FOCUS:

You couldn’t take a step in any direction on the Croisette without noticing that the Festival de Cannes had pulled out all the stops to celebrate its 60th anniversary as the queen of international film festivals. Book stores hawked souvenir anniversary publication albums: 60 ans de Festival de Cannes (Gilletta Nice-Matin), 100 photos du Festival de Cannes (Reporters sans fronti�rs), 60 ans de cin�ma (Univers Cannes), Cannes: Ils ont fait le festival / Elles on fait le festival (Cahiers du cin�ma), and, best of all, a new edition of Cannes Memoires 1946-2007 (Le Festival de Cannes & Backstage), the official album of the 60-year history of the Festival de Cannes with the copyrighted Palme logo decorating the front cover of the publication. Also, a colorful new website offered a pictorial review of past Palme d’Or winners, some legendary moments on the Croisette, scores of celebrities from yesteryear, and multiple hints that this year’s 60�me Festival de Cannes would go down in history as one of its best. As, indeed, it was.

Cannes Pr�sident Gilles Jacob celebrated the occasion with an especially commissioned collection of three-minute shorts by 35 directors from 25 countries and five continents, the two-hour series titled Chacon son cin�ma (To Each His Own Cinema). The icing on the cake was the presence of 20 Palme d’Or winners at the festival. Since the central motif of To Each His Own Cinema was the universal experience of seeing a movie, preferably in a venue that passes for a theater, that alone made the collection interesting. But the payoff was in the underlying concept: »to affirm the festival’s admiration for great filmmakers who have never ceased to astonish and reinvent the cinema« (Gilles Jacob). The names of many of these Cannes-awarded directors also decorated the official festival bag.

Some of the three-minute shorts drew spontaneous applause from the Palais audience as highly amusing movie vignettes. The series opened with Takeshi Kitano’s One Fine Day (Japan), set in a rural area with the movie theater resembling a barn in a rice field. Along comes an old farmer, who parks himself on a bench to watch some bizarre pieces of celluloid before the projector jams and a fire breaks out. The old man looks back to see Kitano himself fanning the flames. Another visual delight was Zhang Yimou’s Movie Night (China), chronicling a visit to a remote Chinese village by a mobile movie projection team. A boy is so fascinated by the happening that he spends all his energy scampering around the projection stand as the equipment is set up that he falls asleep when the movie hits the screen that night.

Ethan and Joel Coen’s World Cinema (USA) gave Cannes cineastes a good kick in the ribs in their sketch set in the foyer of the Aero arthouse in Santa Monica. Up walks Josh Brolin, wearing his Stetson from No Country for Old Men, to ask if »there are any livestock« in either of the two films on the marquee: Jean Renoir’s La r�gle de jeu and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates. After the cineaste at the counter drools at the mouth over both masterpieces, Brolin picks Climates � musing later that »there’s a lot of truth about a lot of things« in the film. And Walter Salles’s jocular 5,557 Miles from Cannes drew a loud guffaw from festivaliers with his paen to the festival. Picture a pair of Brazilian rapper-musicians bragging about what they pretend to know about Cannes � including that hombre named »Gil« who runs the festival!

After the Sunday morning screening of To Each His Own Cinema, nearly all of the 35 directors appeared in person at a collective press conference in the Salle Bu�uel under the roof of the Palais des Festivals. The affair could have turned out to be a raucous game of one-upmanship, for what else is to be expected when so many egos match wits with each other for moments of profound thought. However, with the Pr�sident himself sitting in the front row, most of the filmmakers minded their manners � save for Roman Polanski, who found some questions from lamebrain critics too tedious to sit through. Towards the end of the session, after parring banal cinematic opinions with Atom Egoyan, he rose from his seat in the prominent middle section and walked dramatically off in a huff.

That rather quaint press t�te-�-t�te did underscore, however, how the Palme d’Or circle over the past six decades has become a gentlemen’s club. With Australia’s Jane Campion the only woman in this august crowd (Palme d’Or in 1993 for The Piano), she lightened the moment by parlaying a question from the audience into a joke: »All I know is that Michael Cimino just proposed marriage to me!« Later, when it was reported that the entire Chacon son cin�ma series would be aired on ARTE, the French-German cultural channel, some European TV commissioners approached Gilles Jacob for additional broadcasting rights. And why not! Save for a few downers, To Each His Own Cinema provided a glory moment at the 60�me Festival de Cannes.

