Cannes’ Best Screenplay Award: A Study on the Social Construction of Meaning and Value Dolores Moreno PhD 2016 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there-from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 Abstract Cannes’ Best Screenplay Awards: A Study on the Social Construction of Meaning and Value In studying Cannes’ Best Screenplay award my aim was to better understand the prestige and the meaning making processes that surround the Festival de Cannes. To conduct this research on how awards perform the cultural identity of film festivals, I applied Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on capital, culture, art and distinction (1984, 1993, 1996, and more) together with reception studies and film festival theories. Accordingly, the festival’s prestige is regarded as socially sustained and giving out several awards strengthens and organises its “collective network” (Marijke De Valck 2007). Simultaneously, reinforcing Cannes’ prestige and its identity values secures the position and influence of those same social agents in the economies, cultures and geopolitics of cinema. In my research I examine a set period, from 2006 to 2014, in order to connect the tensions that cut through the Festival de Cannes back to wider frames of reference and back to concrete contexts which are relevant to our understanding of how and why certain films win awards while others are overlooked. Given that film festivals attach symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu 1979) and contribute to the construction of films as cultural products (Janet Harbord 2002), this study provides increased knowledge of the broader ramifications that film festival awards have for industrial and cultural dimensions of filmmaking. The Festival de Cannes can be seen as a network constructed brand that generates symbolic capital and reifies meaning making possibilities (adding to the works of Julian Stringer 2003a, Liz Czach 2004, Thomas Elsasser 2005, Rosalind Galt 2010, Cindy Wong 2011, Dorota Ostrowska 2016, and others). In this light, Cannes’ Best Screenplay Award serves to reinforce certain cinema values that the Festival de Cannes brand is associated with: diversity, reflecting the world we live in and, paradoxically, also authorship. 3 Contents Introduction: Getting Started on a Research Project on Cannes’ Best Screenplay Award Chapter 1. Understanding the Festival de Cannes: from Field Dynamics to Transportable Dispositions Chapter 2. Field Agents Negotiating the Palmarès: The Best Screenplay Award 2013 for A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke) Chapter 3. The Naturalisation of Cinematographic Criteria at Cannes: from Film Development to Film Awards Chapter 4. A Best Screenplay award-winning film from hype to reception: Lorna’s Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne 2008) Chapter 5. Reception of non-European films: Spring Fever (Lou Ye 2009) and Poetry (Lee Chang-dong 2010) Chapter 6. The Value of a Screenplay Award when Bestowed to an Already Successful Film: Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006) Chapter 7. The Meaning of the Best Screenplay Award “Around the World”: Beyond the Hills (Christian Mungiu 2012) Conclusions Works Cited Newspapers, Websites and other Sources Cited 4 Introduction Getting Started on a Research Project on Cannes’ Best Screenplay Award The public image of the Festival de Cannes may be that of “a celebration of cinema” but it is much more than that. 1 All festivals showcase some sort of cultural manifestation, be it theatre, music, gastronomy or films, but they also have social, economic and even political impact and support within and beyond their alleged purpose. For those and other reasons film festivals have became a most attractive topic in “millennial” film studies and film festival studies is now a fructiferous field. Film festival research may have started with André Bazin’s commentary on the Festival de Cannes as a “religious order” (back in 1955), and, to an extent, in assuming that the Festival de Cannes has prestige without engaging in a query about why, on what grounds and for whose interests we are maintaining a mythical approach. While there are undeniable historical reasons for this, there is yet much to be said about the social construction of prestige surrounding contemporary Cannes and its awards; particularly about the value that secondary awards such as the Best Screenplay Award have and where they “get” it from. Following current perspectives on film festivals, awards are not merely the high point of a cinema celebration, since the festival phenomena entails artistic, economic and political complexities within and beyond cinema; and it is from this standpoint that I study how Cannes’ Best Screenplay Award acquires meaning in contemporary cinema cultures, and for whose interests. The academic interest in film festival research is fairly recent but has grown rapidly and extensively. In 1994 Bill Nichols claimed that film festivals are fundamental to understanding film form, and his claim was supplemented with Janet Hardbord’s 2002 argument that they are also 1 I have chosen to leave the festival’s original name because it is widely used internationally. 