by Gianni Canova
A dull, self-obsessed murmur of voices, uninterrupted chatter, amid the all pervasive, inconclusive media hype of endless sound bites. For much of the 1990s, attendees at Europe’s first tier festivals (Cannes and Venice above all, but Berlin had its moments, too) came home with a strange sensation: of having wandered fruitlessly through the corridors of a sterile environment which housed the machinery of self-aggrandisement. Yes, there were one or two movies that stirred the memory, breaking through the fog like remote islands (Tarantino or Lynch at Cannes, Manchewski or Kim Ki-duk at Venice), but these were rather the exception than the rule. Movies were not (and are not) the focus for attention at the major festivals; their core business is the effective exploitation of the cinema and of movies to promote themselves as the indispensable promotional tools for the cinema and for movies. Now, if that last sentence seemed convoluted and tautological, the effect was of course intended. It is as if the prophetic words of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, on his return from his last Cannes festival (in 1982...), had come true: the fact is that festivals are now chasing their own tails, attempting to allay their fears about the onset of obsolescence by an-ongoing facelift of their corporate image. At festivals, you don’t see movies (“go to Cannes and not see a single film”, wrote the far-sighted Fassbinder in Filme befreien den Kopf – “Films Free the Mind” – ed. Michael Töteberg, Frankfurt/Main, Fischer, 1992), what you see is the Great Communication Machine in top gear: on the Croisette, along the Lido between the Hotel Excelsior and the old Casino, Communication is the name of the game, swallowing up ethics, aesthetics, anything and everything in its path. Including the cinema.
Not Locarno, however. Locarno is the exception that proves the rule, trend-proof and free from the invasion of idle chatter. From 1992 onwards, as the world seemed to implode into a sort of horror vacui which found its own breaking point on 9/11/2001, with the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Locarno became the preferred place for films that – in the words of Marco Müller, the Festival’s director from 1992 to 2000 – provided “a way of thinking about the world”. It makes little difference, for our purposes, whether Locarno took on that role consciously, or just as the result of a series of coincidences; what matters is that it was precisely images of the world which festival-goers took home from Locarno in the 1990s, and have continued to do so in the early years of the third millennium, under its new director Irene Bignardi. World-images, or worlds filtered, decanted and concealed in (and behind, above, beneath) the images.
What stays with you after Locarno is not one film, but the cinema. And all the images that go with it: alive, abrasive, pulsating. Absolutely not “for promotional purposes”. Impervious to any attempt at marketing. Non tele-degradable. Non dissoluble – in other words – in talk show gossip. Throughout the 1990s, as Communication took over the world (a process documented by Mario Perniola in his latest book – Contro la comunicazione, Turin, Einaudi, 2004) and Reality did its best to live up to the models set by The Matrix (1999) or The Truman Show (1998), Locarno had the strength and the courage to strike out in the opposite direction, to continue to be a street festival in a real city, with thousands of paying customers every night. The exact opposite of the circus that comes to the ghost town of the Venice Lido, and a world away from the grotesque fun fair which sets up in a little French provincial town in the month of May, where the garish carnival dress of the gala evenings is laid bare in daylight by the pitiless Mediterranean sun.
Looking back, how does one judge the productiveness of a film festival? By the amount of press cuttings or television appearances produced? The latter would appear to be the current parameter at both Cannes and Venice. By the number of stars and starlets attracted by the magnet of the big screen event? Or rather by the quality of the relationships that it has managed to put forward, encourage and spark off? Throughout his nine years at Locarno, Marco Müller constantly laid stress on the need for a festival to “make visible the affections between subjects and objects”. In other words, for it to show not so much and not only films, but also all the loves and desires which lie between gaze and screen, which are the very substance of the cinema – or what’s left of it. Make visible the affections between the observer and the observed. Between the first observers (the filmmakers) and the present observers (the spectators). Between the observer from inside the frame and the observer – from outside – towards the frame. As Müller wrote in his various introductions to the Festival catalogue, this is the only way to escape from the concept and practice whereby festivals are reduced to the status of “machines for the mass production of premieres”. The only way to avoid the mannerisms and academic foibles of an approach which turns a festival into an exercise of taste or style, or a showcase of relative strengths in the marketplace (and the world beyond...). Again as Müller put it in his introduction to the 1993 catalogue: “In the current state of affairs, the cinema is the only thing we can rely on to set a horizon among the images of the present, so as not to give up and drift with the continuous (and thus non-differentiated) flow of images and communication”.
