Mediations
The Auteur or the Audience: Who Really Makes Movies?
September 12, 2021
Bailey: We’ve been talking a lot about “the audience,” but how do five hundred or a thousand individuals coalesce into one group at the Festival, especially in a city as diverse as Toronto? Can’t a film fracture its audience into a thousand personal responses as easily as it can unite them?
Powers: When I first started at the Festival three years ago, I was keenly sensitive to the mass response, the loudest applause, laughter, etc. Unfortunately, that demonstrativeness only happens with certain kinds of films – and sometimes not even...
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September 10, 2021
Bailey: How do those intangibles specific to film festivals – buzz, festival euphoria, the compressed time, the bounty and variety of films – shape an audience’s response to a particular film? And since many films get their first public reception at a festival, to what degree does this environment define films now in the same way that influential movie reviews once did?
Rogalski: Each film defines itself first externally, and at a festival that varies from flash bulbs and red carpets to early-morning screenings in a multiplex with a committed...
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September 8, 2021
Alex Rogalski: Let me dig up a quote: "Contemporary film theorists have made careers out of underestimating the basic intelligence and reality-testing abilities of the average film viewer and have no trouble treating previous audiences with similar disdain.”– Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) redulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31–45.
Bailey: So scholars ignore at their peril?
Kathleen Mullen: And on short films it’s worth noting the distinct relationship between directors and audiences. Many directors of shorts never aspire to make features, just...
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September 6, 2021
Bailey: So since festivals are just about the only place left to generate that unique, in-cinema event with the filmmaker present, does that give us a special responsibility when it comes to defining the meaning and the aura of a film?
Thom Powers: I had a version of this question running through my mind as I read Richard Brody’s new book, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, this spring. It impressed me how passionately Godard’s work was received in the sixties and seventies. Whether people loved or...
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September 4, 2021
Cameron Bailey: Scholars, critics, fans and film festivals have all worked since the sixties with the idea of the auteur as a given; we act on the premise that the director is responsible for the film. But what part does the audience play? What part did the audiences that coalesced around John Woo, Pedro Almodóvar or Quentin Tarantino, for instance, play in creating their bodies of work?
Piers Handling: Audiences play an important role, but not necessarily a crucial one. Those filmmakers who want...
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