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

Founded under Mussolini's cultural apparatus in 1932, the festival spent the '70s floundering before Italian director Carlo Lizzani reshaped its identity in 1979.

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.

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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........

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