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Chris Fujiwara and his relationship with film and the Edinburgh
International Film Festival (2012 - 2014)
When it comes to running a film festival there are many departments
involved, from the film programmers down to the floor staff. Each department
plays a unique and important role toward the smooth and efficient running of a
festival. What begins as a rather small team expands as opening night draws closer,
each individual united with film as a common passion. It is this passion that drives
everyone to work incredibly hard up to and including the two weeks of the festival,
with over one hundred of these workers being volunteers. The aim of the festival is
to share with the audience inspirational films which may not get a cinema release
in Europe otherwise, whether this is because it is a short low budget experimental
film or an Iranian feature length retrospective. It is the job of the Artistic Director
to pick out and oversee the selection of films that will be shown at this event and
that will intrigue and enthral an audience. It takes a great understanding of both
film and audience to put together a successful programme, while in the meantime
disregarding personal taste. It is important for the festival to evolve culturally so as
to encourage good audience numbers and thus have a successful year.
Chris Fujiwara was the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film
Festival for three years (2012, 2013 and 2014) and was gracious enough to spare
me his time to meet me for an interview. He has written three books, The Cinema
of Nightfall (1998) about film director Jacques Tourneur, The World and Its Double
(2008) about theatre and film director Otto Perminger and Jerry Lewis (2009)
about entertainer Jerry Lewis. Fujiwara has also taught and lectured on Film in
Tokyo and the US as well as being part of various film festival juries around the
world and writing many articles relating to film. During the interview, when
discussing with Fujiwara if there was a relationship between programming a film
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festival and critiquing, he explained that he believed they were very different
things. "One difference is that in criticism you have to make a statement, an
argument, but when you put together a programme you are giving examples." Like
with the films themselves, members of the audience are left to take what they will
from the programme. They have been given the opportunity to form a dialogue.
Fujiwara described criticism as a form of dialogue but not one with an
audience, and emphasised this by saying, "I think criticism can exist even if there is
no audience. There is a French critic, Jean-Michel Frodon, who once said in
conversation that he doesn't try to make people see the film, he doesn't care
whether anybody sees the film as a result of what he writes." Fujiwara agrees with
this approach and believes that what you get from a film is personal, he says, "The
main function of the critic is to talk about the experience he or she had with the
film and try to make sense of that and try to put it in the context of the wider
situation of being a person living in the world and so forth." Although many critics
write reviews etcetera with the intention of persuading others to see or not see
the film, Fujiwara thinks that it is better to work on the presumption you are
writing for somebody who has already seen it. With this presumption alone,
critiquing cannot be compared to programming, as the hope is nobody has seen the
films already (apart from in special cases, such as retrospectives). Fujiwara
affirmed the importance of putting how you feel toward a film aside when
programming a film festival, "...in programming you first have to make the leap
from your taste to a secure level of judgement and evaluation, and then you have
to consider surrounding circumstances such as who the audience is and how do you
get them to come to this film and so forth." Although ideally one would hope for a
wide and diverse range of people buying tickets, this is not the case. Fujiwara
stated that it is a small, select group of people who attend film festivals and
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although there are some more mainstream films within festival programmes, it is
generally this self selecting group who are in mind when programming.
Whilst a separate team of people programme the short films for the
festival, Fujiwara understands their importance and actively enjoys them. Even
though he did not have as much time as he would have liked to watch some of the
shorts programmed in the festival, he watched and discussed them in any time he
had available. He assured me, "I had to concentrate on other parts of the
programme and I knew that Lydia and Kim [shorts programmers] were doing a very
good job with the short films." There can be incredibly high quality short films in
film festivals, sometimes filmmakers prefer the short as a medium for a particular
story and others cannot get the funding for a feature. Take Whiplash (Damien
Chazelle, 2014) for example, this award winning film was originally made as a short
as the concept was unable to attract the funding it needed to be a feature film.
The short was screened at Sundance in 2013 and won the short film jury award for
fiction. This helped Chazelle to get the money he needed to make his film how he
originally intended1
. Similarly, a short animation which has been screened at
festivals all over the world, including Edinburgh is The Dam Keeper (Dice Tsutsumi,
Robert Kondo, 2013). This film had always intended to be a short but with the
attention it has gained from its Oscar nomination it is now being made into a
feature film. There are also storylines which suit being in a short format and would
not translate as well in a longer format. Next Floor (2008) by Denis Villeneuve
(Prisoners, 2013) is an example of this. Already an acknowledged feature length
filmmaker, Villeneuve realised this concept suited a shorter length and went on to
win a number of awards. There is great skill required to make a successful short
film and their place is definitely rooted within festivals, with some even regarding
them as equal to the feature film in regard to competition. Fujiwara mentioned
1
Breznican, Anthony, [Online], Sundance 2013: Prize-winning 'Whiplash' short aims to go long, [Cited
24th March 2015], Available from: http://www.ew.com/article/2013/01/23/sundance-2013-whiplash-
short
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that he was recently on the jury at a festival in Pamplona where both shorts and
feature length films were eligible for the main prize, he said, "With my strong
support we gave the main prize to a short film, I was really happy to have the
chance to do that." It is clear that Fujiwara has a passion for film and this is carried
through to any role he has. This is one factor that made EIFF successful and the
same applies for any film festival.
Fujiwara's time at the Edinburgh International Film Festival saw the rise in
ticket sales by 33%. The previous year to him joining had received bad press for a
range of things, such as the lack of the ceremonial red carpet, guests not turning
up and a smaller, less focused programme.2
There were also other issues such as
funding and the move, in 2008, from the festival being held in August to June that
may have still been taking its toll. As Fujiwara was not present at the festival in
2011 he could not comment on what went wrong.
