LECH MAJEWSKI ON THE MILL & THE CROSS

I've been recently fascinated with what would be considered "painterly" in cinema. It has, in fact, become one of my stock questions whenever I converse with a film historian or someone who has a deep embedded knowledge of film. Thomas Elsasesser distinguished between filmic projects where the director and art director collaborate to achieve either a historical drama (via the verisimilitude of historical paintings) and those films that express separate qualities about painting that are "more difficult to locate but [which] may actually have a deeper resonance."

"If we're talking about 'painterly', you really have to make a distinction," Elsaesser qualified. "Are you talking about 'painterly' in the 19th Century sense? Or are you talking about Modern art or painting? So I would make a big difference there. Both you can find in film."

When I posed the same question to Jonathan Rosenbaum for our published conversation in Film International (Vol. 9, No. 3), he responded: "It has an awful lot to do with the way certain people conceptualize and think about film. An obvious example of a painterly filmmaker is Chantal Akerman. She thinks in terms of painters. When I've talked to her before about her films, she'll talk about some of the Belgian Surrealists. Where I would say how much I liked Paul Delvaux, she would say, 'Yes, but his lighting is better than mine.' I remember she said that, which I thought was interesting. Of course, the painterly in film happens especially in experimental forms of cinema, such as the films of Michael Snow. In his own way, Snow is painterly though obviously he's also related to sculpture. Probably even more to sculpture than to painting."

Lech Majewski's sumptuous The Mill and the Cross probably falls within the historical grouping outlined by Elsaesser as it springs directly from Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting "The Way to Calvary"; yet, in its cinematic devices, The Mill and the Cross achieves the quality of beauty delineated by Elsaesser that is effected by the dialogue a viewer establishes with a painting (or, in this case, a film). "The beauty is not something that your eye slides off after a couple of seconds because you think you recognize it," Elsaesser proposed, "but more the fact that the longer you look, the more the painting becomes something else. You know?" This quality of a painting "becoming something else" by way of cinema is undeniably evident in Majewski's The Mill and the Cross.

After a lauded tour on the festival circuit—including an appearance at the 54th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF54) in their World Cinema Spotlight "Painting with Light" (which highlighted the cinematic contemplation of painting)—Majewski's The Mill and the Cross opens theatrically this weekend.

As Graham Leggat wrote in his SFIFF54 program notes for the film: "A miracle of technology in the service of the artistic imagination, Lech Majewski's brilliant film transports its viewers into the living, breathing world of Pieter Bruegel's dense frieze of Christ's passion, 'The Way to Calvary'. And live and breathe it does. Though carefully organized along symbolic axes, Bruegel's 1564 painting sets the drama of the crucifixion within a rustic Flanders scene teeming with everyday life. ('About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters,' wrote W.H. Auden. 'How well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.') Likewise Majewski—using computer-generated blue-screen compositing, new 3-D technology, just-so location shooting in Poland, Austria and New Zealand and a massive backdrop he painted by hand—tells the story of the painting largely through closely observed secular rituals of 16th-century Flemish daily life, in all its earth-toned grubbiness, with occasional scenes revealing Bruegel's artistic choices and the politics of the day. Windmilling, calf-hauling, bread-peddling, villagers dancing and children horsing around take up the better part of the narrative, while cameos by Rutger Hauer (as Bruegel), Michael York (as his patron and friend) and Charlotte Rampling (as a limpid Virgin Mary) give historical context and symbolic depth. But the narrative is not the point—the extraordinary imagery is. The painting literally comes to life in this spellbinding film, its wondrous scenes entering the viewer like a dream enters a sleeping body."

The Bay Area critical response during SFIFF54 was likewise affirming. At SF360, Max Goldberg noted that Majewski managed the problem of plotting a painting in time by organizing his scenes cyclically. Goldberg offered: "In regularly returning to the same actions—young children roughhousing, a man making heavy advances on a woman, a fool playing his flute—Majewski cleverly replicates the way our attention circulates looking at such a dense canvas. This enveloping aspect is further developed with the high-tech imagining systems that allow Majewski to situate his actors within Brueghel's own visual field. Meanwhile, the subversive aspects of the painting—the positioning of the mill grinder at a perch usually reserved for God; the placement of everyday bawdiness just next door to the Crucifixion, here imagined as taking place at the hands of Spanish inquisitors—come into focus through the narrative's slow build. By the time the camera tracks out from Brueghel's framed masterpiece, we're nearly surprised to find all that adventure emanating from a single canvas—only one of many in the gallery at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna."

At the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Matt Sussman observed: "Majeswki both re-stages Bruegel's painting—which draws parallels between its depiction of Christ en route to his crucifixion and the persecution of Flemish citizens by the Spanish inquisition's militia—in stunning tableaux vivant that combine bluescreen technology and stage backdrops, and gives back stories to a dozen or so of its 500 figures. Periodically, Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) addresses the camera mid-sketch to dolefully explain the allegorical nature of his work, but these pedantic asides speak less forcefully than Majeswki's beautifully lighted vignettes of the small joys and many hardships that comprised everyday life in the 16th century. Beguiling yet wholly absorbing, this portrait of a portrait is like nothing else at the festival."

At Vinyl Is Heavy, Ryland Walker Knight—though finding The Mill and The Cross "somewhat confounding, especially from the 2nd row"—nonetheless appreciated its wide and deep palette and noted that the film's "ideas, though rooted in the narrative structure of the painting, feel yet more modern in how arrayed (not inter-related) they are."

And at Variety, San Francisco's own Dennis Harvey raved: "Neither conventional costume drama nor abstract objet d'art, this visually ravishing, surprisingly beguiling gamble won't fit any standard arthouse niche. Still it could prove the Polish helmer's belated international breakthrough, especially if marketed as a unique, immersive museum-meets-cinema experience a la Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark."

At MUBI, Dave Hudson has gathered the critical commentary outside of the Bay Area.

