Widescreen

Just as the growth of music festivals is changing the culture and business model of popular music, so the ongoing expansion of the festival circuit is reconfiguring film culture. Film festivals began in the 1940s as trade fairs, before diversifying into shop windows for the industry, training events and film think tanks. This shapeshifting was necessary but, as I’ve said before (Widescreen, January 2009) it hasn’t gone far enough. Too many film festivals are the same: a main competition of new films, a sidebar retrospective, a shorts programme and so on. Their directors need to realise they can innovate with the form.

This is something I’ve been trying to do myself. Last August, the actress Tilda Swinton and I staged a quirky community film festival, the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, in Nairn, the Scottish town in which she lives (see Widescreen, November 2008). We did it again in March in Beijing with the Scottish Cinema of Dreams. Then in June, I organised The Paradise Movie Hall of Kolkata at the Edinburgh Film Festival. These events involved elaborately decorated venues, baking, music, and as much audience participation and fun as possible.

Yesterday I came back from A Pilgrimage, the latest project with Tilda and by far our most quixotic and ambitious gig yet. A Pilgrimage tried to marry a film festival with the sort of journey that I, as a good Catholic boy, went on at school. We pulled a 34-tonne mobile cinema (the Screen Machine) on foot through gorgeous Highland landscapes, visiting seven Scottish villages and towns, and showing road movies from around the world. Predictably, we got soaked and midge-bitten.

And people came from all over the world to watch movies in our 80-person cinema. The B&Bs were full and some of us had to sleep on the bus, or in car parks. I pulled a muscle dancing to Cher’s “Believe.” We held up quotations from the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson: “Things become visible not by light but by the fresh angle from which I see them.”

Die Zeit, Italian Vogue, and Variety came. The photographer Brigitte Lacombe took pictures. We were on the BBC, in USA Today, the New York Times, China Post, Hollywood Reporter and on CBS. The Times called us “a worldwide cult” and “the funniest and most child-friendly film festival in the history of the movies.” IndieWire wrote that we were “a continual utopia… a glowing example of an innovative way to exhibit cinema… organic and joyous.” I’ve been interviewed by many journalists, but never before has one cried as they asked their questions.

Gulp. Such a strong reaction to a community experiment. Why? Though no one’s ever pulled a cinema across a country before, A Pilgrimage felt familiar. It had some of the togetherness and public rhetoric of the demonstrations against, say, the war in Iraq. But we were demonstrating for something, rather than against—more like “Cinema Cinema Cinema: In In In!”

This catches some of the tone but not the playfulness. It’s the same kind of play as the flash mob phenomenon, the mass dances in Grand Central Station and so on that you can watch on YouTube. We had grins on our faces as those people do.

But there was a serious side too. We showed Peter Watkins’s devastating 1964 film Culloden on Culloden moor at 1pm, the time the battle started. At 69 minutes, the film was around the same length as the battle, in which 1,300 Jacobites were slaughtered. We dressed in black and pulled the cinema onto the moor in silence. Two weeks ago I carried my granny’s coffin down the Shankill Road in Belfast, and this felt similar—the weight, the onlookers, the feeling of tribute, bearing witness.

So, out of the collision between the form of a film festival and that of a pilgrimage came a sort of demonstration-flash mob-impromptu musical-funeral. Tilda and I had hoped for something like this, although we’d also feared that we’d look foolish, or that the pilgrims would have a miserable time.

What I can see only in hindsight is that those who argue that DVDs and home cinemas are privatising viewing, killing moviegoing, are wrong. We projected off DVD, and many of the rare films we showed are not available in prints. The digitisation of the film process made our school-trip/summer camp colloquy possible. Just as the film world is converting to the idea of movies on demand, it should look to the fact that in the era of iTunes and Spotify, more people than ever are pogoing in the mud in Glastonbury. There are neither mud nor midges online, that place where we spend so much of our time these days. Offline, however, that place where we used to live, is beautiful and moving. It’s great to watch movies there.