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  Fears for Future at Cannes: Hard Times on the Boulevard of Stars

Fears for Future at Cannes Hard Times on the Boulevard of Stars

By Wolfgang Höbel

Part 2: TV and DVD Sales Plummet

In recent months, film brokers have been battered with more bad news than ever before. Aside from problems posed by the general financial crisis, movies are not doing too badly at the box office where ticket sales remain moderate. However, worldwide sales of DVDs and revenues from television have dropped dramatically. For many years the red carpet, where celebrities pose for the photographers in Cannes, was where the film industry was able to show off to the world, a spot lit runway for the stars and their wares while the real business was being done on the sidelines. But this year the scene behind the runway looks more like some massive clearance sale --which isn't exactly sexy.

And Hollywood, at any rate, is more or less giving Cannes the cold shoulder this year. The relationship between the American dream factory and the European festival has had the "history of a love-hate relationship," Swiss film scholar and critic Christian Jungen writes in his new book "Hollywood in Cannes," which describes the nearly endless dispute over promotional appearances for American blockbusters in Cannes. It's been going on ever since Alfred Hitchcock, director of "The Birds," was spectacularly attacked by a pigeon in Cannes and a muscle-bound Arnold Schwarzenegger paraded almost naked across the beach. But it seems that this love-hate relationship ended in 2009. Even the Americans seem to have lost their interest in Cannes.

In a last ditch effort, festival organizers managed to entice a few directors important to the US -- such as Taiwan-born virtuoso, Ang Lee, 54, and magnificent misfit, Quentin Tarantino, 46 -- to the gathering. Tarantino wants to prove that he can follow up on his Cannes triumph, "Pulp Fiction," which premiered at Cannes 15 years ago. In his new work, "Inglorious Basterds," an elite force of Jewish-American soldiers slaughters scores of Nazi troops. And at least Tarantino's film promises to deliver a dose of action to the festival, as does Lars von Trier's work "Antichrist."

That's a welcome departure from the deplorable Cannes tradition of presenting hard-to-sit-through, minimalist epics with as little action as dialogue and calling it the only true "auteur cinema" -- even though the auteur's signature is scarcely discernable with this kind of cinema. The dull aesthetics of films that pay homage to art-cinema deities like Michelangelo Antonioni have simply become annoying for a large number of those reporting and reviewing at Cannes. And one wonders whether festival director Jacob is doing the festival any good by describing these mutinous critics as "thought police."

It is true that for years the festival, to which the art of cinema admittedly owes a great debt, has favored a monoculture. But the vapidity of that monoculture becomes painfully obvious to viewers when a film demonstrates a sense of humor and a real fighting spirit, as Matteo Garrone's "Gomorra," a movie about a settling of accounts with the Mafia, did last year. So what will it look like at Cannes in five years' time -- and at the world's two other major film festivals, Venice and Berlin?

The publishers of "Schnitt" (Cut), a Cologne, Germany-based film magazine, recently devoted an entire issue to "The Future of the Film Festival." The issue served as a wakeup call to various festival directors, encouraging them to carefully contemplate the future of their business.

There's been a lot of discussion around the notion that festivals should act as some sort of temporary museum for red-hot but hard-to-sell cinematic art -- because, after the Internet, festivals could be the most important way for independent filmmakers to get their work to an audience. In the magazine, Lars Henrik Gass, director of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, proposes an even more radical argument. As the movie business shifts to DVD and digital channels, films are making less and less money in theaters. Which is why "film as a product no longer needs festivals, and maybe not even theatres," Gass argues. But this need not spell the end of film festivals, he continues. Rather it creates "an historic opportunity to show better films."

Back in Cannes, it seems unlikely that Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux will go that far. Even though Jacob has now discovered the Internet and introduced an earth shattering innovation: Every filmmaker on the Cannes program may present the first five minutes of his or her film on the festival Web site. "Instead of the usual trailer, which extinguishes all desire to go to the movies," Jacob hopes the samples will make the films more appealing, and "especially to a young audience."

"Was it Altman or Renoir -- I forget -- who said that the great artists are at their best in the first and last reel?" Jacob said at last month's press conference. "Let's hope so!" And there he has a point -- a little hope is never wrong.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

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