Lech Majewski was born August 30, 1953 in Katowice, Poland, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and is a film and theater director, writer, poet, and painter. In the 1970s he studied at the National Film School in Łódź, notably as a student of Wojciech Has, who taught Majewski directing. In the early '80s, after completing The Knight and as martial law was declared in Poland, Majewski emigrated to England and then to the United States, where he lived for most of the late Communist era. Today, Majewski is a dual U.S. / Polish citizen. He is a member of the American and European film academies and the Polish International PEN. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted a complete retrospective of Majewski's work. This was their first ever full retrospective of a Polish filmmaker, and one of their only ever mid-career retrospectives. For that program, Majewski created the film eventually called Glass Lips, though initially it was known as Blood of a Poet.

The following comments are taken from his public introduction and subsequent Q&A to the film's SFIFF54 screening. Photos courtesy of Kino-Lorber.

Introduction

A few words before the film. First of all, I would like to say that this is a work that took us three years to complete because we introduced some unbelievable and difficult tasks, technically speaking. I very much wanted to enter Pieter Bruegel's world. I respect him. I love his paintings. He was a great teacher for me in terms of his philosophy and the way he narrates his paintings.

Therefore, we did a lot of preparatory work. We started with costumes first of all. There are no textiles today like the textiles he painted in his paintings so basically we had to make these costumes, and then check the textures in front of the camera to determine which textiles would behave in a similar way as in the Bruegel painting. We had to hand-paint those costumes and hire seamstresses to hem them for us. The costumes alone took nine months of pre-production.

Then, obviously, when we started to look for the landscape that would be most appropriate to shoot the entire movie, we realized that there is no landscape like that; it doesn't exist at all. So we got a very good reproduction from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that houses this painting "The Way to Calvary" by Pieter Bruegel. There are 500 figures in this painting. With the computer we started to analyze the perspective in the painting and found there were seven different perspectives in this singular painting. Obviously, Bruegel was foreseeing cubism 400 years before.

We were completely lost as to how we were going to shoot the nature because in his paintings he uses at the same time a point of view that is coming from the left, from the right, above and from below. We realized we couldn't have a landscape like that, but what we could do was to cut these multiple perspective into single ones and look around for similarities in the real landscape. Then in post-production we could piece it together.

There were also various things that were helping us. For example, an article was published in a Polish newspaper about a little village whose citizens were ancestors of Flemish immigrants from the 16th century. They speak a fossilized Flemish. This language that they speak doesn't exist anymore. Linguists have recorded them and the majority of them are 80+. So when you hear the sing-songs and the voices, keep in mind it is a non-existent language, a medieval French.

I went to New Zealand at one point during post-production and discovered that over the southern island there was a fantastic cloud formation. In fact, the Maori call this southern island the "Island of the Long Clouds". I quickly hired a DP and we shot these clouds because they were so reminiscent of Bruegel's clouds.

The film was assembled by weaving a digital tapestry. We had a lot of young people sitting in front of their computers spending their whole lives, like abbots in a monastery painting illuminated manuscripts.

The author of the original art essay that analyzes this film is the fantastic and brilliant writer Michael Francis Gibson, an American living in Paris and art historian who writes for the Herald Tribune. He wrote the original analysis of the painting in a 300-page essay entitled "The Mill and the Cross, Peter Bruegels 'Way to Calvary' ", [in French, Noêsis, 1996 and in English, Acatos, Lausanne, 2001], hence the title of my film. Michael Gibson researched vanished customs (for example, you see the treatment of the bread, how the people touch the bread to their forehead or the young woman who puts a loaf of bread on her naked belly. It has some symbolic meaning. Pregnancy = the bread, which is the flesh.

On the Hidden Language of Symbols

Michael Francis Gibson gave me his book because he thought I had a "Bruegelian soul", as he wrote in his review of my other movie Angelus (2000). The movie was showing in Paris and he saw it. He wrote a very good review and sent me his book.

I felt his book would make a great film because of his writing. The book was lucid and beautifully written. It's a brilliant guide through the labyrinth of allegories and symbols. The way he writes, it's a masterpiece. I'm a painter so the history of art is one of my favorite subjects. I read a lot of books about it. Also, I am a great lover of old masters, particularly the proto-Renaissance and the Renaissance. So I have read such subjects in other books and rarely have I encountered this kind of fantastic, beautiful and lucid analysis. It's very difficult to write about paintings. Michael Francis Gibson was born to do that.

When we met for lunch in Paris, it surprised him when I suggested making a feature film from his analysis. He thought I was mad. He thought a documentary would be the most we could get out of it. He imagined standing in front of the painting and pointing to various symbols, explaining them. But then he scratched his head and said, "Well, the impossible is the realm of gentlemen. Let's do it."

We selected a few characters from the painting and proceeded to discuss these people, as if they were alive. Where were they going? What were they doing? There were various interesting idiosyncrasies about the behavior of people in those times because it was quite different to our's. Symbols were very important to these people. Today I think we are losing a lot of this hidden language of symbols. We have become inundated with shallow images gliding by. Maybe it's because we're moving too fast? Maybe it's because the images we look at are moving fast in front of our eyes? We rarely focus on anything. In those times they didn't have television and cars.

I remind you that when you listen to music from the past, you will always discover the rhythm of a horse ride in the music. It's a rhythm given by the horse-drawn carriage. The screeching and banging of today's music is more like a train crashing or cars roaring by. It's natural that we digest the sounds and the images that are in our lives. In those times people spent a lot of time looking at paintings. They had the time and they could read the hidden language of symbols.

For example, if Titian is painting a woman dressed in blue and she leans against a tree and in front of her is a basket filled with grapes and an apple, for a contemporary viewer that's a sense that she's picnicking, reclining, and resting on a beautiful day; but, for the observer of those times, they realized that this image was the shortest metaphor for Christianity. The apple represents original sin and the grapes produce the wine—the blood of Christ—which washed away original sin. The tree she's leaning against becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as well as the tree upon which the fruit of her life will hang, crucified.

