In recent weeks, we’ve managed to finish putting together and posting programs for both Flickerings and the Imaginarium, two film-related venues for which I oversee program-planning at the annual Cornerstone Festival in Central Illinois. My Filmwell mates have given me leave to talk about these programs here, even if that makes for a bit of a commercial. But insight into the process of festival programming is one more essential thread of film culture well worth weaving into the Filmwell conversation. We’ll break this into two separate posts, since both film programs are very different from one another and so involve very different kinds of programming processes.
This will be our ninth year of Flickerings, which among other things is an annual four-day program of international and independent cinema, along with our “Film Showcase,” which screens shorts works and not-so-shorts chosen from entries. Flickerings is a small part of a huge music and arts festival, but Cornerstone Festival has been most generous with us in making room for Flickerings to be an “event-within-the-event.” We screens films in one of the only buildings on the festival grounds. On hot summer days, we try to cool things down as best we can with electric fans that vie with the sound system and tweeting birds perched in the rafters – all of which making for a truly unique motion picture experience. But let me tell you, we may screen from DVD, in a barn, with no air-conditioning, in July, but those screenings have been among the most rewarding and most fondly-remembered film experiences of my life – and I know for a fact there are others out there who feel the same way.
Cornerstone flies pretty seat-of-the-pants as such events go, and so I don’t have to finalize my program until the last minute. I’m always waiting for some new film that will give the program that perfect touch. This year, I was trying to pull together a program that — as much as I wanted it to — just wasn’t coming together: the films I needed were too recent for the distributors to let us screen them in our barn amid the cornfields. And then, just as I was turning to my Plan B, my main distributor went bankrupt. The unexpected demise of New Yorker Films was, of course, a much greater loss to American film culture than the complication it meant for my Flickerings plans; so many people have depended on this distributor of international cinema for so many years. In early March, New Yorker’s parent company defaulted on a loan in which they used the film library as collateral, which has put their incredible film library in limbo for the foreseeable future. (There were reports of an auction of the New Yorker library; I’m still waiting to hear how that went.) With just a few weeks until deadline, then, I had to create a new program from scratch — and without my most important distributor. It would have been relatively easy to grab an off-the-shelf program featuring this or that classic director from one of the medium-sized distributors — but that felt a little too haphazard. The problem here isn’t just finding films, it’s finding the right combination of films – old and new, accessible and less so, classic, unexpected — which usually involves working with several distributors over the course of months and tinkering with the result for awhile until it finally seems right.
Then I noticed that Swank had Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy, films I’ve always loved and viewed many times — and intended to screen at Flickerings eventually. (We screened that director’s entire Dekalog series for our first Flickerings program back in 2001.) As it happens, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that amazing triptych — Blue, White and Red — is among the most characteristic exemplars of what I’ve vaguely categorized in my own mind as a “post Cold War” genre. As my thoughts went in this direction now, though, I was brought up short with a sense of just how dated that notion of “post Cold War Cinema” seemed: like something from a quaint and vanished era. Those who missed it or were too young to remember the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War may not adequately grasp what a significant, singular moment in time that was. It was like September 11th, but in reverse: a monumental joy, a release of several generations’ worth of pent-up hope. “Twas bliss to be alive and to be young was very heaven” — at least that’s how I remember the moment. And that’s how it sounds to me even now, listening to a pair of musical recordings produced immediately afterward, Leonard Bernstein’s “Ode to Joy” at the newly-opened Brandenburg Gate and Yo Yo Ma on the rapturous Dvorak in Prague. The “Three Colors” trilogy isn’t necessarily a cinematic explosion of joy, but the context from which the films emerge certainly is one of tremendous, if cautious, hope.
For a veteran director who’d spent his career under Polish Communism, the films represented a breathtaking late-career burst of creativity — a burst that turned out to be the grand finale for Kieslowski, who died shortly afterward. The films speak on many levels, but one of the most deeply-felt has to do with a consideration of Europe’s most cherished values in the light of the promising new era. No doubt for many that promise had to do with the fulfillment of ancient dreams of an Ideal Europe that were already outdated. The globalized, digitized Europe of the 21st century already seems an inter-dimensional jump into a reality that would have been very difficult to imagine in the early 1990s. Indeed, the New New Europe now rising is being shaped by forces so overwhelming that they make it seem like the end of the Cold War was but part of a larger realignment of the world which is now transforming “the West” (including a New New World) at light speed. And yet a consideration of European values in the light of new realities, new kinds of “unification,” seems more important than ever.
Therefore, in 2009, Flickerings will be most pleased to revisit Kieslowski’s marvelous “Post Cold War” trilogy — but as one track in a program which also features several recent films that engage both the European continent and idea on this far side of the fallen Wall. In This World is a sort of “neo neorealist” look at Westward migrations, here through the eyes of young Afghans. The Edge of Heaven captures the entwinement of Turkey with a Germany only recently reunited with itself. The Class is last year’s Cannes winner, a story of non-white immigrant students contending with a white European establishment. And The Visitor brings the great transformation to America, as a lonely college professor is drawn into the lives of illegal immigrants, and is himself transformed. Taken together, the Three Colors, with all the additional colors these other films contribute, should create spectacular viewing and discussion experiences.
Meanwhile, Flickerings 2009 will present an additional track of films which may not seem to have any immediately apparent resonance with the above parallel tracks (though, as always, we may discover some unexpected connections in the experience of watching them all together.) Actually, the first film I booked for this year’s program was Carlos Reygadas’ glorious, expansive-yet-intimate, Silent Light, and two other films seemed to demand a place with that film in a series. I’m very excited about watching Carl Dreyer’s classic Ordet in close proximity with Silent Light, a pairing that promises to enrich the experience of both films. And the much-beloved Babette’s Feast seemed an appropriate conclusion to an informal trilogy that features similar settings, spirit, and concerns.
Next week: Programming Imaginarium 2009