Venice Film Festival 2009: Survival of the Fittest
2010; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3366/film.2010.0010
ISSN1466-4615
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoIt is obviously the case that watching films at a film festival is not the same experience as watching films in the normal context of a cinema trip or a home viewing. Festivals, although ostensibly a celebration of film, more often turn themselves into a test to destruction of the cinematic art, like cars in factories driven by machines over thousands of miles of simulated bad road surfaces or washing machines running cycle after cycle, not to see if they break but when they break. Ultimately, everything breaks. With the 66 th Mostra dell’Arte Cinematografica, to give the Venice film festival its official title, the festival goer does not only have to contend with the slab-like weariness of the sheer number of films to be viewed, but with the added distraction of a nearby beach and beautiful late summer sunshine. Films are applauded here, celebrated and lauded, but some are also booed unmercifully. Contributing to this reaction, I submit, is anger at the two hours of Italian sun stolen from the viewer. Films must earn their right to exist. The test to destruction, though, is a test of resilience. What survives when nothing else survives? What dies last? The cinematic equivalent of this question is resolutely explored in the resurgent apocalyptic genre. A latest addition to this thread was the first major film of the Festival, John Hillcoat’s The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s dark end-of-days novel. Eschewing the survivalist fantasies of the recent Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend (2007)(okay, his family is dead, but he gets to tool around New York in a yellow sports car and play golf off the deck of an air craft carrier), Hillcoat’s film is faithful to the novel’s bleak view of a post-something America. The exact nature of the
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