The success of his time at EIFF, in Fujiwara's opinion, was down to the
strong programme in 2012, "... I put together a programme I thought had some
integrity to it, some meaning and it was well received." He understood that the
expectations of the press and festival-goers were already low and with his new
programme they would either get better or stay the same. In Matthew Lloyd's book
on the EIFF between 1968 - 1980 he mentions "... balancing founding principles
with the need for persistent reinvention."3
It is important for the artistic director
and programmers to understand the place of the festival within the culture at that
time. Whether we like it or not, celebrity is a huge part of our culture. If having a
big name on a red carpet for a photo-call encourages interest from the public, the
smaller more independent/art house films will have more of a chance to be seen.
Not only does it benefit potential ticket sales of independent films but any money
2
Pulver, Andrew, [Online], The trouble with the Edinburgh film festival, [Cited 23rd March 2015],
Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/20/edinburgh-film-festival-what-went-
wrong
3
Lloyd, Matthew, 'Introduction' in How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, (St Andrews Film
Studies, 2011), p. 11
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gained from celebrity appearances at the festival can help fund the screenings of
more art house films which may never get distributed otherwise. Along with the
taking away of the red carpet in 2011, there was also the removal of the Michael
Powell award for best British film which may also have disinclined British
filmmakers to show their film at the EIFF. These unsuccessful changes prove that
although reinvention is necessary for the forward motion of the festival, it is also
vital that these modifications give heed to culture and the motivations of both
film-makers and film-goers.
Television series are very popular in western society at the moment, with
channels such as HBO, Showtime and FX broadcasting high quality dramas. This
increased interest may change the shape of film festivals as we see more television
episodes premiered on the big screen. The term "cinematic"4
is often used to
describe these new television shows, but with no definition it is difficult to
understand what the word actually means. It is a certain undefined quality that
that not every film has. Fujiwara pointed out," You see all the time in festivals and
cinema context things that are shown that could be on TV very easily and that will
be." This blurring of the lines makes the defining of the word "cinematic" very
difficult to capture. It also brings in to question the relationship between cinema
and television. What makes a medium a television show and what makes it a film?
Some films can be incredibly long, some incorporating chapters (not unlike
episodes) and some television series can be very short. Fujiwara suggests, "I think
that we're probably going to get to a new way of understanding the relationship
through the practice of doing it [screening television episodes in the cinema] and I
think festivals are going to play a role in that." Despite not watching television
himself, in 2013 EIFF screened two episodes of Peaky Blinders (created by Steven
Knight, 2013 - ). Fujiwara recognised this ongoing change in culture and embraced
4
Thorpe, Vanessa, [Online], Cinematic TV dramas spark a revolution in online viewing, [Cited 23rd
March 2015], Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/oct/23/cinematic-tv-
dramas-online-viewing
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it, putting in to practice his judgement and evaluation along with the need to
constantly reinvent the festival.
In the three years Fujiwara spent as the Artist Director of the Edinburgh
International Film Festival he managed to regain the balance of independent
cinema. He put together an interesting and inspiring programme of films from
around the world and won back the respect from the press that it deserved. With
careful dedication and direction the festival's programme proved to be a success
each year. Having a great understanding of audience and culture is crucial to the
programming of the EIFF and for the artistic director to have a natural interest in
these aspects already is beneficial. In the last sentence of Lloyd's book he says,
"The question that EIFF must ask of itself is whether the organisation still possesses
the imagination, intellectual rigour and will to go against the grain and interrogate
our notions of international film culture..."5
It can be safely said that during
Fujiwara's time at the Edinburgh International Film Festival the organisation
certainly possessed the imagination, rigour and will to expand the field of
international cinema for audiences.
5
Lloyd, Matthew, 'Conclusion: Utopian Anomaly?' in How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, (St
Andrews Film Studies, 2011), p. 66
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Bibliography
Breznican, Anthony, [Online], Sundance 2013: Prize-winning 'Whiplash' short aims
to go long, [Cited 24th March 2015], Available from:
http://www.ew.com/article/2013/01/23/sundance-2013-whiplash-short, last
accessed 25th March 2015.
Chang, Justin, [Online], Sundance: 'Whiplash', 'Rich Hill' Win Grand Jury Prizes,
Available from: http://variety.com/2014/film/news/live-from-the-sundance-film-
festival-awards-1201070804/, last accessed 24th March 2015.
Dawtrey, Adam, 'Due helps Edinburgh come back from brink' in Variety, [Penske
Business Media, LLC, June 18th 2012) p. 6.
Dawtrey, Adam, 'Topper helps Edinburgh get its groove back' in Variety, [Penske
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Hardy, Forsyth, Slightly Mad and Full of Dangers, (The Ramsay Head Press, 1992)
pp. 180-194.
Lloyd, Matthew, How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, (St Andrews Film
Studies, 2011) pp. 11-66.
Pulver, Andrew, [Online], The trouble with the Edinburgh film festival, [Cited 23rd
March 2015], Available from:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/20/edinburgh-film-festival-what-
went-wrong, last accessed 25th March 2015.
Thorpe, Vanessa, [Online], Cinematic TV dramas spark a revolution in online
viewing, [Cited 23rd March 2015], Available from:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/oct/23/cinematic-tv-dramas-online-
viewing, last accessed 25th March 2015.
