Kenneth Turan,
Sundance to Sarajevo: Films Festivals and the World they Made.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0 520 21867 1
192pp
US$35.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

At this year’s Melbourne international film festival, I brought along a film critic from the Los Angeles Times for company. Between screenings, I had Kenneth Turan regale me with tales of film festivals in exotic locations like the French Riviera, the North American ski fields, the island of Cuba or the land of the midnight sun (Finland). But before I could indulge in self-pity at the thought of yet another queue in the unforgiving elements of Melbourne’s winter, I also learnt of the incredible circumstances surrounding the Sarajevo film festival, which was first held in the midst of war, and the poverty of Burkina Faso, home of FESPACO (Festival Panafricaine du Cinéma de Ouagadougou), which provides a rare opportunity for Africans to see their own films. While the phenomenon of the film festival has extended worldwide (the number of festivals held annually exceeds four hundred), the particular character of each festival reflects something of its host culture. As Turan’s book Sundance to Sarajevo demonstrates, each film festival contributes something different to our understanding of film as art, as commerce, and as politics.

As a critic with more than thirty years’ experience (having attended his first Cannes festival in 1971), Turan offers an insider’s view of the machinations of film festivals and a reporter’s privileged access to the people who make these festivals happen: politicians, festival programmers, jurors, other journalists, and filmmakers. His writing here is an extension of his newspaper craft, and indeed “many of these pieces” (ix) appeared in earlier versions in the Los Angeles Times (although Turan’s acknowledgments do not specify which ones). Presenting a case-study approach to the phenomenon of film festivals, Turan dedicates individual chapters to twelve festivals, following a brief overview of film festival culture by way of introduction. The book is divided into four sections that identify the book’s major themes and form a conceptual map of film festivals.

Part one is devoted to “festivals with business agendas”: Cannes, Sundance and ShoWest, the annual industry convention between studios and exhibitors. Part two covers “festivals with geopolitical agendas” (FESPACO, Havana, Sarajevo, Midnight Sun) while part three is dedicated to Pordenone, Lone Pine and Telluride, “festivals with aesthetic agendas”. A concluding part four – “the politics of festivals” – covers the now-extinct Florida French film festival, which has relocated to Acapulco, and Turan’s experience as a juror at the twentieth Montreal film festival.

In his introduction, Turan briefly explains his selection of these twelve festivals:

Some, like Cannes and Sundance, were obvious choices: besides the fact that I’ve been going to them for a decade and more, you can’t hope to understand why and how festivals function without considering the ins and outs of the biggest, brashest, and most influential of the bunch.

The other festivals investigated were not random selections. The ones I’ve focused on not only show films, but they also serve as picture windows onto a wider, more diverse world and cinema’s place in it. (8-9)

In Turan’s elucidation of these “other festivals”, Sundance to Sarajevo offers a contextualised reading of festivals that goes beyond the cinematic. By placing these festivals within their sociopolitical contexts, in addition to the usual considerations of art and commerce, Turan has produced a work with greater resonance and impact than your typical festival guidebook.

The strongest section is “Part two: festivals with geopolitical agendas”. Here, Turan has gathered moving testimonies from people who attended the first Sarajevo film festival in the midst of relentless shelling and sniper attacks. As festival organiser Haris Pasovic explains:

You don’t have to have everything fine to want to see movies […] You see them because you want to connect, to communicate from your position on the other side of the moon, to check whether you still belong to the same reality as the rest of the world. The favourite question of journalists during my festival was “Why a film festival during the war?” My answer was “Why the war during a film festival?” It was the siege that was unusual, not the festival. (104-5)

The political dimensions of cinema are also demonstrated in this chapter by the bitter responses to Emir Kusturica’s Underground (France/Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1995), an expression of “Yugonostalgia” (101) that some in Sarajevo viewed as tantamount to supporting Serbian aggression. Many were also critical of Kusturica’s decision to leave Sarajevo during the war, rather than stay behind to bear witness. Politics aside, what struck me about this particular chapter was the insight Turan gives to the importance of the cinema in preserving a shred of dignity for these people during a time of war: to them, going to the cinema gives a sense of what it means to be human. The movies become much more than “just entertainment” when people are willing to risk their lives to attend a screening of Basic instinct (USA, 1992).

