What Is a Film Festival For?
A week at the Cannes International Film Festival has dispelled some myths for me. And also gave me some hope.
Welcome back to Projections, where I am coming to you from an elegant apartment in Cannes decorated with Helmut Newton nude portraits. Europe! The sun is shining high, cinema is coursing through my veins, and I am sleeping like a homeless cat, whenever and wherever I can.
Today’s column will be a bit more brief as time management is the name of the game at film festivals, but I’ll be back with more thoughts on Friday. Today, this trip is stirring some thoughts about purpose.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s been an … uneven festival thus far. Riding high off a run of launches in recent years — Triangle of Sadness, The Substance, Anora, The Secret Agent — the legendary festival has taken on a greater import to U.S. film culture than it has had since the 1990s. So when I finally booked the trip to visit La Croisette it was with some industrial intent — can I make my movie year more manageable and my work more informed by seeing the heights of world cinema at their birthing stage? How foolish to attempt strategy in the face of art. There’s still plenty of festival left here, about five full days of programming before the prizes are handed out. But what I’ve seen so far has been a mixed bag to say the least. Which has underlined the silliness of my intention. Just being here, absorbing the design, pageantry, and artifice of the experience has been revealing in ways a single movie never could have been.
Last night, I saw Ron Howard’s documentary of Richard Avedon, the hallowed fashion photographer and portrait master. In recounting his own origin story, Avedon explained how he developed his photographic style during his initial trip to Paris as a man in his 20s seeking purpose. The active, high-toned, hyper-elegant compositions he conjured with models in the city are now seen as form-setting, but at the time, he carefully choreographed each image to redefine glamour and style in one fell swoop. Looking back on it, he marveled at the sheer invention – he just made it all up and somehow it became the standard.
As I watched the sequence, it reminded me of a moment Amanda Dobbins and I had the night before, walking up the red carpet staircase to enter the Lumiere Theatre for the gala premiere of James Gray’s Paper Tiger. It was our first Palais premiere, and what we saw was not Adam Driver and Miles Teller in focus on the carpet, but rather everything else. The raft of aged European photographers working their life through premieres. The hordes of security and admissions ushers swarming in red coats and black suits, directing human traffic like some faux-friendly secret police. The ceaseless traffic, by car and by foot all around the venue, a tangle of flesh fighting for space. The signage and brand integrations looming over the proceedings, a faceless reminder of how this glamour is funded and justified. The now familiar if still rancid stench of overcranked perfume battling body odor and cigarette smoke. It’s a grim carnival and also the most fun a movie freak can have. And just like Avedon’s models, it’s all made up. The bits and pieces you see from across the pond, endlessly scrolling through photos or fast reactions on social media, the crackpot theories about competition programming or standing ovation runtimes — it’s all carefully engineered.
