Back from the Locarno Film Festival in mid-August, David Cox filed a blog for the London Guardian bewailing the dearth of watchable movies at this year's Alpine jamboree. A television writer and producer, Cox complained that "not the faintest prospect of entertainment, stimulation or enlightenment was to be discerned" in most of the festival entries. He targeted his venom at arthouse cinema ("Why most arthouse films are so unspeakably awful?"), complaining that Locarno 2008 had tested his "humility to destruction".

How could these abominations ever have got past their creator's first two seconds of deliberation, let alone won funding from a regional film board, a festival invitation and respectful applause from an audience of supposed cinephiles?

Well, it seems that, when it comes to appalling subsidised cinema, there are certain qualifications that help. Being in black-and-white scores a good few points. A really brilliant director might even manage to switch from b/w for the tragic bits into glorious colour for the redemptive, ecstatic bits. Exposure of the dark horror of life on the social housing estates lurking behind the bright facade of Europrosperity seems a sure-fire ticket to success, especially if accompanied by plenty of under-exposed footage of the grim landscapes of the urban edgelands, preferably featuring lots of pylons.

I do not know David Cox, and would defend his right to be rude about tricky competition films from the subsidised sector. Some arthouse works can certainly be "abominations", particularly if comfort and brain-repose are your criteria for entertainment. But I wonder, has his rant found the wrong target?

I too went to Locarno. For me the ten days were about cinema's variety. As world-class festivals go, it is relatively relaxed, with none of the jostling and red-carpet whoops and braying of Cannes or Berlin.

At the northern tip of Lake Maggiore, Locarno's heart is the Piazza Grande. Here stands one of the world's largest outdoor screens, where two films are projected nightly for a crowd of up to 8,000 people, all in the name of entertainment (competition films are screened elsewhere, as are dozens of other films in other sections). Curiously, Cox is silent on the Piazza Grande's nightly action (though if he'd really wanted to make Locarno sound like hell, he'd have mentioned this year's heavy rain).

Rain or not, parties, screenings, meetings and conferences make Locarno carnivalesque. It's hard to imagine how such variety can induce such blogging rage. Cox mentions enjoying just one competition film (Kirill Serebrennikov's "Yuri's Day"). But I would happily recommend the winner of the Golden Leopard, "Parque Via", by Enrique Rivero, a slow but magically involving film about a housekeeper in Mexico City.

Equally strong were the Polish runner-up, "33 Scenes from Life", by Malgoska Szumowska, about a young woman (played by Julia Jentsch, a fascinating German actress) who loses her family and her centre, and "The Market", a compelling look at working life in eastern Turkey, directed by Ben Hopkins, for which Tayanç Ayaydin won best actor.

These films share careful crafting, a striving for psychological veracity (which an average thriller or comedy wouldn't bother with), and a certain density you might expect of literary fiction. Locarno wears its "auteur" credentials on its sleeve, unselfconsciously. This is not a festival for those who would prefer loud explosions or singing fish.

Some of the weakest films were actually from acclaimed novelists. Chuck Palahniuk, who scripted the David Fincher-directed cult hit "Fight Club", was there to give fair wind to Clark Gregg's adaptation of his novel "Choke". The story is about a sex-addict who pays for his mother's psychiatric care by working in a history theme-park. But the result is a one-note, one-joke movie which suffers, oddly, from being clunkily over-written. 

The festival also included the film debut of Michel Houellebecq, a French novelist whose adaptation of his most recent book, "The Possibility of an Island", was greeted with pans: "catastrophic" and "ridiculous" were among the kinder critical assessments. The issue is ticklish: novelists, particularly successful ones, might think they posess an instinct for cinema. But they often struggle with the narrative economy demanded by the medium, and seem blithely unaware of ordinary (and necessary) rhythms and conventions, such as a crisis or conundrum, the building of suspense or even the art of providing something engaging to look at.

Alessandro Baricco, an Italian novelist, is a case in point. He unleashed his "Lecture 21" in Locarno. If this film shows anything, it is that the distance between idea and execution can be inter-galactic.

Baricco, who has garnered international praise for novels such as "Silk" and "City",  has a thing about Beethoven's 9th Symphony. His film explores its creation through the eyes of a musician in 1824 who wants to understand the composer's genius. In contrast, 170 years later, a science lecturer (played by John Hurt) is convinced the symphony's last choral movement is a failure.

"Lecture 21" feels like a series of sketches for a piece of wistful non-fiction. As a film, it has no tension, nothing to look forward to, no-one in it to like or dislike and precisely no story. There are discussions, talking heads, scenes in the snow and a soundtrack full of Beethoven. It is like a cross between a creaking version of "Amadeus" and Peter Greenaway in violently obscurantist mode.

Alan Parker, another English filmmaker ("Midnight Express" and "The Commitments"), once said that if Greenaway were allowed to make another film in Britain, he'd leave the country. "Lecture 21" wasn't quite enough to make me leave Locarno or even to drive me into the outraged Guardian blogger's camp. I shall remain a sympathetic viewer of non-commercial festival movies. But if a famous author is directing, I might opt for my tried and tested DVD of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" instead.

Picture credit: Nicholas Babaian/flickr

(James Woodall is a writer based in Berlin. His last article for More Intelligent Life was about the glory of witnessing a complete Greek drama in a proper ancient theatre.)