The show must come off ARTS
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Saturday, 18 May: the day, the dam broke at the Cannes Film Festival. In the general con- text of what is happening in France, the Cannes affair adds up to hardly more than a footnote. As an indication of how things are moving in the cinema—increasingly political currents of thought, some decisive cracks in structures that can no longer be papered over, conceivably a portent for the future of other festivals as well as this one—it could be very significant. And, as an event in itself, this pre- posterous day of commotion and shilly-shally was an extraordinary thing to see.
Earlier in the week, we had had the one-day strike, with all festival screenings closed down and some 200 students from Nice squatting dustily on the Croisette outside the cinema. Why, I asked a French left-wing friend, were the students sitting down here? Why not in Nice? 'It is for solidarity.' Solidarity with the festival, or against it, or what? 'No, no. Just solidarity.' Solidarity was the word everyone was using all week : it was a joke by Wednes- day, and on Saturday it stopped being a joke.
Saturday morning: everyone- looking inno- cently forward to the screening of Alain Res- nais's le je faime, probably the most eagerly awaited film of the festival, and mean- while dropping in dutifully to what sounded like a fairly routine press conference in the interminable affair of the French Cinematheque. Resnais, who was to have presided, turns out to have been bloque at Lyons. Francois Truf- faut reads a declaration drawn up in committee, unequivocally demanding the immediate closing of the festival. The three jurors present—Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, Monica Vitti—offer their resignations. Directors stand up to with- draw their films from competition, some cheer- fully, some understandably wistful about this sorry end to their hopes. Jean-Luc Godard denounces the festival trappings, but dreamily suggests round-the-clock screenings, free to workers and students, in Cannes cinemas. Atmosphere: theatrical, excited, only a little quarrelsome, as the meeting is steam-rollered through.
After an hour or so, it transfers itself from the small Salle Cocteau to the main festival cinema. By now, counter-forces are mobilising: critics and foreign delegates out to remind revolutionaries that they are also workers with a job to do. Cries of 'Get out, Godard'; loud cheers for someone who sourly asks why free- dom of expression should be defended in theory and denied in practice. Dick Lester marches stoically out to withdraw the official American entry, Petulia, which, he casually adds, he has always thought of as a British film anyway. An Italian wearing a kind of gold headband declares for solidarity. Shouts, counter-shouts, hubbub; Truffaut is knocked down again ('the fifth time since February,' says someone sym- pathetically); Godard breaks another pair of glasses. Cokes and sandwiches arrive, and a sad official voice reminds everyone of what the municipality paid for the new seating, and hopes dolefully that people will keep the food off the upholstery.
Four hours or so later, they are still at it. It sounds impressive when you read that hun- dreds of film workers have taken over the festival; and standing at a distance, watching crowds mill about the stage against the heavy grey curtains, it looks impressively like some experimental theatre group's rendering of St Petersburg, 1917. But actually most of the people in the cinema seem to be foreigners trying to get translations from other foreigners, citizens of Cannes wandering in for a free show, journalists tracking a story. In fact, the oddest thing about this free-for-all is the way it seems to have been taken over by the stalking ry cameras and microphones, with little groups on the stage gathered tightly round assorted interviewers, no one any longer listening to anyone else, and the boredom of anarchy in- creasingly overtaking what might be called the audience.
A bleak official communiqué, late in the day, announces that 'par suite des evenements actuels, le Jury declare n'etre plus en etat d'exercer ses fonctions.' Competitively, the festival is over. The exodus begins. But at mid- night, thirteen hours after the whole thing started, there is still a noisy meeting going on, votes being taken, more indecisive argument about whether some sort of non-competitive screenings can stagger on.
Nine years ago, in nouvelle vague year, Cannes showed the world what the new move- ment in French cinema was about. Now, these no longer quite so young film-makers have the power to kill the festival. They have lined the cinema up with the other militant movements in France; and all the vague murmurings about a workers' cinema and so on reflect some deep dissatisfactions with actual structures and bureaucratic machinery. But this decisive re- minder that it's a French festival doesn't alter the fact that it is also an international one, and that the people who come from abroad to show films and see them have their stake in the affair. The frivolities—now in any case very muted—are incidental to a highly profes- sional occasion; and the festival authorities, by ceding defeat on the competitive side but doing their damnedest to keep some sort of projec- tion going, did their proper job by reminding everyone of that.
Meanwhile, and ironically, this truncated occasion had left another kind of political im- pression. At the time of shut-down, the three films which stood out were Milos Forman's Like a House on Fire (Czech), Jan Nemec's A Report on the Party and the Guests (Czech) and Miklos Jancso's Under the Red Stars (Hun- garian). Both the Nemec and the Forman films are political allegories, cool, pointed and daring, the one a chess-board piece about a fete-champetre whose Leninesque host permits of no escape by the reluctant guest, the other a brilliantly warm, funny and self-contained anecdote of a small town firemen's ball, an affair of reluctant beauty queens, stolen tombola presents, tiny status wars. Jancso's film, as mes- merising as The Round-Up and perhaps even more brilliantly structured, is about the Russian civil war of 1918, the killing game of red and white countering each other's moves, using the
same tactics of humiliation, the ultimate dead end of war. All three films are of major impor- tance; and fortunately it doesn't look as though London will have to wait too long to see them.
For the rest and for the record: a decently dull Yugoslav entry about Yugoslav war orphans being beastly to a German war orphan; an agonising piece of Italian religiosity, Zurlini's Seduto alla sua Destra, about a black Christ in the Congo; a sub-standard Japanese ghost film, Shindo's Kuroneko, in which the avenging spectral ladies turned into cats, or somersaulted in slow motion over their samurai victims. Britain's swinging cinema (Joanna, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush) looked sadly com- mon, though I arrived too late for Albert Finney's sympathetically received Charlie Bubbles. And the Italians seem to have found a new director of some promise in Salvatore Samperi, whose Grazie Zia is a perverse, baleful, comic and watchable piece about a rich boy whose personal protest takes the form of con- fining himself to a wheel-chair. Heavily influ- enced by Fists in the Pocket, it suggests a director reaching towards a style.
But who is going to remember Cannes 1968 for the films? Last Saturday looked more like a show of strength than a declaration of war. It remains to be seen whether the people who took over the Palais des Festivals (Les Etats- Generaux du Cinema Francais, no less) have any programme beyond immediate disruption, and whether their allies from abroad were expressing anything more than instant emo- tional support.
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