Issue 1: Summer 2008
CINEMA AS SITUATIONS: The 2007 Lucca Film Festival
Donal Foreman
"We really have to talk about that? It's one of your questions?"
It's a warm, hazy afternoon in the Tuscan town of Lucca and I've just asked Luca Perezzi, one of the several co-organisers of the Lucca Film Festival, about the audience. Luca, who has already told me enthusiastically and at length about the origins of the festival, his love of cinema and the eclectic choice of films screening in this year's programme, seems a little weary at this question, a reluctance that seems at once playful and genuine-and makes sense when you consider the nature of this small-scale but impressive festival.
While Lucca features several narrative large-scale feature films in an inclusive programme that sees the Taviani brothers scheduled alongside the idiosyncratic Spanish underground filmmaker Adolfo Arrieta, a close examination of the festival's eight-day programme reveals an overwhelming emphasis on experimental cinema. Since experimental cinema is by definition working outside of the familiar, expected and assumed, its position is always going to be peripheral. In a small town in Tuscany which for all its charm seems principally geared towards facilitating rich tourists, that periphery is inevitably even more peripheral-and the question of the audience is always a delicate one, as Perezzi's response indicates.
But the organisers' practical response to this has been impressive: rather than being simply a local festival, confined by the cultural limitations of that locality, or attempting to dilute the festival's content to appeal to "everyone", they have instead made an effort to become an international focal point for those already engaged in this peripheral but essential world. To that end, some sixty guests were invited to attend the festival this year, including filmmakers, actors, critics, curators and film-lovers from across America, Australia, France, Greece, the UK and Ireland.
This alone makes Lucca a pretty idyllic hangout if you love experimental cinema, but what makes it particularly significant as a festival is the way it co-ordinates and engages this rich panoply of films and people.
FILMS THAT WON'T STAY IN THE CINEMA
Film festivals typically exist in two often-combined guises: as a consumer-focused, film-going extravaganza where one has the chance to see films before they're officially released (and most films that make the selection will be); and as a producer-focused marketplace for the buying, selling and promotion of films. The biggest festivals usually find some room for the avant-garde in their programme (the ‘Forum Expanded' section of the Berlin Film Festival is the only place I've seen innovative selection on a par with Lucca, and I've heard the experimental sections of the London and New York film festivals are comparably rich)-but this is only because they exist on such a giant scale that they have the luxury of incorporating the marginal. The key point is that they still treat it as marginal; that is, they accept the delineations of cinema as defined by the market.
The Lucca Film Festival doesn't accept the traditional boundaries of film festivals any more than the films it screens accept the traditional boundaries of cinema. In fact, the very nature of the films showcased in Lucca seems to demand such disregard of tradition. For example, many of the films screened are expansive in such a way that they even refuse containment within the comforting bracket of "cinema"; often incorporating disciplines typically confined to other areas of art, and sometimes even rejecting the traditional exhibition paradigm of the viewer/dark room/big screen. In reaction to this, Lucca has expanded beyond merely showing films, with exhibitions, music, and literary performances forming a natural extension of the programme.
You can't, for example, do a retrospective of Michael Snow-this year's major festival guest-without dealing with his engagement in the other arts, as well as his film work designed for alternate forms of exhibition. Along with a series of film screenings spanning almost half a century of Snow's output, Lucca's modern art gallery held a wide-ranging exhibition of Snow's work, including interactive video installations, double projections, photography, and sound art.
Now 78, the Canadian artist came to light as part of New York's burgeoning experimental scene in the ‘60s and has since been hailed as a master of ‘structuralist cinema', a stream of the avant-garde more concerned with exploring the formal and physiognomic aspects of film than in using it as a means of representing something else. While most of Snow's films employ long takes that are quite directly "representational", these images are usually emptied of action and narrative (or at the very least any action is pushed to the periphery) and the focus is instead on particular formal properties of the image.
In his most famous film, Wavelength (1967), the camera gradually zooms in, over 45 minutes, from a wide shot inside a New York loft to a close-up of a photograph on its wall. In Back andForth ( 1969), the focus is on an even more elemental cinematic property: panning. The 52 minute film takes place in a classroom at different times of day, with the camera constantly moving, back and forth, from right to left at an accelerating speed, until both directions merge into a dazzling blur. In So is This (1982), probably Snow's funniest film, the 43 minute running time consists only of the (extremely long) title of the film, presented one word at a time. Beginning with "This is the title of this film" (and occasionally reminding us "This is still the title of this film"), the film goes on to reflect on its own intriguing formal potential (eg, the way the size, colour and editing rhythm of the words effects our reading of them in a uniquely cinematic way) and also features some really funny puns. Snow's work is unusual among experimental work in that its strong conceptual basis makes it fairly easy to describe-yet articulating its value and importance beyond the novelty and extremity of its premises is not so easy. A case can be made that Snow's work is restricted by its coldness, its lack of feeling-and almost all of Snow's works, from the ‘50s to today, feature neither traditional humanistic concerns nor an interest in personal relationships or emotions. But the key difference between his work and most contemporary conceptual art is its central experiential aspect, something which a brief conceptual outline can never encompass. Snow's works may begin with an almost scientific curiosity about formal possibilities, but the finished films are successful to the degree that they absorb you in an intense cinematic experience that could not be achieved without Snow's formal experimentation. The concepts structure the experience rather than being the experience itself. In theory, the idea of a camera panning back and forth for close to an hour may sound like a clever idea or a perverse waste of time, depending on your disposition-but as an experience it creates an alien vision of space and time that is so all-consuming it can quite literally alter your perception of the world. Snow's concepts may be cold, but his films offer new visions of experience that are anything but dispassionate.