In part two’s chapters on FESPACO and the Havana film festival, Turan interviews politicians as well as filmmakers, demonstrating the importance of these events to the countries’ leaders and of cinema to a sense of national identity. Profiled in the same part as FESPACO is Finland’s Midnight Sun festival. At these two radically different events – one held during the heat of the day, the other during 24-hour daylight – the cinema becomes a site of refuge from the unrelenting sun. Given part two’s discussion of festivals in their geopolitical context, the Midnight Sun festival seems a comparatively light-hearted event and somewhat out of place alongside FESPACO, Sarajevo and Havana. Perhaps the founders of the festival, the Kaurismäki brothers, would have felt more at home in “Part three: festivals with aesthetic agendas”, if only because their festival – with its many in-person tributes to filmmakers such as Michael Powell, Claude Chabrol, Stanley Donen and Wim Wenders – seems more interested in celebrating film as an international art than in aligning the festival with political concerns.

Part three’s coverage of festivals with aesthetic agendas provides an important counter-balance to “the big three” of Cannes, Sundance and ShoWest profiled in part one. While business concerns are steadily encroaching on the fierce independence of the Telluride festival, the Pordenone and Lone Pine festivals remain steadfastly idiosyncratic in their dedication to the art of the silent film and the Hollywood western, respectively. Without the commercial pressures of new films seeking buyers or jury prizes, these festivals can focus on the art of old material being revived and rediscovered each year.

The weakest chapter in the book is Turan’s discussion of the Cannes film festival. This chapter reads as a collection of impressions and anecdotes, with a brief history of the festival’s origins, rather than in-depth analysis. Its position as the first chapter suggests it is intended more as a “warm up” for the extended analyses that follow. No doubt Turan is aware of the significant number of works already dedicated to profiling Cannes, and indeed he acknowledges Cari Beauchamp and Henri Behar’s Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1992) (19). Apart from some pointed remarks about the selection of films for competition and his bemusement at the decisions of some past juries, Turan merely provides an overview of the Cannes phenomenon, which tends to consolidate rather than debunk many of the myths about this most high-profile and glamorous of festivals. In this sense, he fails to meet the goal he set in his introduction, to help us understand how festivals function by “considering the ins and outs of the biggest, brashest, and most influential of the bunch” (9). Turan’s chapter on Cannes provides entertainment, rather than understanding.

Turan is more successful in achieving his stated goal in the chapter on Sundance, where he engages in an extended critique of the festival’s tendency to select films for competition that leave the audience behind in their pursuit of ‘art’. Once again, Sundance is a festival extensively profiled elsewhere, but here at least Turan seems willing to make a contribution to the Sundance discourse in his criticisms of the poor commercial prospects of the competition films. The stand-out chapter in part one is Turan’s essay on ShoWest. ShoWest provides a contrast to Cannes and Sundance in that it is unashamedly about commerce and does not try to hide this behind the rhetoric of art and independent cinema. A convention rather than a festival in the strictest sense, ShoWest is the annual meeting of studios and exhibitors, where studios send their brightest stars to convince exhibitors to buy their films, and confectionary manufacturers showcase the latest in concession stand technology. The convention may seem a frivolous junket but it has very real economic consequences, and it is a ‘festival’ that few members of the public get to see. This chapter provides just the kind of privileged insight into a festival’s machinations that I felt was lacking in the Cannes and Sundance chapters. Similarly, I found the two chapters in part four (profiling the Florida French and Montreal festivals) disappointingly light reading when compared with the detailed discussions of parts two and three. The book would have benefited from a conclusion where Turan might draw together some of the issues running throughout the work and make some predictions about the fate of festivals in the future.

For a book published by an academic press, I was surprised to find no reference notes for sources of factual information or quotations, which one assumes are taken from Turan’s interviews over the years. Indeed, some quotations in the text are not even attributed. There is also no index and some glaring errors, such as the repeated misspelling of Martin Scorsese’s surname as ‘Scorcese’ (17). The lack of reference notes reflects Turan’s genre of writing: extended reportage, rather than scholarly analysis. At times the work verges on travel writing, as Turan becomes a quasi-tour guide, providing as much information about the countries and their cultures as the festivals themselves. For me, this was one of the surprising pleasures of the book, as it led me to consider the place of cinema in different cultures. For someone who frequently encounters scepticism about the study of cinema as a legitimate profession, Turan’s book demonstrates the imperative of conceiving cinema – and the festivals that celebrate it – as fundamental to questions of nationhood and humanity. Sundance to Sarajevo illustrates the many ways in which movies are so much more than ‘just entertainment’.

Fincina Hopgood
Melbourne University, Australia.
Created on: Friday, 30 April 2004 | Last Updated: 28-Apr-04