There is a painting in Washington D.C. by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch of a woman reading a letter. Her back is turned to the viewer who cannot see what is written on the letter. Only a corner of the letter is visible above her shoulder. There is a painting on the wall next to her. The painting is partially obscured because in those times people hung curtains over paintings so that they wouldn't become too familiar. When you become too familiar with something, you stop seeing it. So you would have to slide the curtain to take a look at the painting and, when done, you would close the curtain. In this painting the curtain is open a little bit and you can see a big storm, a huge wave. Thus, you imagine that the letter is very traumatic for the woman. You get the emotion from the image of the sea. There's a playing card on the ground and it's the ace of hearts.

If in a painting you see a chandelier and it has a candle in it, people from that time knew that the chandelier represented the Virgin Mary and the candle Jesus Christ. Whether the candle is lit or not determines which period we're talking about. If it's lit, it expresses the transmutation of matter into spirit; the wax into the fire.

There are various meanings to the symbols. If the dog is next to his master's legs, it means he's faithful. If a subject is holding something in his left hand, it means he's higher up in the social hierarchy. Basically everything is a symbol. If there is an uneaten fruit on the windowsill, it means that the woman in the painting is not pregnant yet, despite the fact that her dress is bulging as if she is pregnant.

In The Mill and the Cross, for example, women of Flanders used to wash the threshold of the house. It was a common thing to do. Several times they washed the threshold and smeared it with different herbs for different seasons and for different times of the day. Oddly enough, those thresholds were worn out not by people stepping on them—that was forbidden—they were worn out from being washed.

On the Symbolism of the Mill

There are various symbols of the mill. Number one, Bruegel's placement of the mill on a rock is completely surrealistic and unlike anything you would imagine from a painter who realistically paints his observations. For starters, this is Flanders and Flanders is flat. It doesn't have any rock outcroppings, not even hills. But Bruegel, like any respected painter of the time, traveled to Italy and he crossed the Alps. When he saw the Alps, he knelt down and his sketchbook filled up with hundreds of sketches. When he came back to Flanders, the rocks began popping up in his paintings. Apart from everything, the rocks and the nature at that time had an anthropomorphic character, which meant that nature served as a metaphor for the human body. So the rock on which the mill rests is the body, usually the body of Jesus Christ. The cracks in the rock represent the wounds of the crucified Christ. So if you have Leonardo's painting of the Madonna among the rocks, that's what it means. Putting the rock in the painting was Biblical. It's in the gospels. You have St. Peter, Pétros, "the rock", who builds the church upon the rock. Basically, that's what Bruegel is showing.

The shape of the mill and the fact that it has the cross in its blades or sails, the wings of the mill, obviously represents the Church. Therefore, the miller and his mill is completely surreal; it makes no financial sense. It's nonsense. How will he get the grain in there? How will he sell his flour? Perched on that rock, he will obviously get good wind; but, that's about it. Thus, the miller is not meant to be real; the miller is the Creator.

On Going Inside the World of the Painting,
Into the Mill

The painting invites you into the terrain of the imagination. Once we received the fantastic reproduction from the Kunsthistorisches Museum—which was very accurate—we could show it on a big screen and zoom into the details. One of the things that I noticed were the two windows carved in the face of the rock. I instantly saw shafts of light penetrating these windows and illuminating this enormous kind of cathedral inside this mountain. For that reason, we needed machinery that was pre-modern. This miller is the Creator, right? He cranks up the mechanism that allows the sky to move.

Obviously, we wanted to relay the size of the mill's interior; but, most of it was done through sound. Visually, there's a little bit of trickery. We managed to shoot several interiors of existing mills—one in the Czech Republic, the other in Poland, and one in Austria—as well as the big machinery in the salt mines in Poland close to Krakow. The salt mines are from the mid 1400s. Salt used to be more expensive than gold. Whoever had salt had money and power, unbelievably so. Now we can buy a kilo of salt for one buck and you cannot buy the same amount of gold for one buck. So the interior of the mill is a combination. Most of it exists in the reality of the salt mines and the rest of it—like the extension of the staircases—was engineered patiently in 3-D by the minute work of many young people. Throughout the film, 99% of what you see is a combination or reality, pieces of Bruegel and nature, and the construction through 3-D.

All of the images you see were built up by layers upon layers upon layers. People were shot separately against the blue screen. The landscape was shot separately. For example, when Rutger Hauer touches the spider web, it was a situation where at first we shot Rutger with a stick and he asked, "Where do I look?" I told him, "Well, look at the end of the stick." He said, "Then I'll be cross-eyed." I told him, "We'll fix it in post. Don't worry."

Then we had three young gentlemen working on the spider web. One was working on the construction of the spider web. The computer had produced a perfect spider web and we looked at it and thought, "This is not a spider web. This is some German construction. Spiders don't behave like that." We Googled images of hundreds of spider webs and tried to get into the mind of the spider; but, we got nowhere because those spiders are high on drugs or something. They start to do a perfect web and soon thereafter they destroy it by going into various zigzagging ways as if they were thinking about something else, as if they were thinking, "I'm not going to do this spider web. I'm going to do its opposite." We had to figure out what would be the spider's algorithm of mistake; but, we couldn't find it. So we had to destroy the spider web by hand.

Then the other guy was doing the dew drops on the spider web, which was easy because the dew drops behaved politely with gravity. Gravity determined the size of the drop. Then we had the problem of the spider itself. The third young man was creating the spider. He asked me, "With which leg should the spider take its first step?" I couldn't figure that out. So he and I caught several spiders, filmed them, and in slow motion it turned out that spiders of the same species move differently. On one hand we had this top technology and on the other hand it felt like we were in the Middle Ages weirdly rediscovering the world and how it would translate into this 3-D creation. In order to create a tree moving, we had to go out and watch a tree and figure out how it moves. During this process, these young people grew to respect the Creator. That's a perfect animation, really.

On the Tension Between Stillness and Movement

Contrary to the popular idea about cinema, and life, I believe that the most important action is not that which moves but that which stands still. I think that people who are caught in the most important moments of their lives, in dramatic moments or moments of bliss, don't move. They stand still. Initially, I thought that throughout the entire movie I would have the people standing still for one hour and a half and just have the camera move around them. That was the initial idea. But then, you know, as with all good ideas, I had to give in and add movement. Sorry for that.

