The Festival Circuit
The world's first international film festival was Venice, in 1932. It was started by a former finance minister of Mussolini's government, and from 1934 its top prize was called the Mussolini Cup. At the 1938 festival, Hitler pressured the jury; the film seen as the favorite was passed over, and a Nazi documentary and an Italian film split the award. In reaction to this, France conceived of a rival festival. That became Cannes. The first edition was supposed to open in September 1939, but war broke out days before it began, and the festival wasn't actually held until 1946. Berlin followed in 1951, proposed by a film officer of the US military occupation authority and funded to open in divided West Berlin. It was called "the showcase of the free world." All three began for political reasons, not aesthetic ones. Today we tend to think of festivals as neutral machines for discovering talent, but the machine was built out of politics first, and only started carrying talent afterward. And even once the circuit existed, whether a film passed through it always came down to someone's hand pushing it along. Rashomon, which won the Golden Lion in 1951, was a film its own Japanese studio wasn't especially eager to send. Pather Panchali, which won an award at Cannes in 1956, was placed in a late-night holiday slot and missed by most of the jury; the critic André Bazin and the director Lindsay Anderson lobbied for it, and a re-screening followed. L'Avventura (1960) was booed loudly at its first screening, with walkouts one after another; the next day, a statement signed by a group of prominent filmmakers was circulated, and opinion flipped. The circuit exists, but whether something travels through it is always pushed by someone's hand. Through this circuit, Brazil's Cinema Novo reached the world in 1964, and in 1966 the first feature film from sub-Saharan Africa did too.