Cannes Opener
Séamas McSwiney lifts the lid on new book celebrating sixty years of Cannes, and looks ahead to this year’s event.

In any given year at the Festival de Cannes, it’s not difficult to find sixty adjectives that could aptly or ironically sum up what just happened – not to mention sixty films and personalities that likewise define that year’s event. So, logically, Chris Darke and Kieron Corless, the authors of Cannes: Inside the World’s Premier Film Festival, a book celebrating Cannes’ sixtieth, have a task that arithmetically squares this abundance.

The adjectives flow – sometimes on the nose with witty insight and other times colluding to form double-barrelled superlatives and riskily contrived metaphors – as the characters and films take the stage to tell the story, the history, the politics, the art, the events, the key players, the disasters, the resurrections, the reinventions, the consolidation, the protocol and, most amusingly in the end, the rumours, the tittle-tattle, and the inside track on some of the disputes that defined it.

Without slavishly following a timeline, the book gives a sense of how Cannes became the most iconic cultural crossroads that exists. In media terms it is the biggest and, as a marketplace, it is global de chez global. There is also the clear sense that Cannes was not only often on the cinematic cutting edge, but also has always been organisationally innovative: none can match it for size and diversity, it is the template for film festivals worldwide.

We are reminded that Cannes’ initial impetus was political. It was dreamed up in 1938 to counter the fascist tendencies that sought to dominate the Venice Mostra. The first Cannes was scheduled for September 1939 but it was upstaged by the invasion of Poland and the Second World War, so the first festival didn’t actually take place until 1946. Since then it has blossomed and grown but not without some hitches. For example, 1948 and 1950 didn’t happen due to lack of funding, but 1968 still counts even though it was closed down halfway through by the action of young radicals, like François Truffaut, Milos Forman, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard et al., in support of les événements of ’68 in Paris. (For the record, the last film screened at the ’68 festival was Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin, playing in Critics’ Week).

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.