| Survey The 2nd Conference of International Children's Film Festivals in Europe Krems/Austria, September 1998 For an ethical cinema – The importance of children's film festivals in the present media landscape by Domenico Lucchini (Switzerland, ex-president of ECFA) ”The Cinema must be ethical. A film has a right to exist in so far as it is necessary for the maker and for the viewer. Otherwise, one should rather not bother. One cannot and should not waste an occasion as rare and as beautiful as that of a film. To make a film is a great privilege, one should not spit in the face of fortune, and one must fight to do it right, against all odds. Nothing depresses me more than the corruption of good taste. A large proportion of the images that are presented, even to young viewers, are ugly and vulgar. Corruption of the public should be a culpable offence.“ Gianni Amelio In these past years, the festivals for children have developed in a relatively confused manner, partially due to the lack of references, rules and orchestration. The differences in the diverse approaches, with some excesses and drifting, risk further compromising the already limited space available for the diffusion of a quality cinema and the lively cultural milieu of children's cinema. The organisers of the festivals have therefore decided to meet again to reflect together and to seek the means for a better co-ordination (schedules, programmes, marketing, financing, audiences, relationships to other professionals and new media), but also to favour a certain „moralisation“ of their approaches. This does not mean the uniformisation of the conditions and objectives, but the presentation, in their multiplicity, of the whole range of the festivals targeted at children, attempting to create simultaneously a network of communications and new possibilities, of cooperation and co-ordination of the activities, and, above all, a redefinition of the roles within the changing audio-visual world. As the etymology suggests, a festival is a celebration, a precise moment in the course of the year in which people change their daily routine for something out of the ordinary. But a festival is anticipated, prepared for, and experienced intensely. At a festival one talks, discusses, appreciates, and criticises, and, above all, one communicates and exchanges. According to the definition of the IFFPA (International Federation of Film Producers' Associations) the end aim of the cinematographic festivals must be that of contributing to a better comprehension between peoples and to the development of the art and industry of the cinema“. When exploring a sector such as that of the children's cinema, an area which does not constitute, as is gradually becoming clear, a specific genre with its own themes and trends, it is necessary to choose an artistic approach which is well-defined and culturally convincing. This allows the purely film-related discussion to be extended to involve parents, educators, teachers, and the general public as well, and not just those associated with the industry, to consider and examine, along with the children, the themes concerning the young and their relationship to the universe of communication through images. Festivals in general, and even more so those for children, should contribute to the development of an open sensibility to the world's problems, teaching, from not only within the school but also outside, a sense of responsibility and active personal participation, respect, attention to values, capacity for dialogue, as well as making a conscious stand on the rights of infants and children. As prescribed by the „Convention on the Rights of Children“, ratified by the UN in 1989: „The child has a right to peace and recreation, the right to devote itself to play, and to participate in cultural and artistic activities.“ Films for children and festivals for children are a part of such cultural and artistic activities. They are an integral part of cultural education in the sense of the democratic postulate „culture for all“. „Cultural education is aesthetic education, i.e. developing a relationship to the perceptible environment. Therefore cultural education plays an important part in the everyday life of children. Playing, contact with different media, and the acquisition of media content, are meaningful activities in present-day childhood; i.e.: „The „cultural competence“ of children refers above all to media, its availability and content.“ (Jürgen Barthelmes, Thesen zum Kinderkino, Essay on Children's Cinema). Similarly, children's festivals, while not neglecting entertainment and spectacle, should present works with an artistic, sociological, historical and heritage viewpoint. In addition to presenting recently produced and distributed films, previews of „majors“, festivals should endeavour to include unknown filmmakers, limited distribution films, and also normal repertoire films, but with the addition of homages, backgrounds and retrospectives. A commitment which would be fulfilled, not just in the organisation of a real and proper review of films, but also in the organisation of opportunities for meetings and discussions, and the staging of exhibitions which assimilate the audio-visual language. But, above all, the mission of festivals is to arouse and stimulate the curiosity of the general public, and to endeavour to promote their knowledge and education. A fundamental prerogative is a basic requirement that present-day man, and even more so youth, must possess a mental preparation and a critical-cultural habit for the interpretation of cinematographic works. The cinema phenomena illuminates the realities of man and the society he has constructed. lt is a language capable of expressing the joys, hopes and fears of man, it is an art form for communicating to humanity the richness of an artistic intuition which expresses itself through images in movement. The cinema entertains, excites, exhalts, presents and represents the things of life. Children and youth in general often see, reflected in the narrations, their problems, their most secret aspirations, their difficulties in integrating and being accepted. Confronting, via a cinematographic work, some of the problems which interest youth the most can provide an opportunity for dialogue which would otherwise be impossible, a source of awareness of the reality which surrounds them, and which they will soon be