Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 8, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
“At the Oscars, money counts; in Venice, the filmmakers and the actors”, Hollywood star Sean Penn once enthused a few years ago. That sounds good, but it is no longer entirely true. After all, the great days of auteur cinema, the avant-garde and independent directors have long since passed at the Venice Film Festival as well. Yet the summer activity at the Lido still has its very special charms. The Grand Canal as a backdrop, the Adriatic beach as a stage and the stars wave from the gondola – even the sophisticated festival in Cannes cannot compete with that. Critics persistently grumble that Berlin and Cannes have cinematically overtaken the Lido. But in fact, within only four years festival director Marco Müller has managed to lure more Hollywood films to Venice than ever before. At this year’s festival alone (August 29 to September 8), stars including George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Scarlett Johansson are announced.
Commerce – and dictator Benito Mussolini – already stood godfather at Venice’s birth. The hoteliers on the Lido, the atmospheric bathing island of the lagoon city, saw their guests drifting away to other beaches. And the already existing art biennale attracted only a small audience. Mussolini, who had already recognized cinema as the «sharpest weapon», primarily wanted to polish up his international image, by contrast. Incidentally, the first film shown on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel was «Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde» by Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian. Some critics think this at the same time something like the «official baptism» of cinema as modern art. The prize of the Golden Lion, so coveted today, did not yet exist.
In the 1930s, Venice was unrivalled as the stage for cinematic art from all over the world. Rene Clair, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir and Ernst Lubitsch came. The great freedom lasted until 1938, when «Olympia» by Leni Riefenstahl was honored; later, the Biennale degenerated into purely German-Italian film days at which Goebbels appeared in a white linen suit. «A large proportion of the films were low-level war films», an American critic wrote. The great period for Venice came in the 1950s and 1960s, the age of «Dolce vita» in Italy: Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini – never again were there so many Italian directors of world renown. Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle and François Truffaut were also discovered in Venice.
In 1968, Alexander Kluge became the first German to receive the Golden Lion for «Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed»; it was the international discovery of «young German film» – and it was to remain the last Golden Lion for many years. The left-wing protest movement set about breaking up the sophisticated event; at times the screen-stormers set up a kind of «Anti- Festival», for years Venice was cancelled altogether, and a Lion was awarded again for the first time in 1979. «We did not correctly assess the realities of a cinema governed by economic laws», director and communist Gillo Pontecorvo said at the time. «The only result is that the competing festivals have drawn advantages from the disappearance of Venice.» Now these laws apply in Venice too: Seven of the 21 competition films come from the USA. Only the Germans have gone empty-handed in Venice for years; this time again, no German director is in the running. The last German winner of the Golden Lion can hardly be remembered: It was Wim Wenders, the film was called «The State of Things». That was a quarter century ago.