5 key to understanding film products. Simultaneously, Daniel Dayan took a different approach, putting emphasis on how a festival is configured (2000[2013]). By that time, Julian Stringer (2001 and 2003a) was observing the idiosyncrasies of the film festival event as well as further analysing their gatekeeping function, and Kenneth Turan (2002) put forth a wide angle explanation of the international film festival circuit. Later, Peter Biskind (2004) added dimension to the topic with a detailed explanation on how a film festival, a film company and “film style” had emerged together at Cannes. Meanwhile, the relationships between film festivals, film form and film economies became central in the study of national cinemas and world cinemas, being addressed by Liz Czach (2004), Thomas Elsaesser (2005), Shohini Chadhuri (2005), and Daniel Steinhart (2006), to name a few initiators. Film Festivals became, of course, also important in the study of transnational cinema dynamics, with works such as those of Lucy Mazdon (2006 and 2007), Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (2006) Lúcia Nagib (2006) and Stephanie Dennison (2006). Then, since the appearance of Marijke De Valck’s 2007 seminal book on film festivals, the field has done nothing but grow and mature as a multidisciplinary field within and beyond film studies. This fact can be assessed by reviewing any of the available Film Festival Research Annotated Bibliographies (De Valck and Loist 2008 to 2015, in filmfestivalresearch.org) or the titles in the collections of the Film Festival Year Book (Iordanova and Rhyne eds., 2009, Iordanova and Cheung 2010 and 2011, Iordanova and Torchin 2012, Iordanova and Marlow-Man 2013, Iordanova and Van de Peer 2014) and Framing Film Festivals (Dovey 2015, Stevens 2016, Richards 2017 and Robinson and Berry 2017). It is common academic knowledge today that festivals and awards serve many different purposes which are only sometimes overtly stated, or even only sometimes rationalized by participants. It has also been widely agreed that the theories of Pierre Bourdieu are of major relevance to understanding cultural mediation (Smith Maguire and Matthews 2014), prestige (English 2005, Mezias et al. 2013) and film festivals (De Valck 2014a, 2014b, and 2016 also perceptible in Peranson [2008] 2009 and 6 Dayan [2000] 2013). Therefore, my research draws on current film festival scholarship and the theories of Bourdieu to problematise the apparent disinterested celebratory nature of film festivals and their awards, contributing to our understanding of how that image is built, and for whose benefit. The Festival de Cannes gathers media, industry and audience attention from “all over the world” and the winner of its most important award, the Palme d’Or, attains distinction and exposure at many sites, but is this true for all Cannes’ awards? Each year, the jury of the festival chooses the award-winning films by watching the twenty or so films that have previously been shortlisted for The Competition by the Festival de Cannes’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, and his team. The Competition’s films gather most of the critics’ attention and aim for the best international distribution deals; in short, these are the films that one tends to associate with the Festival de Cannes. The Competition is resolved in the Awarding ceremony; its awards are the Palme d'Or, the Jury Prize, the Best Director Prize, the awards for Leading Actor and Actress, the Best Screenplay award, the award for Best Short Film and the Camera d'Or award for the best full-length film by a new director. While the Palme d'Or is clearly the most important Festival de Cannes’ award (to an extent it is the most coveted award of all film festivals), I would like to draw attention to the fact that it is one in a palmarès composed of several awards where each receives a different name. In my research I question the construction of prestige around the Cannes’ Best Screenplay Award to better understand the role that it plays for the festival, for the award-winning films, for the people who meet at this festival and for those who trade with its films or comment upon them in present days. Therefore this research should have impact on our understanding of contemporary meaning construction around festivals, awards and award-winning films. In my framework chapter I present most of the conflicting interests and synergies that, according to current scholarship, make up a film 7 festival, so that we do not think that a screenplay award-winning film is plainly the film which has “the best screenplay” each year. As much as all festivals (of film or any other kind) can be considered significant regarding their cultural manifestation and in terms of social construction, the Festival de Cannes, with all its glitter and artistic claims, attracts and fills the eye like no other.