The anniversary year saw Cannes breaking new attendance records. With 4,000 accredited journalists and 4,500 invited guests, more space was needed in the film market and additional seating capacity for screenings. A brand new festival venue, a 500-seat theater christened »La Salle du 60�me,« was opened atop the Riviera market complex to accommodate programming of past Palme d’Or winners and the expanding Cannes Classics section. Black limousines lined the Croisette for the European Cultural Ministers Day. No one really knows why a dozen ministers show each year for a one-day film conference, but this annual rendezvous has now become a fixture on the C�te d»Azur. As confirmed by Bernd Neumann, the German film-oriented cultural minister, this annual ECM Day offers a rare opportunity to compare notes on funding across-the-border productions of common interest to all European Union partners.

When I interviewed Gilles Jacob as to how the festival handles its ever-expanding growing pains, he confirmed that, since the turn of the millennium, accreditations have indeed been increasing by a continual 3 % over each past year. »Up to now,« he added, »we can still manage the swell without too many programming alterations.« Although he also admitted that »hotel accommodations can sometimes be a bit tricky during that core weekend in the middle of the festival.« Gilles Jacob closed the interview by waxing eloquent about the future of the Cannes film festival. As the current Pr�sident, with an additional quarter-century under his belt as its former D�l�gu� G�n�ral (aka festival artistic director), he alone has fashioned the festival to what it is today. Together, of course, with a core of 20 committed festival staffers. All of whom are cineastes to the bone � festivaliers, for want of a better word � people who think of Cannes as the ultimate expression of festival elegance and film sophistication.

Look in the Catalogue Officiel, and you will find the key festival organizers listed: Gilles Jacob Pr�sident, Catherine D�mier � Directrice G�n�rale, Thierry Fr�maux � D�l�gu� Artistique. But there’s also V�ronique Cayla, formerly Directrice G�n�rale and now Directrice G�n�rale du Centre National de la Cin�matographie, with her headquarters located in the Village International Pantiero. And Pierre Viot, formerly Cannes Pr�sident and now Cin�fondation Pr�sident, with an office under the roof of the Palais des Festivals. Other key festival staffers are Christine Aim�, who runs the press office with a gentle but firm hand, and Nicole Petit, who handles Gilles Jacob’s appointment calendar in Cannes. Last, but not least, there are Christian Jeune, head of documentation, and Van Papadopoulo, programmer of the increasingly popular Cannes Classics section. Not to be overlooked either are Laurent and Didier Jacob, who (among other things) serve as Gilles’s right and left hands in the compilation of past festival events and media documentation.

Over the past 40 years, during my own regular attendance at Cannes, I have learned to value the contribution of several knowledgeable insiders, staffers and scouts who work for the festival for little or no remuneration. They are there simply because they love cinema and enjoy discovering and supporting directorial talent. One of these is Anne Guimet, who began as a staffer in the Semaine International de la Critique (SIC) and now assists Catherine Jacques in the L’Atelier section on the Pantiero during the festival. During the rest of the year she works for Cahiers du Cin�ma in Paris, helping to develop the publication’s new French-English website. Another valued friend over the years is Dany de Seille, press attach� and publicist in the current SIC family of critics.

This year, I was particularly pleased to see that the Cannes Classics program paid honor to a veteran French critic-scout-publicist with a screening of Todd McCarthy’s Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient. There are few people who know American and Asian cinema better than Rissient. Other French critics who deserve the same honneurs are Marcel Martin, the retired secretary of FIPRESCI (Federation of International Film Critics), and Max Tessier, who knows and understands Japanese cinema inside out. As for a critic-historian who is familiar with the history of the Cannes festival from its origins to the present day, try Freddie Buache, the retired head of the Cin�math�que Suisse. You will always find him sitting in the front row of festival press screenings. Freddie has 52 Cannes festivals under his belt.

Everyone on the inside of Festival de Cannes knows that Gilles Jacob seldom travels. Instead, he works tirelessly on plans for the festival’s future. So when I asked him whether or not the full capacity of the Cannes festival might be reached in the foreseeable future � in other words, when would there be no more room left for further growth or more expansion � he laughed. For he considers his job as Pr�sident only half done. »One day,« he confirmed, »we want to open an archival museum to celebrate the history of the festival. We already have assembled a large number of photos from the past and want to add film clips and other memorabilia to the collection.« Then he added with an amused smile: »All that’s missing at present is the money.«

Ron Holloway