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 experience of this dark mystery will, I think, finally produce some extraordinary cinema reflecting and responding to it. We can’t know what that will be. I think in the meantime that we can watch one film—Antonioni’s “L’eclisse”—that best expresses the sensation, the poetics, the emotion, the condition, of what it is to be plunged into an inexplicable cataclysm; in the time when Antonioni made his masterpiece, the cataclysm was the threat of global thermonuclear war (even though that fear was never expressed in the film itself). The condition conveyed in “L’eclisse” is unstated; so it transfers perfectly to our present moment, and reflects our lives right now. Film Twitter and across the web, the trend is to suggest happy movies, movies that lift spirits, and those can be wonderful. “L’eclisse” is not that; it is a mirror, a sounding board, an echo that we can share.
Whipsawed by the chaotic state of international cinema—Who is watching it anymore? Where will it screen? Is there even a theatrical market for it anymore, “Parasite” aside?—U.S. festivals intent on presenting movies from around the world have new pressures, not all of them good. One pressure is to just show the hits and the so-called “masters” (every festival now, it seems, has a “masters” section—the term itself has become a brand). Which means that the counter-pressure is to avoid loading up the lineup with movies by first- and second-time filmmakers whose names are unknown to all but the geekiest of cinephiles. And an overwhelming pressure is to stock the program with movies from the countries that even the more sophisticated U.S. festivalgoers, who after all represent a narrow slice of the narrowing “arthouse” audience and trend older, tend to be interested in. Which means France, France and more France, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany on a good day, and Japan.
These movies track, not coincidentally, with the countries which have received the most Oscars for foreign-language film, and which have produced the overwhelming share of non-English-language movies distributed domestically. In other words, it’s a harmonious feedback loop of received culture and languages, and anything outside of this loop still has—in 2020—a difficult time breaking through.
This is just one of the reasons to celebrate the breakthrough that “Parasite” represents.
So, it sounds counterintuitive to argue that the serious film festival shouldn’t care about any of that. The mark of a real festival in 2020 is one that navigates the harsh realities of markets, problematic audiences and difficult sales companies, and tries to come up with something I would term “globalist.”
The term is deliberately confrontational in a political climate where the worst American instincts for nativism and isolationism—instincts that regularly resurge, based on our peculiar geography which keeps us an arm’s distance from most of the rest of the world except Latin America, a land which continues to terrify or confound most Americans—are back and raging. I’ve long been a loud critic of the Oscars and its methods, especially when it comes to movies outside our borders. But for all the astounding flaws of its nominating system—worst of all, kowtowing to numerous corrupt national “film boards” where cronyism replaces cinephilia, and passively accepting their selections, and next worst of all, limiting submissions of one movie per country—there’s no other entity in world cinema like the Academy’s international film committee that is actually so globalist in its makeup. It heightened that profile this year by replacing “foreign-language” with “international feature,” possibly a reflection of the membership’s expanding international and younger representation. (In a September statement, committee co-chairs Larry Karaszewski and Diane Weyermann said, “We have noted that the reference to ‘Foreign’ is outdated within the global filmmaking community.” Note the G-word.) Even better, the submissions field expanded to 91 titles (originally 93, until two were disqualified for the Academy’s arcane, NFL-like rules) from last year’s total of 87, including first-time entries from Uzbekistan and two from Africa, routinely the most-ignored continent, Ghana and, bizarrely enough, Nigeria, home to Africa’s largest film industry.
All of this is now retrospect, since the Academy has done for the most part it’s usual Euro-centric paring of the 91 down to five, with only the slam-dunk “Parasite” coming from outside Europe. But the submissions field is a fundamental part of why the Palm Springs Film Festival can be said to be the most globalist festival in the U.S., and only second to TIFF in North America in terms of sheer international breadth. I’ve written here before about the arguably facile way this is organized, how the festival plays in early January (it’s the year’s first festival in the world) to link it with the Oscar season, how its splashy gala which marks the official post-holiday launch of the final Oscar campaign push threatens to always overshadow the substance of the festival itself, and how—in a now-rejected format—it simply took on every submission to the committee regardless of quality.
