel, promotion and upkeep that go on year round even if the spotlight shines for only 10 days. Someone has to pay for these budget items and with that invariably come strings.

In the past couple of weeks, I feel as if that big wave from A Perfect Storm engulfed me with all things TriBeCa. I learned a lot of things about the festival but not a great deal about what films were being screened. It's difficult to say why that would occur. It may be the fault of the New York and national media coverage; it might be that the selections were weak. But if I were a TriBeCa sponsor, I'd be happy. I would feel that my investment and association was well worth it based upon the ink it received and then cross my fingers that a certain percentage of attendees would be favorable to my company and product from all the subliminal messages signage affords.

I talked to a film exec that had attended the event and carped about the fact that it had only evening screenings other than on weekends. But he admitted that TriBeCa had great parties and likened it to the Maui Film Festival without the option of surfing during daylight hours.

The big question for this nascent festival is how it will employ the advantage it has owing to its location and the enormous press it's enjoyed. Can it leverage those assets to bolster the quality of its 2006 lineup?

The big hurdle it has to clear is Cannes that occurs less than two weeks later. Given the choice of a premiere at the venerable event or a prime slot from the new kid on the block one can well imagine the option most established filmmakers would make. There are of course other options for TriBeCa that range from moving its date after Cannes and enjoying the sort of arrangement of concurrent premieres that exists between Venice and Toronto in September or truly pursuing unheralded talent and moving toward the Sundance model. I'm not convinced the latter path would work for New York audiences.

Discussions of this sort are dominated by strategy rather than content and that appears from this perspective to be the Darwinian aspect in the development of film festivals. They've adapted to survive the brutal marketplace to a far greater extent than changing as a result of the composition or tastes of the audience. One now has to plumb the schedule of a major festival to find the gems because programming has become less democratic. The films with the glossy veneer by name filmmakers or with marquee performers suck up the focus and propagate a comfortable if generally uninspired alternative cinema.

There remain a handful of festivals on the calendar that remain dedicated to new and idiosyncratic filmmakers such as Locarno, Rotterdam and Seattle. You don't hear a lot about these events in the mainstream press because they lack the sponsors and financial war chests to have the glossy premieres and celebrity guest list that get you headlines and features. And that's probably for the best when you consider what that's done to change the face of other festivals.

May 3, 2005

- by Leonard Klady