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Festival
History For
several weeks, I kept checking my mailbox to see if my invitation to sit on the
jury for the 53rd Cannes Film Festival had arrived, yet. Alas! it failed to
materialize. But I still figured that, with Luc Besson serving as jury president
this year, anything could happen. And may still. Yes,
strange as it may seem, those inscrutable, hermetic, and just plain odd
creatures known as "film critics" have actually been known to sit
alongside real live actors, directors, and even producers on the jury for the
event that has become described as le plus belle festival du monde.
(Alexander Walker and Charles Champlin did it. Even Pauline Kael did it.) And
there have been Averys in Cannes, before. In 1962, my father, a U.S. Naval
officer, was in town while the film festival was being held, and took a snapshot
that happened to include a portion of the hind section of Harold Lloyd, the
famous screen comedian who was in town to show a compilation of clips from his
films (Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy) and to receive an official
"homage" from the Festival organizers. Mr. Lloyd was allegedly
nonplussed over being caught on-film in such a less-than-flattering position,
and the photo that my dad took thereby entered our family mythos as the
"famous" photograph of "Harold Lloyd's back side." This
year, the fifty-third Festival is to be held from May 10 - 21, and will include
the main Official Programme, which will screen nightly in the Grand Salle
of the Palais du Festival and compete for jury prizes; the three
non-competing "sidebar" programs (Un Certain Regard, the
Directors Fortnight, and the International Critics Week, all independently
organized under the Festival's general aegis); and the millions of feet of film
unreeling in the Marché (Market) section. There will be two official homages,
one to Robert Bresson, and another to Luis Buñuel, who will have a new
auditorium, the Salle Luis Buñuel, inaugurated in the Palais in
his honor. Following last year's retrospective on Le Film d'Amour, a
thirty-three film program on Le Cinéma Rêve le Futur (Cinema Dreams of
the Future) will show everything from Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon
to The War of the Worlds, Plan Nine from Outer Space (you read
that right), Blade Runner, Brazil, Mario Bava's Planet of the
Vampires, and the anime Ghost in the Shell. French actor
Philippe Noiret will receive a special Festival trophy for career achievement;
and the film director Otar Iosseliani, who was born in the Russian province of
Georgia and has worked as a filmmaker in France, will not only preside over the
jury for the Camera d'Or, awarded to the best first feature film shown in
any of the Festival's programs, but will be honored with a special screening of
his 1962 film April, which, like Renoir's A Day in the Country,
exists only in a partially-completed form. This
will be the last year that the Official Programme will be assembled and
presented by Gilles Jacob, who has served as the Cannes Festival director since
1978, and has had much to do with streamlining and improving the event. Instead
of waiting for countries to submit films to be shown at the event, Jacob and his
staff search out and view films being made around the world -- a process that
sometimes begins directly after the close of the last festival, and continues on
up to the beginning of the next one -- and will extend invitations to
participate. Filmmakers themselves could also submit films directly to the
Festival Organization's attention (which was how Steven Soderbergh's sex,
lies and videotape got in to the 1989 Festival). Ecran Noir has
reported that, for this year's event, 1,397 films were seen in order to select
the twenty-three feature films, from fifteen countries, that comprise the final
program. And it is Jacob who receives praise for a brilliantly composed program,
or receives flak for a program that turns out to be disappointing, so a Festival
director is required not only to be an astute judge of film but also skilled in politesse
and diplomacy, as well. (For the record, those who preceded Jacob in this post
were Maurice Bessy, 1973 - 78; Robert Favre le Bret, 1952 - 72; and Philippe
Erlanger, 1946 - 51.) Sean
Penn, currently in the process of working on his third directoral effort, has
been invited to show his film The Indian Runner at the fifty-third
Festival. When it debuted in Cannes in 1991, an ABC-TV news reporter -- who also
took the opportunity to make some flippant jokes at Penn's unknowing expense --
took one look around and asked, with all the brouhaha involved, why even have a
Cannes Film Festival? The event has taken on something of a huge, lumbering life
of its own, like the mythical Gargantua roused from his slumber and looking for
sustenance to devour. It
is crowded, noisy, and expensive. (twenty-five U.S. dollars for a glass of
mineral water, or so I have been told.) A Planet Hollywood franchise was opened