Some, though not all, of these still apply. But it’s worth noting other things happening in Palm Springs: A rising tide of curation, cinephilia and an acceptance of what I’d call competing “globalisms.”
Good signals: Just a little over half of the field of 91 (51) were selected for the “Awards Buzz” section. This meant that curation was going on, which meant the inclusion of movies that the Academy committee would easily overlook but absolutely demand to be seen in a serious festival, including Oualid Mouaness’s Lebanese drama, “1982,” Maryam Touzani’s Moroccan “Adam,” Milko Lazarov’s “Aga,” Sophie Deraspe’s TIFF triumph “Antigone,” Kantemir Balagov’s “Beanpole,” Sebastian Borensztein’s wonderful Argentine caper “Heroic Losers,” Elia Suleiman’s tour-de-force Cannes-winning return “It Must Be Heaven,” Cesar Diaz’s Guatemalan “Our Mothers,” Hans-Petter Moland’s latest with Stellan Skarsgard “Out Stealing Horses,” Alvaro Delgado Aparicio’s strong festival circuit player “Retablo,” Nora Fingscheidt’s tense study “System Crasher,” Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s superb Filipino procedural drama “Verdict,” Corneliu Porimboiu’s transgressive lark “The Whistlers,” and Hlynur Palmason’s powerful Icelandic drama “A White, White Day.”
Despite a few overlays with AFI Festival, this selective list alone indicates that Palm Springs—in the context of Southern California film festivals–is now a far more aggressive festival-of-festivals event than AFI’s festival (of which, full disclosure, I served as program director in 2009). That’s despite AFI’s original festival-of-festivals mission it took over from the late, lamented Filmex—still, the most nuanced and richest festival-of-festivals of its kind in Southern California, and the festival and model which Toronto followed when it was born. Besides, Palm Springs screens over double the movies that AFI screens, and has far more latitude to bring in major work from the big festivals across the just-concluding calendar year.
And here’s the difference, and what’s palpably new: Palm Springs used to be all about sheer volume, a kind of blind globalism, untethered by any kind of aesthetic. You’d be able to see the latest from Reygadas, maybe, but also confronted with unspeakable garbage made by government-approved filmmaker hacks from distant countries able to get into the Oscar pile. That drag is generally gone; in its place is a far more conscious, though developing, point of view on global cinema and particularly on the rise of young women filmmakers, the thing that will most mark this moment in cinema history. 2019 will, without question, be viewed as the year that women filmmakers reached some kind of unprecedented critical mass.
This was especially true with the acutely drawn chamber piece “Adam,” Heather Young’s quietly horrifying movie from Nova Scotia; “Murmur,” Melina Leon’s brilliantly photographed (in black-and-white Academy ratio by Inti Briones) Peruvian nightmare; “Song Without A Name,” Sandra Kogut’s sneaky-good saga of Brazilian class turmoil; “Three Summers”; to say nothing of Mati Diop’s instant classic work of dream-realism “Atlantics” (more easily viewed than most on Netflix); and the previously mentioned work from Deraspe and Fingscheidt.
Along with this kind of feminist globalism were other kinds that made many unexpected connections, the sort you only experience at a film festival. On a single day, I accidentally found myself watching three movies in a row which were structured in vignette form, one of the most difficult and therefore rarest narrative structures: Runar Runarsson’s impressive Locarno award-winner “Echo,” which takes the viewer across dozens of acutely drawn mini-dramas in Reykyavik during the holidays; Suleiman’s typically droll tapestry—as always, with the near-silent Suleiman, playing a close version of himself—of life inside Palestine and outside (Paris, New York) which won Cannes’s best screenplay prize; and Roy Andersson’s strange dream piece “About Endlessness,” one of his lesser absurdist enterprises that somehow won best director in Venice. Flaws and all, this was some kind of magnificent feast, in one morning and afternoon, provided by artists taking on enormous issues (Palestinian freedom, human existence, a nation’s entire social strata) but in bite-size pieces of narrative.