On the Business Side of the Production

Our Swedish co-producer hired an English production manager who measured what it would cost to make this film in England. It came to £33,000,000. But we did it in Poland for a fraction of that amount.

Initially, I thought that the movie would only be shown in five museums. The Louvre subscribed to this movie, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., MoMA in New York (because I had a big retrospective there three years ago), the Prado in Madrid, Spain, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (because they house the painting); but, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and there it was sold to 32 countries for theatrical distribution. I was totally surprised that people would want to see this film in theaters. Kino-Lorber is distributing the film in the United States and Canada.

SFIAAFF 2011: BAY RONG (CLASH, 2009)—VCinema Podcast Interview With Johnny Tri Nguyen & Thanh Van "Veronica" Ngo

"The New Wave has been the template for so many emerging national cinemas. If you come from a country that has had, for instance, a fairly consistent film industry but of films that outside their own country nobody knows and nobody wants to see ... the moment that you then have a generation that has a chance to go to a film school in California or New York or somewhere else, when they go back they want to start a new wave. That's their model. There is no other model for saying, 'How can I go back to my own country and do something that is not the industry and is not television?' It has to be a new wave. ...It usually takes only one film to suddenly create a national cinema with a new wave effect."—Thomas Elsaesser.

Elsaesser's formula requires no further proof than the Vietnamese action film The Rebel (Dòng Máu Anh Hùng, 2007), which catapulted its director Charlie Nguyen and its two lead actors Johnny Tri Nguyen and Thanh Van "Veronica" Ngo into the international spotlight while kickstarting a new wave of Vietnamese filmmaking. Their follow-up effort Clash (Bay Rong, 2009) was an even-greater box-office success in Vietnam and arrived in the Bay Area as the centerpiece film for the 29th edition of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF), where I had the pleasure of sitting down with this charming and refreshingly down-to-earth couple to discuss their stardom and what it means for the future of Vietnam's film industry.

My thanks go out to Jon Jung ("Coffin Jon") who accepted this conversation for podcast at his site VCinema, which specializes in Asian film from cult to the classics. Be sure to check out Jon's archives at VCinema for past podcasts relating to films from environs East, and enjoy my conversation with Vietnam's most glamorous duo Johnny and Veronica.

Cross-published on Twitch.

"THE POLITICS & POETICS OF OBSOLESCENCE": THE MUBI INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS ELSAESSER

My thanks to Danny Kasman at MUBI for publishing my brunch conversation with Thomas Elsaesser, recently conducted inbetween panels at the UC Berkeley international symposium on silent cinema—Cinema Across Media: The 1920s. Equal thanks to Laura Horak and Althea Wasow for arranging the time for me to sit down with Elsaesser and, of course, to Thomas himself for being so generous with his time during such a busy conference. Along with the topic of the changing role of national cinemas in international film festivals, Elsaesser and I also discussed another subject of recent interest.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Recently, I was asked to introduce a revival screening of Black Narcissus at the Mostly British Film Festival in San Francisco and what was foremost on my mind was how eager I was to see the film again, even though it was going to be about the eighth time I had seen it. I had to ask myself: "What is it about this movie that keeps you coming back to it again and again?" I knew the story inside out. I knew all its plot developments. The performances were familiar. And yet I keep returning to the film with the same degree of anticipation.

The best clue to understanding this in myself is an observation made by poet Mark Doty in his lovely volume Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, wherein he suggested that paintings exert a gravitational force and that—if a painting "speaks" to you—you are drawn into its orbit, returning to contemplate it again and again, at times for extended lengths of time. This caused me to consider that it was not the narrative or story that was pulling me in but the underlying beauty of the film—its painterly qualities—that had caught me in its orbit. Not only with Black Narcissus; but, recently as well, with a restored print of Luciano Visconti's The Leopard, which I watched at the Castro Theatre and equally appreciated for a similar gravity.

Thomas Elsaesser: Well, first, I recall that The Leopard is a pretty sexy film as well, if I remember it right. I was much younger when I saw it.

Guillén: Can you speak to that quality of what is "painterly" in a film?

Elsaesser: That's a big question, but an interesting one. Now, with Visconti—both in Senso and The Leopard—the director and the art director very clearly thought of where the color scheme comes from, costumes and so on, because they were historical dramas. There you are talking about the echoes of the film literally created with historical paintings, with the settings, with a kind of gravitas, which traditional art conveys. But when you talk about Leo Carrax, or someone like that, using Paul Gauguin—and Gauguin painting is a fascinating subject—using color schemes from Piet Mondrian or an abstract expressionist or a painter friend, that quality is more difficult to locate but it may actually have a deeper resonance.

If we're talking about "painterly", you really have to make a distinction. Are you talking about "painterly" in the 19th Century sense? Or are you talking about Modern art or painting? So I would make a big difference there. Both you can find in film. But Visconti is as operatic as he is painterly whereas obviously Godard is not operatic at all.

Guillén: I guess what's interesting me is that sensorial experience of having an aesthetic arrest when faced with a beautiful painting or a beautiful film; the physical attraction.

Elsaesser: There we come to what we've already talked about: the contemporary contemplative film, which has the quality of attention that you associate with painting. My question is: do you return to the painting because what is beautiful is somehow "out" there or is the effect of the beautiful something you establish in dialogue with the painting? The beauty is not something that your eye slides off after a couple of seconds because you think you recognize it, but more the fact that the longer you look the more the painting becomes something else. You know?

You see a Renoir and at first you think, "Wow, what voluptuous nudes" and then you think, "But, no, the brushstrokes!" How often he must have gone over and caressed that particular part of the body. Or that he gave as many caresses to a painted tree as he gave to the back side of one of his nudes. You see? And then you establish a rapport with the painting. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to put yourself in the place of the painter, as I've just now suggested, but it's that something happens and your mind gets drawn into things that you never thought you'd be interested in or think that you'd notice. Even though this is a painting full of light where all sorts of things happen, if you look long enough and if you follow certain colors and color schemes, you realize incredibly there's a geometric grid underlying the composition which on the surface is not noticeable at all but it gives the painting its strength that allows you to watch it for 20 minutes or half an hour. So if you transpose this to film, then you can call "painterly" films those films that really—on the surface of it—do not evoke painting as such; but, which allow you to unravel the way they were made and why they were made over a period of time. They were made to attach your attention to them.

