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1 - Festivals that (did not) Matter: Festivals’ Archival Practices and the Field Imaginary of Festival Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

Antoine Damiens
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Summary

Abstract

Chapter 1 explores the historiographical and political project of festival studies. In considering queer film festivals’ investment in preserving their own history (or lack thereof) and the state of various archives, I am interested in two inter-related issues. 1. How do institutional settings, professionalization, and sexual politics shape festivals’ archival practices and/or the very existence of archives on film festivals? 2. How might we understand the gaps in the archives, the presence of documents that attest to the existence of yet do not describe ephemeral festivals? In recovering festivals which have been erased from traditional histories, Chapter 1 operates a critique of festival studies’ disciplinary unconscious. It reveals the set of theoretical coordinates which conditioned the development of the field.

Keywords: festivals; archives; epistemology; ephemera; methods; festival Studies

‘But then, perhaps we are taking our pleasure a bit too seriously? It is, after all, rather difficult in an academic discourse to avoid the pleasures of seriousness […]. Indeed, to divorce ourselves from serious pleasure would immediately involve us in another marriage with it, the very gesture of exclusion reinscribing us in its hierarchical structure. Once again, the radical pleasure of abandoning seriousness becomes a serious pleasure.’

In this introductory chapter, I turn to the question of LGBTQ festivals’ physical archives and festival studies’ disciplinary apparatus. I pay particular attention to festivals which have been forgotten: some of the events I describe only exist as neglected traces within archival collections. Symptomatically, these ephemeral events are also ignored in the academic literature as the field is typically concerned with festivals’ longevity and the role they play in the economy of film. In defining festivals as ephemeral events, this chapter thus sets out to interrogate festival studies’ historiographical project: it argues that our focus on major, established events simultaneously justifies festival studies’ theoretical apparatus and reasserts the legitimacy of festival research within film studies. In centring festivals that failed or that happened only once, this chapter hopes to carve a space for a reimagining of festival studies itself.

Type
Chapter
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LGBTQ Film Festivals
Curating Queerness
 , pp. 39 - 76
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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