Our Man at the Film Festivals

Almost Every Town in Europe secretly yearns to have a film festival, especially if it has a tourist season to go with it. The presence of a few big stars, a few dozen starlets and a few hundred journalists on expense accounts never did anyone's economy much harm. And there's always the chance of a scandal (Nudipix furor at filmfest) or a minor international incident (Hail of Tortillas Greets U.S. entry: Washington recalls envoy). Given luck and good planning, a little cultural prestige may even accrue. All you need, by way of basic equipment, is a decent projector, a couple of hotels, a not-too-distant airport and a small municipal subsidy. Not long ago I was invited to attend a Grand Cinematographic Concourse in a Mediterranean fishing village with a population of 850. The film chosen for the Gala Inauguration was a Western entitled, according to the official handout, The Balls of San Fernando.

In the course of 1966, 200 film festivals were held throughout the world, and the number is likely to swell. But the most potent pair, the oldest rivals, and still the only springboards for instant international fame are Cannes and Venice.

The first Cannes festival was scheduled to start on September 1, 1939. Because of the late unpleasantness, it was postponed until 1946. Since then, the Cannes jury has garlanded and launched such movies as Rossellini's Open City, Delbert Mann's Marty, Alf Sjöberg's Miss Julie, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Orson Welles' Othello and Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying. It was also at Cannes that Antonioni's L'Avventura was ferociously booed in 1960; but the jury caught up with critical opinion two years later by giving him a prize for L'Eclisse. All these entrants were picked by the Cannes selection board. Rejects and mavericks are screened during the festival in the small commercial cinemas that line the Rue d'Antibes. These showings are arranged by an organization called the Film Market, which must never be sniffed at, since without its efforts the general public might never have seen films such as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Venice, the senior partner of the big two, dates back to 1932, when Mussolini founded it to invest Italy with cultural glamor and to attract visitors to Venice after the tourist season had ended. (The two-week festival starts at the end of August. Cannes, by contrast, takes place in mid-May, just before the tourist season begins.) Recent winners of the Venetian Golden Lion have included several films that changed the course of movie history. With Rashomon, in 1951, the Japanese cinema made its first decisive impact on the West, and Akira Kurosawa was established overnight as one of the 20 best living directors. Recognition for India came in 1957, when the top award went to Satyajit Ray's Aparajito; and with Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais gained a seal of official acclaim that his native country had formerly denied him.

If you are planning a trip to either of Europe's capitals of competitive cinema, be warned. They differ radically in atmosphere. Venice is aimed at the purists, while Cannes cocks an eye at the box office. The former is staged for evangelists, the latter for merchants as well as missionaries. Venice is married to the cinema; Cannes is its randy, promiscuous mistress. Both are worth seeing, but it's foolish to approach them in the same mood. What follow are my notes on the two great festivals that celebrate the hypnotic art once described by Orson Welles as "a ribbon of dream."

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To begin with, Venice does not happen in Venice. The venue is the Lido, a sandy spit of land way out in the lagoon and accessible from the city by public water-bus or private motorboat. I remember Robert Benchley's famous, bewildered telegram to The New Yorker: "Arrived in Venice. Streets full of water. Please advise." It may well be raining, thus reinforcing D. H. Lawrence's impression of the place as "an abhorrent, green, slippery city." Tourists seeking modern and reasonably priced accommodations on the Lido flock to the Eurotel, which has its own beach and is ten minutes' walk from the flag-bedecked Palazzo del Cinema, where the films are shown. Other visitors, richer or more immersed in literature, make for the Hôtel des Bains, which is the setting of Thomas Mann's best-known short story--Death in Venice, a threnody for an aging homosexual. Top people, whose expenses are either paid or tax-deductible, choose the Excelsior Palace, a stupendously crenelated monstrosity that charges $50 a day for a double room overlooking the main road.

