Biennale Cinema
65th Venice Film Festival
Introduction by the Director of the 65th Mostra, Marco Müller
So who will take us toward new (different) territories, unlikely continents?
While they are certainly not unprecedented or surprising, at least two hints can be found in the program of the 65th Mostra.
a) If we look beyond reflexivity, negativity and historicity, some responses to the end of modernity and the “grand narratives” can perhaps be found in the worlds (in the South, to the East) where “necessary modernity” has never really arrived.
b) Even in worlds nearer to us (in the West, in the North), the passion for the new has not vanished: a “new” which is not novelty for the purposes of publicity, but creation, the sort with a signature, which has an author and so will not disappear with the fading of the latest “new” fashion. An author of the kind who can still allow him or herself the luxury of being untimely – who believes in the new but is conscious that the future is an art of transmission (and, at times, of tradition).
The (provisional) goals of our work are these.
We have reaffirmed the futility of the consecration of Art (pet subject of the festival since the end of the Thirties) and Geography (the pointless ecumenism of a festival as “atlas of the nations and the planet”). Rather, it is now a question of putting to use our knowledge of the route covered in former times in order to come up with new tracks, helping to renew the systems of mapping.
In order to put on a 65th Festival that will be pluralistic, and therefore intentionally contradictory, we could not but place the emphasis, as a glue that would hold the works together, on the intuition of the truth that is concealed in them.
Purity, uniformity and absoluteness appeared unfeasible (because unproductive), and so we have pursued authenticity through its opposite.
Quality has counted, but even more the non- coincidence of the expressive phenomena: narrative freedom; the splendor of the forms; the pleasure of the screen; the challenge to the “common sense of the real” – the continual questioning of the idea of fiction (or of non-fiction...) and of the limits of the point of view permitted to the moviegoer.
Shuffling the cards has meant: taking unexpected risks, trying out untested solutions; recapitulating the recent phases of the “new” in cinema in order to reassess them, to relocate them in the territories to which they belong (but without covering our backs with ideology).
The variety of propositions and options, models and schemes – even of genres (we have not foregone our midnight showings) – has revived the possibility of addressing very different kinds of viewers, particularly keen to explore, to reflect and to enjoy the diverse trajectories of the program. Once again this year it is questions that we must ask of them rather than providing them with answers.
As a result of these programming choices, we like to picture the “Venice International Film Festival” as a place with a richer range of individualities, which can be formed not by assimilation but by comprehension, through an active gaze and through comparison. The future of the Festival, in the shadow of the emerging new complex of movie theaters, is undoubtedly in need of it.
Marco Müller
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