When everyone was raving about Marlene Deitrich, Josef von Sternberg used to say, "Forget about Marlene. Frankly, the way I think about a great film, if you turn it upside down and back to front, it would still be a great film. Because what really interests me is the distribution of light and shadow over two hours." That would be a painterly point. A filmmaker says, "It's not what everybody else thinks that's important. If that rhythm, that way I catch light and shadow, wasn't consistent and interesting over two hours, Marlene Deitrich wouldn't strike you as beautiful."

Cross-published on Twitch.

FILM FESTIVAL YEARBOOK 1—A Response to Section Two

With the 47th edition of the New York Film Festival currently in progress, I thought now would be a good time to follow-up on my response to Section One of Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova with Ragan Rhyne, published by the Center for Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews and Wallflower Press; namely because Section Two of the Yearbook provides six festival case studies, including Rahul Hamid's informative and fascinating historical essay "From Urban Bohemia to Euro Glamour: The Establishment and Early Years of the New York Film Festival" (2009:67-81).

As stated in Iordanova and Rhyne's introduction, Hamid's contribution to the Yearbook plumbs the depths of NYFF's archives to narrate the establishment of the festival through a description of the institutionalization and organizational politics of NYFF's first edition. I was particularly captivated by this strategy because—in essence—by laying out the conflicts, issues and compromises that characterized the first years of the NYFF, it addresses "the curatorial challenges still faced by the festival today and can offer insight into the epicurean world of contemporary film festival culture." (2009:67)

"Epicurean" is a lovely and apt term to emphasize the role of curatorial taste in shaping any festival's given program and how conflicts in taste texture festival experience. What has become perhaps the most important value of my appreciation of Hamid's case study of the NYFF is how it has provided an ameliorative perspective on some of my ongoing complaints about the San Francisco International Film Festival, which I now understand are neither specific to SFIFF nor "original" in any sense of the word. Said complaints have longstanding historical precedent and reflect the ongoing challenges compromised by curatorial choice. That choice can (and perhaps should) always be questioned by audiences and press; though that's not to say the challenges become resolved even if the choices are commuted. More and more I've come to understand the staged irresolution of these conflicts through the film festival platform. No one is to blame. It is the nature of the beast; film festivals the cage within which the beast paces.

Hamid situates his discussion by deferring to the seminal work of Thomas Elsaesser, who "describes the post-war film festival circuit as a direct response to the growing power and hegemony of Hollywood and the US film industry. This antagonistic relationship to Hollywood colored much of the international discourse around festivals, situating festivals and the European art cinema they programmed as anti-commercial 'high art' and American cinema and theatrical distribution as the province of the masses and lowbrow commercialization (though famously, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut challenged this distinction)." (2009:67-68) As the awkward fate of commercial distribution of films presides over the future of so-called festival "art film" and alternative exhibition practices, this current concern appears to have been built into the film festival phenomenon from its onset.

Amos Vogel—along with his wife Marcia—created Cinema 16, which had a direct influence upon how the NYFF was initially programmed. His 1975 book Film as Subversive Art was (as Hamid describes it): "Part manifesto, part celebration, and part detailed cinematic catalogue, there is no better introduction to Vogel's curatorial philosophy, which prioritized the examination of form over content, allowing industrial film, experimental work and auteur cinema to be appreciated on an equal plane." (2009:70). Vogel and his compatriot Richard Roud—then director of the London Film Festival—were instrumental in the establishment of the NYFF.

The NYFF helped to elevate the stature of cinema on parity with more established art forms, such as theater and literature, largely due to the advocacy of Andrew Sarris at The Village Voice and Eugene Archer at The New York Times; both of who did not see film as subordinate to the established art forms, in contrast to older critics (like Stanley Kauffmann at The New Republic) who did (2009:75).

Kauffmann emerges as a problematic figure in discussing the formative years of the NYFF, especially for his 1965 essay "Are We Doomed to Festivals?" in the October 2 issue of The New Republic. As detailed by Hamid: "In 1965, Kauffmann viciously attacked the [NYFF], homophobically complaining that Roud's descriptions of the films were written with a 'limp mind and wrist'. He called Special Events a 'circus sideshow', maintaining that festivals were for selling films and not for the display of art. Good films will be released, so ran the logic, and the rest were not worthy of the exalted status given to them by the festival in the first place. Kauffmann argues that the festival films should be shown in small venues year-round like Vogel's Cinema 16 (Kauffmann 1965:30-32)." (2009:77) I'm not familiar enough with Kauffmann's work to know if he has since retracted his initial impressions, though Bart Cardullo—in his important Bright Lights Film Journal interview with Kauffmann—bravely circumambulates around Kauffmann's opinions shaped by nearly 50 years of film criticism.

Kauffmann was, by no means, singular in his criticism. Several older critics and the business establishment itself complained throughout 1964 and 1965. This criticism was compounded by that of younger critics who took objection to the establishment of the "hold review" policy (which has since become de rigeur for festival press coverage). "According to Sarris, the rule that films could not be reviewed during the festival (because this was too far in advance of their theatrical releases and therefore not useful for film promotion) grew to become a major cause of anger among critics, who were not primarily interested in the films' profitability." (2009:77).

Again, to be made aware that this longstanding conflict with the hold review policy has been in place since the onset of the NYFF serves to mollify my disgruntlement with the hold review policy at SFIFF. I now more fully understand the compromise struck between commercial and art cinema within the parameters of the film festival proper as a tension that is hardwired into the festival experience. That concession being made, however, I am still critical of the questionable policy of the tiering of press at film festivals, where celebrity "red carpet" journalists are granted more privilege and access than journalists who—like myself—elect to focus on first-time directors from the Global South or auteurial cinema. If reliance on studio fare provides essential financial backing and a spectacular dimension to film festivals—which I can appreciate—it should not, however, occlude the role of film journalists in advancing the work of non-studio fare. I plead for more parity in this instance.

