The Festival as Spectacle: Power, Simulation, and the Erasure of Subjectivity in Contemporary Cinema Culture

Saturday, March 22, 2025

Film festivals have long been perceived as sanctuaries for cinematic excellence—sites of artistic elevation, transnational celebration, and cultural prestige. Yet, beneath this aestheticized veneer lies a deeper truth: these festivals are not neutral arenas of art appreciation but curated theatres of power, control, and ideological reproduction. When viewed through the critical lenses of thinkers such as Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Rancière, Guy Debord, Mark Fisher, and Jean Baudrillard, film festivals emerge not as ruptures in dominant narratives, but as their most seductive performances.

Spectacle as Control (Debord & Baudrillard)

Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle warns us that under late capitalism, lived experience is displaced by representation. Film festivals, often presented as temples of cinematic experience, are in fact hyper-curated simulations of artistic dissent—simulacra, in Baudrillard’s terms—offering the illusion of rebellion within tightly bounded rules of acceptability. The “radical” films selected often conform to a digestible, aestheticized subversion. They become safe zones for bourgeois rebellion—commodified versions of critique that can be celebrated, awarded, and consumed.

Baudrillard’s Transparency of Evil further clarifies that in the age of simulation, transgression is neutralized by its integration. Festivals don’t exclude the avant-garde—they assimilate it, strip it of risk, and parade it for applause. Dissent becomes design.

The Fetish of Form and the Death of Narrative (Mulvey & Rancière)

Laura Mulvey’s work on the male gaze finds new territory in festival circuits, where even “arthouse” films frequently privilege voyeuristic spectatorship masked as aesthetic innovation. Female bodies remain aesthetic vessels rather than autonomous subjects. The so-called “female-led” or “feminist” films often reinforce patriarchal framing under the guise of liberation.

Jacques Rancière’s notion of the partage du sensible—the distribution of what can be seen, said, and thought—highlights how festivals preconfigure perception. Selection committees, juries, and critics operate as invisible architects of cultural legibility. What is awarded is not what is most urgent or radical, but what aligns with pre-existing modes of visibility. Rancière’s democratic rupture—where the invisible becomes seen—is denied by the festival machine. The unseen remains unseen, unless it can be mythologized in digestible aesthetics.

The Depressed Gaze: Acceleration, Alienation, and Empty Visibility (Fisher & Berardi)

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism describes a world where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Festivals embody this malaise. They celebrate “critical” films while remaining deeply entangled with luxury sponsorships, institutional elitism, and aesthetic conservatism. This dissonance breeds a culture of hollow celebration—where the crisis of meaning is hidden beneath champagne toasts and red carpets.

Berardi’s Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide offers a provocative frame for understanding how alienation has pushed subjectivity toward collapse. In the hyper-mediated realm of festivals, we no longer encounter presence, only performance. Every actor, director, critic, and even spectator becomes a self-aware avatar—trapped in the loop of exposure, branding, and spectacle. There is no collective catharsis, only curated despair.

The Erasure of the Human Subject

What emerges is not a space for cinematic transcendence, but a gallery of roles—objectified performers, interchangeable creators, marketable faces. The human becomes an accessory to the brand. There is no time for slowness, opacity, or refusal. The rhythms of festival culture are aligned with capitalist acceleration, producing visibility without depth, presence without embodiment.

Toward a New Radical Aesthetics

The true rupture may lie in becoming unreadable—stepping outside the aesthetic grammars permitted by festival circuits. A radical image today is not one that mimics revolution but one that resists translation, that cannot be consumed, that refuses to entertain. This is where the human subject reclaims space—not as spectacle, but as opacity.