Under the rain, the Lido becomes a sodden strip of beach, Coney Island without the animation. Critics, producers and publicity men slump in the lobby of the Excelsior like steerage passengers on some nightmare cruise. Shipboard romances and feuds strike up, and the hotel itself grows daily more like a superannuated liner. You wonder why the chairs aren't bolted to the floor. One old hand declares that this is the drabbest of all Venice festivals. No, says another, the second drabbest. Such is the dearth of stars that you find journalists interviewing one another. Nothing is here to warm a publicist's heart. The program is resolutely austere. Professor Luigi Chiarini, who has run the festival since 1963, abhors flashy blockbusters, and the people who make them have learned to avoid the harsh critical cross fire that one encounters in Venice.

Chiarini seems to infect the food as well. Hedonists embark for the city to eat--expensively at All' Angelo and at Harry's Bar (where the preferred cocktail, a blend of peach juice and champagne, is called a Bellini) or more cheaply at the Malamocco, where you may even run into a few authentic Venetians. Back at the Lido, the buffs forgather at an earthy, open-air trattoria. Crewcuts wag in a corner, and you are reverently told that they belong to the editorial staff of the Swedish equivalent of Cahiers du Cinéma. (For the benefit of nonbuffs, I should perhaps explain that Cahiers is the French film magazine that spawned and fostered the New Wave.) The sun finally pierces the porridge-gray canopy of cloud; but by now you have begun to feel that there's a paradox implicit in the very phrase "film festival." Isn't it perverse and inherently unfestive to go to a seaside resort and spend most of the day in the dark?

To Chiarini, anything recorded on celluloid for noncommercial reasons is arguably holy. Sixteen hours of heavyweight piety are devoted to the rejected footage of Robert Flaherty's documentary Louisiana Story. You get a powerful sense of madness closing in when, after something like 48 shots of a tree, the commentator (who was also the cameraman) pensively remarks: "We--er--got a bit hung up on that tree." But there are also invaluable morning showings of forgotten films, rescued from the archives and given a second lease on life. In 1965, for instance, the theme was the German cinema before Hitler seized power. I goggled at a treasure-trove--a world of sly housemaids and convent girls in bloomers, of sinister actors beaming at me gimleteyed from the heart of German insecurity. A world (to put it another way) of mad scientists torn between ruling mankind and raping their nieces.

Veteran delegates swap nostalgic tales of the resplendent past. In 1937 there were fireworks on the beach and the usherettes wore crinolines in honor of Anna Neagle as Victoria the Great. Five years later the Rumanians planned a mountainous wingding, ordering vast quantities of caviar to be shipped from Odessa: By the time it arrived, the sturgeon's eggs had turned into tadpoles. Above all, the elder critics mourn the passing of the days when Hollywood came to the ball, and the first male acting prize (awarded in 1934) went to Wallace Beery for his "powerful personality" in the title role of Viva Villa. In the same year the Vatican condemned Venice for screening Ecstasy, which showed Hedy Lamarr in the muffled-by-foliage, always-in-long-shot, often-out-of-focus nude. I even met an old French historian who remembered the inaugural festival, at which Grand Hotel (starring Garbo, Crawford and Barrymore) was savagely hissed, and a besotted Italian reviewer described the legs of Miriam Hopkins as "the most fragrant and intoxicating revelations of femininity ever seen on the screen."

"Oh, for a Cary Grant retrospective!" I hear a fellow critic sighing. And I guiltily know what he means, having just returned from a silent German melodrama whose subtitles were rendered via loudspeaker into Italian and passed on to me in French by an adjacent Greek. (In Cannes you can hire transistors and listen to foreign dialog translated into English. In Venice there are no transistors, and the films are subtitled only in French or Italian. Hence the atrocious lapses of judgment made in Venice by Anglo-Saxon critics who are not linguists. A good deal of the veneration we accord to the Continental cinema is undoubtedly due to the fact that our critics don't fully comprehend its vernacular subtleties.)

