Richard Caves’s basic economic properties for “complex creative goods” apply to phenomena such as films, opera, dance, music, and other expressive forms. They are the uncertainty of demand, the tendency to create art for art’s sake, the non-substitutable creative work team, the ‘infinite variety’ of highly differentiated goods, the A list/B list property of art, the significance of temporality, and the long-term valorization of the product or performance (Caves, 2000, pp. 1–10). They capture the nature of the movie as an experience good while also extending to the making of immersive environments. Especially, ‘infinite variety’ and ‘A list/B list’ lend themselves to introducing population characteristics.
The First and the Last Experimental International Film Festival, the Mardi Gras Film Festival, the Antenna International Documentary Festival, the wow Film Festival, the Short Soup International Short Film and Food Festival, the A Night of Horror International Film Festival, Sydney Underground Film Festival, the Stinkwater! International Short Film Festival, the Harmony International Short Film Festival, the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival, the Sydney Film Festival …
This list evidences that festivals categorize their identity and related goods by non-comparable dimensions and can be illustrated with the British Council’s Film Festival Directory (2016), listing over 1,200 film festivals across twenty-four genre categories. The International Izmir Short Film Festival, for example, is a short film festival, which uses additional labels such as ‘Animation, Asian Cinema, Black Cinema, British Films, Digital, Documentary General’ (and more) to describe itself. Although this suggests a variety of cinema genre, festivals are only loosely related to genre, which is the major aesthetic system of
Stable categories have emerged, although these can be ‘mixed and matched’ for further identification of uniqueness, for example ‘horror film’ in genre, ‘independent cinema’ in film culture, ‘short film’ as movie type, political and social resonance with cultural meanings such as ‘Chinese Cinema’, Black filmmaker’, and ‘Anarchist’. Additionally, ‘infinite variety’ grows around hybrid arts and media (e.g., cinema and culinary pleasure or ‘mixed media’). Finally, ‘infinite variety’ grows around the unresolved tensions over what constitutes cinematic representation, e.g., in cultural-political constructions such as ‘Arab cinema’ or ‘Asian festivals’ (Stringer, 2016).
Only two comprehensive survey works, by Stephen Follows (2013) and myself, provide systematic evidence of the size and growth of the population. Unfortunately, Follows’s dataset includes a high number of one-off events that highly likely got advertised but never staged.2 Table 1 shows how one can arrive at a better estimation—by making the assumption that one-off events are evenly distributed organizational failures within the country of their indicated location. This approach results in an estimate of a global total of over 5,900 film festivals operating over some or all years during 1998–2013.
Global film festival population, 1998–2013 (Follows, 2013)
Location |
In percent |
Full sample |
One-time festival |
Adjusted samplea |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Rest of world |
13.9 |
1,349 |
526 |
823 |
Brazil |
1.1 |
107 |
42 |
65 |
Spain |
1.3 |
126 |
49 |
77 |
Germany |
1.7 |
165 |
64 |
101 |
France |
1.7 |
165 |
64 |
101 |
Italy |
1.7 |
165 |
64 |
101 |
India |
1.9 |
184 |
72 |
112 |
Australia |
3 |
291 |
114 |
178 |
United Kingdom |
5.5 |
534 |
208 |
326 |
Canada |
5.5 |
534 |
208 |
326 |
United States |
62.6 |
6,076 |
2,370 |
3,706 |
Total |
99.9 |
9,706 |
3,785 |
5,921 |
My survey (2015) excludes mixed-art festivals, awards ceremonies without curated film performances, the online-festival, and any one-off event. A second edition had to occur the following year or, for biannual fests, one more year later. I made 2012 the last year of my enumeration, including biannual festivals taking place in 2011 and confident to re-open in 2013, based on third-provider event information from various sources (e.g., festival reports on the
During 1997–2010 the population had doubled, but founding numbers dropped to the level of 1997 in 2011 and halved again in 2012. This finding supports festival practitioners’ observations of a growth spurt and a cooling-off period after what they think was a period of more intense competition. Finding 1,274 festivals in 2011 and 1,641 in 2012, a mean of 1,457 film festivals suggests itself as the number of annual events for the end of the observed period.
Matched on unesco classification, the nearly four-thousand organizations (3,983) across time in my sample point to predominantly European and Northern American locations (3,385, or 85 percent). About 1,300 US film festivals, over 400 in France, nearly 300 in Great Britain, and about 200 organizations in Italy, Germany and Canada respectively form dominant national
Within Europe alone, the majority of the festivals, or 42 percent, are located in Western Europe, while 27 percent are in the Southern region (including the Balkans), 21 percent in Northern Europe as well as 9 percent in Eastern Europe, including Central Europe and the Russian Federation. When applying a cut-off at 10 percent, the largest film festival populations happen to exist in countries with long histories of a cinema industry and its surrounding culture, which are France (22 percent), Great Britain (15 percent), Italy and Germany (each 11 percent). Table 2 shows that 15 cities account for 20 percent of all film festival organizations worldwide.
