Academic Responses (International Reception)

• Bill Nichols - "New Cinemas and the film festival circuit". 

"Films from nations not previously regarded as prominent film-producing countries receive praise for their ability to transcend local issues and provincial tastes while simultaneously providing a window onto a different culture. We are invited to receive such films as evidence of artistic maturity-the work of directors ready to take their place within an international fraternity of auteurs-and of a distinctive national culture work that remains distinct from Hollywood-based norms both in style and theme"

"To want to know of foreign cinemas, for example, of their indebtedness to state control often betrays our own ideology of the free market and artistic license. We ask more to gain reassurance that this is a cinema like the one we imagine our own to be than to explore the intricacies of the relationship between culture, ideology, and the state"

"Part of what we want to discover in our film festival encounters is something akin to what Dean MacCannell calls "back region" knowledge. Like the tourist, we hope to go behind appearances, to grasp the meaning of things as those who present them would, to step outside our (inescapable) status as outsiders and diagnosticians to attain a more intimate, more authentic form of experience. Festivals, like museums and tourist sites, foster and accommodate such desire"

"New Iranian Cinema is [designed to travel]. What the critic from elsewhere adds, as a supplement, might also, in this light, be regarded as the finishing touch that completes a distinctive, complex fusion of the local and the global."

"[On censorship] As in China, film-makers have considerable freedom to make what they can get funded, knowing that direct attacks (but not necessarily aesthetically esteemed ones) will hinder their own advancement."

"Every year, Attebai explained, Farabi organizes the Fajr Festival and the Ministry of Culture classifies films into four categories, "A" through "D," on the basis of their perceived quality (a mix, apparently,o f formal and social criteria). The "A" and "B" films receive greater distribution support, they can command higher box-office prices, and their makers receive priority for further film-making proposals. "C" and "D" rated films receive far less support and their makers must struggle harder to make another film."

"Iranian film representatives learn... what predispositions and doubts loom in the festival-goer's mind.Their answers aim to satisfy our curiosity... arouse our sympathies and heighten our appreciation. As with most contemporary forms of crosscultural encounter, an inevitable degree of knowing calculation enters into the experience on both sides."