As part of Minikino’s Hybrid Internship for Film Festival Writers program, I got to attend sessions with guest speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds related to the short film industry and the larger international festival circuit. The following article draws from one such session with Gregory Coutaut, who writes for Le Polyester—a French-language film website which publishes interviews and coverage of film festivals. During our session, we talked about subjectivity in art, the economics of dubbing, and the importance of writing in one’s native language.
One question that I had always meant to answer by applying to this program was my role as a writer. What exactly am I accomplishing by writing about films, short films, film festivals, and the film industry? For Gregory and Le Polyester, who are sometimes the only French-language media present in film events, the answer is clear. They are writing in French to ensure that there exists a diversity of opinion in film media, because the vast majority of articles about the topic are published in English from an Anglophone perspective. Departing from this thought, I interrogated my own approach as an Indonesian who prefers to write in English, and found that there are four approaches to writing about film that I have engaged in.
Writing Film Reviews and Analyses
First, there is the film reviewer; people like Roger Ebert and David Ehrlich who generally write for newspapers. The subject of their writing are often commercial feature films, and they mostly write their articles to be helpful for the film audience as consumers—namely, in helping them determine which films they might like and want to buy a ticket for. The form of their writing therefore largely followed the function; lists of a film’s positive and negative qualities, perhaps with a star rating attached. This is appropriate for helping the reader navigate the box office, commercial feature films will always find an audience thanks to large scale studio advertising, but feels wildly inappropriate for arthouse and short films, which often lacks the marketing firepower of commercial films.
Second, there is the analyst writer, people who write about films as a vehicle for ideas. I used to count myself as a member of this group. My main interest in writing about films is decoding the “text” (as we call it in my university’s English Department). “Princess Mononoke” (1997, Hayao Miyazaki) is definitely a film about the environment, and so when I write about it, I will talk about the Shinto influences on the screenplay, or Miyazaki’s sense of personal ethics.
I still find this to be the most interesting part of writing about films, but my understanding of what can be worth analysing has definitely expanded. For instance, the context in which films are produced and distributed are also interesting exercises in cultural expression. They are complex, thought-provoking, and certainly worthy of being considered and written about.
Earlier in the program I got to talk to Aditya Assarat about his efforts to fund film production at Purin Pictures. My main takeaway from that session is that producers hold major influence in shaping the stories we get to see on the big screen, perhaps more than the screenwriters and directors. They can promote certain genres and cultural backgrounds and provide platforms for artists who might otherwise not be able to fund their vision—plus they might also be creatively involved as well! I was used to thinking about producers as artless businessmen (perhaps due to my previous focus on commercial feature films), but they are certainly more interesting than mere suits in a c-suite.
Similarly, film festivals are also their own medium. They can have identities and represent unique, interesting ideas. There is for instance, the Tampere Film Festival, which prints its promotional materials without the year attached so they can be reused next year. Riina Mikkonen, executive director and programmer at Tampere Film Festival, shared in one of the sessions about how having a visible sustainability initiative at Tampere got the festival attendees to think and talk about how they can make their lives more sustainable. Certainly, film festivals also provoke dialogue and have their own unique sense of identities. Just like films.
Short Films as a Unique Medium
Third is the film critic—which are noticeably different from film reviewers. I’ve always wanted to be like Varda, Truffaut, and Rohmer—the people who wrote about films as an artform and laid out the theoretical groundwork for how we talk about film. “Auteur theory”, “cinéma vérité”—lots of big, important ideas that first made their debut as essays in the Cahiers du Cinéma journal before being put into practice through French New Wave films. These are writers who really love cinema and write about their belief that it should be placed on the same pedestal as drama and literature (less wild of an idea now than then). Perhaps Gregory Coutaut was too humble to admit it, but that’s part of why his presence as the only French-speaking film writer in a lot of festivals gets noticed. People care about the opinions of the community which gave birth to ideas like “auteurism” and the “death of the author”.
There is one way in which I have found myself to be like those idols of mine. It is when I write about the different forms of cinema which exist. For instance, the short film. It has a different economic model to commercial and arthouse feature films. Its shorter duration means it is often shown in programs, and this opens up new possibilities for the meaning of creation. When you watch four or five short films as one whole, the way each film overlaps and differs creates little delights for your brain to pick up. Maybe one film uses darkness and out-of-sync audio to convey loneliness, and the next film uses the same techniques to convey confusion instead. Because you saw these scenes one after another, you are even more likely to notice the intent behind their craft and appreciate it.
If the struggle of those French New Wave era critics was in ensuring that “cinema” as a whole is taken seriously as an artform, then our struggle as twenty-first century film critics is in ensuring that said artform’s diversity is properly recognised and appreciated. There is often a sentiment that short films are merely playgrounds for filmmakers to hone their craft before tackling more ambitious, feature-length projects. This misconception has obviously been banished in other artforms—authors are often celebrated for their short stories as much as they are applauded for their novels, and nobody would seriously argue that a single is just a musician’s practice for an album. Proper recognition for short films as an artform already exists in short film festivals and among certain parts of the industry. As writers, it is our job to ensure the spread of these ideas and the development of an appreciative vocabulary.
The Festival Writer and the Act of Pointing
I believe almost everyone has experienced the desire to do “show and tell”. Perhaps it’s an interesting-shaped cloud which prompted you to point at the sky and say, “look!” Or perhaps it’s a really interesting book that you want to bring up in conversations. Inevitably, these interactions will invite follow up questions from the people around you. “So, what do you like about it? What makes it so interesting?”
Gregory Coutaut said writing about films is a bit like translation. When you do it, you are trying to translate the ideas and emotions you get from one language and explain it in another. For instance, you might try to capture the joy of watching a short film program in an 800-word article. You convey everything which makes it so interesting; the meanings contained, the emotions evoked, and perhaps the importance thereof. It will always be imperfect because like translations, no article can ever replace the actual experience, but that is not to say that it cannot be valuable or powerful. He also compared this activity to short film programming—which is also about presenting works which you found interesting in a way which is conducive to their appreciation.
For now that is the approach which I found to be meaningful—to see myself as a translator and my writings as acts of translation. One that bridges the cineaste’s world with the audience’s world, one which renders the experience of a film festival accessible to someone who will read the article from far away or in the future, and one who will help the reader gain just a little more understanding of artistic expressions made in another medium.
editor: Fransiska Prihadi
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