called upon to experience at firsthand. The proposals put forward for the Children's Festivals are based on these fundamental concepts and criteria. The cinema should not, therefore, have a pedagogic objective in the narrow sense, as it would have presented in a school context, to be analysed and used as a didactic tool as part of a cycle of lessons conceived and structured along the lines of a curriculum with a different scope and content. lt should, rather, be an occasion to meet and to exchange experiences. Each film therefore ends up becoming, sometimes despite the author, often despite the public which willingly flocks to the festival, an inevitable opportunity for communication and dialogue. I believe that the cinematographic medium as a communicative art form is a very valid instrument of cultural information. It is, nevertheless, important that some degree of selection is made for children. Rather than create a cinema which is declared as being for children, I believe that we must bring the children to understand the cinema as a whole, the grand cinema. What is important is to graduate this communication according to age: at all times maintaining the level high, bring the child closer to the better examples of cinematographic expression. I am convinced that the children of today have vast capacities for cultural reception, and are capable of understanding more, of going into the specifics of cinematography. Has nobody realised that the reader and member of the audience, after many years of not completely passive practice, have become the reference „experts“ as regards the communicative typologies which have often put us in the role of user? Today, the figure of the end-recipient is considered of topical interest, regaining an active role in the science of communication as well as the attention of programme producers: on the basis of the emerging social drives and of theoretical arguments, often neglected in the past, the receiver is no longer considered as just a simple consumer, a passive client, but even an equal interlocutor of the mass media. The realistic hypothesis of placing the end-recipient on an equal footing to the originator, passes through the study of serious processes of educating consumers in the use of the media, processes in which the school should be involved in the first instance. lt also passes through the political invention of new and more correct modalities of openness of the apparatus with respect to its users: modalities conscientiously aware of the problems of decentralisation, of access, of communicative exchange and of participation. The school, while not surrendering its fundamental mission, must draw closer to the new audiovisual languages, creating in the process learning situations which are more stimulating, more original and more participative. The objectives are straightforward and aimed at all participants as a whole. For the children, it is a case of inducing a socially responsible behaviour. Bringing the children to the cinema leads to an education through visual perception, the tapping of emotions which are individual and yet at the same time collective. Openness to other worlds, the approach to the unmentionable, awareness of differences, are sources of material which is richly pedagogic in nature. Furthermore, this media allows the child to decipher the difference between fiction and reality. Television counterfeits reality in its imagery – the cinema presents itself as fiction, and evokes a possible reality. For teachers, these new practices imply a re-examination of traditional didactic methods. For the professionals in cinema, the partnership, with respect to respective missions and reciprocal roles, provides the scope for projects rich in potential. The mission of the school finds a complement in the discovery of and initiation in the language of images, in the predisposition of children to the world of the future, in the enjoyment of cinematographic culture: conscious of being free, critical and aware when confronted by images. Children normally give themselves to a different type of discussion involving memory, time, the present, history, morality, or whatever. The point is that the traditional verbal intercourse at root level takes on a basic and vulgar form, and so if the cinema for children is a lesser genre, the style should also be lesser. Over time, the child undergoes too many levels of banality. The easy trap of sentimentalisation, the dull and sugar-sweet affectation, the banalisation of the adolescent's moral universe, are the cliches which are invoking a slow and unstoppable decline of the genre. The director Francois Truffaut, who for his masterpiece films on childhood can be considered the most authoritative voice on the subject, in an interview on the subject of the correct methodology for representing children in the cinema, highlighted two errors which can be easily committed: the most common and serious would be that of starting a priori from a dramatic idea, albeit perhaps effective on the level of „fiction“, instead of from the real problems children have with the world. The other problem is that of not placing the child truly at the centre of the film, but to give it a supporting role to the adult star, or worse, to accompany the child with ponies, dogs, flying reindeer and red balloons! Festivals, while not renouncing entertainment, should not indulge in sentimentalism or „adultism“, but should simply help to grow. On the other hand, the symbols, the codes of every artistic language, are not dependant on the age of the spectator to whom they are targeted. There is no difference in the nature of a film made for a child or an adult. At the level of the themes dealt with, there are none specifically and only for the child: the questions which cross and shake the world interest the child closely. Seeing as the languages of the arts function thanks to codes and conventions which are in constant evolution, the programmes for children should not only contain repertoire films, but also the more advanced forms of contemporary creation. On the other hand, the programmer must take account of a certain number of specific characteristics of the child: its age, its level of concentration, its capacity (greater or lesser) of conceptualising its creative potential. Before being a pupil, a child who attends the projection of a film during school, is, in the theatre, first of all a spectator. And this status as a spectator is even more pronounced if the child frequents the cinema on a regular basis. A child's sensibility, history, social class, imagination, intelligence, emotional and receptive faculties, makes each child a unique spectator. The meeting between a child and a film must pass, above all, through the notion of pleasure. „The cinema, the bearer of dreams, the memory of the world, remains essential in a period in which the television has the tendency to make the desires and tastes of children uniform. Hence the necessity of exposing the young spectator, from his most tender age, good films originating from all around the world (short length films, documentaries, fiction, masterpieces from the history of the cinema), to allow it to find gradually for itself its own space within the world of cinema.