Locarno, 2024
For the estimable cineastes confused by last year’s dispatch, may I state for the record: I love the Locarno Film Festival. I love the picture-postcard setting, the eclectic competition, the management, the press agents, the industry professionals, the programmers, and the local retailers. I even love the other critics. I love the soft-boiled eggs that I crack and consume every morning in the hotel. I love trudging up the sharp incline to the Belvedere. I love finding Tim Blake Nelson ensconced in an attractive suite overlooking a mountain panorama, only to sadly notify him that Holes (dir. Andrew Davis, 2003) dominated our formative English GCSE syllabus. I love staggering back down the incline, pulse quickening, dictaphone overheating, with a scribbled piece of paper in my pocket that reads: “Pitch TBN interview to FT Arts Desk in early Jan before new Captain America– ££.” I love watching tap scenes from My Sister Eileen (dir. Richard Quine, 1955) in encompassing CinemaScope.
I love it all! And what a healthy, tenable and rewarding time to be a film journalist, by the way. When to see the very newest offerings means attending expensive and exclusive festivals, where loss-making is an expectation, not a surprise. Leaving aside the current state of remuneration, there remains a giddy delirium to in-person attendance. In Locarno, the critic is afforded a luxury of choice spanning several scenic sites: at Teatro Kursaal, a casino-cinema-restaurant amalgam, you attend press screenings in the morning and early afternoon; at Gran Rex, situated off a steep alley by the main square, you catch classic movies through the day and into the evening; and at Piazza Grande, shrouded by a massive open-air screen and innumerable mustard-coloured seats, you watch films of commercial notice under the glow of nighttime, clustered among the regional punters who have ambled in, sometimes accidentally, from across the Alps.
There’s a lot to love. This year, the retrospettiva, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht and entitled The Lady with the Torch, featured a veritable bounty from Columbia Pictures to mark its centenary. Noir, screwball, western, musical, thriller: all were accounted for. What an opportunity to observe 35mm prints of films that you’d otherwise squint at via splotchy YouTube-vision. I was particularly enamoured by the circuitous civil war flick, The Last Frontier (dir. Anthony Mann, 1955), starring Victor Mature as a mercurial Oregon fur-trapper named Jed Cooper, enlisted by an embryonic army fortress to fend off some furious Native Americans. This tense back-and-forth between the settlers and inhabitants respawns over the picture, but during the skirmishes the protagonist evolves from being a feral nuisance to a respected sergeant, a shift illustrated by the blue uniform he adorns at the close. Cooper is first drawn from that archetypical construct, the noble savage: a man unspoiled by society, bound to nature, and resistant to the ever-present danger of creeping civilisation. It struck me that Cooper’s trajectory towards polite society inverts Golden Age pirate lore, which forges tales of normal folk embittered by traditional customs and maritime hierarchies, propelling them into lives of plunder and cut-throat buccaneering.
And to have the remotest chance of seeing almost any of the films that premiere in Locarno, or in equivalent European festivals, you, too, would need to be a pirate. Even entries from established auteurs such as Hong Sang-soo, whose disarming By the Stream (2024) played this edition, are fortunate to receive miniscule UK distribution. (My editor tells me that in lieu of theatrical showings, many Hong films appear on Karagarga, an invite-only, private tracker site, where users must upload as much as they download to retain membership privileges.) That Hong was one of the most recognisable names in competition perhaps demonstrates the joyfully cloistered world that we cinephiles inhabit. Elsewhere, how might you anticipate viewing via official, legal avenues the second in Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy (2023–24). It runs at almost four hours long; it documents the lives of Chinese migrant workers in the country’s provincial, casualised textile industry; the title of this instalment contains the parenthesis, Hard Times. It’s not hitting Netflix next week.
How do critics keep up with all this? First, if you’re granted accreditation, you’ll have permission to use a digital library. This platform usually consists of some selections but rarely includes the bigger names. Radu Jude bucked the trend this year: his two experimental shorts, Eight Postcards from Utopia and Sleep #2 (2024), could be watched online for the festival’s duration. Access is time-sensitive, though: Locarno’s version is rendered unusable at the end of August. Second, you’ll be given links to screeners. On request, PRs provide usernames and passwords for files that are usually hosted on Vimeo: these are handy for when you’ve just arrived, when you’ve just left, and when you risk conducting interviews with relevant talent without having seen the film. The latter scenario, if unaddressed, delivers a ghoulish façade: a shrieking void of indignity that leaves you in a soporific trance, wishing the world would collapse as you fulfil your editorial commandments. (This happened to me once.)
These screeners are shared among friends and colleagues, which provides a route for unaccredited anoraks to keep abreast of the latest submissions. Otherwise, critics have their means. One evening, as I slipped tentatively into Lake Maggiore—the rock surfaces were mossy, there was an unwitting audience—I asked a close friend about his underhand viewing tactics: “I either download torrents or stream through fmovies.” Lake water lapping my chin, I nodded. For others I poked, the delinquent use of Pirate Bay and its adjacents constituted a common response. Swallowing a negroni, one critic advocated searching “Chinese Google” for streamers, as its copyright infringement policies are less rigidly policed. Another scribe insisted that he rarely pirated films: the last time was “a few months ago.” We chuckled mirthlessly.
In admiralty law, pirates were considered hostis humani generis, an enemy of humankind. By this logic, such seafarers were literally outside of the law—outlaws—and therefore subject to the extra-judicial force of any nation state that happened to encounter them. The pirate, on these terms, was an exceptional figure, an infamous and egregious criminal category that could be dealt with summarily, if necessary. But for established institutions, I think the act of piracy rather provides an ad hoc method of supportive dissemination, chipping at the financial borders that limit festival coverage and film writing in general. Piracy widens not just which films can be watched, but who can watch them. It develops a critical corpus that encourages wide and varied cinephilia, a devoted interest in often experimental film, and a simultaneously disintegrating and catalysing language that, in the mantra of the festival, sustains “cinema forever.” You can’t hang these bootleggers.
In short, art is shaped and determined by the quality of its audience. On this point, I was impressed by the revitalised house organ, Pardo, which debuted this year and corralled journalist colleagues to commission, write and edit for its daily publication. This process looked intense and arduous for its contributors, but the paper offered a sharp, analytical accompaniment to the event offerings (excepting “When You Love Your Job, You Want to Keep Doing It” as the Irène Jacob interview pull-quote). Such a press-centred approach exceeds the possibilities of over-friendly, soft-ball marketing fluff, and its development should enhance the vocabulary with which to understand and appraise cinema at Locarno. The films shown here need thoughtful and judicious audiences, whether lawful or unlawful, in-person or online, watching during or after the festival. These cultivated viewers should be understood as neither friends nor enemies but crucial, subjective interlocutors: it’s hard to love everything, after all, however much one might insist.
Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!