A year of revolt the world over, tumultuous 1968 also brought high drama to Cannes, the single time the film festival had to be cut short, with no one taking home a prize and no red-carpet finale.
As the film industry s paramount fest opens this week for 12 days of screenings, parties and movie promotion, the May 14-25 festival remembers those events 40 years later.
It was day nine of the festival that year, when cult director Jean-Luc Godard hung onto the velvet curtains to stop the screening of a Carlos Saura movie nominated for the festival prize, and Monica Vitti, Terence Young, Roman Polanski and Louis Malle resigned from the jury in support.
New Wave giants Godard and Francois Truffaut had been specially dispatched to Cannes to stop the festivities by hundreds of clench-fisting film types, who after days of heady soul-searching in Paris voted to revolutionize filmmaking and stop the festival, in solidarity with striking students and workers in France.
The next day, May 19, festival president Robert Favre le Bret declared the 21st edition of the event over, and sadly sent everyone home early.
The French press, busy reporting nationwide barricades and protests escalating into a general strike by 10 million workers, feared the end.
The Cannes Festival is dead, said the daily Parisien Libere of one of the country s pre-eminent events. A crime has been committed.
This year the festival remembers re-screening some of the movies cancelled by the political havoc – Saura s Peppermint Frappe starring a young Geraldine Chaplin, as well as movies from Claude Lelouch and Peter Collinson.
And the 15,000-odd festival-goers due in the Riviera city for the 12-day extravaganza of films and fun will also be treated to a slew of celebrations held four decades after events which impacted the movie-world to come.
The year 1968, said the influential US movie trade magazine Variety this week, saw a film renaissance amid revolt.
The best of the times, remembered Variety s chief film critic Todd McCarthy was the unprecedented sense of symbiosis between what was going on in the world and what we were seeing on-screen.
The year also proved paradise for film-buffs with the release of cult movies to become, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary s Baby, Petulia, Belle De Jour and The Thomas Crown Affair.
Top box-office film that year was convention-breaking The Graduate, while other indelible screen successes included Yellow Submarine.
Memories of Underdevelopment, If … and Night of the Living Dead.
With the benefit of hindsight, said Variety s Cynthia Littleton, it’s clear 1968 was as much a watershed year for media and entertainment as it was for world history, all of it colored by the emergence of a countercultural movement eager to thumb its nose at authority and social convention.
One of the highlights of this year s Cannes festival dives back to US counterculture of the 60s and 70s with Milestones, a rarely-viewed more than three-hour 1975 epic by legendary indie US filmmaker Robert Kramer, just restored by top film labs.
Backdropped by the drama of the then ongoing Vietnam War, the movie written and shot over several years chronicles the lives of young Americans questioning Washington s world role and home values at a time of radical change across the globe.
Symbolically, the film, which travels from communes to the Attica revolt to feminism, is screening at Cannes prestigious parallel event, Director s Fortnight, itself a child of 1968.
Up until then Cannes was a little like a film Olympics, a national contest with each country selecting its own movie – and in some cases censuring opposition filmmakers – with national anthems played before screenings.
But after Godard and company halted Cannes that year, angry French filmmakers determined to fight officialdom and take movie matters into their own hands set up a national filmmakers association, the SRF, which in turn created the Fortnight as a way of giving cinema a breath of fresh air.
Our main idea was to offer more independence in the selection of films, one of its founders Pierre-Henri Deleau said in a press interview.
Founders recount how they contacted filmmakers, saying you have a film and want it shown at Cannes but weren t selected. Come and Directors Fortnight ll find you a screen and a hotel-room. There ll be no jury, no prizes, but lots of film buffs.
The formula was an instant success.
In 1972, the Fortnight propelled Ken Loach out of obscurity with Family Life. Two years later it featured fledgling director Martin Scorsese s Mean Streets, starring young actor Robert de Niro, later came Nagiso Oshima s Empire of the Senses.
Among star directors brought to world attention during the Fortnight are Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee and the Taviani and Dardenne brothers, of Italy and Belgium respectively. This year the Fortnight fetes its 40 years with a feature about its history titled 40X15.
