Abstract or Keywords
In January 2020, the Sundance Film Festival became the last of the major festivals to wrap before COVID-19 forced peers like Cannes, TIFF, and the Venice Film Festival to cancel or move to online formats. Nearly a year later, director Tabitha Jackson announced that, in its 2021 edition, Sundance would employ a new online platform that would offer “the opportunity to reach new audiences, safely, where they are.” The resulting festival was a resounding success, drawing Sundance’s largest audience ever and garnering the single highest acquisition price ($25 million from Apple TV+ for CODA) for a Sundance premiere. Both triumphs can be traced to Sundance’s timely exploitation of the current streaming landscape to provide not just a market for its films but also socially distanced exhibition space that could approximate an in-person experience. As Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich noted, virtual Sundance was the first film festival of the COVID-19 era that “felt the most like an actual event.” In this paper, I will discuss the role of digital delivery and online platforms in the relocation of the aura of a live event to the virtual film festival, with Sundance as my focus.
This presentation will consider how festivals like Sundance mobilized the concept of the virtual as a form of memory (Deleuze 1989) as well as a type of affect, a feeling of liveness not accessible to the spectator’s body but nonetheless a palpable event (Massumi 2002). In line with Francesco Casetti’s (2015) concept of media relocation, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival’s roll-out of live virtual premieres, an online festival village, and globe-encircling (and encompassing) theater, gallery, and party spaces effectively simulated the inclusive and insular experience of Park City, Utah during late January, particularly for prior attendees. At the same time, while the virtual film festival’s online platform would seem to have annihilated the aura of the in-person film festival by transforming a cultural experience into a mass exhibition event, an emphasis on shared temporal co-presence resurrected the feeling of inclusiveness and exclusivity that has been the hallmark of film festivals since their beginnings.