Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema: Politics, Histories and Cultural Value

Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema is the first systematic study of the role ideology plays in film festivals’ construction of dominant ideas about art cinema.

Film festivals are considered the driving force of the film industry outside Hollywood, disseminating ideals of cinematic art and humanist politics. However, the question of what drives them remains highly contentious.

In a rare consideration of the European competitive film festival circuit as a whole, this book analyses the shared economic, geopolitical and cultural histories that characterise ’European A festivals’. It offers, too, the first extensive analysis of such festivals’ role in the canonisation of select Italian films, from Rome, Open City to The Great Beauty and Gomorrah.

The book proposes a new approach to ideology critique, one that enables detailed examination of how film festivals construct ideas about not only contemporary art cinema, but assumptions about gender, race, colonialism and capitalism.

Rachel Johnson lectures in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures at the University of Leeds. She researches film festivals, cinephilia and displacement. Her work has been published in edited collections and journals such as Contours of Film Festival Research, Cinergie and the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Alongside research and teaching, she co-directs the film club Leeds Cineforum.