Author: Robert Koehler

NOTE: This essay was written before the covid-19 pandemic, when film festivals around the world closed or cancelled, with no date in sight for relaunch. In a sense, this piece was written in another era, which just ended. But because of that, the strangeness of reading something written at one moment before that moment radically changed can have its own value.   

Everything in film culture—like every cultural project—will be permanently changed by this crisis and how governments and society will respond to it. We are in effect living in a global, collective mystery whose outcome is completely unknown. The …

Like every other North American festival this time of year, the Palm Springs film festival, which closed this past Monday, is pulled into the apparently inescapable vortex of the Academy Awards. Despite all the sturm und drang of the Academy’s internal organizational drama, cost overruns on the new Academy museum at Wilshire and Fairfax and strain to diversify its (still) white-dominant membership, the Oscars rule, and not in a good way. The Oscars have utterly colonized English-language movies aspiring to that thing known as “art.”

This is a recent development that the so-called “art film” world hasn’t figured out or …