FOCUS:

Every would-be critic who set foot on the Côte d'Azur has a fond memory of the Cannes film festival. Usually quite exaggerated, but always entertaining. Some of the best accounts were written by people who had never set foot inside the Palais des Festivals. Instead, they preferred »Doing the Cannes-Cannes« or »Cruising the Croisette« — Variety-ese for enjoying the hustle-bustle and the scuttlebutt and that neverending parade of bikinis over a long drink from the patio of the Hotel Carlton or the terrace of the Majestic. Some of the best stories stem from the heyday of Robert Favre le Bret, Délégué Général from 1952 to 1972, when he stepped up to become President of the Festival du Film and continued to run the show from behind the scenes for a few more years.

Favre le Bret, who ran the Paris Opera in the off-season, loved the pomp and circumstance of the Cannes show. His arrival on the Croisette coincided with the change of the festival dates in 1951 from the autumn to the spring, to say nothing of the shock of not having a film festival at all in 1950 due to a budgetary fallout. Like any good card shark holding a good hand, he went for broke. Of course, glamour and parties. Gina Lolobrigida was all over the 1952 festival. And why not a couple yachts anchored in the bay. That same year, when Orson Welles won the Golden Palm for Othello, he was hosted by Alexander Korda on his yacht with Graham Greene along for good company. And a knack for pulling a couple rabbits out of the hat. Believe it or not, Mack Sennett, long forgotten in Hollywood, was also a star attraction of the 1952 festival. Charlie Chaplin and Groucho were waiting in the wings. Parties, Personalities, Patriarchs of the Cinema. Put them all together, and Cannes stands for Celebrity — up to the present day.

My favorite stories about Favre le Bret? I liked the way he ran his juries. The Délégué Général had a incurable habit of sitting in on all the final jury meetings. He would give the president of the jury two votes, plus the power of the veto as a last resort. Of course, that veto was never really necessary, as the jury presidents were all French for the first decade of his tenure. Jean Cocteau, a personal friend, was hand-picked to serve in 1953, 1954, and 1957. But no matter — the French entries back then deserved most of the top awards anyway. Once the Hollywood Studios noticed that a Golden Palm added up to très bien tickets sold at the box office, Cannes was off and running. »Doing the Cannes Cannes« in the mid-1950s meant stuffing the ballot-box to assure a winner. By the mid-1960s, it was estimated by one insider that a Golden Palm was worth at least a million dollars in free advertising. Probably more, publicity wise, if you throw in snapshots with les starlettes. Jean Moreau, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Kim Novak, Romy Schneider, Grace Kelly, Anouk Aimée, among countless others, were regulars at Cannes.

The advent of the Nouvelle Vague in the 1960s changed everything. François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, played along with the game for a while. After all, other big names had walked the thin tightrope between art and commerce before them. Directors like Luis Buñuel and Luchino Visconti, Orson Welles and Michelangelo Antonioni, all had used Cannes as the springboard to international coproduction deals and worldwide distribution. François Truffaut once told me that a world premiere at any of the three bigtime film festivals — Cannes, Venice, Berlin — meant international sales across the board. More important: a guarantee that he could maintain his independence as an auteur in the fullest sense: writer, director, and hands-on producer.

Since Favre le Bret was not at all willing to share the limelight — nor that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — with the young mavericks, the blowup at the 1968 Cannes festival was inevitable. The Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (1969), aka Directors’ Fortnight, joined with the previously established Semaine de la Critique (1962) to challenge the rights of the Official Program in the Palais.

Out went Robert Favre le Bret in 1972, and in came Maurice Bessy. A wildcat in his own way, Bessy launched one non-competitive sections after another to stem the tide of the radicals: Perspectives du Cinéma Français, Les Yeux Fertiles, L’Air du Temps, Le Passé Composé. Save for the Perspectives du Cinéma Français, a showcase for new French productions, no present-day Cannes colleague has ever been able to name a single film that had run in any one of these special sections, nor could he explain what the noms de guerre originally stood for. Although Bessy’s tenure was a short six years, he did break completely with the past and opened the doors to a new Cannes festival in 1978 under the aegis of Gilles Jacob. A reign that was to last for 25 years.

Ever since then, Cannes has been a grab-bag of styles and themes by filmmakers from around the world. The era of the grand-staircase festival. The biggest and richest film spectacle on earth. The Oscars, if you will, for a fortnight. How much bigger can it get? That’s for Thierry Frémaux to decide. As of 2004, he is in charge of the Official Program. While Gilles Jacob, the newly elected President of the Festival de Cannes, is looking after the past. He wants to build a Cannes Museum. An all-year-around Cannes-Cannes for Cineastes and Festivaliers. The tourists will love it!

Ron Holloway