Biennale Cinema 64th Venice Film Festival
Introduction by the Director of the 64th Mostra, Marco Müller

"Over these four years we have learned not to renounce anything: you get down to work and then you see what happens, without having to count on the Mostra (the International “Mostra” of Film Art) as a place that can be fenced off as autonomous, on the one hand, and on a frontier that distinguishes the rest, as visible totality, on the other.

Of course, there has been a yearning, an esteem for the values represented by a small and vanished community. Even a bit of nostalgia for the virtues of a seasoned host of cultural warriors who tried to open breaches in the flank of a civilization of dominant mass cultures – we have certainly not repudiated their intentions and aspirations, and still share their appreciation of much of the cinematographic canon which that community had defended for years. But the battlefields of the struggle for the affirmative and not merely reactive defense of the artistic value of cinema were, always and exclusively, the artistic and industrial, cultural and mercantile circles opened up by the cinema. Since we had the vocation (the determination) to play a small but active role in those circles, we had to understand the balance of forces within them, and seek to worm our way into them, bringing a truth (conflict) of the cinema in which we believe and extolling in the depths of cinematographic and audiovisual production the contradictions that it entails. So that it explodes on a thousand levels, even onto the covers of the glossy magazines (but without using controversy as a pedestal on which to show off our ideas). In the openness of our society, no strategy is possible, only tactics. So it was necessary to go on getting our hands really dirty. It was a pointless luxury to think for ourselves only at night, when all the headpieces and subeditors are gray. It was also necessary to believe that new individualities and originalities could still be formed by assimilation and comprehension, through exchange and dialogue. Not to lend credence to the common belief that the best films have the least possibility of being sold and finding an audience (this is what allowed us, for example, to create the conditions for the planetwide impact of the winner of our 2006 Golden Lion, Jia Zhangke’s Sanxia haoren).

The contemporary era of cinema is one that no longer seems capable of building on the memory of itself. The history and the stories of cinema are being minced up into petty and scandalous gossip about the mechanism of the world. The only possible idea of the future seems to be an extrapolation of the eternal and unchanging present. The festival has tried to react to this lack of memory, to find imaginative relationships that could link what has been to what must still be possible. To retie the threads with its past: seeking in those seventy-five years, all of them spent within the framework of a Biennial Exhibition of Art and Culture, the traces of the unpredictability of the future in the sense of its difference from what had gone by. An evolution not free of second thoughts, of errors perhaps corrected only in fits and starts, of contradictions in terms, but in the end exceptional in the way that it has transcribed, under the form of selections and programs, all those visual realities that had not already leveled out the economic limitations and the rigidity of codes of expression. Over its history, the festival has announced, on many of the occasions it has been staged (and we are convinced that this is also true of the 2007 program), the possibility of a freer approach, of fertile contaminations between languages, of comparisons/confrontations with the real."
Marco Muller