| The Fortnight That Lasted 30 Years | |
| As Directors' Fortnight opens its doors for the 30th time, Nick
Roddick pays tribute to the radical sidebar that grew out of the les evenements
of May 1968.
If you're human, you have to wait 12 months before you're one year
old, but with events it's instantaneous. So, after 12 months, the thing
is in its second year and, in the inexorable way of mathematics, the 30th
anniversary comes 29 years after the launch.
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| Which all goes a long way to explaining why the Quinzaine
des Realisateurs (the Directors Fortnight), launched on a shoestring in
May 1969, is having its 30th anniversary this year.
Of course, the historical moment with which the Quinzaine shares its 30th birthday les evenements of May 1968, which were a turning point in so many areas of French social, political and cultural history really brought the Quinzaine into the world. May '68 not only brought France to a stop: it also halted the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in mid-course. Out of May '68 came the Societe des Realisateurs de Films, a radical organisation that marched with the students and workers. The SRF also planned a radical alternative to the Festival a development which may have been viewed with deep suspicion by the latter's organizers, but which seemed, balanced against the very real possibility of further disruption, the lesser of two evils. The SRF and the Quinzaine were both founded by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, a seminal figure in French postwar cinema who, over a decade earlier, had co-founded with Andre Bazin what is probably the most influential film magazine of all time. Doniol liked to label things in the simplest possible way. The new magazine was to be a notebook (a cahier) about cinema, hence Cahiers du Cinema. So, too, the new Cannes sidebar: brushing aside the more radical proposals of his younger associates who wanted the new event to be called 'Cinema en Liberte', Doniol decreed it should, like a certain brand of British varnish, do exactly what it said on the tin: be a fortnight (quinzaine) for directors (realisateurs). The name has stuck (even though the running time is now more like 10 days) and the Director's Fortnight is now celebrating its 30th anniversary. "The idea was simple," says Pierre-Henri Deleau, who left a steady job in educational television to become Doniol's assistant in 1968, and has been running the Quinzaine ever since. "The idea was to open up the Cannes Festival to little-known filmmakers and national cinemas, without concern for budgets or shooting formats" remember, in '68, 16mm, which was excluded from the Festival proper, was the radical format par excellence free of "censorship or political or commercial considerations: in short, to show films and allow their directors to be discovered in complete freedom." Faced with the upstart sidebar, the Festival proper adopted a policy of hands-off tolerance which has changed little in 30 years, giving the Quinzaine three hotel rooms for the duration of the event but otherwise keeping its distance. "There wasn't a delegue general [the post currently occupied by Gilles Jacob] in those days," recalls Deleau. "Robert Favre Le Bret was president and he did everything. And he knew he would have to cut us some slack. After all, the '68 Festival had had to be stopped because people were hanging from the curtains - people like Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut, directors who were already well known. He was afraid there would be further incidents, so he said to himself, 'Better to let things happen. If we let them do their little thing in their own little corner, maybe we'll all have some peace.'" The little corner consisted of a single screen, the now-defunct Rex, which the Quinzaine could use up to 4 o'clock, and the old 100-seater, Olympia, which it could have after midnight. Generosity itself. Things were a trifle chaotic that first year. For instance, there
was no catalogue, simply a poster which had to double as a programme. And
the first film ever shown Cuban director Manuel Octavio Gomez's La primera
carga al machete (The First Charge of the Machete) wasn't even on it.
"I didn't know you needed temporary importation permits," recalls Deleau
ruefully, "and the first two films were stuck in
"I said to him, 'We can't: the programme's full.' But, because there weren't any more trains to Paris that night, he stayed in our hotel, along with the prints. Next morning, when we found out our films were stuck in customs, I took those prints round to the cinema. It seemed like a master-stroke at the time, because both films turned out to be masterpieces [Humberto Solas' Lucia was the other]. They're now classics, but we didn't know that then. It was pure luck, and we didn't tell anyone about it for a long time. We can laugh about it now. I suppose we had a lucky star." Things soon calmed down on the organisational front. But the sense of artistic risk-taking remained a guiding principle for the Quinzaine, where the policy was and still is to show only films that the organisers love. Director after director has remarked on the contrast with the main Festival, and on the endless enthusiasm the Quinzaine's organisers have for seeing films, showing films, talking about films... Not, of course, that Deleau can always get the films he loves: offered a lot in the main competition, most film-makers will head for the other end of the Croisette. "And I'm the first to congratulate them: it's only natural that they should want to be in competition," he says. What does bother him, though, is that the decision is increasingly being taken for commercial, not artistic reasons, citing the case of one of this year's competition films which had accepted an offer from the Quinzaine, but whose (US-based) foreign sales agent had pushed for and got a competition slot. The letter he received from the film's director saying how much rather he would be in the Quinzaine was some consolation. "But directors today have practically no say," he comments. "It's become a festival for foreign sales agents." Still, the track record is impressive. Brazil's Cinema Novo found an international launch-pad with the Quinzaine. The new cinemas of Poland and Czechoslovakia first attracted wide critical attention there. African cinema found a world stage. Nor was it just Third World cinema that the Quinzaine revealed. It gave George Lucas' first film, THX 1138, starring a young Robert Duvall, its international premiere. And Deleau recalls walking up and down the Croisette with Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro who were here with Mean Streets in 1974 because none of the journalists had heard of them and so didn't schedule interviews. He was trying to keep their spirits up. It can't have been easy. Thirty years on, nothing much has changed: the passion for the cinema remains the watchword. From the Quinzaine's three decades, Deleau can cite any number of examples of those moments when a film he has loved enough to choose has, in its turn, been loved by an audience and has received a standing ovation of two, four, even 15 minutes. Particularly gratifying have been the times when this has happened with a film Deleau thought might be too difficult or long for a Cannes audience. "I remember once we had a four-hour film," he says, "and we thought no one would stay until the end. But it was Angelopoulos' The Travelling Players: it got a standing ovation. At the back of the auditorium, there was this strange-looking man walking up and down in an almost military fashion, staring straight at Angelopoulos, who is not very big and who had his back to the stage. The man started to walk towards him and Angelopoulos began to get worried. Then he went down on his knees, kissed the Angelopoulos' feet and left without saying a word. It was Werner Herzog: one great director's tribute to another. Moments like that take away the tiredness. They make up for everything." And what of the directors themselves, whose films have been launched, boosted or otherwise helped on their way by the Quinzaine (see list above)? Ten years ago, when it was only just out of its teens, the Quinzaine published a book filled with tributes. One such tribute will suffice to set the tone of respect, gratitude and reverence in which the Quinzaine is held by the film-makers of the world, especially those who come neither from France nor from Hollywood. Nagisa Oshima has had five features and a short in the Quinzaine, from Koshikei (Death by Hanging) in 1969 to Ai no corrida (Empire of the Senses) in 1976. "I think one of the most important things in my career has been the presentation of my films to the whole world thanks to the Quinzaine des Realisateurs," he wrote. "I met good critics, good journalists and a wonderful audience, who taught me lots of things. I will never forget the applause and the warm support they gave me after the screening of Empire of the Senses. "The Quinzaine also gave me the opportunity to meet other directors and to converse with them. I am still proud to be part of that family of film-makers. It is my profound conviction that the director is the essential person when it comes to creating a film, and I am, therefore, particularly pleased that this idea is implicitly recognised in the name of Quinzaine des Realisateurs. "Thank you, dear Pierre-Henri Deleau and your team, thank you for everything. Quinzaine des Realisateurs for ever! |
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