XV TURIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Turin(Italy) november 14-22 1997

INTRODUCTION TO 1997 EDITION

Edgar Reitz maintains that the spread of multiplex movie theaters has had the effect of turning spectators into consumers in a rapid and irreversible way. (As usual, Italy is at the tail end of this, but is quickly making up for lost time.) So, the movie-goers are not being turned into pods (as in Don Siegel's film), but into kernels, i.e. popcorn-eaters. The fact is that the multiplex movie theaters do not live off of the sales of film tickets as happens in conventional movie theaters, but they make their profits off of the sales of drinks and popcorn. Therefore the films must necessarily address audiences composed of popcorn eaters. The run of each film must get shorter and shorter, and finally be done away with altogether. The conclusion we come to is the paradox that a film can no longer be screened -- even in a movie theater with a capacity crowd -- if it is meant for non-popcorn-eaters.
Yet, the spread of multiplex movie theaters has had positive effects. It has helped reaffirm the idea that film viewing is a social event, It has reversed the tendency towards isolation caused by the electronic media and has rendered it obsolete. It has returned the consumption of images to the public sphere. Nevertheless, all these benefits of multiplex theaters have been wiped out by their negative effects. They have reduced film entirely to its aspect as a ware, and incorporated film into a syllogism whose conclusion is that a director's work has no more dignity than the popcorn sold in the lobby.
This is the reason, as Reitz maintains, that festivals represent the last bulwark of film culture, the last line of defense against the total turning of film into a consumer item. Festivals are the last places that safeguard the unique and distinctive quality of each film. They contrast with big department stores, where the items are found piled up on the shelves according to a purely seasonal principle of selection. The future of directors' cinema is, hence, linked to the ability to extend and reproduce the cultural environment that festivals bring along. Cinema's future depends on the chances of inventing new forms of festivals that may have to give up the limitations of "the great isolated event" --isolated in time and space. Instead, festivals may have to produce a series of continuous events and be transformed into sorts of permanent and widespread festivals. You cannot define the tasks and goals -- in a word, the ambitions -- of a film exposition better than this. You cannot impose any more burdens and responsibilities than these.
The Turin Film Festival is aware both of its own limitations and of the problematic perspectives within which it is called on to act. Yet it is keeping its annual appointment -- this year its fifteenth -- by offering a program that is varied yet divided into neat sections. There are three competitions that animate the program. Rather, it is better to say four, to include the Turin Space competition within its extended program , an interesting showcase of local talent, fruitful in the various directions it takes and in the small but not insignificant "discoveries" it reveals. All the competitions of the "Young Cinema Festival" are less and less "young" in the demographic sense, yet younger and younger in the sense that they show their true calling -- to explore the dynamics and the tendencies of the "new cinema" in the broad sense of the word.
The two sections, Non-Competing Films and European Perspectives, are to a certain extent rather speculative in the guidelines they follow and thus offer us a chance to see directors and works that diverge from the Festival format. These include the short films offered by the copy fund created by the European Film Festival Clearinghouse as well as the short reflections on the future that have been brought together productively under the heading Locarno demi-siècle. These sections will serve to widen our own horizons, enrich the panorama of festival offerings, and advance our work investigating new things happening in film.
This year's thematic study is dedicated to "American Independent Cinema." This is a term that people keep on using for the sake of convenience and out of inertia in an effort to put a name on that territory that is anything but uniform and monolithic. This special program's critical guidelines have been drawn with rigorous finesse by Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan. This section should give us the chance to check out this phenomenon's latest developments and newest talents.
The last few editions of the Festival have been developing another fine line of study -- the "personals" on contemporary directors who are little or only partially known in Italy and the distribution of whose works suffer the same fate here. They are figures on the side only in relation to mainstream cinema. Indeed, they have made extremely personal and original contributions to the definition of that idea of modern cinema that guides all our choices; and so, we must take them on periodically and systematically. This year we take on Robert Kramer. There cannot be a more anomalous filmmaker than him -- from the point of view, we mean to say, of the fruitful and multifaceted contradictions that run through his inexhaustible searchings. And we take on Arturo Ripstein, It is unbelievable that he has been almost completely ignored by Italian critics and audiences alike, with the possible exception of his last film, which was distributed here thanks to the award it won at the Venice Film Festival. He has been active for more than thirty years and figures among the greats of Latin American cinema at this end the century.
This year we have not failed to offer a wide retrospective dedicated to a national cinema. In our own past history, we have already paid a series of critical second visits to the nouvelles vagues of the 1960's. These retrospectives, and the publications that go along with them, make up a formidable corpus of solid critical inquiry. We are now taking a different tack on a voyage that is much more demanding in time, meant to travel through about thirty years of classical Mexican cinema. This is a national cinema that has been mostly ignored, or, at best, only partially appreciated. It is a virtual mine of discoveries where the movie-goer can find things surprising, lush, and extremely entertaining.
Although it often shows a cockeyed tendency to imitate the aesthetics and mythology of Hollywood films of the same years, it is rich in its varied genres and characters whose personalities are marked by strong national traits.
Lastly, the Proposals make up a section that is by definition heterogeneous. This section serves as a kind of holding pen whose job is to hold things that come in many shapes and defy labelling according to any one format or standard. The Proposals open a window onto the discontinuity of the various experiences that mark the most "external" -- though not necessarily the most "extreme" -- borders of audiovisual production, above all in Italy.
We wish you not only to enjoy the films, but to find stimuli and guidance. These are qualities that go beyond the values that are shot on screen, beyond the fullness of the results achieved by this or that director, and beyond the more or the less happy outcomes of each single work -- because if we are expecting to see just masterpieces, there would be no festivals

Alberto Barbera
Director of th 15th Turin International Film Festival