This year's Virginia Film Festival highly encourages everyone involved to get wet. Whether they're watching "Jaws" while floating in a pool or putting on beach gear and heading to a dance party, participants will leave the Festival soaked with new insight into film, from classics to premieres and everything in between.
The festival is different from the approximately 800 other film festivals around the world in that it always has a specific theme. Each year, the Festival's Artistic Director, Richard Herskowitz, carefully picks a broad theme under which the Festival's programming is brought together.
"We're the only major film festival based at a university," Herskowitz said. "The concept is that we construct our festival as if it's kind of a course, a four-day course on a cultural theme."
This year's theme is "Wet," and the four day course will involve the Aquatics & Fitness Center's swimming pool, a beach dance party, numerous special guests and dozens of liquid-focused films.
"So many of the most vivid images from classic movies involve water," said Herskowitz, explaining his choice of the theme. "I came across a comment from Jean Renoir saying that he couldn't imagine cinema without water -- it made me realize that water is a really powerful motif in a lot of my favorite movies."
Now, we in Charlottesville just can't seem to stop worrying about water. Herskowitz, who has programmed the Festival for nearly a decade, stumbled upon his first clue in November that the issue of water might become very big.
"In the course of the year, it became evident that a drought was materializing," he said. "I remember thinking, 'Boy, it would be pretty ironic if the drought is really severe by the time the Film Festival's happening.'"
Aspects of Charlottesville's water problems and their ramifications will be reflected onscreen throughout the Festival, especially in "Chinatown," the centerpiece of the programming and the basis for film critic Roger Ebert's annual shot-by-shot workshop.
Besides the political and social weight that water holds, it has remarkable cinematic qualities that have inspired filmmakers to use it in their work.
"Visually, there is something about the way water reflects and refracts light and creates moving patterns of light that has a primal effect on filmmakers and on audiences," Herskowitz said.
Water's visual power has made it a prime candidate for playing a part in experimental film. The Festival series Liquid Light will bring out this inherent power of water and other liquids, as it showcases the work of several leading experimental media programmers and filmmakers.
And of course there are the thematic attributes of water. In some movies, water might symbolize submersion or suffocation; in others, fluidity or the absence of borders. For instance, contemporary Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang ("The River," 1997) uses water to suggest the impossibility of borders.
"His obsessive motif is water leaking through walls and through ceilings," Herskowitz said. "To me, what this signifies is the kind of hopeless effort people make to maintain their boundaries from each other and keep their separateness."
"The way water flows across these boundaries in Ming-Liang's films kind of shows the impossibility of maintaining those separations," he added.
"Wet" encompasses not only water, but also bodily fluids. Like Ming-Liang, filmmaker George Kuchar is interested in the lack of boundaries, but in terms of the human body.
"Kuchar, in all of his films, really is constantly calling attention to the movement of fluids both in and out of his body, and the fact that skin is not an intact boundary," Herskowitz said. Kuchar will introduce some of his experimental films as part of the Liquid Light series.
Athough the festival places much emphasis on classic and independent film, that doesn't mean it can't compete with other, bigger festivals (like Sundance) in terms of obtaining and showing premieres. Proof of that comes in the form of Nicolas Cage and his directorial debut, "Sonny," as well as "Far from Heaven," probably the hottest film on the festival circuit at the moment. But the Va. Film Festival differs in that it's not driven by the big names or the latest new movies.
"We just remove ourselves from that," Herskowitz said. "What this Festival is about is looking at new films in the context of film history."
With a theme, the programming can include both current and past films, relating them to each other. In connecting past and present, the festival broadens the historical cinematic awareness of its audience, which includes aspiring filmmakers.
"The problem with the emphasis on the latest films is that it is damaging the future of film." Herskowitz said. "That is, people who see a lot of new movies get excited and say, 'I want to make a movie like that,' will make films that are basically imitative of whatever the current formula is."
In placing contemporary film in its historical context, Herskowitz said, "our main hope is that a festival like this is actually improving the future of cinema."
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