Wherever you are on the planet, head towards the nearest large metropolis or holiday destination, and it is likely a short wait for the next 'international' film festival. But rewind sixty years, and film festivals were still a new phenomenon, with a handful scattered about, and those exclusively in Europe. Film festivals, like the Olympics and the World Fairs, were opportunities for countries to brand themselves as modern and display their excellence.
Inaugurated in 1952, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) broke new ground as the first international film festival outside Europe, and the world's first travelling festival, a four-city feat of unequalled logistics. At a time when much of Asia and Africa remained under the yoke of imperialism, IFFI was a self-assured and meaningful assertion of the ability of a newly independent and formerly colonised country to enter into the fraternity of modern sovereign states. IFFI, in its imagination, form and reception, is shaped by the interplay through the decades of India's articulations of its place in the world and its own self-definition as a nation. The festival's current decline can also be traced to the gradual eclipsing of what is known as the Third World project.
The Third World project sought to accelerate the decolonisation process brought about by nationalist movements in the colonies and the weakening hold of the imperial powers. Just as the newly independent states wanted to have their say in world politics, there also surfaced a notion of a right to neutrality towards emerging power blocs and non-interference in domestic affairs. Central to this approach is an assertion of sovereignty as a counterpoint to the narrative-setting paradigm of the Cold War, a rejection that the West saw as either naïve, disingenuous or dangerous. As Himal contributing editor Vijay Prashad writes in his work on the Third World project, The Darker Nations, not only does the phrase East-West conflict 'distort the history of the Cold War because it makes it seem as if the First and Second World confronted each other in a condition of equality', but also marginalises the sovereign ambitions of the Third World. And yet, in the category of the newly independent countries (and the still colonised) was the coalescing of an eloquent counterpoint.
Parliament of cinemas
By 1949, India had already hosted two conferences on Asian relations; and through the early 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru exhorted the value of Asian and African solidarity. Thomas Elsaesser, a film historian, has categorised the myriad shapes of film festivals through history, and the ambitions of the inaugural IFFI would seem to fit the earliest model of 'an ad-hoc United Nations, a parliament of national cinemas'. It was essentially a government affair meant to showcase to the world a country whose survival was held in serious doubt.