1 - Film Festivals, Paratextual Networks, and the Mediated Auteur Life Cycle

Summary

Abstract: Approaching the film festival as a mediated archive site and one of the key sources of global cinematic discourses on film authorship, this chapter explores paratexts generated by film festivals along with associated media outlets, professionals, and cinephilic networks. Each has engaged in the knowledge production of auteur culture in the last two decades. From film profiles, festival reviews, programme weblogs, and commissioned anniversary videos to visitor tweets, festival-related paratexts open up conversations on the becoming of auteurs while also revealing multiple authorial agents crisscrossing in paratextual productions and citations. Drawing on connections between the International Film Festival Rotterdam and Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a starting point, the chapter reflects on authorship in relation to cultural consecration and digital memorialization.

Keywords: film festival, digital archive, participatory culture, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Film festivals and associated models of cultural events and competitions have long been key sites fostering the global careers of, and international support for, East Asian filmmakers. In the foreword to the edited collection Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method and Practice, Dina Iordanova provides an anecdote that resonates with the stories of many generations of East Asian directors who have been able to continue making films through recognition and support outside their countries of origin. Back in 1937, Rattana Pestonji – known in Thailand today as the father of Thai cinema – had just graduated with an engineering degree in London. Prior to returning to Bangkok, he submitted a short film to the Amateur Cinema Competition in Glasgow (Iordanova, 2016, p. xi). This short film subsequently won the Hitchcock Award, with Alfred Hitchcock himself presenting the prize (Ainslie, 2018, p. 9). After this initial success, Pestonji started a film career and later set up the first Thai film studio, producing features such as Santi-Vina, which went on to win awards from the Asia Pacific Film Festival in Tokyo in 1954 (Ainslie, 2018, p. 35). The film, which was the first Thai feature shot in colour 35 mm, was thought lost before copies were found at the British Film Institute and film archives in Russia and China. Through a restoration project run by the Thai Film Archive in collaboration with a lab in Italy, the film was restored and selected to screen as part of the Cannes Classics programme in 2016 (see Rithdee, 2016).