Border Exchanges: The Role of the European Film Festival

Abstract

Although they are an important feature on the landscape of European cinema, the film festivals and their precise role have rarely been explored. There has been a tendency to use Cannes as representative of all the others, since it indubitably has the highest profile, but can it truly reflect the activities of the myriad other events across the continent? Moreover, the abiding impression of the festival each spring on the Riviera is that it is an international event where the European dimension is simply geographical, rather than cultural. This article will compare and contrast Cannes with two of its A-list counterparts, namely the Berlinale and the Czech Republic's Karlovy Vary, in order to tease out the characteristics of the European film festival today, and as such represents an initial approach to a topic that demands far more analysis than there is scope for here. That said, by drawing on the discourse of post-colonialism, this article posits a theoretical model to helps us understand the importance of the European festival as a locus of cultural exchange between the realms of Hollywood and world cinema.

Keywords:

• film
• Europe
• post-colonialism
• festivals

Notes

¹ For more information on the activities and membership of the FIAPF, visit the organization's web site (www.fiapf.org).

² For detailed information of the activities of the European Coordination of Film Festivals (ECFF), see the web site at www.eurofilmfest.org.

³ The primary intellectual advocate of this notion of a cultural bridge between the fronts in the early post-war period was Alfred Kantorowicz, who in 1947 established a periodical, the appositely named Ost und West (East and West), for this very purpose. It proved an impossible dream as the Berlin airlift heralded the onset of the Cold War. For more on Kantorowicz, see Ralph Giordano's online article ‘Gibt es keinen Gewinn?’ at www.alfred-kantorowicz.de/giordano.htm (accessed 21 September 2006).

⁴ Source of the statistics (Meza & Horn, 2006c, pp. 341–342).

⁵ Source of the statistics (Meza & Horn, 2006b, pp. 339–340).