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  • Festivals, Markets, Critics: Notes on the State of the Art Film
  • Daryl Chin (bio)

The New York Film Festival started in 1963; at the time, there were many in the film community who questioned the need for such a festival. Though film festivals had been a staple of European filmgoing since the 1930s, the United States didn’t really get started with film festivals until the 1960s. Now, with festivals so much a part of the very business of film, it’s hard to remember a time when festivals seemed superfluous.

During the first year of The New York Film Festival, it should be remembered that the Hollywood studios were very suspicious of the appearance of artiness; in the first year, no major studio release was represented. (The closest thing to a Hollywood movie that first year was All the Way Home, produced by David Susskind and released through Paramount Pictures; based on James Agee’s A Death in the Family, this was the type of TV-based prestige production which was looking for cachet.) There was also a thriving foreign film distribution system, with many distributors clamoring for the rights to almost every notable film made. Campus film societies were legion, hungry to show challenging fare. At that time, The New York Film Festival seemed just a little redundant. In addition, The New York Film Festival was associated with the tastes of two of the founders, Amos Vogel (who had been a pioneering film distributor and exhibitor with his Cinema 16 in the 1940s), and Richard Roud. In the early 1960s, everyone had a say, there was a great deal of contention, and no one wanted to follow the leader. So The New York Film Festival was met with cries of artiness, cultism, elitism.

Three decades later, The New York Film Festival is no longer redundant; in fact, it’s become a necessity, if New York City is to continue to be a cosmopolitan cultural center. The complications as to why the foreign film market collapsed in the United States are too numerous to go into here; suffice it to say that, in every period of film since World War II (except for the last decade), there has been an area of the world which has sparked the interest of critics and audiences in the United States. I am referring to such phenomena as the Italian Neo-Realists after World War II, Japan in the early 1950s, the Italians and the French Nouvelle Vague in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the German Neue Kino in the 1970s, Australian films in the 1980s. Right now, there are two areas of the world which have excited critics and festival audiences: Iran, and the three Chinas (the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, [End Page 61] and Taiwan), but few of these films have had commercial distribution in the United States. Even when some of these films get distribution, that distribution is severely limited, so, effectively, these films don’t exist in the American market. American films now exist in a vacuum, but it’s a warped vacuum, because American films have broken the dams of all foreign markets and have flooded the fields.

If The New York Film Festival has now passed its third decade of existence, The Toronto International Film Festival has just reached its maturity: twenty-one years. With these two festivals, the film community in New York really establishes a beachhead in September, a small advance skirmish awaiting the onslaught of the prestige blockbusters launched from Hollywood just before Christmas, just in time to establish credentials for Academy Award nominations. The decade of the 1980s saw sea changes in Hollywood, and these two festivals are seen as places to launch the fall and winter seasons. Now, it’s not uncommon to come across a junket featuring Faye Dunaway or Diane Keaton or Debra Winger or Anjelica Huston or Demi Moore, Hollywood stars who wouldn’t deign to go near a festival a few years ago. Times change, and, in taking their careers into their own hands (which, in many cases, means producing and/or directing as well as acting), these stars are just like any other...

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