Some films in the programme opened up other areas of inquiry more by subversion than expansion. The subject of the festival's other main retrospective even went so far as to reject cinema as a whole-albeit through the use of moving images. The late Guy Debord is best known as the philosopher-in-chief of the Situationist art movement of the ‘60s, and as the author of the great cultural treatise The Society of the Spectacle-but his much-neglected filmography is one of the best examples of the intellectual or essayistic stream of experimental cinema of which Jean-Luc Godard is perhaps the most famous example. Starting from the central premise that industrial, capitalist civilisation operates and maintains itself through processes of alienation-alienating individuals from each other, workers from the products of their labour, etc-Debord developed a body of theoretical and practical work that favoured the creation of "situations" and the subversion of everyday life. Debord's theory saw the separation of art from life as part of the greater industrial process of alienation, and for him the cinema, in which spectators sat passively in the dark and consumed images made by others, was the greatest example of this. His commitment to cinema, therefore, is somewhat perverse, a kind of oppositional stance taken from within the medium itself-essentially a form of the subversive technique known as détournement that Situationists applied in many areas of life.
All of Debord's films are strongly text-based, the soundtrack usually consisting of almost nothing but voiceover (usually read by Debord himself), to which the images (often stock footage from newsreels, advertisements and Hollywood movies) are always treated as secondary and untrustworthy. Debord's films are clearly not experiential in the same way as Snow's; his consistent narration insists on intellectual engagement rather than sensual absorption, and his vision of cinema seems to treat it less as an art of images than as a microscope under which to deconstruct and critique images. Yet Debord's inherent opposition towards the medium often cannot restrain an aesthetic flair. His 1967 film, The Society of the Spectacle (probably the most faithful film adaptation of a book ever made), punctuates its analysis with melancholy musical refrains, and its images of Paris street life are frequently stunning, all adding to a subtle emotional undercurrent that Nicole Brenez described as "a unique formal rehabilitation of feeling" (1). Nonetheless the strongest aftertaste of Debord's films was for me a sense of works painfully aware of their own insufficiency, films that wanted to thrust you away from cinema and out into the world.
CINEMA AS....
Then there was the extent to which the festival was actually a film production in itself. Since its inception in 2005, Lucca has seen several significant filmmakers make work while at the festival. This year, several films were screened that were shot at the festival last year, including River of Anger (2007, Antoine Barraud), an experimental documentary on last year's major guest, Kenneth Anger, and Steve Is (2007, Silvia Palermo), a fascinating interview with Stephen Dwoskin. The number of cameras, both film and video, floating around the festival this year suggest that this is a tradition likely to continue and expand.
Adolfo Arrieta, the head of this year's competition jury, could be said to be a key influence on this creative tendency of the festival. Arrieta shot much of his most recent film Vacanza Permanente (2006), at the festival's inaugural year, and premiered it in Lucca the year after, and his style of filmmaking-which he defined, before announcing the jury prizes, simply as "cinema is life, life is cinema"-seems to see filmmaking as a way of engaging with and reinventing reality rather than avoiding it; a philosophy that doesn't preclude the use of fantasy or genre in the process. Two Arrieta short films from the ‘60s, presented in versions recently recut by the director, El Crimen de la Pirindola (1965) and La Imitacion del Angel (1967) illustrate this powerfully. Each is a beautifully lyrical work that combines an almost innocent love for adventurous narrative and cinematic illusion with a raggedly offbeat handmade style of filming, which infused his somewhat fantastical stories with a documentarian's (or perhaps home-movie maker's) openness of vision.
Another filmmaker adept at using film as a way of being in the world was Stephen Dwoskin, another long-standing figure in experimental cinema who was subject of a retrospective at last year's festival. Nightshots (1,2,3) (2007) is a beautiful half-hour trilogy of portraits of women that, despite being shot Paris Hilton-style on lo-fi nightvision DV, created astonishing and haunting images of intimacy and physicality. In the accompanying interview with Dwoskin in Steve Is, he talks about using cinema as a way of getting closer to people, even touching them. This perspective is a striking departure from the typical view of cinema as voyeurism, but one that makes perfect sense in the context of the intense gazes and interaction between cameraman and subject in Nightshots.
