Film: Cannes, the most turbulent festival of them all, is described in fascinating detail.
Cannes: Inside the World's Premier Film Festival By Kieron Corless and Chris Darke Faber & Faber, 278pp. £14.99.
There is a much-quoted observation regarding the surreal experience that is the Cannes Film Festival - that it's not only impossible to describe it to someone who's never been there, but also nearly impossible to describe it to someone who has been there.
For the media, it can mean watching a dour, slow-moving art film at 8.30am or chasing celebrities or starlets for a quote or a picture. For distributors, it generally involves popping in and out of the hundreds of films showing in the crowded marketplace, watching 15 minutes in between sending text messages and making a snap decision as to the movie's commercial prospects. For producers, it usually means a succession of meetings seeking finance and seeing no films at all. For actors and directors with films in the official selection, it entails a few days of back-to-back round-table "interviews" with hordes of international press, all asking the same questions over and over.
However, Cannes, which celebrates its 60th run when it opens on Wednesday, continuing until May 27th, remains the world's most important film festival. It is so self-important that its official title for most of its existence was Le Festival International du Film, as if it were the only film festival in the world. Since 2002 it has called itself Le Festival de Cannes.
"You have to be there," one distributor told critics Kieron Corless and Chris Darke, "otherwise people assume you've gone bust."
In their engrossing new book, Corless and Darke go a long way towards usefully describing Cannes to people who have and who have not been to the event.
VENICE WAS THEfirst city to host a film festival, beginning in 1932 when the major prize was the Mussolini Cup.
France responded seven years later by setting up a rival event in Cannes. The timing could not have been worse. The opening date was set for September 1st, 1939, when, as the authors note, "Germany took Poland by blitzkrieg". Two days later, England and France declared war, and the festival was put on hold until 1946.
"Politics have been rife throughout the festival's history," Corless and Darke observe, citing a succession of incidents. From the beginning, Hollywood set down its own rules in order to increase the proliferation of US movies on international screenings. The diplomacy of the organisers was stretched time and again during the Cold War era as they attempted to avoid offending the sensitivities of different countries.
In 1961 there was uproar after Luis Buñuel won the Palme d'Or for his provocative Viridiana, which the Vatican condemned as blasphemous and which was suppressed from being screened in Buñuel's native Spain until 1977.
The present festival president, Gilles Jacob, states that "we go a long way to defend the rights of artists". "In the late 1970s," he notes, when the festival used "back-channel means" to screen Andrei Tarkovsky's haunting Russian film, The Mirror, "the Russian delegation practically broke down the door to the projection room", but "the door was barricaded, which bought enough time for the film to be shown".
The most turbulent festival of them all is described in fascinating detail in the book. That was in May 1968, when the turmoil on the streets of Paris percolated down to Cannes, and a group of young film-makers led by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard set about closing down the festival. They succeeded.
Cannes, however, has thrived on controversy, even when it has surrounded its own selection process and allegations of fixing prizes. For example, the book quotes from Dirk Bogarde's memoirs to illustrate the pressures placed on the festival jury he chaired in 1984 to appease Hollywood with prizes.
The Cannes organisers were particularly aghast at that jury's decision to give the best actress prize to Helen Mirren for Pat O'Connor's Irish drama Cal, but Bogarde and his jurors stood their ground.
Corless and Darke also explore the most fabled aspect of Cannes - the glamour - charting the "seismic impact" the young Brigitte Bardot triggered at the festival, and the international media sensation when unknown actress Simone Silva manufactured a photo- opportunity. Spotting Robert Mitchum posing for photographers, Silva "sashayed hungrily into the shot" and dropped her top. In the ensuing melee, several photographers tumbled off the cliffs into the water below.
THE ONLY SIGNIFICANTdeficiency of Corless and Darke's book is the disappointingly sparse illustration - just eight pages of photographs, three of them featuring Bardot. That said, it is a thoroughly researched critical and political history of the festival, and by extension, of world cinema, and it is imaginatively organised in its time-shifting structure.
Cannes has produced dozens of humorous anecdotes down the years, and the book quotes many of them: when a Belgian prankster slapped a custard pie in Jean-Luc Godard's face on his way to a festival press conference; when Jerzy Skolimowski and Marco Ferreri shared the Palme d'Or and the former described the latter as "a nonentity" and Ferreri dismissed Skolimowski as "a Polish plumber"; and when Terry Jones was thanking the jury for its award to Monty Python's The Meaning of Lifeand quipped "the money is in a bag under the sink".
Michael Dwyer is Film Correspondent ofThe Irish Times .