Finally, "The NYFF also pushed the culture of film festivals one step further by being, in a sense, a festival of festival movies. The films selected were for the most part self-consciously artistic, created for an educated, international audience. On the other hand, the NYFF was non-competitive and stayed away from the hyperbolic atmosphere that surrounds festivals like Cannes and Venice. It was created as a haven for art appreciation. A staid and reverent atmosphere remains at the festival even today, as it approaches its fiftieth year. Further insulated from a promotion-crazed commercial atmosphere by the proliferation of festivals on this continent (Toronto in particular), the NYFF seldom hosts any North American premieres any more. Contemporary critics might also view the event as elitist and think of the festival as a completely bourgeois and irrelevant institution, but ironically that was part of the original point of the festival—to give film a place in the cultural establishment of the city." (2009:79-80)

In summation, Hamid's historicization of the NYFF serves as a template to understand the organizational precedents of international film festivals in general, drawing into focus the perhaps necessary contention between art and commercial cinema and the role of film festivals and their audiences in negotiating that tension.

The remaining case studies in Section Two of the Yearbook include Charles-Clemens Rüling's organizational analysis of the Annecy International Animation Festival as a "field-configuring event"; Kay Armatage's hands-on recollection of the 1973 Toronto Women & Film International, which examines—as the editors state in their introduction—"the ephemeral history of women's film festivals through her own memory" (2009:3-4); David Slocum's look at two African film festivals: FESPACO and the Zanzibar International Film Festival; and, finally—of related interest to the NYFF's current Masterworks series "(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966", expertly graphed out by Kevin Lee at The Auteurs Notebook—Ruby Cheung's narration of how the Hong Kong International Film Festival transitioned from a government-run program to a model influenced by corporate efficiency and sponsors, and Ma Ran's examination of how "that policy and aesthetics collided as underground Chinese cinema found its way onto the international film festival circuit, much to the chagrin of Mainland Chinese bureaucrats" (2009:4).

All of these essays are fascinating, informative reading that broaden an appreciation of the film festival experience in its contemporary unfolding. I would also recommend Richard Porton's erudite Moving Image essay "The Festival Whirl", wherein he references the Yearbook in his consideration of "the utopian possibilities—and dystopian realities—of the modern film festival."

Cross-published on Twitch.

FILM FESTIVAL YEARBOOK 1—A Response to Section One

Hello. My name is Michael and I am a film festival junkie, which means I cycle through addiction (should I watch four movies today or five?), recovery (I'm feeling oppressed with movies and I'm going to stop watching so many of them) and recidivism (the Toronto International's coming up!). Thus, you can imagine my unbridled delight in Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova with Ragan Rhyne, published by the Center for Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews and Wallflower Press.

As synopsized: "The first installment in an annual series, the Film Festival Yearbook features essays on the global proliferation of film festivals, focusing on the dynamics of the festival circuit. Contributions discuss the function of individual festivals within a larger and more complex network and the cultural policies that shape channels of film exhibition and distribution. The inaugural volume will include essays by Dina Iordanova, Charles-Clemens Rüling, Ragan Rhyne, Ruby Cheung, and Rahul Hamid. Forthcoming volumes cover gay and lesbian film festivals; festivals of Asia and the Asian diaspora; and the relationship between festivals and geopolitics."

Dina Iordanova is professor of film studies at the University of St. Andrews, where she directs the project Dynamics of World Cinema. She is the author of Cinema of the Balkans and Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and the Artistry of East Central European Film, both published by Wallflower Press. She guest-edited a recent Festivals issue for Film International, where I first became acquainted with her work and which I reviewed for The Evening Class. Highly-recommended reading.

As is Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, which impressed me straight off for its staged parity between academics and critics-practitioners. Walking their talk even further, I was honored—as a non-academic and more practitioner than critic—to be invited to contribute to the next volume. Reviewing the worth of this first volume is almost impossible, if not implied—its necessity and timeliness are givens—so, instead, what I've decided to do is to respond to the essays themselves in a series of four entries that correspond to the sections of the book to set an (idiosyncratic?) example of how I've rendered the information relevant to my own festival experience(s).

As editors Iordanova and Rhyne lay out in their introduction to the volume: "By launching the series of the Film Festival Yearbook with this inaugural volume, we aim to: 1) explore festivals in a systematic manner that, while relying on individual case studies, will foreground theoretical concerns at the intersection of arts management, cultural policy and film studies and 2) chart the complex structure of the international film festival network, bringing along a better understanding of World Cinema. A level of abstraction is needed for the study of festivals to gain momentum and translate the currently scattered research environment of festival studies into a sufficiently structured context. Our hope is that the Film Festival Yearbook will serve this function.

"In a programmatic essay, Thomas Elsaesser described the festival network as a specifically European industry response to Hollywood's distribution mechanisms and explored festivals in the context of actor-network theory. With respect to Europe, Elsaesser claimed, the festival circuit had become the key force and power grid in the film business, with wide-reaching consequences for the respective functioning of other elements of film culture, such as authorship, production, exhibition, cultural prestige and recognition." (2009:2) That "programmatic" essay—"Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe"—was published in Elsaesser's European Cinema: Face to Face With Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005). Although film festival scholarship had been ongoing for some time, Elsaesser's essay provided a fulcrum through which existing scholarship could be incorporated into the burgeoning field of film festival studies as well as a gameplan on how to proceed systematically. As important as his essay is to the field of film festival studies, I'm heartened that it has been made available in PDF format. Again, highly recommended reading.

