Festivals and events

Cannes film festival under the mark of its fifty annyversary

An historical overview article of the fifty years of Cannes Film Festival accompanied by the review of the this year issue of the Festival. The main trends as well as representative individual films are mentioned.

Cannes film festival was initiated in 1939 as the reaction to the Venice film festival political refusal of Renoir’s Great Illusion, but it actually started after the Second World War, in 1946. At the first, there was a marked predominance of European films, though the Clement’s conception of the »festival as the window into the world« was followed too, and the Cannes film festival have had a reserved space to the representatives of the world-wide films (USA, Mexico, India, Japan, Egypt, Poland, SSSR). From the beginning there was a noticed split among the jury decisions and the film critic reception. The split was compensated during the sixties by the establishment of subsidiary programme of the Week of Film Critics.

The sixties were specially open to the »new film« — nouvelle vague, cinema novo etc. — and the festival started to function as the »Festival de inconnues«. The 1968. did not missed the festival: the voice of Godard was remembered asking for the filmmaker’s control of their films. The period of the Gilles Jacob (1978-) was marked by the attempt to satisfy the festival audience so the festival became more pronounced »film market«, but the more marked division among the commercial and art film in eighties was institutionalized by the introduction of specific selections (Un Certain Regard; Quinzaine des Realisateurs) where the more exclusive artistic films and directors were presented. In late eighties and the beginning of nineties the emphasis on the American independent film was present, but the nineties were more marked by the preference for east Asian filmmmakers.

The anniversary Festival was not marked by a good programme: besides some interesting and valuable films, there was a predominance of violence films, with overperesent killings, and quite a number of films fascinated by the gay problems. The birthday cake based on the recipe »blood, sweat, tears, violence, hate, death and love« is a long way distant from the idyllic beginnings of the Festival, but, according to the Douglas Sirk — it is all the film is about.

Dragan Rubeša