during the fiftieth Festival, in 1997, punishing the surrounding arrondisement
with loud music until all hours of the morning (whether it'll be thumping this
year, given the franchise's serious problems, is another question). People
complained about the lack of glamour, style, and true star power when Liv Tyler
could be seen glowering from every billboard in sight when Stealing Beauty
was showing at the 1996 Festival. Yet,
if you have to ask why have a Cannes Film Festival at all, then you should
probably start following the World Wrestling Federation. Even people who hate
how hectic the event has become would, if you asked them, never dream of missing
it. In 1996 alone, festivalgoers could see the premieres of Breaking the
Waves, Secrets and Lies, Crash, The Eighth Day, Kansas
City, Ridicule, Microcosmos, The Van, and André Téchiné's
Thieves, and that was in the Official Programme, alone. In other words,
it's the films, stupid. Aside
from the Academy Award (Amero-centric, I know, but true), the Palme d'Or,
the Cannes Festival's prize for best film, is still the most prestigious film
honor to be had. The event has managed to maintain its position in the top
echelon of annual international film festivals -- including those held in
Venice, Berlin, Toronto, London, Park City, Utah, and New York City -- while
hundreds of other events buzz around somewhere in the ether below. It has its
own colorful history, both fair and foul. But
it was not the first international film festival. That was Venice, which was
started in 1932 as part of the city's annual Biennale of the arts. By the mid
Thirties, though, the bestowing of prizes had begun to noticeably favor entries
from Italy and Germany, countries which had by that time entered into a Fascist
alliance. The top prize, in fact, was not yet known as the Leone d'Oro
(the Gold Lion), but the Coppa Mussolini. In 1937, Grand
Illusion, generally regarded as the best film shown at the event, was passed
over for the top prize. The following year, the Coppa Mussolini for best
picture was split between Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, made with the
cooperation of Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, and an Italian film, Luciano
Serra, Pilota, which was produced by Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce
himself. The French delegation withdrew from the event in disgust, and decided
that an alternate event was needed, one where any country could come and show
their films, without fear or bias, under a general atmosphere of rapport. After
considering several possible sites, Cannes, a beachside resort town in the South
of France where F. Scott Fitzgerald set the opening chapters of his novel Tender
is the Night, was decided upon. The
first Festival International du Film Mondial was set to start on
September 1, 1939. The opening film, to be shown in the town's municipal casino,
was to be the remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles
Laughton. Films by Jacques Feyder, Julien Duvivier, Christian-Jaque, Rouben
Mamoulian, Cecil B. De Mille and Howard Hawks were to be shown. The awards
jury's president du honeur was to be noneother than Louis Lumière
himself, who, with his brother Auguste, began filming and publicly showing
motion pictures back in 1895. And celebrities ranging from Mae West to Philippe
de Rothschild could be seen strolling along the Croisette,
the wide boardwalk which separated the beach from the town of Cannes itself. The
opening night film was shown, without a hitch, on September 1. On
September 2, Hitler's armies invaded Poland. France and Great Britain declared
war on Germany, and the remainder of the Festival was canceled as people
scurried about to prepare for what would be six long, hard years of war that
would change the map of the world for years to come. On
the night of September 19, 1946, Grace Moore sang the Marseillaise while,
behind her, fireworks exploded over the nighttime harbor of Cannes. With the
restoration of the French Republic following Nazi occupation, and the end of
hostilities, it was time to lighten the mood a bit. The second premiere
International Film Festival started with the Soviet-made documentary Berlin,
showing the fall of that city to Allied forces and made by camera crews working
under extremely hazardous circumstances. The showing, again at the city's
municipal casino (the Palais du Festival, with its entrance located on
the Croisette, would not be up and running until 1949), was plagued by
projection problems and, at one point, a power outage. But Berlin, and
the other films on the program, were shown from beginning to end. Over fifteen
days, one could see screenings of Notorious, Gaslight, Gilda,
Brief Encounter, A Matter of Life and Death, Wonder Man
with Danny Kaye, French cabaret performer Noël-Noël in a very change-of-pace
performance in La Pere Tranquille, Disney's Make Mine Music,
Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, the Soviet film Zoya with its
original music score by Dimitri Shostakovich, and The Lost Weekend. At
