Life as a cyber-cadreur at Cannes
Glenn Myrent, American resident in Paris

One hundred years before Filmfestivals.com began, the Lumière Brothers' cameramen traveled to the proverbial four corners of the earth shooting and projecting the world's first short (52 seconds each!) films of street life. The life of a "cyber-cadreur" (as I began calling myself at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival while shooting Hi-8 video) can be just as adventuresome as the lives the Lumière cameramen led. The crucial distinction being that instead of globe-trotting in search of images, pictures of the world, the world's pictures come to Cannes each May. One set of eyeballs isn't enough to take in all the "data" encapsulized in films and street life.

(By the way, a "cadreur" in French is the technician who looks through the viewfinder and frames the actual shot.)

A cameraman in Cannes is faced with an overwhelming choice of people and events to point his camera at — and that's without getting into interviews with actors and filmmakers. I've often felt like I'm engaged in the hopeless task of trying to capture a five-ring circus while suffering from jet-lag. The demands on "talent" tend to mean that coverage of Cannes fits into the "Whoa! Shapely topless chicks on the beach" school, the "'Don't they look glamorous?' stars on the red carpet" school and the "Sound bites and talking heads on the beach or in the hotel suite" school. People who have never set foot in France have a rough idea of what this stretch of the French Riveria looks like for two frantic weeks in May. The challenge is to look for original imagery. The goal is to ask a question the person you're interviewing has never been asked before. Like the "real" filmmakers whose wares are on display in Competition or the Festival sidebars, my goal is to bring an element of surprise and originality to what I do. Failing that, a steady shot is always a source of satisfaction.

The end result of what I choose to shoot will be digitized and "broadcast" on a website in the form of streaming video, an image the size of a postage stamp — or a small congregation of postage stamps. Then again, this leap in technology (from the 10 lbs. Lumière camera to a 1 lbs. digital camera) has democraticized image-capture to the point that anyone with a computer can now follow "real" life, instantaneously, as it unfolds in Cannes. Just a few years ago, an unedited video stream seemed incredibly cool just for the hell of it. Where television continues to be locked in to often dubious packaged presentations, the Web gives us the leeway to run an entire interview, instead of just a handful of quotes, if the material warrants it. That's a journalist's dream come true or an editor's nightmare, depending on how interested you are in any given pocket of information.

Last year's President of the Jury, filmmaker David Cronenberg, was one of the first to hail the new technology when he sat still for a cyber interview at Cannes in 1996 to discuss his film Crash. That same year, Danny De Vito and Kevin Spacey, stars of L.A. Confidential , weren't allowed to sit down in the lobby of the Carlton (no chairs) and held an impromptu press conference that had all the calm reserve of pork belly salesmen shouting in the Board of Trade pit. In a major free-for-all with journalists circling around for the kill, the two loquacious actors fielded questions as fast as they came.

When asked if New York City is a dangerous city in which to live, Kevin Spacey reacted: "For me? No, I feel very safe in New York. I feel safer in New York than I do in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel. Although I can walk the streets here - people are extraordinary."

PR people have their hands full and they'll just get fuller as more and more Web-based outlets clamor for the "face time" that was once the exclusive province of long-established TV networks. A recent survey in Variety stated that in the U.S. as much as 45% of people under age 30 now get all of thier movie information off the 'Net.

"We've been here for the last five days and now we're ready to see Cannes and enjoy it," noted Neil LaBute, (writer/director of In The Company of Men) at the American Pavillion in Cannes, May 15, 1997. "It's a wild and unbelievably chaotic festival and yet it stays on course. You think you've got a handle on this crazy carnival and then they bring in another carnival. I feel like such a gawker. I have the traditional head whip. It's amazing this mix of black tie and thongs."

In 1997, when I asked Sigourney Weaver how much sleep she got the previous night, on her first trip back to Cannes since The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), she responded: "Not enoug ! You know in France they keep changing your drink. I rarely drink and if I drink, I drink one thing. So when I have to drink champagne, white wine, red wine, cognac, etc… I'm not used to it. … This year has been the most special visit being part of the 50th celebration. It's pretty inspiring. I was sitting next to Bernardo Bertolucci and Sydney Pollack, in front of Pedro Almodovar and Johnny Depp. I was thinking 'If these guys are in the audience, who are the 50 [previous Golden Palm winners] or so on the stage?' I was frankly so moved by two things. First of all, the range in age of the directors. To see Antonioni come out and Robert Altman - by then I was 'gone'. To see Joel and Ethan Coen and finally Jane Campion. I couldn't help thinking that the good thing was the internationality of the film community at that moment. This is one of the things I love about film - it's an international pastime, an international art form."

When asked if being a movie star is like being a 4 or 5 year old when your parents take you everywhere, needing people around you to take you from place to place, Weaver replied: "Only in this situation, at Cannes, not in real life. Thank God! No one in New York cares about anyone else. "You think you're important!?" In this situation you need a kind of buffer. You need to focus your energy on what you're actually supposed to do. Because there are so many other people wanting your time. So we're here to talk about The Ice Storm. So that's when you need people around to make sure what it's all about. Then you go home from Cannes. But here, it is a very specific situation."

In 1998, documentary maker Marc Levin, winner of the Camera d'Or for Slam, told a soldout crowd in the Noga Hilton Directors' Fortnight screening of his first fiction feature, that the French New Wave and in particular the upheaval of May '68 made him want to become a filmmaker. When I asked him "Why?" the next day, he responded: "I was a teenager. I was a kid. I was in the streets of Washington and New York. Sex, drugs and rock n' roll."

"Civil rights, anti-war, the student revolt. That for me was where it was at. That's what turned me on. And then seeing these films that were made in the midst of all that, that said to me, wow, that's what I want to do. You read about the French in the 20s, or the French New Wave in the 60s, or different movements when you have just a bunch of people that are all somehow feeling the same thing - most recently, Denmark's Dogma Movement - then something starts to change. It's not one movie, it's a whole group of artists that are somehow reading the same thing in the air. I would love to sit down with the Dogma group and have them meet our whole team. I think that is where it's going. Where reality - where fact and fiction clash, where reality is staged in a drama - my friends call it "drama-verité," - but that is where the action is. The technology allows you now to move in that direction. People hungry for something authentic and how you do that, given the new technologies that are out there? I think that's very much the future."

Whether it's interviewing film talent, trying to pry one's way into a beach party late at night, gawking at the stars as they head up the red-carpeted stairs each evening, body surfing market mania in both the basement of the Palais des Festivals and the giant tent along the Mediterranean or browsing the hallways in the Majestic or Carlton Hotels, not to mention parting the seas along the Croisette while trying to walk through the densest human-congested mile in Europe, there's always something to see at Cannes that's not necessarily projected on a screen during the Mother of all Film Festivals.