Film Festivals Reflect Changes in Cinema IndustryPeter Cowie talks to the directors of several famous film festivals about the organization and technical challenges they face every year. In a celebrated New Yorker cartoon, two men are gazing up at a cluster of buildings at the top of a spiral road. One says to the other, "What this town needs is a film festival." Prescient words, for over the past decade just about every city and town on the map has engendered a film festival, often replacing the traditional "art house" in the region.
Back in 1932, when Count Volpi founded the Venice Festival as part of the Venice Biennale Art Exhibition, just a handful of films were screened—on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior on the Venice Lido. Today, the great annual festivals screen literally hundreds of movies, and in numerous locations and theatres. This proliferation of sites, allied to the dramatic improvements in sound since 1992, has posed significant challenges to festival directors. A major part of most Dolby engineers' year is spent attending such events, preparing the theatres, rehearsing, and checking the sound conditions right up to the moment of projection. One festival after another has experimented with digital projection, the latest being Berlin, where Chen Kaige's The Promise was screened in the Berlinale Palast direct from a server.
For the past five years, Dieter Kosslick has been Director of the Berlin International Film Festival. "We have a brilliant sound environment in the Berlinale Palast," he says, "but this is because the building was brand-new, and of course it is also a live theatre, where musicals are staged. The sound was good in some other cinemas, too, but we still had so-called "normal" sound conditions in certain other festival locations. So we devoted a lot of effort to improving these cinemas." During the Berlinale, every film is checked during the night before the screening, and a lot of the filmmakers—especially the Americans—try, notes Kosslick, to join the local technicians through the small hours, to hear the sound and check the projection. "One of our big advantages is that we have the CinemaxX and CineStar megaplexes, which comprise 35 screens, each equipped to the latest sound standards. Films like Star Wars Episode III and The War of the Worlds received their German premiere in the Berlinale Palast, in particular because of the excellent sound quality." "At the very end of my 15 years of public film financing," says Dieter Kosslick, "I launched an initiative concerning sound in Nordrhein Westfalen. At the "Popcom" in Cologne, we started to organize panels and discussions about the importance of sound. We had just completed the financing of Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, for example, and one of the marketing tools of the film was the music. This was a film that proved that if you don't have the sound, you don't have a silent movie—you have no movie! A lot of people forget that sound is 60 to 70 percent of a movie. In film financing, people always add the music or the composer at the last minute when the budget is getting tight!"
Dieter Kosslick also started the International Film School in Cologne, making the sound department one of the first components of the program. At the Berlinale Talent Campus, held within the framework of the film festival, sound is prominent, and in 2004 Oscar®-winner Walter Murch was in attendance to talk about sound issues. The digital revolution is helping festivals even at the selection stage. "When we project films and DVDs in our small theatre," emphasizes Kosslick, "we do notice that sound today is much better. One's influenced in one's selection, if only subconsciously, if the sound is not good. So filmmakers try to use the new digital technology to deliver us a really good product to consider." Marco Müller took over as Director of the Venice International Film Festival in 2004. "Every year the chief technician was submitting a report, saying we should do something to improve the sound conditions," he says. "As usual, the answer was, 'There's no money.' So we had to rely very heavily on the creative transformations which were offered by Federico Savina [brother of composer Carlo Savina and a long-time Dolby film sound consultant], and he's probably the best sound engineer for theatres we have in Italy. We have been able to invest a little. We haven't been able yet to upgrade the equipment in a definitive way. But for the Sala Grande, where the competition films are screened, Savina was always able to deliver what the producers and directors requested."
The main festival palace at Venice was built in the early forties, and has a solidity not always achieved today. This prevents any "leaking" of sound from the auditorium, something that remains a problem with the more recently-constructed Palagalileo, where press showings take place, and which resembles a gigantic indoor tennis court. "To me," underlines Müller, "festivals are essentially about how you show the films. You must offer the best conditions. In Locarno, where I was Director from 1991 to 2000, we were lucky enough to have Patrick Boillat as our chief engineer. His most amazing feat involved the Piazza Grande, when Dolby® Digital surround became the general rule. We had to multiply the subwoofers, and Patrick had to calculate the new intervals in this enormous, open-air space. The length and shape of the Piazza Grande in Locarno makes it impossible for the sound to be in sync unless you have a delay of a fragment of a second—so that was very tricky. In my time there, we would often have as many as 11,000 to 12,000 spectators in the Piazza watching a single film." Although Müller firmly believes that festivals should press ahead with digital facilities, he is pessimistic about one particular aspect. "When we screened some classic Chinese films in 2005, we cleaned up the monaural sound with the help of Technicolor in Italy. But obviously, no distributor wants that kind of sound, because they insist that we provide them with a 5.1 simulation. When you do that, the result is so artificial. When you are in this aseptic space, it's very difficult to recreate something that will give you the same emotion as the original sound."
Starting in 2006, Müller moved the daily press screenings at the Venice Festival to the 600-seat Perla auditorium, "the other venue where we can be sure of perfect visual and sound quality," he notes. Piers Handling, Director of the Toronto International Film Festival, recalls that when he joined the festival in 1982, "Sound was a completely different kettle of fish in those days. Digital and surround sound did not exist, THX was a decade away. We showed films in 35 mm and 16 mm formats. Sixteen-millimeter sound was awful, muddy and in a large cinema, almost inaudible at times." Now, however, continues Handling, "Sound has undergone a revolution. Digital formats and surround sound are everywhere. THX is in a number of the cinemas we use. Dolby sound technicians come up and help us tune the cinemas before the festival starts. Because we are showing so many world premieres of major films, we have to get it right as the directors are all here and they expect immaculate screening conditions—and this includes sound. Along with the technical developments in the theatres, sound mixing and effects have also undergone their own revolution, so sound has become a creative part of the film, as opposed to an adjunct."
Toronto was one of the first festivals to screen digitally in high definition, and a couple of years later, recalls Handling, "We did a live satellite download of a film that was shown at the festival (in reality it was semi-live as the company did not fully trust the process so they downloaded a few hours before the public screening to make sure it worked!). At the 2005 festival we had digital projectors in 11 of our 24 cinemas." The Pusan International Film Festival, now regarded as the most important annual Asian event in its field, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2005. "When the festival was launched," notes programmer Dosin Pak, "PIFF used eight screening theatres and they were equipped with Dolby Digital (either CP50 or CP500). This year, we had a total of 31 screening theatres, including outdoor screening, as well as two multiplexes. They are capable of screening digital cinema." More than 60 percent of filmmakers visiting Pusan check the sound before their work is screened. As festivals mushroom throughout the world, the pressure on existing movie theatres to upgrade their equipment will continue to increase—and that's all to the good, especially at a time when digital cinema is at last coming over the horizon.
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