the end, it was decided that an award for the film considered to be the most
exemplary of those shown at the Festival should go to Réne Clément's account
of French railway workers and the Resistance, La Bataille du Rail (The
Battle of the Rails), making it essentially the first of many Best Picture/Palme
d'Or recipients to come. The
idea of giving out the award in the form of a gold palm leaf was first suggested
by Suzanne Lazon, a Paris jeweler, in 1954. Jean Cocteau -- who would serve
twice as the Festival's president du jury, again as president du
honneur, and, in 1964, would be named "honorary jury president in
perpetuity" -- did a quick sketch of a palm leaf , there on the spot, and
it has been this simple design which has served as the symbol for the award
trophy, and for the Festival itself, to this day. In
1953, Edward G. Robinson, Italian actress and screenwriter Titina de Filippo,
and Belgium screenwriter Charles Spaak cracked the all-French festival jury
lineup (which lasted from 1949 to 1952). Olivia de Havilland became the first
female président du jury in 1965, followed the next year by Sophia
Loren, who managed to chair the jury while opening an exhibition of her
photography in New York, and completing her scenes for Chaplin's new film A
Countess from Hong Kong in the U.K. (Loren would fly in to Nice, be
chauffeured by car to Cannes, and catch up on seeing all the competition films
entered in a screening room, on into the night, if necessary. And she saw all
the films before the jury voting commenced.) To date, there has not been either
a black, or Russian, jury president, a situation that I'm sure Sidney Poitier or
Nikita Mikhalkov could easily remedy. The
decision of who-gets-what at the end of the Festival is decided upon by the
10-member jury on the last weekend of the event, when they are sequestered in a
villa, located in the hills above Cannes, to talk, argue, and finally vote on
the choices. When two films tie for the Palme, the award may be given ex
aequo (with equal honors). Starting in 1978, the Camera d'Or award
was instituted, voted upon by a separate jury, for the best first feature film
showing in any of the Festival's programs, including the Official Selections.
(Past recipients include Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and Mira Nair.) Short films
have also been honored since the beginning of the Festival, and many more are
bestowed by independent groups ranging from FIRPRESCI, the international film
critics society (which hands out a huge jeroboam of Piper-Heidseck champagne to
be director of the winning film), to the Cheminots Cinephiles, a group of
national railway workers and film enthusiasts which dates from the time when
newsreel cinemas could be found in French railway stations all over the country.
At
the 1963 Festival, the writer and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol's statement Le
cinema est mort, vive la television was treated as if it were a shot heard
'round the world. When you hold an event that attracts international media
coverage, not to mention one that gathers different people from different
countries all into one spot for an extended period of time, something's
occasionally got to give. While the Festival was not held, for monetary reasons,
in 1948 and 1950 (in 1947, the acting French Minister of Culture, François
Mitterand, took one look at all the hoopla, which was part government-financed,
and said, "Such a festival cannot take place every year."), it was
shut down, for the first and so far only time, during the events of 1968, when
millions of French workers went collectively out on strike in response to French
President Charles de Gaulle's policies and actions, particularly those of riot
police called in to disperse student protestors at the Sorbonne. A delegation
which included François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard arrived on the eighth day
of the Festival and began holding open discussions, on whether the Festival
should continue or not that year, in the Palais de Festival, discussions
that drew so many people that the building became effectively
"occupied" for a full day and night. Members of the awards juries
voluntarily resigned, and filmmakers withdrew their films from being shown. (The
sole holdouts: the Soviets, who were late getting to the Festival because
transportation was slowing to a crawl all over France.) Finally, Robert Favre le
Bret announced that events made it impossible to continue to hold the remainder
of the Festival. The event closed with a planned tribute to Henri Langlois, who
had been reinstated, after joint protests from the French and international film
community, to his position as head of the Cinémathèque Française, after
French Culture Minister Andre Malraux dismissed him as head of an organization
which Langlois himself had created. There
were other occurrences, almost equally contentious -- the time when Joseph
Strick sat down at the evening screening of his film of James Joyce's Ulysses
