Introduction: non-theatrical film festivals

Abstract

The idea for this publication stemmed from the Reframing Film Festivals conference that the curators of this special issue organised in Venice in February 2020, which was conceived to foster research engagement with the histories of film festivals and their relationship with film historiography and canons. During this two-day event, among the contributions dedicated to the micro-histories of a variety of festivals based in Central and Eastern Europe, South America and South-East Asia, several artists, curators, archivists and historians from France, Austria, Italy, Chile and Spain presented research focused on non-theatrical cultures and related festivals. This strand of research ranged from historical analysis of international competitions for amateur filmmakers to theorisations of the festivals dedicated to analog video art and time-based art, from the study of the historical developments of national non-fiction festivals to the mapping of ethnographic film festival circuits. Hence, in this special issue dedicated to non-theatrical film festivals, readers will find a combination of voices representing film cultures that have been developing outside of movie theatres and away from the logics of theatrical distribution, as the title implies. The common denominator of these essays is their spatial focus on film festivals, understood as ‘sites of passage’ (de Valck 2007, 36) where it is possible to explore and historicise the particular modes of circulation, exhibition practices and promotion strategies associated with ethnographic, amateur, documentary and experimental cinemas. So, the overall purpose of this collection is to understand how certain sub-circuits of festivals have operated and taken shape in the European context, and how they have informed cultural hierarchies, canons, and histories of cinema. In examining a variety of local, national, and international cases, the essays engage with some of the core ideas related to the study of film festivals, including matters of programming, networks and sub-networks, audiences and award ceremonies, access to and curation of their historical archives, and their historical connections with local communities and specific cultural fields. Tackling these and other research topics, the authors provide reflections on how festivals influence the production and circulation of amateur, experimental, and ethnographic films. Thus, this collection draws a set of viable methodological and conceptual paths to frame and analyse the relationship between festivals and developments in film historiographies, while also interrogating a wide range of topics related to film festival studies and non-theatrical film cultures. Following the 1999 Orphan Film Symposium and through a Film History special issue curated by Streible, Roepke, and Mebold (2007), the category of non-theatrical cinema has been primarily adopted in Anglophone film scholarship to describe and historicise amateur and professional small-gauge films experienced in non-theatrical settings. More recently, the term ‘non-theatrical’ has gained currency in film and media scholarship to define several practices surrounding digital access to films (Aveyard 2016; Brown 2016), STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA 2022, VOL. 19, NO. 3, 187–190 https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2022.2119346