You will have heard that, after absences resulting from last year’s Hollywood actors’ strike, the stars are back at Venice International Film Festival. You can’t move for a Pitt or a Jolie or a Kidman. Of course the auteurs never went away. For the 81st edition we have films by Pedro Almodóvar, Tim Burton and Luca Guadagnino. Less publicised is the news that we are also watching fresh material from Alfonso Cuarón, Thomas Vinterberg and Joe Wright. Films by those men share 15 Academy Awards between them. Yet none is in the main competition. None is opening the festival. Why? Because they are all here with television series.
Some Rubicon has been crossed. A full eight years ago, Screen International, one of the main trade papers, ran a story headlined “Should film festivals be looking to add, or expand upon, high-end TV drama strands?” The move was already under way. In 2014, Cannes screened episodes of David Lynch’s return to Twin Peaks. Programmers in that Screen piece seemed largely happy with the development. “Getting people out to a theatre to have a collective experience only helps support the importance of the big screen,” Genna Terranova, then director of Tribeca Film Festival, enthused.
Yet there remains something uneasy about this arrangement. Television and cinema have been rivals since the former’s mainstream surge in the 1950s. The competition prompted the older medium to respond with enormous screens and productions to match. It would be a stretch to say that without TV you wouldn’t have Ben Hur, but the smaller screen’s arrival made that Charlton Heston epic more likely. The move to more adult material in the late 1960s and early 1970s – the era of Midnight Cowboy, Mash and The Godfather – opened up other vistas not available on telly. The price of survival was eternal vigilance.
One would expect such an event to lean into quality, but they also favour creators, such as Cuarón, who have proved themselves in the older medium
Many of the responses in the Screen article made the argument about quality. Of course there was excellent television in the much-vaunted millennial golden age. There was superb television in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s not the point. There is a great deal of good theatre out there as well, but nobody is trying to insinuate that medium into film festivals. If anyone is arguing that television should be kept away from Cannes and Venice because it is a lesser art form, those people deserve to be rudely ignored.
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This straw man came up when, in late 2019, the staff at the high-brow French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma named that Twin Peaks series as the best film of the decade. When people like me objected, we were told we were snobs for thinking TV inferior to the medium of Jean-Luc Godard, John Ford and Adam Sandler. Once again, that’s not the point. I don’t think music a lesser form than cinema, but I wasn’t considering Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly as best film of the decade either.
All right, that is a facetious comparison. Perusal of the series playing at Venice confirms an overlap with cinema that no record album could claim. Cuarón, whose Roma won the Golden Lion here in 2018, directs Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline in a conspiracy thriller for Apple TV+ titled Disclaimer*. Vinterberg, winner of an Oscar for Another Round, gives us Families Like Ours, a dystopian drama about a drowned world. Daringly, Joe Wright, director of Atonement and Darkest Hour, brings M. Son of the Century, a film about the rise of Benito Mussolini, to a festival that, founded in 1932, briefly boasted an award named for the dictator.
The festival’s move towards television belatedly acknowledges decisions made by the film-making talent. Until as recently as 20 years ago, whatever critics or the public may think, actors and directors clearly did regard telly as a lesser business. Stars graduated from the small screen to the big screen. If you went in the opposite direction your career was most likely in decline. A few weeks ago, Mackenzie Davis, the Canadian star of films such as Terminator: Dark Fate and TV shows such as Station Eleven, schooled me on the new realities. “There isn’t this binary between film and television any more,” she said. “Nicole Kidman works more in TV than she does in cinema. And she’s one of the most esteemed talents of our generation.”
True enough. And yet. At Venice, at least, the TV series that screen remain those that, certainly on paper, look most like movies. We began all this by noting the auteurs who were helming the shows at this year’s festival. One would expect such an event to lean into quality, but they also favour creators, such as Cuarón, who have proved themselves in the older medium. The purists need only worry if Celebrity Love Island turns up on the Lido.