Cinema can, of course also be a means of learning. The Lucca Film Festival turned into one of the most interesting classrooms a cinephile could ask for when Pip Chodorov, head of the French distribution company Re:Voir and a filmmaker himself, gave a two-day lecture on the history of experimental cinema for local high school kids, and a few other keen hangers-on. Screening 16mm prints of some of the most important avant-garde films of the 20th century, Chodorov covered wide ground, from the early animated experiments of Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger through the ‘60s work of Paul Sharits and Robert Breer (exploring the effects of single-frame or "flicker films"), Stan Brakhage (painting directly on film), Jonas Mekas (author of the epic and visionary home movie collage Walden [1969]), to more recent works by Martin Arnold (remixing found footage) and Jeff Scher (manipulating film directly with chemicals). Chodorov consciously leaves video out of the picture, focusing instead on how the particular material properties and possibilities of film instigated the form of many of these works; he's also a vocal proponent of screening films on film, comparing a video transfer of a film to a "photocopy of a painting".
Sometimes the power of cinema is simply cinema. Perhaps the most remarkable and privileged event of the festival was the surprise screening of Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Erdély's Dream Reconstructions (1977), which has rarely been shown since it was first made in Hungary's legendary Béla Balázs Studio (an experimental film house funded by the communist state on the condition that the films would never be seen publicly). Reconstructions is marked by a brilliantly debased conception of time and space involving fast-forwards, rewinds, and whole scenes of conversations between people and projected images-all of which seems quite literally avant-garde in its anticipation of our increasingly mediated and media-infused reality. Its strength is not in its relationship to things outside cinema-its subject at many times is, in fact, nothing but a film screen-but in its creation of new ways of experiencing the world through purely cinematic means.
But the festival expanded in many other directions too. Other extra-cinematic events included live performances by festival guests, such as a reading by Marta Hoskins, (star of Keja Kramer's short film Skyrocket [2007] which was also screened); a concert of music composed by Isidore Isou, a leader of the Lettrist movement from which Debord and the Situationists emerged; a screening of Super 8 home movie footage with a live score by local electronic band MAIS.... And, in addition to hosting Pip Chodorov's classes, the cinema venue was used outside the festival proper for impromptu ‘social' screenings, where people who had their film with them were allowed to show them for whoever was around, in between officially scheduled films.
All of this raises questions both about what we have come to expect from film festivals and what we have come to expect from cinema. The sheer breadth of issues, disciplines, styles and philosophies covered in this experimental film festival (in both senses), also challenges the notion of marginality that the E word usually implies. However, French critic Nicole Brenez, in her excellent essay "Jeune, dure et pure" (one of the best introductions to experimental cinema around), has already argued cogently against this label of marginality:
What seems to me essential is that experimental and avant-garde cinema should be thought of not as a marginal, minor and different cinema, which it is only from an economic and social point-of-view: from a formal viewpoint experimental cinema is the whole of cinema-it explores all its potentialities. (2)
For those willing to forgo the handrails of the conventional experience and dive in, the only conclusion is that Brenez's right. This shouldn't be called Expanded Cinema or considered some exception to the rule. The mainstream work should be the anomaly; it should be called Restricted Cinema; the exception to the unruly.
A NEW SITUATION
There seems to be an influence of Debord in particular in the way the festival has become a focal point not just for certain kinds of people and films, but for the creation of a whole cultural scene-and one which involves creative engagement as well as spectatorship. It refuses the modern notion, magnified by globalisation, that art and culture is something that comes from afar, that we import and consume; rather than something that happens where we are, that we make. Certainly part of the motivation behind the festival organisers-a collective of six or seven 20-something Lucchesians, mostly students of philosophy, English and film-was to set up a festival that would give them the opportunity to see films and meet people they would never otherwise have the opportunity to encounter. But they were also particularly inspired by one Italian critic, Marco Melani, to whom the festival's first year was dedicated. According to one of the organisers, Alessandro de Francesco, Melani had impacted on them all by "his way of thinking cinema and living cinema." Perezzi expanded: "Marco Melani really understood how to live and interpret cinema. Not cinema just as movies. But cinema as situations."
Cinema as situations? Put another way: a cinema that we interact with, that goes both ways and that involves the creation of a space in which we act, and act differently, and in which different things are possible than in the established, mainstream cultural spaces of our society. Even though the festival is in a way disconnected from its own locale (the people of Lucca have yet to fully embrace it, shall we say), it is localised in a very beautiful way, as in: this is it, happening right here, right now. It's a new locality, a locality of new possibilities, that is nevertheless here. It's one that the Lucca Film Festival built.
As anti-cinema as Debord may have appeared, he did emphasise that his main opposition to cinema was the way it was, which was not the way it had to be: "It is a particular society, not a particular technology, that has made the cinema like this."
The same goes for film festivals.
They can be anything we want them to be.
Lucca Film Festival:
Donal Foreman is a filmmaker, film-writer and film-viewer living in Dublin.
Website: http://www.donalforeman.com