Top locations across film festival history (Vogel, 2015)
Rank |
Film festival location |
|---|---|
1 |
New York |
2 |
Los Angeles and Hollywood |
3 |
London |
4 |
Paris |
5 |
Toronto |
6 |
San Francisco |
7 |
Sydney |
8 |
Rome |
9 |
Berlin |
10 |
Barcelona |
11 |
Montreal |
12 |
Amsterdam |
13 |
Chicago |
14 |
Philadelphia |
15 |
Washington, D.C. |
This ranking illustrates that festivals are located in capital cities and urban centers of creative/cultural-economic concentration. Given the cut-off at rank 15, the table conceals the quantitative differences that are quite small, as a longer extraction would put Mumbai, Seoul, Athens, Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Tokyo, and many more well-known cities across the world in view. Excluded would still be the many large cities from African and Asian regions and the festival locations in smaller states and island regions.
If one adds to the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Canada, (which make up roughly two thirds of the enumerated population) the festivals of Spain, Australia, India, the Netherlands, Brazil, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, and Japan, already a near majority of film festivals is reached. Still, there are very few countries that do not have at least one film festival in their cultural history, which makes a case for a global network. There can also be ‘interrupted’ festival history, such as that of the Moscow International Film Festival, operating first in 1935 and performing continuously only since
The global film festival population historical emergence (a) and by world region (b), based on first event (Vogel, 2015)
The observed span, proxying the organizational age and resilience (measuring simply the distance between the first and the last edition of the case) reveals a global population mean of twelve years and a spread in organizational age from two to over eighty years. Very old organizations are in a minority while being a world-wide phenomenon. Using the total event spans (not displayed) rather than the organizational spans, the cultural magnitude of festival events appears more clearly. Europe alone provides more event-years or events (in total nearly 26,000) than Northern America (ca. 15,200), followed by Asia (ca. 3,200), Latin America (ca. 2000), Oceania (over 1,200), and Africa (nearly 600). This statistic shows that regions with the most organizations need not have the most sustained or most compacted film festival culture as a matter of active cultural experience-making. What remains, however, is the western concentration of formal organizations in the data.
Film festival characteristics (1932–2012) for the four world regions of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern America and Oceania (presented for Australia and New Zealand)—a. first events, b. closing events, and c. span of event activity in years (from left to right) (Vogel, 2015)
Film festival characteristics (1932–2012) for the four world regions of Asia—a. first events, b. closing events, and c. span of event activity in years (from left to right) (Vogel, 2015)
Film festival characteristics (1932–2012) for the four regions of Europe—a. first events, b. closing events, and c. span of event activity in years (from left to right) (Vogel, 2015)
If we assert, plausibly, something of an existing national film culture, the data can be used to express the relationship between national festival exhibition by these arts nonprofits with commercial cinema exhibition and production. As official statistics on national cinema production (typically registering feature-film production only) lack observational continuity, a narrower correlation exercise must suffice (see further below in the section on ‘film culture by country’). Commercial exhibition is usually gauged by counts of cinema theatres and audience attendance. Commercial business data, however, focus on the number of screens on which movies play (cf. Swami & Eliashberg, 1999) rather than social spaces (theatres) that also festival-event productions. Another common but not consistently collected factor is national film
Comparative magnitude and strength in cinema cultural patterns, expressed in Pearson’s r, based on author’s data and public records (unesco Institute for Statistics, 2009; Vogel, 2015)
Film festival tradition |
||
|---|---|---|
European countries (n = 30) |
Country group (n = 21) |
|
Attendance per capita (2005) |
0.36 |
0.6 |
Screens (2005) |
0.91 |
0.83 |
Feature production (1970–2012) |
0.92 |
0.48 |
Across these other countries for which observations exist (around 35 depending on the calculation discussed), there are strong positive, and statistically significant coefficients (above 0.30) between the measure of ‘festival tradition’ on one hand and attendance per capita and number of commercial screens (both in 2005) on the other hand (all are Pearson’s r and p < .05). The results suggest that non-European countries with more compact festival traditions also have a strong commercial cinema culture in 2005, a year in the founding-boom window mentioned. Furthermore, using the total count of feature film production between 1970 and 2012 provided by unesco, I proxied industrial film production tradition (unesco Institute for Statistics, 2009). For
Finally, the population can be quantitatively explored by looking at the sub-field level. Representing an ‘A list/B’ list phenomenon, festivals accredited by FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers Associations, 2008), a