"It is only through the continued development of both strands of festival studies—case studies and the theorization of their broader relevance to our understanding of the festival as a circuit—that this research will continue to progress," Iordanova and Rhyne argue in their introduction. "Just as the study of museums and galleries has become crucial to our understanding of the institutionalization of arts and heritage, so too must the study of festivals be central to understanding the socio-cultural dynamics of global cinema and international cultural exchanges at large." (2009:1)

As mentioned earlier, the volume has been divided into four sections. The first section on the film festival circuit begins with an analysis by Ragan Rhyne—"Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders"—wherein she "deploys some of the case studies in this volume, arguing that the various interests of festival stakeholders are negotiated through the administrative and economic structures of a newly-globalized non-profit sector." (2009:3) Ragan Rhyne is a Research Associate at the Center for Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews on the Dynamics of World Cinema project. Her work has been published in GLQ, Velvet Light Trap, and the Journal of Homosexuality. It is perhaps of contextual import to note that the Dynamics of World Cinema project is a major research project undertaken by the Center for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust. This two-and-a-half-year-long study hopes to examine the patterns and cycles of various distinctly active circuits of contemporary film distribution and exhibition, and the dynamic patterns of complex interaction between them. Their attention will focus predominantly in four areas of the global circulation of non-Hollywood cinema: the international penetration of international blockbusters mainstream distribution, the film festival circuit, the film circulation via diasporic channels, as well as the various Internet-enabled forms of dissemination. The project's distinctiveness is in the endeavor to correlate these diverse strands and foreground their dynamic interactions.

Rhyne's essay poses the provocative consideration that the film festival "circuit" might be a misnomer. "The trouble," she writes, "is that materially, the film festival circuit is not nearly as connected as we have thought. In fact, we might abandon the structural idea of the festival circuit as a single entity altogether and instead understand it as an international cultural sector linked by a common economy of public and private subsidy." (2009:9) This economic understanding of the festival as a cultural industry managed through a global non-profit sector necessarily places a spotlight on who the stakeholders are in any given film festival. By "stakeholders", Rhyne references "filmmakers and studios, journalists and press agents, professionals and programmers, local cultural councils and supranational agencies, tourist boards, cinephiles, and others", all of whom she proposes "have particular interests in seeing the network proliferate." (2009:9) As both journalist and cinephile, I'm primed to question my own staked interests.

Rhyne's historical purview of the role the non-profit mechanism has had in enabling film festivals to function—being funded by "some combination of earned income, government funding, corporate sponsorship and private donations" (2009:10)—likewise raises thorny issues about the hazardous reliance on such means of economic backing. Most recently, at the 29th edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Executive Director Peter Stein and the festival's programming staff came under severe fire from conservative constituencies protesting the inclusion of Simone Bitton's Rachel, a documentary about Rachel Corrie and her controversial death. Conservative private donor Maurice Kanbar—who felt Rachel had no business being in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival line-up—was overheard proclaiming that the Jewish Film Festival would not receive one more penny from him. The Koret Foundation and Taube Foundation likewise pulled their funding, protesting injuries to the Israeli state. They were deeply offended that the SFJFF invited Rachel Corrie's mother to the festival, and that the program was co-presented by the American Friends Service Committee and Jewish Voices For Peace; organizations which they claim are "virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups that support boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel." At Tikun Olam, Richard Silverstein staged debate on the issue. Statements by both The Koret Foundation and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival have been posted at JWeekly.com, where coverage on this "controversy" has continued.

I, in no way, want to deminimize the economic impact that withdrawal of funding from Kanbar and the Koret/Taube Foundations might have on the operations of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, albeit momentarily, and I consider this an unfortunate blow; however, this is a classic example of funders trying to manipulate a festival's programming, and thereby cultural policy. Perhaps Kanbar and the Koret/Taube Foundations should concert their conservative efforts to financing their own Zionist Film Festival—spelling it out clearly for all concerned—and leave the mission objectives of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival alone?

In a less vitriolic but no less important example, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently jettisoned their 40-year-old film program. Doug Cummings has provided a masterful synopsis of the controversy at his site Film Journey; a controversy that, once again, underscores how withdrawn funding can strangle film culture. Critic Kenneth Turan lays out the hazards competently for the L.A. Times.

Both examples confirm Rhyne's hypothesis: "From the outset, geopolitics and cultural politics have been co-articulated in the institutional structures and commercial affiliations of international film festivals." (2009:11) Rhyne cites Daniel Dayan's essay "Looking For Sundance: The Social Construction Of A Film Festival" (published in Moving Images, Culture and the Mind) wherein Dayan remarked that the film festival—referencing Sundance specifically—is often "an agonistic site of negotiation" dependent "upon a variety of conflicting interests" and "structured to not only contain them but also to deploy them toward institutional goals through what he calls the collective performance of the festival—a performance that actually requires the negotiation of these conflicting interests. Ironically, these conflicts, he argues, are fundamental to the cohesion of the festival as an event.

"…Dayan argues that the festival is constituted not only through the negotiation of these conflicts but also through journalistic chronicles of it—what he calls the 'written festival'. 'Like the physical event, but even more acutely so, the written festival turned out to be made of different versions, relaying different voices, relying on different sources of legitimacy. But it also provided its own common threads.' (Dayan 2000:52).

"Through his concept of 'the written festival', Dayan suggests that film festivals—or at least Sundance in particular—are constituted not only through the negotiation of various stakeholders, but through the articulation of these conflicting positions in journalistic coverage of the festival. This negotiation, in other words, is not incidental to the festival institution itself, but crucial to both its function as an event and to the way that the festival is understood as a cultural phenomenon. We might understand this as suggesting that the constant public discussion of the battle of festivals for aesthetic autonomy from the varying pressures of Hollywood, audiences, critics and corporate sponsors is theoretically misleading. The festival cannot solve these conflicts. Rather, it has an interest in playing them out in the cultural public sphere." (2009:18-19). San Francisco and Los Angeles have certainly had the opportunity to do so in recent weeks.

It's perhaps important to remember that the festival as a cultural industry managed through a global non-profit sector was an evolved response to the administration of the world's first film festival in Venice, founded by none other than Benito Mussolini and conceived as a tribute to fascism in Italy and Germany.

