Locarno parla italiano – 404!: Glitching Locarno Film Festival 

by Silvia Cipelletti and Evelyn Kreutzer

This video essay grew out of an experiment, which took place over the course of half a day during the Locarno Film Festival. The experiment arose from the observation of a particular phenomenon: an apparent disconnect between the international and glamorous atmosphere of the film festival, the cultural and linguistic peculiarity of the festival’s locale, and the small scale of the city of Locarno. From a common lack of Italian subtitles on the big screens, sidelined by the other two Swiss national languages – French and German – to the diverse range of activities  in different areas of the city, we repeatedly noticed a strange ‘glitching’ effect – a disconnect between local and global, between languages, and between different demographics on site. 

What happens when an international and globally-renown film festival is confronted with the everyday life of a small, peripheral town in the Swiss landscape? What realities or parallel dimensions are generated through this clash of scales, languages, and cultural environments? Janet Harbour states that ‘film festivals are events tied to place, part of the calendar of local rituals that perform and enact the specific nature and appeal of a location for both inhabitants and visitors’. We wanted to find out how this idea unfolds in the landscape of Locarno, investigating the short and long term impact of the festival on the fabric of this Swiss town.

Our first impulse was to approach this topic through fieldwork, by trying to interact with and interview the inhabitants. Our aim was to research environments on both the periphery of the town and in close proximity to the big screen in Piazza Grande, trying to discover the perspective of those who inhabit these places year-round, and to understand how they experience the film festival and its impact. However, many interviewees were hesitant to talk to us, or had little to say about the festival. For example, one man working near the big screen in Piazza Grande said he had never seen any films at the festival. Other interviewees, such as the owner of a musical instrument store, responded enthusiastically, but eventually expressed an interest in the festival that had nothing to do with the films, but rather with the general influx of people and the music concerts it generates every year. These responses speak to Harbor’s observation that the ‘live events of the festival fall somewhere upon a spectrum that on one end has chance and on the other a more consciously motivated performance and self-interested spectacle’.

During this experiment, both of us naturally dropped in as characters within these dynamics, aware that we were playing our part in this series of linguistic, cultural, and spatiotemporal glitches. This process reminded Evelyn of the playful flanerie of the two protagonists in the film Daisies, with us being caught up in the wonder and hilarity of exploring the uncanny and unusual dimension of the Locarno landscape during the film festival. This exploratory attitude of free association continued even in the editing phase of the material collected in those few hours in Locarno. 

Inspired also by the chaotic and satirical aesthetic of the well-known meme page Il ticinese medio (‘The Average Ticinese’), which showcases ironic memes on locals in relation to the Locarno Festival, we made free associations and at times consciously incongruent matches of images and sounds. Somehow, it seemed impossible to escape this glitching, or ‘lost in translation’ effect. The irony of this process thus revealed a broader theme of multiscalar encounter and clash between the local dimension and the global cultural infrastructure of the film festival. Is there an effort or intention for encounter and dialogue on both sides? Or does the film festival simply land and then take off, like an alien object on foreign ground? In the words of Bill Nichols: ‘Hovering, like a specter, at the boundaries of the festival experience, are those deep structures and thick descriptions that might restore a sense of the particular and local to what we have now recruited to the realm of the global.’ Toby Lee further related this idea to their experience of fieldwork at Thessalonki International Film Festival: ‘I quickly realized that I was less interested in what would usually be considered the “center” of the institution – the offices, the core staff, the work of the festival director, programming decisions – and more interested in what might be considered its “periphery,” where the festival interacts with other institutions, businesses, and individuals, and with its public.’ We experienced a kind of ‘reverse marginalisation’: the local reality of Locarno becomes an uncanny host to the international film festival, which juxtaposes itself to the city for the duration of ten days.

The need to insert subtitles on short notice, to make the interviews in Italian understandable to the audience of the Future of Survival conference, only created an additional element of linguistic glitch. The use of the AI transcription tool implemented by Adobe Premiere generated incomprehensible subtitles, which mispronounced Italian instead of translating it into English. The video essay is an attempt at retracing the steps of this experiment through our retrospective reflections, while still presenting the first edit in its authentically chaotic version, which is faithful to the series of glitches we identified and experienced firsthand while exploring Locarno Film Festival. 

Authors

Evelyn Kreutzer is a media scholar, video essayist, and curator, based in Lugano, Switzerland, and Berlin, Germany. Together with Kevin B. Lee (Lugano) and Johannes Binotto (Zurich/Lucerne), she co-leads the research group The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, 2024-2027), in which she primarily focuses on exploring questions of memory and archival theory and practice in the videographic mode. She serves as Associate Editor for [in]transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Images Studies and as co-editor of the Videography series in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. Her written and videographic work has been published in journals like The Cine-Files, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, NECSUS, Research in Film & History, and [in]Transition. Her audiovisual book Televising Taste is forthcoming with Lever Press. 

Silvia Cipelletti obtained her Master’s degree at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio (AAM). She currently works as a PhD candidate for the research project The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, 2024-2027), and as a teaching assistant for theoretical courses that investigate the interface between architecture and visual media. She is also affiliated as research associate to the Laboratory of the History of the Alps LabiSAlp in Mendrisio, works as guest lecturer at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, and curates workshops on film and narrative building at the AAM Mendrisio. Silvia’s architectural short films have screened at the Locarno Film Festival and the Venice Architecture Biennale. Her essays and articles on architecture and film have been published in various journals and platforms, including Stoà Journal, Magasin for Bygningskunst og Kultur, Cartha, Il Giornale dell’architettura, and Trans Magazine.

References

Harbord, J. Contingency, time, and event: An archaeological approach to the film festival. London: Routledge, 2016: 76.

Lee, T. ‘Being There, Taking Place: Ethnography at the Film Festival’ in Film festivals: History, theory, method, practice, edited by M. de Valck, B. Kredell, and S. Loist. London: Routledge, 2016: 124.

Nichols, B. ‘Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit’, Film Quarterly, 47, no. 3, 1994: 16-30 (in Lee 2016).