But however much reviewers may lament the lack of glamorous gaiety, they cannot deny that they deplored it when it flourished. The festival they sniff at today is the festival they begged for 15 years ago. "It used to exist for the public," a disgruntled Venetian tells me. "Now it exists for the critics. They've got what they wanted."

Professor Chiarini looks back in pride on the festival's beginnings. Consecration of the Cinema as the Official Art of our time was the headline of a French report on Venice in 1932; and Chiarini wants to keep it that way. He is an aesthetic puritan, a Savonarola of the cinema, with little time for those who go to the movies for entertainment. Talking to this bald, bureaucratic idealist, I glean the following opinions:

"You are not here to amuse yourself. You can do that in the cinemas across the lagoon, around the Piazza San Marco. This is not a fete, it is an exhibition. We are not interested in stars and spectacles but in research and experiment. There are two kinds of audience I care about--the students who go to our retrospective shows, and the ordinary people of Venice who see the festival films in our open-air cinema. I don't regard the dignitaries who see the official indoor showings as a serious audience."

Chiarini's high thinking dominates the festival; and when, on the last day, the international jury is shipped off to a nearby island (Torcello or San Giorgio) to deliberate behind locked doors, there's no doubt that its decisions are governed by strictly artistic considerations. All the same, tact is a great vote swinger, and if there's a major American entry, it might seem churlish not to award it at least an acting prize. Local patriotism, too, should be appeased where possible. Venice has not forgotten the almighty fuss of 1960, when Luchino Visconti, having failed to win the Golden Lion with Rocco and His Brothers, stormed out of the prize-giving ceremony, vowing never to return. He broke his vow five years later. The film he brought with him was an anemic and pretentious tragedy of incest called Vaghe Stelle dell' Orsa. It duly carried off the prize.

The future looks moderately bleak for Chiarini's Venice. For one thing, the number of outlets for art movies has multiplied in recent years: They no longer need the Venetian seal of approval as desperately as they did. For another, the prospect of rigorous competition (and thus of likely defeat) tends more and more to discourage all entrants except those with nothing to lose. Why, after all, should a commercial producer take the risk of being turned down by the Venice selection committee--and of exposing himself, if accepted, to the combined onslaught of the international press? Finally, how long will the Italian government go on subsidizing a festival that isn't helping the tourist trade?

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Compared with the austerities of Venice, Cannes is an orgy. First of all, it is (continued on page 259)Film Festivals(continued from page 224) bigger. It shows more films, attracts more film makers, undresses more starlets, and pays the expenses of more critics and reporters (250 at the last count, not including a further 500 journalists, photographers, radio commentators and TV representatives who came under their employers' steam). Subsidy to the amount of $225,000 is provided in equal parts by the town, the province and the government.

Cannes disarms purist criticism by blatant candor. It regards the cinema as primarily a popular art. Robert Favre LeBret, the astute diplomat who directs the festival, always makes this clear to his juries. "I explain to them that the winner of the Grand Prix must have artistic quality, but it must also be capable of being welcomed by a large audience." Last year's jury took this advice rather too much to heart. The Golden Palm was shared between Claude Lelouch's Un Homme et une Femme, a dashing piece of animated glossy-magazine photography, and Signore e Signori, a comedy directed at the top of everyone's voice by Pietro (Divorce--Italian Style) Germi. As an American observer said: "The Frog entry lacks substance"; and when Germi's award was announced at the final ceremony, a storm of catcalls halted the proceedings, interspersed with cries of "Cretins!" and "Assassins of the cinema!"

Undeterred by such fleabites, Favre LeBret points out that only two Cannes prize winners in 20 years have subsequently failed at the box office. In Europe and the American art houses, a Golden Palm usually gives an enormous boost to a film's earning capacity. (The exception is Britain, insular as ever, where it means virtually nothing.) "There are two kinds of film maker," says Favre LeBret, "the artist and the industrialist. Cannes has room for both."

