Film Festivals

Marijke de Valck is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She is a well-known specialist of film festival studies and author of Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (2007). She co-founded the Film Festival Research Network and is co-editor of the book series Framing Film Festivals. Brendan Kredell is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Oakland University. His research focuses on media and urban studies, an area in which he has published widely. He received a Fulbright fellowship for his work on culture-led urban redevelopment and the Toronto International Film Festival.Skadi Loist is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Media Research of the University of Rostock. She co-founded the Film Festival Research Network and serves as member of the Steering Committee of NECS. Her research interests include film festivals, queer cinema and media industries. She has worked with the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival since 2002.

"Bringing together leading film festivals scholars, this book is a welcome and much needed addition both to the growing field of festival studies, and world cinema more generally. Festivals, no doubt, offer the most fruitful ground on which to investigate the transnational dynamic of cinema, but they are a complex phenomenon and anything but easy to study. Because they present such a dizzying convergence of numerous elements—cinephilia, tourism, art, business, geopolitics—they have escaped the traditional, rather limited frameworks in film studies. This volume brings these diverse dimensions together in a systematic method, offering productive theoretical and practical tools with which to address both the specificity of particular festivals and their embeddedness in a larger festival and cultural network."-Meta Mazaj, Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania"For any scholar interested in the part played by film festivals in the emerging study of transnational film culture this excellent collection provides a comprehensive and vital starting point."- Gareth Stanton, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London"... the present volume treats film festivals theoretically and comparatively, considering them as networked sites that negotiate cultural capital on local, national, and global scales. Contributors include many of the key researchers in the field, among them Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, author of the terrific Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen (2011). Valck includes in this skillfully edited collection essays not only on Cannes and Asian film festivals but also on “identity-based community festivals." ... this book is required reading for anyone interested in the subject."- S. C. Dillon, Bates College

• PrefaceThe Film Festival and Film Culture’s Transnational EssenceDina Iordanova IntroductionWhat is a Film Festival? How to Study Festivals and Why You ShouldMarijke de Valck Part IHistoryIntroduction Brendan Kredell1 Making Film History at the Cannes film festivalDorota Ostrowska 2 Film Festivals in Asia: Notes on History, Geography and Power from a DistanceJulian Stringer 3 The Film Festival Circuit: Networks, Hierarchies, and CirculationSkadi Loist Part IITheoryIntroduction Marijke de Valck4 Contingency, Time and Event: An Archaeological Approach to the Film FestivalJanet Harbord5 Publics and Counterpublics: Rethinking Film Festivals as Public SpheresCindy Hing-Yuk Wong 6 Fostering Art, Adding Value, Cultivating Taste: Film Festivals as Sites of Cultural LegitimizationMarijke de Valck Part IIIMethodIntroduction Skadi Loist7 Being There, Taking Place: Ethnography at the Film FestivalToby Lee 8 On Studying Film Festival Ephemera: The Case of Queer Film Festivals and Archives of FeelingsGer Zielinski 9 Positionality and Film Festival Research: A ConversationDiane Burgess and Brendan Kredell Part IVPracticeIntroduction Brendan Kredell10 Seeing Differently: The Curatorial Potential of Film Festival ProgrammingRoya Rastegar11 Affective Labor and the Work of Film Festival ProgrammingLiz Czach12 "The Festival Film": Film Festival Funds as Cultural IntermediariesTamara L. Falicov