Thus, during the final decade of the last century, Locarno established and gradually reinforced its identity, seeking out films that always needed an audience to be “completed”. This involved a preference for the other rather than the new, rediscovering geography at the roots of history, placing archaeology as the foundation for any possible historiography. It also meant celebrating differences rather than identities, contradictions in place of coherence, the contamination between techniques, styles and languages, rather than a determined defence of the presumed purity and uniformity  of a single concept of film. And so, when the Festival altered its competition rules in 1996, removing the previous restriction to “first or second films” or “emerging film movements” and allowing instead all entries admissible under the definition of “new cinema”, Locarno really did become a seismograph for new audiovisual shapes and forms, opening up increasingly to video as well as film. Each year it recorded a film and video landscape marked by constant shifts, shaken by the unpredictable groundswell of innovation, altered by the convergence of historic film form and its current or potential mutations.
Looking back at the prize winners of the past 10 to 15 years at the Festival, what is significant is not so much the titles or the names of individual filmmakers, as the new geopolitical scenario which emerges from them. The countries of Arab North Africa (with Rachid Bouchareb and Nacer Khemir) scored successes, as did films from the former Soviet Socialist Republics, such as Kazakhstan and Georgia, but so did post-communist China and post-Khomeini Iran, Hong Kong and Australia, Argentina and Korea, Mozambique and Kirghizstan, not to mention the stateless cinema of Tony Gatlif (laureled in 1997 for Gadjo Dilo) or the experimental, risk-laden and surprising filmmaking of the Brothers Quay (prize winners in 1995 for The Institute Benjamenta).
The overall picture thus presented was unprecedented. It was utterly different from the ceremonious, hidebound auteur filmmaking wheeled out at Cannes and Venice, media events determined always and by whatever means to secure the services of the familiar faces on the festival circuit. By virtue of its focus on the other, Locarno often came across the new: before Venice and before Cannes. So much so, indeed, that when she took over as Festival director in 2001, Irene Bignardi could not avoid noting how the lifeblood of the “Locarno style” was now being openly sucked by tired, anaemic festivals, vampires that preyed on the excitement generated elsewhere to revitalise themselves: just how many filmmakers and film movements were being “discovered” in Venice or Cannes after Locarno had had the necessary courage and farsightedness to invest in their future, when they were still genuine outsiders? But perhaps we should repeat at this point that these are anyway not the proper criteria by which to judge the work done by a festival.
One undeniable achievement of Locarno is that it has established a truly global reach, from its own very particular location in Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Canton Ticino. As Irene Bignardi rightly pointed out, in her introduction to the 2002 Festival, it has created “in a world which at times seems to have lost its mind, a network of friendship, solidarity, mutual understanding and discovery of the “other”, which links together Americans and Afghans, Iranians and Palestinians...”. As we entered the new century, with retrospectives dedicated to the Indian Summer and tributes to the Kabul film archive, Locarno continued to be a non-standardised, open-format festival, capable of hosting short and very short subjects alongside full-length or even series-length features, of blending fiction works that linger in the genre tradition and film-diaries, film-memories or film-autobiographies, of finding space for the video art of Shirin Neshat and the new aesthetics of digital. Entirely logical in its deliberate contradictions. Surprising by its very ability to be predictable. Unwavering in its curiosity for everything not already recorded, established or canonised. No wonder, therefore, that the list of filmmakers who arrived in Europe and the world via Locarno should include names such as Richard Linklater and Gurinder Chadha, Michel Khleifi and Clara Law, Aktan Abdykalykov and Fruit Chan, Wong Kar-wai and Charles Burnett, Naomi Kawase and Park Kwang-su (to name but a few). In keeping with the “subdued but undomesticated schizophrenia” put forward by Müller as early as 1996, the Locarno Festival allows its visitors to breathe a different atmosphere. It generates constant short circuits of the emotions (but also of vision, perception, rhythm and languages), with the aim of striking the spark that may set alight those affections referred to above, between people who observe and people who exist – and offer themselves to the world – to be observed.