Australian Film Festivals

Audience, Place, and Exhibition Culture

Kirsten Stevens

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137586377
• eBook ISBN: 9781137581303
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This is the first book to offer an in-depth examination of the history, operation, and growth of film festivals as a cultural phenomenon within Australia. Tracing the birth of film festivals in Australia in the 1950s through to their present abundance, it asks why film festivals have prospered as audience-driven spectacles throughout Australia, while never developing the same industry and market foci of their international fellows. Drawing on over sixty-years of archival records, festival commentary, interviews with festival insiders and ephemera, this book opens up a largely uncharted history of film culture activity in Australia.

© The Author(s) 2016

Kirsten StevensAustralian Film FestivalsFraming Film Festivals10.1057/978-1-137-58130-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kirsten Stevens¹

(1)

Monash University, Caulfield East, Australia

End Abstract

In 1999, a film festival premiering in the Queensland resort town of Noosa announced its intention to be Australia’s first competitive feature film festival. Like other major competitive festivals the world over, this event sought to present a blue-ribbon gala aimed at drawing representatives from the international film industry to Australia’s shores. The jury presiding over the festival’s main prize, the Golden Boomerang, featured luminaries of the Australian film industry (Jack Thompson, Gillian Armstrong, Rachel Ward) as well as international filmmakers (John Sayles) and festival directors (Mark Fishkin, Mill Valley), while the cash first prize of $50,000 sought to rival the award offered at the Venice Film Festival (Barber 1999: 9). From the start, Noosa positioned itself as an international calibre film festival. Entirely privately financed and backed by prominent sponsors, including Polo Ralph Lauren, SAAB, and Kodak Australia (Fischer 2013: 90), Noosa was set to be a glamorous, celebrity-studded affair. It would be spectacular. It would be, in short, unlike anything yet seen in Australia. Despite the optimism surrounding this new venture, however, by the end of the year the festival had collapsed. Owing over $300,000 to creditors and $50,000 in prize money to its winning film, Khuentse Norbu’s The Cup (1999) (Albert and Holgate 2000: 13), the Noosa Film Festival was no more.

The failure of the Noosa Film Festival ultimately reflected specific issues connected with the event—issues of financial management, sponsorship, planning, and organisation (Fischer 2013: 89–90). Yet, despite its brief existence and resounding collapse, the event nevertheless proves illuminating when considering the nature of film festivals in Australia. Along with demonstrating the speed with which film festivals can appear on and disappear from the international stage, the event also highlighted the differences that set Australia’s film festivals apart from leading international celebrations. Through its emphasis on being the first Australian event to attract high-profile international partners, secure global industry participation, offer large cash prizes for an international feature film competition, as well as generate the type of red carpet celebrity hype common at international events, Noosa shone a spotlight on Australia’s lack of such ‘typical’ international-style events. While the red carpets at Cannes , the buzz around Toronto , the indie-stars and industry of Sundance, and the glamour of Venice have entered the popular consciousness, producing a collective understanding of what a film festival looks like, Australia’s celebrations en masse have failed to follow this course. Instead, film festivals in Australia have developed their own character, informed by the particular conditions of their location, the needs of their audiences, and desires of their organisers—qualities that from their very start have seemingly put them out of step with the forces shaping international celebrations.