In his own way, though less vocally, he rules Cannes just as toughly as Chiarini rules Venice. He has the last word in nominating the jury, which is normally half French and half foreign; and he doesn't hesitate to impose the guillotine on films he considers too long. "Cut thirty minutes and we'll take it," he told the Rumanians last year after seeing the movie they proposed to enter. They made the requisite cuts and it won a prize for direction. Shrewdly, Favre LeBret has never pretended that the festival was a tourist attraction: "This is a professional congress. It's a meeting place for eight thousand people whose business is movies. There's nothing here for the general public." Yet the public comes. Day and night, there's a staring throng outside the Festival Palace, where the main showings are held.

Cannes is a two-ring circus with fairground attached. The big ring (black tie for evening screenings, beachwear OK for afternoons) is the Grande Salle of the Festival Palace. Next door, in the Salle Jean Cocteau (dress informal), the French critics present their annual selection of films by new directors. The fairground booths are the cinemas along the Rue d'Antibes (come as you are, but preferably clothed), where a dozen films a day are hopefully offered for auction to international distributors.

Because they are ostensibly private, these showings are exempt from censorship. The erotic content is often high. Take last year, for instance. "After Lolita," said a typical handout, "comes an incestuous love affair--Lollipop." This sounded inviting but turned out to be tepid drivel. The next day, however, I saw a Swedish movie about incest--Vilgot Sjöman's My Sister, My Love--which was at once a work of art, exquisite and poised, and a masterpiece of eroticism. It was marred only by an odd stroke of shyness: In Scandinavia, it seems, men have pubic hair but not genitalia. I also remember an Anglo-Greek melodrama in which, at ten-minute intervals, an unexplained thug with an eye patch appeared out of left screen, seized the nearest actress under 50, irrelevantly flogged her with what looked like dental floss, and then returned her to the otherwise uneventful plot. (I missed the supporting short, a documentary dealing with "the Cult of the Phallus among Indian Maidens.") Another item that should not go unrecorded is the Danish crazy comedy that began with a drunken fisherman romping home to assert his authority by leaping onto the kitchen sink and urinating--in color, back to camera--for a full 60 seconds. According to the narration, which was thoughtfully dubbed into English, he did this to prove a point: "The soul cannot forever be crushed in a dark taciturnity."

For a fortnight in May, Cannes is the film world in microcosm. Those who inhabit it sever all other allegiances as they dash blinking from one coal-black auditorium to the next. They read nothing but the daily Festival Bulletin, and revel in the punning of its gossip columnist. (Example: "If Omar Sharif marries, his wife will be called Langouste Sharif." Homard means lobster, and a langouste is a crayfish. This low do we sink.) And if Cannes is the world, the Carlton Hotel is its capital city.

The Martinez is more modern and just as luxe; the Walsdorff-Victoria has better food; and my own favorite, the Gray d'Albion, has prettier decor--all contemporary elegance at street level and classical comfort above. But the Carlton is the hub of the action, the quintessential scene, the place where the gossip rages and the vital deals are swung. Thin on the ground in Venice, the top stars still converge in bulk on Cannes, and the traffic is thickest in the Carlton lobby, through which everyone who is (or was, or would like to be, or would like to make) anyone must sooner or later pass. Everyone, that is, except Brigitte Bardot, who has boycotted Cannes for the past ten years. She turned up, unknown and uninvited, in 1956, and annoyed the festival authorities by getting more press coverage than anyone else. Irked by their disapproval, she has calmly snubbed them ever since. The rumor in 1966 was that her minimum price for returning to Cannes was a Légion d'honneur.

