In the middle of May 50 years ago, Jean-Luc Godard helped to shut down the Cannes film festival in an act of solidarity with student demonstrators across France. This spring the French-Swiss film director’s subversive spirit has once more been at the controversial heart of the festival’s opening weekend.
“Great cinema makers are close to anarchists,” said the 87-year-old figurehead of French cinema yesterday, following the premiere of his new film, The Image Book (Le livre d’image), which has been chosen to compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or jury prize.
Godard, whose early life is the subject of the film Redoubtable, just released in British cinemas, spoke yesterday morning to a huddle of admiring journalists via Facetime, in an unprecedented festival nod from a great auteur towards the banality of modern visual technology.
Asked about his memories from half a century ago, Godard said: “I have many, many memories of ’68 and of people who are now departed.”
Back then, as a leading light of the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), the director and his contemporaries had already ripped up the creative rulebook, dispensing with narrative order. In France, Godard’s early films, such as Breathless, are still talked of with reverence: on Friday the newspaper Le Figaro referred to him as that “mythical cinéaste”.
Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius’s humorous biopic, which was shown in Cannes last year, focuses on the more overtly rabble-rousing part of Godard’s career, in the late 1960s. And traces of the revolutionary spirit that burned like a fuse through France in the May of 1968 are hard to miss in this festival. They are there in the controversy surrounding the politics of Godard’s new movie, a filmic collage that tackles western condescension and violence in the Arab world, and also in the backdrop of national social activism. Student unrest on the campus of Nanterre University this weekend has led to the cancellation of exams and the county is waiting to see how President Emmanuel Macron, like Charles De Gaule before him, will handle the volatile situation.
Fifty years ago the rebel influence was felt so strongly on the Côte d’Azur that the festival’s main auditorium was occupied. When festival organisers tried to start showing a Carlos Saura film, Peppermint Frappé, protesters, including the film’s star Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie, actually clung on to the rising curtain to halt the screening. The 1968 festival came to an end shortly afterwards. No one was awarded the Palme d’Or and only seven of the 27 films programmed were shown.
This spring some film critics, many of whom view the elderly Godard as a tiresome irrelevance, suspect The Image Book has been included in the competition purely because of the golden anniversary of the protests on the Croisette. Certainly the design of the 2018 festival poster pays a nostalgic tribute to Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou. But after yesterday’s premiere of The Image Book, several critics were persuaded the director still has something to say: “It is a film about how he sees the world now, through film,” said Deanna Gao, a critic for a Chinese magazine who is based in Paris. “The Chinese adore him and this is a very interesting, intellectual movie.”
The 2018 Cannes has been ridiculed and applauded in equal measure for the comparative absence of famous names and mainstream entertainment – aside from the promotional screening this week of the lastest Star Wars title. Cannes’s longtime festival director, Thierry Frémaux, is clearly attempting to point to a future for cinema. He has grabbed headlines by banning selfies on the “tapis rouge” and by pushing out Netflix’s small-screen offerings in an effort to make space for cinematic art. Writing to the 4,000 accredited international journalists arriving on The Croisette last week he said he was against looking back at the past 71 years of the festival’s existence. Such “a venerable age”, he wrote, “might foster a degree of immobilism,” and adding, “Our wish and ambition are quite the opposite. We want to make the most of this new decade to explore, experiment, question our customs and practices.”
A frail Godard announced yesterday that his ability to make more films would now depend on how his legs, his hands and his eyes hold out, but he seems to intend to keep running with the avant-garde pack. His new film is an impressionistic argument spliced together from archive footage and is deliberately disjointed and disorientating. Real images of war and death alternate with suggestive cinematic moments, some featuring the faces of Henry Fonda, Laurence Olivier and Joan Crawford, to name but a few. A selection of sequences set on trains are a reference, Godard confirmed, to the Lumiere brothers’ first filmed sequence, the French comic strip character Becassine playfully appears as a kind of Cassandra-like voice of doom and as an avatar for the director himself.
Later this week a more recent rebel, Lars von Trier, is also due in town, bearing what promises to be even more uncomfortable fare. The director’s new serial killer film, The House That Jack Built, stars Matt Dillon, but is said to have nothing else Hollywood about it. Banned from the festival seven years ago after appearing to express empathy with Hitler, the Dane has also been criticised following Björk’s disputed allegation that he had been abusive on the set of Dancing in the Dark. Frémaux’s decision to invite von Trier back seems a sign of his commitment to make a home for talented troublemakers.
“We are very happy to see Lars back on the Croisette,” said Anthony Muir of Swedish regional funding board i Väst, who backed Von Trier’s latest. “We had always had the impression that the ban was just for that year and a film director has to be a little bit provocative. It is very good if Cannes is going to become more of a place for that.”
So far Frémaux’s changes appear to have caused much of the showbiz razzamatazz to fall away. But at least Godard, a quavering voice yesterday speaking via mobile phone, was able to convey something of the revolutionary glamour of 1968, concluding: “When we were young we fed our audiences hope.”
