Post-Chiarini, the Venice Film Festival Nearly Faded into Obscurity. One Man Revived It.

Historians generally agree: a lot happened in 1968. Student revolts in Paris, demonstrations against the Vietnam War in America, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. A decade of counterculture encouraged young people to speak out and not take it anymore. Granted, it’s easier to imagine a government being the subject of ire than a film festival, but cultural institutions represent a different kind of power: the power to inform taste, shape discussion and define what can be considered legitimate art. So when students protested the Venice Film Festival in 1968 with placards reading “Mostra fascista?” (“A fascist festival?”) they were doing more than objecting to narrow programming and a penchant for highbrow taste. They were revolting against a festival with fascist origins at a time when the cultural role of cinema needed to be expanded. Their aims were fair enough but the immediate result was not a utopian festival delle arti but instead a decade of misdirection, ambiguity and purposelessness from the oldest film festival in the world. It would stay like that until Carlo Lizzani took over in 1979.

Protests like the ones in 1968 were impossible to imagine in 1932, the year the Venice Film Festival was founded. Youth culture was not yet a fully formed thing, but cinema culture was coming into its own. The Venice Biennale had been going on since 1895, but by the 1930s, the movies had sound and could no longer be dismissed as carnival sideshows or simply working-class entertainments. Cinema was art and deserved to be recognized as such. Of course, festivals are an excuse to celebrate the state as much as they are the art, and Venice’s origins were certainly tied to the aims of the Fascist government. The festival was co-founded by Giuseppe Volpi, Mussolini’s minister of finance. From 1930, the entire Biennale was made autonomous from the Venetian municipality, bringing it more directly into the Fascist state’s cultural apparatus and allowing the regime to use the arts to advance nationalist aims. The first competitive year of the film festival was 1934, with films competing for the Coppa Mussolini—literally, the Mussolini Cup. Goebbels was a frequent visitor. Cinema has always been beloved by dictators and children.

The Fascists didn’t survive the war, but cinema did, and by the 1950s, Venice was on a roll, exhibiting films from around the world and introducing Indian and Japanese cinema to Western audiences, many of whom wouldn’t have known a cinema that wasn’t from California or Paris. Akira Kurosawa won the Golden Lion (the Mussolini Cup was no more) in 1951 for Rashomon, and the great Bengali director Satyajit Ray won the same prize in 1957 for Aparajito, the second film in the wonderful Apu trilogy.

The festival continued to flourish into the 1960s under the directorship of Luigi Chiarini. A film theorist as well as a director, Chiarini was meticulous in his leadership, resisting political pressure and imposing strict aesthetic criteria when judging the films submitted. But the 1960s were a decade of revival, artistic as well as political. It was the decade of Godard and Truffaut: filmmakers who ripped up the rule book, rewrote the grammar of cinema and contributed to the general atmosphere of upheaval that led to 1968 and the unravelling of the festival.

The festival that year opened just days after Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia, suppressing the Prague Spring reforms. Students and other protesters took the streets, in support of the Czech dissidents but also in protest against what they saw as an anachronistic and bourgeois event. As with that year’s Biennale, there was a strong police presence at the opening of the Film Festival on August 25, 1968. Protesters demanded Chiarini resign and that the festival be self-managed by participating filmmakers. They held placards reading “Down with the culture of the powerful!” Cavani and Pasolini were among the filmmakers in support of the demands. By the end of that year’s festival, Chiarini had resigned.

Some of the best films were made in the 1970s, but you wouldn’t have known it if you were in Venice. No Golden Lions were awarded; the festival was no longer competitive. And in 1973 and 1978, there was no festival at all. It was the Anni di piombo (Years of Lead) in Italy, and the country’s cultural institutions were questioning their role in a nation that was between identities. Venice had been eclipsed by Cannes and was falling into irrelevance. The problem was a lack of direction. How could a festival with fascist origins remain politically independent? How could a festival marry an appreciation of arthouse cinema with the increasingly popular blockbuster? How could a festival dispel accusations of representing bourgeois, elitist tastes while also upholding distinction and meritocracy in the art form? Enter Carlo Lizzani.

Lizzani was no unknown bit player when he took over the festival in 1979. A writer and a director himself, he had worked on major projects like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and was a screenwriter on the Oscar-nominated Bitter Rice (1950). When he took over, Cannes was regarded as the more important festival, Venice had a smaller budget and had been marred by a decade of identity crisis. He had just three months to prepare.

One thing he did not do was try to turn back the clock and revert the festival to what it once was. Nor did he try to imitate the commercialization that Cannes represented. Lizzani recognized that a new way forward had to be forged, one that was open to the artistic and the popular, to new audience tastes but also audience expectations about what a festival was and how the cultural gatekeepers who organized them should act.

The main ways he did this were by creating new sections within the festival with the aim of increasing the number and diversity of films submitted and exhibited. The Officina section allowed space for experimental cinema to be brought to Venice; on the flipside, the Mezzogiorno–Mezzanotte section (“Midday–Midnight”) was established to incorporate commercial and spectacular cinema into the festival. The festival that had awarded films like Ordet and Last Year at Marienbad could now screen Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Golden Lion award was brought back in 1980, after 12 years of not being awarded.

Lizzani’s work was recognized instantly. The Washington Post that year reported that he was largely responsible for turning the festival around. (Though not before crediting American graphic designer Milton Glaser for designing a new, stylized winged lion trophy.) However, Lizzani did not act alone. Many of his radical interventions were informed by the advice of critic Enzo Ungari. Ungari, a screenwriter and critic, knew that the festival’s programming had to include contrasts and juxtapositions, mixing experimental cinema with big-budget crowd-pleasers. Really, we should think of the revival of Venice as the Lizzani-Ungari project. The festival no longer subscribed to the division between popular and artistic cinema; the Lizzani ethos was that both were valid and both could be celebrated in the same festival.

Today, Venice is as important as ever, for filmmakers and distributors as well as for critics and fans. There are still controversies, commercialism and celebrity—all of which are ultimately distractions—but the festival’s importance is seldom questioned. Last year, 4,580 films were submitted for consideration; 21 played in the main competition. Venice’s evolution reminds us what a festival is for and what it can be. Cinema is often seen as a preserver of the past, but Lizzani knew its gatekeepers had to look forward.

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