“ (Ginette Dislaire, Ecole et cinema: Choisir un film pour les enfants). The problem is to define, if possible, the centre of this network of planning: the cinema for children. And if today, the cinema for children no longer exists, and, perhaps, not even the children, the adolescents? Pre-adolescence appears, in the eyes of the culture industry, information systems and consumer promotion mechanisms, as an irregularity which must be controlled even at the cost of denying it. „Childhood, as a cultural product, rather than as a fact of nature, is therefore disappearing“ Also as a result of the strong impact of television which „superimposes the knowledge of the adults onto that of the children via its images, and has annulled the code that separates the two age groups, the code which distinguished them by attributing to the one and to the other different statuses and roles“ (Marina DAmato, Childhood and Prejudice, Rome, 1993). Towards the end of the seventies, the concept of the breakdown of the prevailing codes and paradigms ruling the classification of the works destined for children was considered positive, because it induced an openness to a higher level of civilisation, because it re-integrated childhood into the world, kept it within the course of time, restoring complete citizenship rights to the „children“. At the end of the eighties, abetted by the medium of mediums – the television – it is this completely liberated space which appears to go into crisis as a result of the indifference to the differences which legitimate everything and, equivalating all subjects to the zero ideological degree, nullifies the point of communication and transforms it into a colossal, metalinguistic, self- referential jam. At this point, as radically affirmed by the organisers of an important festival, such as Giffoni, it is possible to assert that the cinema for children no longer exists, for the simple reason that all cinema is for children, absolute protagonists, on and off the screen, of the third age of the cinema? Or even, as some sociologists maintain, „suppress youth“ (Gianni Borgna, The Myth of Youth, Laterza 1997), abolish it by decree? Was Croce right, and the young man must simply force himself to become adult? And is it better to return to Nestor as the ideal model? We believe that the banner of childhood and youth has a perennial value. However, in the era of globalisation it is necessary to adapt, keep up to date. So in the audio-visual sector, and, more specifically, the cinema, it has become a power play for the festivals to enlarge their range as far as including works not reportedly destined for children (often entering into competition with other festivals) attempting in this way to escape the „trap“ of industrial codes. On the other hand, by the very nature of the cinematographic product, the children's festival, and therefore any other festival, must be able to measure itself against the industrial character of the cinema, and not be indifferent to the range of offers available on the free market – which it must obviously be able to look at with careful scrutiny to extract the quality (definable only in relation to our project) from the quantity. As asserted this year by the director of the Festival of Locarno, Marco Müller, with reference to some driving ideas of a „new cinema“ and its programming: „Thanks to the formulation of some proposals, options, narrative models and outlines of genre, there has been a renewed vigour in the more vital area of experience of elaborating strategies for continuing to communicate with very diverse groups of spectators. There is no need to be fettered by formulas of entertainment and spectacle which are too mediocre or unwanted to couple politics and popularity, analysis and denunciation, precision of dialogue and the joy of the screen (this has resulted in a new association between aesthetics and industry, which goes well beyond the traditional dialectic of author-professional, author-genre)“. (Marco Müller, Catalogue of the Locarno International Film Festival, 1998). Remaining within this process means choosing films for children without having to follow the fashions imposed by the market, but also without forgetting the visual communication languages as codified by the market. Let's try to explain. The children are among the major „consumers“ of video-films, and, potentially, among the most frequent visitors to the cinema. To be able to determine their tastes, their tendencies, is certainly a culturally meaningful operation, but is also important on the commercial level. At present there is no market for cinema for children. Lost behind the rhetoric of the genre, today it occurs in church halls or in exclusive clubs of „cinema d'essai“, before letting itself die in the enchantment of television. What to do? We should create a market or at least a network for the distribution and diffusion of the works presented at the various festivals. Certainly not an easy operation which passes necessarily through meticulous care of the films presented. lt would involve adopting the films, promoting them on the national and international scene, creating an appropriate network, attempting to gain access, penetrating established resistance and misunderstandings, to the commercial network, and, where possible, that of television. In short, to become accomplices of all those who make films: from the producer, the director, to the distributor, as it is within this network that the cinematographic works live, or die.
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