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Film festivals have changed hugely since the first festival, Venice, opened in August 1932 with a screening of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The biggest, such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance, and Toronto, function variously as global film marketplaces, the chance for a ‘first look’ at new releases before they make it to theaters, and for audience engagement beyond the screen, with personal appearances by film-makers and stars. In the film journal Projections, Gus Van Sant recalls a memorable encounter with Derek Jarman at the Berlin Film Festival and, in The Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint, Chris Jones provides a how-to guide to launching your film on a global stage.
The 21st century has witnessed an ever-increasing multiplicity of festivals: local and regional, genre or identity based, even digital festivals. Film festivals can provide an opportunity for audiences to engage with films in a very different way to a standard cinematic experience – explored by Lesley-Ann Dickson in her case study of programming and exhibition practices at the Glasgow Film Festival, and Rosana Vivar in her research with fan communities at the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival. Geli Madelmi surveys the emergence of online festival platforms that enable the viewer to program their own personal film festival from amongst thousands of new releases.
Stanley Kubrick's impact on cinema goes far beyond the fourteen films he directed though, each meticulously-executed artwork, from his early non-fiction short The Day of the Fight (1953) to his late masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut (1999), is testament to his holistic, perfectionist approach to film-making. In one of our new overview articles, Maria Pramagiorre dubs Kubrick’s oeuvre ‘a cinema of failure’: his anti-heroes, despite inhabiting hyper-masculine milieus, embodying a troubled masculinity beset by anxiety and weakness.
In his study of Kubrick’s ‘Total Cinema’, Philip Kuberski describes how the director, who in his early career had worked as a photographer, used both natural and artificial light ‘as a means of illumination’, to create visual effect and impart meaning. In addition to their formal innovations, Kubrick’s films reached beyond the conventions of genre. In ‘The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick’, Norman Kagan explores how Kubrick consistently tested genre boundaries, whether in the science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or the claustrophobic horror The Shining (1980). Discussing Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick’s foray into period drama, Ryan Gilbey argues that, by avoiding “the fusty clichés of tour-guide film-making”, Kubrick achieves an emotional authenticity that allows contemporary audiences to connect with its 18th century characters.