Moving on to Dina Iordanova's entry "The Film Festival Circuit", she "challenges the standard line in festival studies that film festivals constitute an alternative system of distribution. Instead, her suggestion that it is better understood as an exhibition network sheds light on how the economy of the festival circuit actually functions." (2009:3)

Cautioning that the art of cinema has been taken over by seemingly "secondary concerns like the rank of celebrities on the red carpet and the numbers of accredited journalists" (2009:23-24)—take heed San Francisco International!—Iordanova concludes: "The global film festival phenomenon is not inherently networked. Most festivals come about as singular ventures, independently from each other as temporary entities and discrete exhibition sites. They mushroom autonomously from each other, copying each other's model and replicating it in their own locality. It is only after a festival is established locally that the issue of its relationship with other festivals in what constitutes a loose network comes about. In that, individual festivals are discrete phenomena that spring up independently rather than as part of an orchestrated move." (2009:26).

The notion of film festivals as an alternate distribution model surfaced for me during my days on the board of the Global Film Initiative and was articulated by Jonathan Marlow in his fiercely opined Greencine editorial "They didn't build their sales model for you" (which remains a good read all these months later).

Film festivals as an alternative exhibition network, however, raises questions about the fees extracted by filmmakers and distributors from festivals to offset costs which will most likely never be achieved by a theatrical distribution (rendered incidental). Transparency on this subject is woefully inadequate. Any input encouraged.

Finally, Janet Harbord's essay—"Film Festivals-Time-Event"—"takes a somewhat different approach to her conception of the festival circuit, calling for renewed attention to the temporality of the festival circuit, rather than a strict focus on festival geographies." (2009:3) Harbord is Reader of Film and Screen Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Film Cultures (Sage, 2002), The Evolution of Film (Polity, 2007) and Chris Marker: La Jettee (Afterall/MIT Press, 2009).

Harbord's essay thoroughly fascinated me, as much on a philosophic level as on a cinephilic one. "While attempting to think of a film festival, its meaning is inseparable from its particular location. And if it is not possible to make sense of a film festival without its emplacement, it is increasingly difficult to imagine certain cities apart from their film festivals." (2009:40). Hello, San Francisco! In my recent research project on the community-based festivals in the Bay Area, it's already becoming apparent how crucial the multiculturalism and ethnic diversity of San Francisco and environs plays out in its ongoing festival culture. In some respects when it comes to personal experience, some cities are their film festivals. Though I have been to Toronto several years in a row, I know nothing about the city itself except the infrastructure of TIFF. The same for the Palm Springs International. I do not extend myself past the festival experience to familiarize myself with what else the city might have to offer. But those are the admitted failings of an affirmed film festival junkie.

The spatial qualities of film festivals not only have to do with urban settings but the venues within those cities. For example, I have a vigilant eye on negotiations to move the San Francisco International out to the Presidio and away from the more-convenient Sundance Kabuki theaters. I hope to determine why this is considered a necessary choice; what—if any—connection it has to civic subsidies for development of tourism; and if this choice can escape a critique of classism, especially from a population committed to public transit? Has the San Francisco Film Society thought out a solution to access? Transit to the Presidio is highly problematic, let alone that the site itself is insular, with few amenities for the public. Will SFFS consider shuttles from convenient transit nodes (much like the Palm Springs International) or are they catering to an upper echelon of membership who can drive their fancy cars to the festival; lower minions be damned? I propose that one of the most winning aspects of the Toronto International Film Festival is how its public transit system efficiently connects its various venues, insuring egalitarian attendance.

As for time? Her essay could have just as aptly been entitled: "Does anybody really know what time it is?" Harbord defines a film as a recorded document of something past, which is then exhibited in the present. She argues that festivals gather together "the time of film and the time of viewing and recenters the time of projection as a live event. This choreography of a dance between the live event on one hand and the recorded, pre-fixed film on the other is the manufactured time of the festival. The alchemy resulting from these different temporalities, the now and the then, characterizes the potency of the film festival as event." (2009:44)

Further considerations of time involve when a festival is scheduled within a yearlong calendar. One of the specific challenges encountered by the San Francisco International, let's say, hinges on its being perhaps the very last festival of the calendar year, coming into play as Cannes announces its line-up of what is presumed to be the next year's bumper crop of films. Then there is the somewhat addictive intensity of film festivals produced by the compression of time anywhere within a few days to a few weeks. Then there's each person's selection of films, the choices made to best manage time spent at a festival; choices that include film length, film stock, conflicted screenings, and how much time one has to get from one venue to another, or to nourish the body with food, social networking or unapologetic down time.

If truth be told, my film writing was conceived by diary entries; my journalism from journal entries. Anaïs Nin encouraged me to consider that attending a film was a valid moment of life experience. She faithfully recorded cinematic events in Paris in her diaries, which inspired me to endeavor the same. This habit of writing in my diary about films I've seen has reached its seeming apotheosis in The Evening Class, which has become my running account of the sociality of Bay Area film culture. Harbord reflects on same: "A critical factor in the manufacture of live time is the role of reporting, the witness statements of journalists and bloggers sent out to the wider public to describe the event that has already happened. If the gate-keeping functions of film festivals are most evident in spatial terms, the barriers and ropes that demarcate internal worlds, the temporal also has a function in this practice of demarcating the event from everyday life, from the outside. Written reportage, which is the main form of festival journalism, is a delayed experience, a postcard as it were emitted from the place of happening. The newspaper report helps to seal the time of the event as a live happening that can only be recounted afterwards to those outside of its boundary.

"The task of the film festival is to make time matter," Harbord asserts, "to give urgency to the viewing of film in an historical context in which the public release of film is no longer a necessary compelling event of itself. The condensed structure of the festival makes the here and the now of viewing critically important. Contingency, which marks the festival as an unfolding event whose details are unknowable in advance, affords a singularity to the experience: to see a film here and now will be unlike any other time of viewing. This moment of viewing will attach itself to the film in many cases, bringing a film notoriety or award that then becomes part of its circulation, a moment 'carried over'." (2009:43-44).

These are fascinating concerns that ramify into considerations of what the difference is between the advance previewing of films on screener in contrast to the in-cinema reviewing of films in a festival, modes of distribution and exhibition, and how both anticipation and fulfillment are temporally and spatially structured.

Cross-published on Twitch.