At Cannes, a Rich History of Capturing Politics, Mores and Film Icons

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/arts/cannes-film-festival-history.html

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PARIS — The world was just catching its breath after World War II when the Cannes Film Festival began in 1946.

Since then, the festival has helped introduce the Italian Neo-Realists, the French Nouvelle Vague, the gritty Hollywood classics of the 1970s and many major directors known to viewers at the multiplex and students of film studies.

This year, the festival, whose red carpet has helped start a thousand careers, will hold its 70th edition. (Over the years, the festival skipped a few editions.) To celebrate, a series of events are planned between opening night on Wednesday and closing night on May 28, when the prizes are to be awarded. The jury, led by the Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, a Cannes regular, includes the actors Will Smith and Jessica Chastain.

The poster for the 70th edition features Claudia Cardinale — a star of “The Leopard,” which won the festival’s top prize in 1963 — twirling in a skirt, her hair blowing in the wind, the very image of vitality. (A slight kerfuffle erupted in recent weeks when it emerged that the image had been Photoshopped to make her appear slimmer.)

Each year, the festival turns a sleepy, even seedy, Mediterranean resort town into a swirling carnival of glamour.

“Arriving in Cannes in early May from London, you’re hit by the faint licorice smell of mimosa on the breeze and the warmth of the air,” said Joan Juliet Buck, the author and former editor of French Vogue, who writes about visits to Cannes in her new memoir, “The Price of Illusion.”

The festival’s inaugural edition in 1946 featured Rita Hayworth in Charles Vidor’s “Gilda,” Anna Magnani in Alberto Lattuada’s “Bandit” and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s “Gaslight.” Among the countless stars who have shone here over the years are Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, Monica Vitti, Sophia Loren, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Not to mention filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.

In 1955 the festival introduced the Palme d’Or, the top prize for a film. (Since 1998, the statuettes have been made by Chopard.) Critics love to rank the winners. The 1955 winner was “Marty,” directed by Delbert Mann.

The winning films have often mirrored changes taking place in the wider world. In 1958, Mikhail Kalatozov became the only Soviet director to win the top prize, for “The Cranes Are Flying.” In 1964, the Palme d’Or went to Jacques Demy’s “Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a brightly colored musical starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo that exudes a kind of innocence. In 1967 it was Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” with an air of menace.

Then came 1968. That year, no prizes were given. François Truffaut, Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard, among other filmmakers, called for the festival to be halted in light of the social uprisings sweeping France. The turbulent politics of that era are the backdrop to a film in competition this year, Michel Hazanavicius’s “Redoubtable.” It stars Louis Garrel as Mr. Godard and Stacy Martin as his wife at the time, Anne Wiazemsky, and is based on Ms. Wiazemsky’s memoir.

In response to the events of 1968, the festival started the Directors’ Fortnight the next year to showcase more avant-garde works.

Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” with Robert De Niro as the gun-wielding Travis Bickle, won the Palme d’Or in 1976, after dividing the critics in the house: Half cheered, half booed. Audiences were on edge that year, after a bomb had been discovered the previous year, in a failed plot by a terrorist group.

In 1979, in a moment that seemed to capture the politics of both the present and the past, the Palme d’Or was shared by “Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War classic, and Volker Schlöndorff’s “Tin Drum,” based on Günter Grass’s novel of the same name set in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) during World War II.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the festival featured many films from Eastern Europe, including several by the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, bringing an awareness of life under Communism. At the same time, changes in the movie industry were turning Cannes into the biggest film marketplace in the world.

Eventually the old Art Deco-style Palais des Festivals was torn down, and in 1983 a giant new one was inaugurated. The hulking building on the port was quickly nicknamed “the bunker.”

It is here that movie stars walk the long red-carpeted steps to be greeted at the top by the festival’s top brass — today, they are Thierry Frémaux, who as director oversees the selection of films in competition, and the festival’s president, Pierre Lescure, a former executive at the Canal Plus pay-television company in France, which broadcasts the opening and closing ceremonies.

The advent of television has also shaped the festival. “In 1987, I was disoriented, couldn’t find the center anymore,” Ms. Buck recalled. “Barbet Schroeder said, ‘The only way to really grasp the festival from now on is to watch it on TV.’” (This year, Mr. Schroeder — who directed “Barfly” and “Reversal of Fortune,” among others — has a new film showing out of competition at the festival, “The Venerable W.,” a documentary about a Burmese monk.)

In 1993 Jane Campion became the first woman to win a Palme d’Or, for “The Piano,” a prize shared with “Farewell My Concubine,” directed by Chen Kaige. Ms. Campion will break new ground this year, too: For the first time, the festival will showcase some television series out of competition, including “Top of the Lake: China Girl,” Ms. Campion’s follow-up to her acclaimed feminist crime series, featuring Nicole Kidman.

The festival is known for its news conferences, where directors and actors face journalists from around the world. Sometimes, these events have become heated. In 2011, the Danish director Lars von Trier was barred from the festival after he said during a news conference for his film “Melancholia” that he was a Nazi and sympathized with Hitler.

In 2013, a jury headed by Steven Spielberg awarded the Palme d’Or to Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color.” But Mr. Spielberg said the jury also formally recognized the film’s stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, who were at odds with the director over the emotional challenges of shooting the film’s lesbian sex scenes, prompting an international debate about female empowerment and the male gaze.

Since 2015, when France was hit by a series of terrorist attacks, the film festival has increased security. Still, fans line the road hoping for a glimpse of stars, paparazzi snap photographs and the images are now published instantly around the world.

At a reception in Paris for French films in this year’s competition, Audrey Azoulay, the outgoing culture minister, recalled that an earlier iteration of the Cannes Film Festival was started in the 1930s as a rejoinder to the Venice Film Festival, which began under Mussolini and where Joseph Goebbels was once a guest of honor.

Speaking days before the runoff election in France, Ms. Azoulay warned that a victory by the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, would threaten the openness and international spirit that Cannes stood for.

Ms. Le Pen lost to the centrist Emmanuel Macron. He is expected to name a new culture minister before the end of the festival.