The Emerging Critics Workshop: A Donkey’s Work
Film festivals don’t exist if nobody talks about them. The power that the Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto film festivals hold over English-language cinephilia is directly tied to their status as the most-talked about festivals every year – the ones that produce the most amount of news reports, reviews, interviews and gushing reaction tweets. For the filmmakers, none of these festivals are direct producers of financial capital, in the sense that very few of the films shown are ever expected to make their money back, but they are all incubators and producers of cultural capital and soft power. That is their purpose: to be seen and talked about as the most vaunted of cultural institutions, through which they can unlock greater influence within the wider film industry ecosystem.
When film festivals really took off in the post-WWII rebuild, they did so primarily in the form of a national competition, not altogether unlike the Olympics. Over the years, more and more festivals proliferated, many of which set out with specific artistic or curatorial aims. But, as film academic Marijke de Valck has outlined in Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (2007), it’s the last twenty, maybe thirty years in which film festivals have become institutionalised – huge, hulking behemoths, a small cohort of which are seen as too big to fail, nestling themselves in a wider network of corporate sponsorships, public subsidies, and their status as tastemakers of international ‘arthouse’ film, essentially monopolising anything that doesn’t fall under the populist Hollywood blockbuster model or genre movie.
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To this end, many of these festivals – as well as a nearby running pack of mid-level, though equally institutionalised festivals such as Rotterdam, Telluride, Locarno and so on – have long since invested in young talent, through masterclasses, talent development labs and so forth. For an aspiring filmmaker of any stripe, inclusion into a major fest is a potentially career-changing stepping stone, far more so than entry into a vaunted film school. But filmmakers are only the first part of the film festival equation. First, yes, you need the films. Second, you need people to talk about the films. Enter the film festival critic’s workshop.
As the role of the film critic has become ever more precarious, where a traditional route to professionalisation has become nigh-on impossible, film festivals have stepped into the breach to provide an alternative route into the industry. For the uninitiated, the film critic workshop works something like this: you apply, gushing about what a determined critic you are and what a fantastic programme the festival has. You are sometimes accepted, and then you spend the duration of the festival with your cohort watching films, and taking advice from a mentor or mentors, usually an experienced big name in film criticism who might introduce you to a couple of other big names, some of whom may give you a job down the line. That mentor will edit your writing which is to be published usually on the festival website, under its own branding and banner, or at a partner publication with which the festival is working. Importantly, travel and accommodation – the two highest barriers of access to a festival for any young critic – are often subsidised.
Access into these workshops can be a huge benefit for aspiring critics, immediately connecting you to a network of possible employers and colleagues (it’s this networking that’s of far more value than any advice you’re given on your writing). Most of the writers who’ve put their name to this publication are probably children of film critic’s workshops. Shit, most of the editorial board of this publication, and this writer, all took part in the same Cinema Rediscovered workshop at some point. Speaking for myself, that workshop was key – it gave me the tools and confidence to say that I could take film criticism seriously, and absolutely remains an immensely important moment in my criticism career thus far.
But there is an underlying reason why these workshops are now so commonplace, and I don’t think it’s any philanthropic cause on the part of the film festivals to create great film criticism. Film festival institutions are anxious to actively frame the way they’re talked and written about, and the otherwise highly precarious nature of modern film criticism as a living provides a space in which to actively control the optics: the discourse that is vital to the production and retention of cultural capital needs to be shaped in ways which are appropriate and aligned with the festival’s aims. Let’s face it, having a Sight & Sound critic write a report on your festival is not the same as having Alex Billington blog about it; one positions itself as a vital progenitor, producer and gatekeeper of filmic good taste within the English language (whether or not you buy into that branding is not the question); the other once called 911 on somebody using a phone in the cinema. Co-opt the critic, bring them into your festival infrastructure, and you have the opportunity to shape how they position themselves against or with your festival.
Film festival workshops then become a way of self-capturing and self-producing The Discourse™, generating cultural capital without the volatility or potential harsh critique either of independent publications or self-interested bloggers. The work produced under the best of these workshops is nearly always of a high quality. It is sometimes even harshly and provocatively critical of the films screened at the festival (Rotterdam 2023 had its critics respond to Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO to mixed response). But it is never critical of the festival or its festival infrastructure, which does so much to gatekeep and entrench models of inequality within the film industry.
To understand precisely what film critics workshops are looking for, it is worth looking at the type of critic they often pick – which often fits a specific archetype. You generally feel comfortable introducing these people to your grandmother. Young (obviously), wide-eyed, with an academic bent but more or less accessible prose. Their preferences often hue towards a very Mitteleuropan and middle-class standard of ‘good taste’ that the film festival circuit adores – auteur-led works, personal docs, slow cinema. Politically they will generally all be socially liberal, internationalist, but whilst their writing may include all these things it will rarely be openly radical in any form, at least not in the workshop context. Formalism and aestheticism take precedence in workshop film criticism – less politically risky after all. The writing can cut, but it never stabs. It can praise, but it can never tip the scales. Heck, I probably tick most of these boxes.
For the modern-day institutionalised film festival, this perhaps is the ideal critic. Someone who can write beautifully about films but lacks the tools to take a sledgehammer to the industry and reimagine film anew. It’s just the right type of person to continue reporting dutifully on each year’s slate of films, thumbs up or thumbs down, but without interest in exposing the film festival industrial complex as a mass producer of cultural capital and gatekeeping that is wildly out-of-touch with most audiences, existing increasingly at the largesse of publicly-subsidised institutions and largely inaccessible outside of the festival context. Produce enough of these types of critics that the self-generation of cultural capital can continue apace.
Yet, some of the most vaunted workshops – let’s just take Locarno, Berlinale and Rotterdam as being probably the three biggest – tend to highlight and select critics largely not from the global West, but beyond. Their recent intakes are a diverse group including folks from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. The opportunity to bring together a worldwide, globalised cohort of knowledgeable, excitable, and vigorous critics is an opportunity to unleash some truly brilliant, incisive writing. It’s also an opportunity to widen what you might call a worldwide cinephiliac network – one that nourishes and enriches cinema culture everywhere. Even just by bringing these people in a room together, the workshop manages this.
The writing that emerges would generally feel at home in any international trade publication, but what might be presented as polishing diamonds in the rough to me appears to be an attempt to shear off differences and unique perspectives, producing a particular ideal of what film criticism is meant to look like and read like.
The film festival critics workshop is therefore only incidentally a space for critics to practise their work and flourish – it is really a space for the festival to produce the cultural capital it in turn needs to survive and justify its continuing existence. When you consider that most festivals operate on a mixture of public subsidies, private sponsorships and general audience ticket sales, then the proximity to cultural capital is an essential marketing exercise to give your brand a little edge of high class.
So the critics workshop becomes part a cycle of perfectly fine film critics writing for perfectly fine publications, making perfectly fine work, all producing the requisite amount of cultural capital, and perhaps if a couple are lucky enough they’ll make a living from it – and meanwhile fewer and fewer places exist with both the readership and the editorial bravery to meaningfully break this cycle. In the modern neoliberal context, a better film criticism culture can only emerge once a separate means of producing the cultural capital is created. What that is, I’m not sure. but I do know this: whilst the film festival critics workshop is a great place to make new friends and find professional contacts, it is not the place to become a great critic. The modern film festival structure simply does not allow it.
(And yes, I will continue to apply for these workshops).
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