This paper offers new perspectives on a history of film festivals, before and around the Venice Espositione of 1932, traditionally considered as the ‘first film festival’. More specifically, it puts forward the following three arguments: First, that the Venice event showed a willingness to invent new interfaces for moving image education, according to the idea that art could be an educational tool, in a historical context where the relationship between cinema and education was largely dominated by educational film. Secondly, that the format of the first Venice festival needs to be understood in relation to multiple cinematic and non-cinematic influences that preceded. And finally, that although the now widely established ‘festival model’ was largely formulated in Venice in 1932, that first edition did not fix the signified (the event type proposed in Venice in 1932) to the signifier (‘film festival’) once and for all, but rather that integration happened gradually throughout the 1930s and 1940s.