and discovered that, without his prior knowledge or consent, some of the French
subtitles had been blacked-out (censored) on the print being shown, causing
Strick to immediately yank the film from the event; Andy Warhol being invited by
Festival officials to bring his three-hour film The Chelsea Girls to
Cannes, saying that a place, somehow, somewhere, would be found to show it, then
being told that no place could be found after all and causing Warhol to pack his
film and his bags and head back home; Michael Wadleigh handing out black
armbands to audience members entering a screening of Woodstock, in 1970,
after news about the Kent State shootings had reached France. But nothing comes
close to the free-for-all that was the 1956 Festival, the height of which
occurred when the showing of Alain Resnais' great documentary regarding the
concentration camps, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), was
stopped, after it had already been set-up to project, by Festival officials who
entered the projection booth moments before it was to be shown, fearful that it
could offend the sensibilities of German delegates attending the festival. One
feature film on the program, about East German refugees, had already been forced
to withdraw; another, about an obscure border conflict between Finland and the
Soviet Union, would also be taken out of the Festival, with people angrily
packing bags, issuing dismayed statements, and then stomping back home. Luis Buñuel's
Cela s'Appelle l'Aurore (That is the Dawn) had earlier been
accepted, then rejected by the Festival as being, in their words, "too
anarchic" -- so the filmmakers took it right around the corner and showed
it at a private cinema, on the rue d'Antibes, a street which runs
parallel to the Croisette, during the Festival, where it would attract an
audience of international attendees who were, sometimes, looking for something a
little more better than what was showing at the Palais and would thus be in need
of something a little more "anarchic." (This practice would continue
on into the 1970s, when the Festival expanded to accommodate more films, whether
of an "anarchic" nature or not.) The
final awards ceremony has provided, over the years, anecdotes of legendary
proportions. In the beginning, prizewinners received pieces of hand-crafted
crystal, even original artworks. Currently, the Palme d'Or is the only
trophy given out, with everyone else receiving award scrolls. Lars von Trier was
so disgusted at receiving two minor prizes for his film Zentropa, in
1992, that he threw them in the trash outside the Palais. They were quickly
retrieved by his producer, which is more than can be said for Robert Altman. At
Cannes, it is part of the procedure for prizewinners to be photographed on-stage
after receiving their awards. The story goes that when Altman received the Palme
for M*A*S*H, at the 1970 Festival, his producer, Ingo Preminger, walked
up to him on-stage and told him that the photographers wanted to get a picture
of Altman handing the Palme d'Or to Preminger. (Unlike the Oscars, the Palme
is given to the director, not the producer, of the winning film.) Altman
obliged, after which Preminger quickly retreated, so Altman believes, through a
side door into a waiting car that whisked him away to the airport with Altman's Palme
d'Or, which he claims not to have seen since. With
some exceptions, the list of films named as Best Picture at the Cannes Film
Festival has held up pretty well. (The only problem being that some of them -- Two
Cents Worth of Hope, The Given Word, Chronicle of the Burning
Years -- have been extremely difficult to see in the U.S.) It is still a
little hard to believe that Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Smiles
of the Summer Night were both passed over for receiving the top honor during
the years when they were shown in-competition. This was remedied during the 50th
Festival, when members of the international film community voted for Bergman to
receive a special Palme des Palmes award for the director who has never
received a Best Picture award at Cannes. Each
year, as the men and women in evening dress ascend the red-carpeted "mere
rouge" leading up the steps to the Palais, there is always the anticipation
of being on the brink of what may turn out to be a rare cinematic experience. Or
maybe not. Three years ago, Mathieu Kassowitz, the young director who had been
widely lauded and won the Best Director award at the Festival in 1995 for his
film La Haine (Hate), found himself facing an openly hostile
reception to his film on modern violence, Assassin(s) (he then had to go
through the whole experience again when the film premiered in Paris a few weeks
later). And, last year, Peter Greenaway's 8 1/2 Women was apparently so
out-there that jurist Holly Hunter was reported to have been visibly shaken
while on her way out of the screening. So what new masterpieces, or new
outrages, can be expected to be culled from the world film community this year? |
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