Notes
Festival notes
Four days, six features, two short programmes. Notes taken in the dark and typed on the train home, which is the only honest way to write about a festival.
The programme has a shape now
Every mid-size festival programme currently runs to the same shape: an opener with a recognisable cast, three or four acquisitions that are already sold, a documentary strand that carries the political weight, and a late slot for whatever the programmers actually liked. The shape is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when a programme has to satisfy a funder, a sponsor and a local audience in the same week.
The effect on the films is measurable. Anything under eighty minutes or over two hours is now hard to place, because it does not fit the grid. Several of the best things shown this year were in the short programmes, where the grid does not apply.
The room
One small thing worth recording. The best screening of the week was in the smallest room, on an old print, with a projectionist who adjusted the sound between reels. Nothing about the presentation was technically superior. But an audience of sixty in a room that seats seventy behaves differently from an audience of sixty in a room that seats four hundred, and the film was better for it.