Film festivals arrived in Australia relatively early on in their global development. Australia’s first major film festival—the Melbourne Film Festival (MFF , later Melbourne International Film Festival )¹—premiered in 1952, only a year after the arrival of the Berlin Film Festival in 1951 and some half a dozen years after Cannes (1946). While the Melbourne event, along with the Sydney Film Festival (SFF ) which arrived in 1954, debuted amid these venerable European festivals, however, their existence and operation have remained outside of conceptualisations of film festivals from this period. The early phase of film festival history has instead been widely theorised as distinctively ‘European’ (Harbord 2002; Elsaesser 2005; de Valck 2007; Quintín 2009). As Marijke de Valck (2007: 14) argued in her seminal history on film festival development, film festivals are understood to have emerged from the specific geopolitical and industrial contexts of pre- and post-Second World War Europe. Operating as highly competitive nationalistic events that were international in their scope and appeal, festivals, such as those in Venice (1932), Cannes, Locarno (1946), Karlovy Vary (1946), and Berlin, developed as quintessentially European celebrations. Since their emergence these events have not only sustained a level of visibility and importance within the global film festival circuit, but also received particular attention within film festival scholarship. As a result, such European film festivals have come to epitomise the early existence of film festivals within conventional wisdom. Moreover with Europe seen as providing, as de Valck theorises (2007:14), ‘the cradle of the film festival phenomenon,’ these festivals have further come to stand in as the templates from which all subsequent film festival activity developed. Yet, despite this established understanding of the European roots of global film festival development, the film festivals that arrived in Australia through the early years of the format’s history bore only passing resemblance to the European national show cases and international spectacles.

Unlike the international celebrations, film festivals in Australia developed along different lines as distinctly insular and audience-driven events. Writing of Australia’s two premiere film festivals—those run in Melbourne and Sydney—in a 1980 issue of the Australian Women’s Weekly, show-biz reporter John Michael Howson observed the core differences between the Australian festivals and international events. He reported (1980: 152), ‘There are no starlets in bikinis, no wild parties at exclusive hotels and night clubs and precious few Rolls Royces gliding up to the cinemas.’ Instead of glamour and celebrity, he explained (1980: 152) in Australia film festivals were there for the festival spectators:

Unlike Cannes, the world’s most talked about film festival, the Melbourne and Sydney festivals are not market places or publicity venues for movie producers—they are for the ‘serious’ film goer. They are a feast of good film fare for people who like, if not love, pictures and who are willing to spend dozens of hours in cinemas over the two weeks of the events watching pictures that will, for the most part, never be released commercially in Australia, but which allow the viewer to see what is happening cinematically in countries around the world.

Although more than three decades have now passed since Howson made these observations, relatively little has changed. At their core, film festivals in Australia remain neither market places for industry, nor sites for celebrity and publicity, but distinctly audience-oriented affairs. Yet, despite this long-held and intuitive understanding that even Australia’s premiere film festivals have developed a different character to those staged at Cannes, Venice or Berlin, little attention has been paid to exactly how and why these events differ from their international counterparts.

In part, the omission of discourse on Australia’s film festivals reveals the bias that prevails within existing research and writing on film festivals. To date scholarly and critical discussions of film festivals have focused on particular events and more broadly on particular types of events. At the heart of the growing array of literature on film festivals are a number of close descriptive case studies of events, ranging from the very big (Cannes, Berlin, Sundance ), through the influential (Telluride, Rotterdam), to the specialised (LGBT, Human Rights), and the culturally distinctive (Asian, African). Within these case studies, as Lindiwe Dovey notes (2015: 11–12), ‘an industrial focus on the so-called “experts” at festivals (the curators, filmmakers, producers, sales agents, media lawyers, distributors, and juries)’ pervades. By focusing on the industrial actors and experts who populate the international film festival circuit, discourse on film festivals globally has become skewed towards a discussion of those events at which these actors are most visible or active. In short, it is those festivals featuring markets, premieres and competitions, and which are aimed at facilitating interactions between and among filmmakers and members of the film trade, that have become the focus of study.

Writing in 2008, Mark Peranson loosely categorised these types of festivals as existing towards the business end of film festival operation. He identified two ideal models of film festival operation—the ‘business model ’ and the ‘audience model ’—which exist at either end of a continuum (2008: 38). These two models, he explains (2008: 38–39), exist in a core-periphery relationship, with the business model reflecting those influential, large-scale, premiere-focused, highly competitive events which place greatest importance on the concerns of stakeholders with a commercial interest in festival activities (distributors, sales agents, sponsors, etc.). In garnering the majority of attention in critical film festival discourse, these events have shaped how film festivals are thought of and talked about, influencing conceptualisations of what a film festival ‘is’: what characterises such events and what function they serve. Yet, if Peranson’s other model of film festival operation—that focused on audiences—exists at the periphery of film festival operation and scholarly discourse, it also constitutes the majority of film festivals operating around the world.