The Carlton lobby is not without its transient maniacs, some of whom radiate the kind of glow that comes of intravenous consolation. Last year a haggard little man with happy eyes rushed out of the elevator and embraced me. He was wearing a silvery silk suit and I had never seen him before in my life. "Thank God you made it," he gasped. "There are some real nuts around here. Ten minutes ago I'm sitting in the bar with your pal X--" (he named a fairly well-known Continental director whom I'd never met) "--and he's making like we're old buddies, birds of a feather, cha-cha-cha. Then all of a sudden he says will I go up to room 120 and kill the first person I see. So I figure what the hell, and I go up. And when the door opens, it's an eight-year-old child. An eight-year-old child! In a cute little nightie with ribbons and everything! What kind of a fink does he think I am?" "A potential P.R.O.," I was going to reply, "and you've failed the loyalty test"; but already he was lost in the crowd, his shimmering suit melting into the vinyl and sequins and gold lamé of the resident starlets.

In the Carlton bar and out on the adjoining sea-front terrace, the stars are giving interviews of carefully rehearsed candor, designed to flatter the journalist's ego while disclosing absolutely nothing of importance. Producers are haggling with potential distributors. The only thing that is really talking is money. Heavy-lidded men exchange shrugs with competitive blandness. "For reasons I cannot pin down," says a man at the next table, "it was not doing too well in Boston as of yesterday. But Düsseldorf is another story..." Rock Hudson ambles in and affably accepts a drink. Blue-chinned and tight-lipped, Jean-Luc Godard scans the scene, doesn't like the look of it, and pads briskly out. In a corner of the terrace Sammy Davis Jr. is publicizing a film that isn't even being shown at Cannes. At every table, watching and waiting, would-be or has-been, there are model-type actresses. Think twice before you take a pretty girl into the Carlton bar at festival time. It will instantly be assumed that she is longing to be cast as the Spider Woman in Naked Creeps from Outer Space, and that you are her agent-cum-pimp.

The Carlton's private beach, across the road from the hotel, is where the photographers swarm, hoping to snap a starlet whose bikini has shed its top. These are photographers of a special breed, who haven't looked through a lens in years. Submerged in the throng, they brandish their cameras over their heads and click away at random. Last year their major target was a plump contender in fish-net briefs with a rose delicately clasped between her buttocks. Although the Carlton beach allures the crowds, a more select group favors the Plage Sportive a few hundred yards away. Here you can bask, swim and water-ski with people like Peter Ustinov, Jeanne Moreau and Tony Richardson. You can also see a bronzed middle-aged man who capers about with daisies in his beard, playing a barrel organ and flourishing posters that advocate nuclear disarmament. He goes to all the Mediterranean festivals, and claims to be one of God's spies.

The late Jean Cocteau, uncrowned king of the festival for many years and often enrolled in its jury, described it as "a nosegay of flags blended together by a sea breeze"--un bouquet de drapeaux que le vent du large mélange. A typical day at Cannes is full and frenetically international. It might go something like this:

9 A.M.: Private showing of Japanese film in Rue d'Antibes. Subject: cuckolded taxi driver who takes vengeance on his wife's lovers by pretending that she's dead and using her supposed ghost to blackmail them. Modern setting, medieval thinking.

11 A.M.: Official Swedish entry at Festival Palace. Glacial and literary. I slip out halfway through to attend press conference held by the director of last night's movie. Mob of critics firing wordy questions in six languages. Heat intense, enlightenment minimal.

12:30 P.M.: Promotion lunch at Eden Roc to publicize British entry. Overwhelmed by escapism, I choose freedom. But where to eat? In the center of Cannes, there's Mère Besson's place, modest in appearance but boasting a Michelin star for its aromatic Provençal cooking; and the gaudier Mandarin, where the Chinese menu features "Fish in Squirrel" and "Palm of Bear's Claw." The most reliable bistro is L'Esquinade. All three are within five minutes' stroll of the Festival Palace. Down at the port, where posh yachts and grimy fishing boats jostle democratically for anchorage, the specialty is seafood, for which the Voile au Vent charges more (and deservedly so) than the Coq Hardi. But I am bent on total escape, and drive eight miles westward to the coastal village of La Napoule. Here, in the shaded garden of a restaurant called L'Oasis, I wolf a meal that fully merits two stars. A third is clearly in the offing: If granted, it will place L'Oasis among the 13 best tables in France.

