Ever since Benito Mussolini invented the film festival, in Venice in 1932, art and industry have merged at festivals to create strange bedfellows. Now the workings of film culture are highlighted by incongruous blends of polemics and test marketing, promotion and education, displays of power and tributes to art and artistry.
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Both movies were shown at the Toronto film festival afterward, but neither is coming to the Chicago International Film Festival, whose programming this year seems to suffer, as usual, from minimal clout, bad timing, disorganization, and the tendency of its better programmers to move on. (This year’s notable loss was Helen Gramates.) Of the other ten best features I saw in Venice and Toronto–Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako, Jafar Panahi’s Offside, Garin Nugroho’s Opera Jawa, Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, Ron Mann’s Tales of the Rat Fink, Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Invisible Waves, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century–only the last three have made it into the Chicago festival. And the festival doesn’t have a monopoly on worthy fare: Tales of the Rat Fink is playing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center (where Mann decided to show it instead of at the festival), and the Film Center and Chicago Filmmakers are both presenting exciting short works by School of the Art Institute graduate Weerasethakul (better known as “Joe”).
Toronto, which may have the most domestic and laid-back street life in North America, confidently hosted its orderly, user-friendly, noncompetitive festival. This year it was more industry run than ever–it might even have had more media blitzes than Sundance–and higher ticket prices kept public attendance down. Many serious noncommercial films were shown, though this seemed chiefly a kind of courtesy to cinephiles. The local press treated the arrival of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez at a couple of premieres as the only cultural event of any importance.