Australia’s film festivals sit comfortably at the audience end of Peranson’s continuum. Characterised less by their competitions, industry involvement or number of premieres, if indeed they have any, Australian film festivals are presented for their audiences’ enjoyment and edification. Yet, although the distinction between these Australian film festivals and the leading business festivals of Europe might be glaringly apparent, even prosaic, there exists little in the way of an explanation as to why this nation’s festivals have developed along such different lines. Left unanswered, for example, are the questions of what makes audience festivals such a pervasive and attractive model for film culture and exhibition practices? And why has a country such as Australia, which possesses a strong international reputation and venerated festival history, developed a number of festivals aimed at audiences but failed to establish a more celebrity- or industry -oriented event? In addressing these questions, this book provides an intervention into the study of film festivals and the existing understanding of how such events spread outside of Europe through their early history and beyond.

Australian Film Festivals: Audience, Place and Exhibition Culture offers the first sustained and in-depth examination of the history, operation, and growth of film festivals as a distinctive cultural phenomenon in Australia, tracing their development from their earliest history through to their present operation. Rejecting the notion that Australian film festivals were ‘copies’ of international celebrations, and thus can be unproblematically theorised under existing frameworks of film festival scholarship established in relation to these events, it instead offers an alternative approach. It works to theorise the Australian festival experience as providing a different structural model of film festival development, one that challenges existing assumptions on the ways such events are thought to have developed beyond Europe. While taking a local perspective, therefore, it is the aim of this book to open the discussion of both historic and contemporary film festival development at a global level. It seeks through considering the Australian perspective to explore the impulses that have enabled the growth of film festivals as distinctly global phenomena that reflect a variety of local, national, and regional impulses, not simply as the successful exportation of modes of film presentation and celebration from globally significant and influential powers.

Film Festivals in Australia

Place provides a central focus for this book. It is notions of ‘place’—imbued with the specific geographic, cultural, social, and political qualities that shape and connote such spaces into located environments—and the differences between places that provide the basis for the discussion of film festivals undertaken here. In this sense, this book offers a departure from previous national or regional studies of film festivals—see, for instance, Mazdon (2007) or Dovey (2015)—in that its interest in Australian film festivals resides with their location within place and not in their ties to particular cinematic traditions. In short, this book is about film festivals in Australia, it is not about festivals of Australian films.

The reason for taking this approach is twofold. In the first instance, this book positions itself against theories that have produced a distorted view of how film festivals are understood to have developed globally. It is interested in locating Australia within the global experience and evolution of the film festival as a particular phenomenon of cultural celebration as a means for questioning how the history of these events has been theorised to date. In the second instance, a focus on festivals of Australian films, in the sense that Dovey (2015), for example, tied her examination of African film festivals to particular readings and frameworks of African filmmaking, are hampered by the marginal position festivals of Australian films have held both in Australia and beyond.

There exist relatively few film festivals that take Australian cinema as their exclusive focus. While such festivals have existed from time to time both within Australia and overseas,² these events have been few and far between. A larger number of festivals feature Australian film sidebars or specialty programmes, while others run short film competitions aimed at (local) Australian filmmakers. Ultimately, however, the story of film festivals in Australia has reflected the history of film exhibition in Australia more generally. That is to say, as film critic John Hinde observed in 1981, they have been characteristically concerned with ‘other people’s pictures’ and not those by Austra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Enthusiastic Amateurs: Origins of Australia’s Film Festival Movement
• 3. Growth and Change: Curator-Led Festivals, Fragmenting Audiences, and Shifting Film Exhibition Cultures
• 4. From Film Weeks to Festivals: The Spread of the Urban Film Festival After 1980
• 5. Between Success and Failure: Crisis and Recovery at the Melbourne International Film Festival
• 6. Programming Perceptions: Film Festivals and the Construction of Taste
• 7. A Festival for Every Occasion: Niche Programming, Event Culture, and Vertically Integrated Film Festivals
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter