Film Festivals as Aesthetic Experiences: Theories of Affect and the Collective

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

Film festivals may be distinguished by virtue of their collectively felt atmospheres, and, while oscillating between uniqueness and the generic, they equally provide and require specific moods. Characterized by an intense schedule of film projections as well as observing the elongation of the cinematic by way of meeting and celebrating film-makers, film festival phenomena comprise several elements which play into their atmospheres. The author argues that tracing the becoming of those elements draws us closer to the role of film festivals as well as to our experience thereof. Breaking down the complexity of the film festivals is effected by drawing on similarities with art exhibitions. Drawing on the argument that their prime functionality lies in supporting films as works of art, the study pinpoints how film festivals become aesthetic milieus where common, shared aesthetic experiences are enabled. A collective dimension of experience is to be maintained to the extent that curatorially blended festival programs group certain films or establish connections among them, thereby ‘quasi-synchronically’ orienting festivalgoers. Film festival events reconfigure the position of spectators within the aesthetic dimension.  Applying the concepts of affect and percept is relevant to grasp both the pre- and transindividual dimensions which contribute to the experience of film festivals and make up their atmospheres. The event-like character of the film festival, as a temporal organisation feeding on film images and re-enabling affects as various bodies (spectators, film creators and so on), we may well understand its significance on a representational level. Meanwhile, looking through the lens of body studies and Deleuzian affect theory, the experiential domain of the unrepresentable, affective capacities alludes to the formation of the collective and the subjective, as both coming into being. The study ultimately aims to reveal the multidirectional dynamics between film festivals and certain ingrained structures, like spectatorship and cinephilia.