IN FOCUS DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT AT 50
‘Carlos Saura and Geraldine Chaplin held on to the curtain to stop the screening of their own film’ Gilles Jacob, former Cannes delegate general
as a journalist for a weekly magazine, was at the Peppermint Frappé screening. “Out of solidarity, Carlos Saura and Geraldine Chaplin [the actress who was Saura’s wife at the time] held on to the curtain to stop the screening of their own film,” says Jacob. “It was a unique act in the history of cinema, a magnificent example of suicidal generosity that won them the respect and affection of all the ‘revolutionaries’.” After the festival closed down, attendees scrabbled to get home, he recalls. “I piled into a tiny car but the gas stations were almost all empty and we nearly didn’t get home. The international guests all headed for the nearby Italian border. Fritz Lang returned to Rome with [Robert] Favre Le Bret, my predecessor [as delegate general].” French director Bertrand Tavernier — who has gone on to become a four-time Palme d’Or contender — was also at Cannes, working as a press attaché alongside the late publicist Pierre Rissient. “We were handling Milos Forman’s magnificent The Firemen’s Ball, Peppermint Frappé and, if my memory doesn’t fail me, Karel Reisz’s Morgan — A Suitable Case For Treatment,” says Tavernier. He recalls Saura had mixed feelings about the cancellation of Peppermint Frappé. “I can picture him saying, ‘I’ve been fighting for years against censorship of Franco, and Cannes protected me, gave me strength. It’s strange and paradoxical to stop, in the name of the Revolution, the screening of a film, denouncing the hypocrisy and machismo which reigns in Spain under Franco’s dictatorship.’ I think Forman felt a bit the same,” recounts Tavernier. Directors’ Fortnight artistic director Waintrop was a 16-year-old high school student in Paris occupying his school. “To be honest, nobody really cared or noticed what was going on in Cannes. The situation was so intense in Paris,” he says. “Later, of course, we learned about it and thought it was a good thing but at the time we were more interested in what was happening at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt.
40 Screen International at Cannes May 9, 2018
Mai 68, La Belle Ouvrage
“I do remember we created our own cinema club in 1968 at which, sort of bizarrely, or interestingly, we showed films from the new generation of Eastern European cineastes emerging at the time, titles like Black Peter and A Blonde In Love,” Waintrop adds, naming two early films by Forman. Socialist realism A number of filmmakers also remained in Paris during the peak of the protests, including notably producer and exhibitor Marin Karmitz, who was focused on directing at the time. The events of 1968 had a profound impact on his filmmaking and indeed the whole ethos around the creation of his game-changing production and exhibition company mk2. He directed a series of features — Sept Jours Ailleurs, Camarades and Blow For Blow (Coup Pour Coup) — inspired by the socialist movements of the late 1960s. A restored copy of Blow For Blow, about a group of female textile workers who ignore union advice and take their factory boss hostage in a protest over sweatshop conditions, screens in Cannes Classics on May 11 ahead of its re-release in France on May 16. Further 1968-inspired films screening in Cannes this year include late filmmaker JeanLuc Magneron’s Mai 68, La Belle Ouvrage,, which mixes footage of street protests and chaotic hospital scenes with eye-witness accounts of the (Right) Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappé
events on the streets and police brutality. “He was one of the early members of the SRF,” says the filmmaker’s son Loic Magneron, who is handling sales of the relaunched title under the banner of his Paris-based company Wide Management. “He was already established as a well-known documentary filmmaker for his reportage. When the protests broke out, he stayed in Paris and shot what was going on, fully immersed in the events, focusing on the Latin Quarter, the youthful nature of the movement and the way in which communication about the events had been manipulated by the state-run media.” The film, which premiered in the inaugural Directors’ Fortnight in 1969, has just been re-released in France, kicking off with a screening at the Cinématheque Francaise. It screens here in the market today and will screen in the US and Spain as part of the 1968 retrospectives. Looking back at the legacy of 1968 on contemporary cinema, Waintrop says little of that militant, socialist spirit remains. “I don’t think cinema is as rebellious as it was in the 1960s and ’70s. At that time, a whole section of society was in step with cinema, and cinema was in step with a whole section of society,” he suggests. “Today, filmmakers are more focused on themselves and their careers… times have changed. You have a few socially minded filmmakers, like Ken Loach, but they’re rare.”
‘The arrogance of power had provoked events’ Bertrand Tavernier, filmmaker
That said, Waintrop notes this year’s Directors’ Fortnight selection does contain a handful of titles capturing difficult social conditions, notably Argentinian director Agustin Toscano’s The Snatch Thief, about a handbag snatcher seeking redemption, and Julio Hernandez Cordon’s Buy Me A Gun, a dystopian vision of cartel-controlled Mexico. “These films show a profound crisis in their countries of origin… but whereas there was a lot of hope in the cinema of the 1970s, there is a lot less today,” says Waintrop. As Cannes Film Festival unfolds once again amid widespread strikes and street protests across France, attendees this year might be asking if a new revolution is around the corner as discontent rises over the erosion of the hard-won worker rights gained in 1968 due to the ‘gig economy’ of the digital era. Although those who lived through 1968 think a repeat of the strife of that period is unlikely, there is a sense of ‘never say never’. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” says Tavernier. “The arrogance of power, the ignorance of reality had provoked events. Today, is history repeating s itself or is it stuttering?” ■
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