You might notice something else in this: Just these three movies mentioned provided even casual Palm Springs audiences with an acute sampling of the year’s major festivals (in this case Locarno, Cannes and Venice), taken in with a little time and distance to draw thematic and formal connections that aren’t possible in the middle of the hectic fall festival season. Even though Palm Springs hasn’t caught up to AFI in terms of Locarno titles—and, given the less adventurous audience in the desert, at least as it currently exists, probably won’t anytime soon—it boat-races AFI in terms of overall coverage of significant premieres across the calendar, from Sundance to Sao Paolo and Rio. Palm Springs may likely never screen such a work of magnificent transgressive vision as Albert Serra’s “Liberte” (seen at AFI), but it made prominent room for equally important work like Pietro Marcello’s stunning, poetic Jack London adaptation “Martin Eden,” Beniamino Barrese’s extraordinary portrait from Sundance “The Disappearance of My Mother,” “Verdict” (which must surely rate as one of the festival year’s most underrated and under-discussed movies, despite its Venice special jury prize), “A White, White Day” (probably the best-of-show in Cannes’s Semaine de la Critique), as well as four from the Chinese-speaking regions of East Asia (plus another from Tibetan Pema Tseden) that deserve separate consideration.
With the inclusion of these movies Palm Springs 2020 has ramped things up to a new level of curated globalism and connections. They included Wang Xiaoshuai’s exquisite, epic melodrama, “So Long, My Son” (which won Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei unusual and extremely well-deserved shared male and female actors prizes in Berlin); Diao Yinan’s sinuous, operatically violent crime drama, “The Wild Goose Lake”—both from Mainland China; “A Sun,” Chung Mong-Hong’s family epic that expands and unfolds in breathtaking ways and swept most of the Golden Horse Awards for Taiwan; Anthony Chen more than fulfilling the promise he suggested in his Singaporean debut “Ilo Ilo” with the even more accomplished global warming-tinged love story “Wet Season,” another Golden Horse winner; and Pema Tseden—possibly the greatest Asian filmmaker that even the hardest-core of American arthouse mavens know nothing about—returning with one of his best works to date, “Balloon,” which addresses the same issue of China’s one-child policy as in Wang’s movie but from the opposite (west) end of the growing Chinese empire. Asian cinema has always had a hard time getting sufficient coverage and exposure in Palm Springs, for all of its international branding, largely because North American audiences (Palm Springs, and the surrounding Coachella Valley, is the most popular winter destination in the U.S. for Canadians, and it sometimes feels at screenings as if you’re right back at TIFF) tend to resist Asian cinema unless it’s in a familiar genre like wujia. But this year marked some kind of breakthrough, both in terms of the sheer magnificence of the movies (“The Wild Goose Lake” seems destined to become a Chinese crime classic, and the veteran Sixth Generation Wang has rarely been better) but in terms of the festival’s willingness to tackle a wide range of stylistic and thematic concerns that made this more closely resemble the kind of viewing you’d take in at the Vancouver Film Festival, a North American haven for Asian cinema.
Now, all of this doesn’t mean that Palm Springs is turning into a haven for adventurous cinema. As I’ve noted here and in previous reports, the festival’s loyal and reliable audience is at its core older, affluent, well-traveled but not willing to go too far. Suleiman? Yes. Schanelec? No. The programmers, some of whom want to test the limits, know that and know how far to go. But that isn’t really the point. The contours of the festival, expanding globally but in a curatorial sensibility, have matured and grown more nuanced, in ways that I suspect are almost invisible even to long-time regulars. Like a cactus that grows in the Coachella Valley desert, the changes from year to year can be almost undetectable. But they are there, and they suggest something promising.