Peggy Ahwesh experimental film and video maker extraordinaire, whose work has been featured on Talking Pictures (see below) and who has been to more film festivals than you can shake a stick at, offers a penetrating analysis of the hilarious novella: César Aira’s Festival .
Below her review, courtesy of our friends at New Directions, you can read the first ten pages.
“Festival, the short novel by César Aira will send chills of recognition down the spine of any filmmaker who has attended a big international film festival. I have been to many over the years with my short experimental films and pretty much know the game of trying not to miss the fun stuff while navigating a strange city. And for the uninitiated, the novel is a spot-on deconstruction of the cult-like inner workings of festivals, the peculiar logic they all seem to share and the politics of the culture industry.
Perhaps Aira went to one or several festivals in person and was horrified and/or humored, or even fêted, who knows, but his observations on our tastes, prejudices and fantasies are beautifully described and the details —the overwhelming daily schedule, the pretensions of high art cinema, the aloof sponsors and my favorite, the discovery of the most obscure, underrated and/or lost film as a sacred offering—are all precisely placed in Aira’s labyrinth of personalities and events.
The story revolves around the perplexing, unknowable Steryx, the featured guest at the festival. Steryx has been prolific, cranking out ridiculous low-budget sci-fi movies that all take place on a far away planet in the future 40,000 light-years ahead. The plots are preposterous and early on in each of them, according to his biographer, the actors oddly lose energy and go lifeless, apathetic. Still by the end of the film they manage to succeed in saving the Universe from total annihilation. The ultimate victory!
Quote (page 70):
“It’s a time-space distance so prodigious that the mind can’t grasp it, and when the viewer is confronted with this double abyss, sees that the plot turns on the kidnapping of Princess Nivea’s spoiled pooch by archvillain Turcomax’s gang, and the dog is barking his head off on an asteroid made of cardboard and will be rescued by a masked hero riding an atomic goose…Do you see the contrast? The Cosmos and a windup Pekinese, and all filmed in a hotel room, with folding stage sets.”
But what makes the story compelling is the author is not cynical or damning of his characters as he easily could have been. For example, we are privy to the inner life of Perla, the dedicated film scholar who has banked her career and her analytical passions on Steryx, and through the twists and turns of her self reflection, we come to identify with her struggles and appreciate her exhaustion.
According to Perla, Steryx has been vastly under appreciated until now but when he shows up to the festival with his aging, impossible mother in tow, all the organizers’ elaborate plans go awry. The mother is miserable and ruins the vibe but she does give the story a necessary friction and absurdity. She insists on going everywhere with her son even thought she hates the movies—she is hungry, tired, loud, in pain, forgetful, demanding… and makes Steryx late for everything because she walks incredibly slowly,
frustrating everybody.
Quote (page 14)
“The polite questions people asked her were left suspended without answers and even the words her son addressed to her required repetitions and supplemental body language in order to summon any response. She refused to drink anything, but then insisted that she’d ordered tea,which she then refused to drink when it was finally brought. She lifted her wrist—on which she wore a tiny gold watch—to her left eye to see the time. Her angry comments, about the food led to explanations that in turn led to an intractable mix-up: her small watch was several hours off the local time, but calculating the difference wasn’t feasible for her old, worn-out brain.”
Throughout the author discourses on genre, post modernism and the art establishment. What better vehicle than science fiction to lampoon the silly plots of movies and the absurdity of fandom? And with the sci-fi movie plots embedded in the overall narrative we have stories within stories, to muse over the outlandish and the impossible.
Quote (page 22)
“The characters (those remote people of the future) needed the movie to begin so that they could exist in the present; but because they were fictional beings, they existed only as ghosts, and they longed for a reality that was elsewhere…That feeling, provoked by reality’s being reactivated by fiction, created the literal present where cinema and the audience existed. With these exalted, almost mystical ideas, Perla’s book came to an end.”
Questions of motivation swirl around the text—“Why did Steryx bring his mother to the festival?” and “Is Perla’s obsession warranted or misplaced?” and “Is Steryx a madman or a genius?” and “Are his films radical innovations or hack jobs?” Read Festival and find out.
—Peggy Ahwesh
Read the first ten pages of Festival below
Excerpt from FESTIVAL & GAME OF THE WORLDS by César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver. FESTIVAL copyright © 2011 by César Aira. GAME OF THE WORLDS copyright © 1998, 2018 by César Aira; translation copyright © 2024 by Katherine Silver. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
more by Peggy Ahwesh on Talking Pictures:
A Christmas Present from Talking Pictures: “Philosophy in the Bedroom” a film by Peggy Ahwesh