ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the cycle of international industrial film festivals that began in Rouen, France, in 1960 and continued in Turin, West Berlin, Madrid, London, Venice, Lisbon, Vienna and a host of other European cities in the 1970s. It focuses on the 1960 festival in Rouen, which screened 160 films from eighteen nations to more than five hundred visitors. It argues, first, that such festivals helped stimulate interest in a critical but neglected movement – an alternative, industrial “new wave” – that many observers hoped would help revive European film industries and, second, that they fostered a form of cultural cosmopolitanism with ramifications that went well beyond the film business itself to both reflect and animate shifting configurations of global capital.