2:30 P.M.: Public debate at the Hotel Martinez between writers and directors. Subject: Is Plot Essential to Motion Pictures? Supporters of straight narration include commercial film makers likeDelbert Mann (Marty, The Bachelor Party), Jean Delannoy (L'Eternel Retour, Symphonie Pastorale) and Henri-Georges Clouzot (Le Salaire de la Peur, Les Diaboliques). Their argument: that films should tell a story that the public can understand. Their common enemy: Jean-Luc Godard, who maintains that the cinema of simple storytelling has had its day. "When you add it up, it only amounts to about ten percent of the sum total of moviemaking."

Delbert Mann says he dislikes exhibitionist directors. He prefers a good story that conveys an emotional experience. Godard ripostes: "Your kind of cinema prevents me from making my kind! American cinema has deteriorated at the heart. You and Paddy Chayefsky and people like you have accepted the system and don't try to change it. You have surrendered your responsibilities. You forget that cinema is not a part of you--you are a part of cinema."

Mann pleads guilty, but adds that cinema in the U.S. is a business, not an art, that compromise is necessary, etc., etc. Godard: "Of course a film must be sold to its audience. But I don't see why I should think about my audience on the same scale that Hitler did." The key exchange occurs when the conversation turns to Last Year at Marienbad:

Clouzot: Surely you agree, M. Godard, that films should have a beginning, a middle part and an end?

Godard: Yes, but not necessarily in that order.

5 P.M.: Czech film in the Salle Cocteau, chosen by the French critics. Brilliant, poetic and critical in depth of the society that sponsored it. Sharp lesson for the Western cinema.

7:45 P.M.: Official German entry at the Festival Palace. A film self-critical to the point of self-indulgence. Lots of brutality to prove how vicious brutality is.

9:30 P.M.: Private showing (Rue d'Antibes) of French erotic movie. Lesbians munching one another's breasts and being mowed down by machine guns. Mostly hilarious and not seriously sinister.

11 P.M.: Supper at L'Aventura, a heavily beamed room with strolling musicians. The lamb cooked in herbs is costly but worth it.

12 midnight: Official gala at the Casino, given by one of the participating countries. Cold cuts, admission by invitation only, and obligatory black tie. One sips champagne, chats with a star or two and edges discreetly toward the door. Darryl Zanuck and other entrepreneurs stay on to play the tables.

1 A.M.: Choice of two night clubs, both at the eastern end of town. Whisky-à-GoGo, a crowded cavern roofed with foliage, resembles a minor tropical airport where 50 flights have been postponed, the air conditioning has exploded and the Muzak has been turned up to maximum clamor. The other club is decorated like a Dodge City saloon and has a transvestite floorshow. Both are ridiculously expensive.

2 A.M.: Nightcap at a bar just off the Croisette with Richard Lester, who directed A Hard Day's Night, Help! and The Knack, which won the Golden Palm in 1965. He's now a member of the jury and relishes the job. "It's like marrying a woman who owns a liquor store," says this tireless addict of cinema in all its forms.

3 A.M.: To bed, with badly bruised eyeballs.

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For the most part, movie critics are fanatical enthusiasts. They will travel long distances and keep impossible hours on the outside chance of glimpsing a masterpiece. But you cannot blame them if at times they grow surly and discouraged. Every once in a while they may unearth a minority audience for an art movie; but they cannot compete with the advertising technique, the sheer saturation bombardment, that ensures a mass audience for a majority movie. It is packaged and presold before they ever see it. How can a critic hope to influence the making of films that cost more than--say--a million dollars? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors, hinting that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car.

Yet for all their faults, Cannes and Venice justify the critic's choice of profession. Here are two festivals where all films are equal, and it is still possible for a handful of intelligent critics to change the taste of nations.