The summary characteristics for the global festival population provide evidence for a center/periphery pattern in festival culture and its concentration in metropolitan areas. The population is marked by ‘infinite variety’ and a powerful elite of festivals of national and global fame. Film festivals can be assumed to thrive next to or in exchange with cultural institutions and community-based organizations which are traditionally associated with more permanent art forms, such as museums. Further surveys of film festival culture should include observations at the program level and the qualitative cultural supply, which film festival research has tackled mainly by ethnographic method (see next chapter). One major result of this festival population is the co-creation of ‘independent cinema’, an elusive term simultaneously denoting a discourse, a genre, a movement and an aesthetic format (Berra, 2008; Goodell, 1982; Khoo, 2007; Nornes, 2009). I want to end my introduction with a brief discussion of this meaning:
‘Independence’ should be approached with some sense of semantic variance; and the concept includes allusions to economic dimensions such as resource, linkage to distribution, formal film training, and more. In the industry, there are also so-called independent producers and distributors, i.e., firms that operate in some relation and hardly fully independent from the very big companies (Crisp, 2015; MacDonald, 2008; Squire, 2004). Often applauded for safeguarding authenticity and autonomy (instituted signs of an artistic inspiration, see Chapters 1, 10, and 13 for a sociological approach), the idea of independence rejects the type of creativity associated with industrialized film production while not completely abandoning it. As an aesthetic vision, independent cinema must also be differentiated from the so-called avant-garde, a further important reference for festival analysis (Hagener, 2007), summarizing a cross-disciplinary arts and intellectual movement located in European cities and, as to cinema, organized in film clubs and societies, having its own media outlets and facilitated discourses in metropolitan centers. Post-wwii, the center of the movement had shifted to New York, known for experimental and underground filmmaking with its own institutions. It was influential in the 1960s and 1970s with a post-colonial critique, Third World cinema.7 John Berra treats independent cinema as a ‘polite social critique’, ‘a mirror image of the audience it caters to, crowed seeing novelty and quality’ but not “necessarily
As a regular consumer of cinema and modern dance festivals, I got interested in film festivals when I noticed the passion some people in my English friendship circles had for these events, certain movie directors, maintaining a certain style of talking about film. By the time I got to know about the film festival research literature, I had already interviewed people in International film festivals, documentary, short, women’s, lgbtq, children/youth, and anti-capitalism festivals. The choice of fieldwork cases on which many of the following chapters in this book draw, was influenced by a first survey effort (Lang et al., 2006), followed by the global database (Vogel, 2015) that forms the basis of this chapter.
Do these global-level patterns constitute preliminary evidence for the theoretical claim of ‘festivalization’? I believe that they ‘put a floor under’ under studies of the dynamics of cultural globalization as well as the key position of urban centres in media culture. Widening our view to the existence of global and transnational cultural production networks (Brodie, 2016; Christopherson, 2006; Curtin, 2016; Halle, 2002; Lim, 2006) we can locate film festivals in these constellations as co-producers of a global image culture (Lim, 2012), while also situating national specificity in that context of transnational interactions and structural densification. Following global modernity scholars, we can think of festivals as border phenomena, combining both informal elements and formal structural formation pertaining to world society, where informal structures may be suggested to solve problems of incomplete formal structuration (see for this suggestion Boris Holzer in Schwinn, 2006, pp. 259–279). Keith Wagner (2015, pp. 232–233) encourages us to ‘break free of the center/periphery model’ based on notions of partial globality argued by Sassen, Jay and Moretti as to lived experiences and the hypermobility of cultural texts, non-western texts linking into a global orientation of genres, styles and so forth, and not last the flows of people. Film festivals contribute to this partial globality by exhibiting foreign movies as ‘world cinema’, a category furthering a certain discourse,
Different from film theory, I use ‘genre’ as a constructed category or symbolic boundary. Using the example of ballet, a dance genre or style by a fellow sociologist, genre “is at once a ritual classification for balletomanes, a commercial classification for performing-arts promoters, and an administrative classification for public agencies that fund the arts” (DiMaggio, 1987).
According to festival professionals (Edwards & Skerbelis, 2012), a US American festival needs to run at least five years to qualify for grants. Even well-planned events can fail within one festival period and exit the field with large debt (Stevens, 2016, p. 1). Another meaning of one-off cultural productions exists for events such as summits or similar non-recurrent events (see Leca et al., 2015).
There is a subpopulation that performs in multiple cities. To include them, I fixed them on their headquarter country or city unless there was real independence in the diverse locations.
An undercount may result from collection-side language barriers (despite doing the work with a multilingual researcher team), lack of website presence, and overrepresentation of anglophone organizations in the film festival directories used for enumeration. However, my French festival data do not lend support for bias through third-party data providers.
I inspected these variables for the years 2006 to 2012 and found similar associations with the festival variable. For datasets see the unesco’s website (
The organization counts as non-transparent and closed to academic researchers (Stringer, 2016, p. 41). For a case study on divergent interests between fiapf and a festival see (Stevens, 2016, pp. 32–40).
Similarly de Valck (2007, pp. 25–27).