Cannes 2004: the times they are a-changing

Catholic New Times, Sept 12, 2004 by Marc Gervais

Here we are, late August, the U.S. Presidential election heating up (of crucial importance in determining how the world will be governed, intelligent, highly concerned folk are saying).

Strangely, in this context, my mind keeps going back to last May's Cannes Film Festival. Not to more recent major film festivals I have not seen, nor to others soon to be upon us; but the point I hope to make here will perhaps be relevant in their case as well.

Why this looking back? There's a reason, and a wonderful one. A few days into the Festival, some of us Cannes veterans were asking what it was that kept bringing us back year after year. A Swedish friend (like myself, poor soul, attending his 39th Cannes Fest!) may have hit the nail on the head. "Because it's the biggest and most important annual international cultural event in the world, and we can't afford to miss it."

Big words. But in spite of the mind-numbing efforts of most of the media coverage to reduce Cannes to the level, say, of Oscar glitz, and the worship of what is totally insignificant, the world's number one film festival continues to be relevant in terms of the real world we live in, affording an incomparable view of contemporary world culture: where is the world going, what are the aspirations, fears, yearnings, of human beings right now, and how do we picture human existence. Maybe even, what is it all about?

This year, a certain kind of culture was obvious: the Michael Moore, political-culture phenomenon. No question about it, his Fahrenheit 9/11 dominated the Festival from the beginning. Since then, Moore's movie has been helping to shape the consciousness of the American electorate and to determine some aspects of the political agenda. This could significantly influence the results in November.

Fahrenheit 9/11 not alone

Cannes was culturally relevant beyond that. Fahrenheit 9/11 was far from being the only voice raised in protest against what one might call the Bush way of shaping the truth and run the world. Another U.S. documentary equally devastating though more sober, Robert Greenwald's Unconquered: the War on Iraq (made in collaboration with former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson) also received privileged showings on Cannes screens, eliciting the same overwhelming response: revulsion against the War, the killings, the lies, the bullying, the suppressing of individual rights, and the sabotaging of the United Nations. That was the almost universally shared reaction in Cannes, and no one was more vociferous than the American film people in attendance.

This is the wonderful news-it is not merely a question of facile Bush-bashing and winning an election, important as that surely is. It was as if the cinema, the international cinema, was expressing a renewed sensitivity to social justice, to a concern for the countless helpless victims all over the world, to the quest for a more decent, more human world order. Beyond that, a renewed celebration of the basic human realities: love, decency, morality, meaningfulness, and life.

For example, Allende, a superb documentary on the Chilean president who, some thirty years ago, tried the impossible: to create, in his native Chile, a Communist democracy without resorting to violence. He was not permitted to do so by the Cold Warriors on both sides in those good old days: he was murdered by Pinochet's forces ... or is the proper word "martyred?" His example still points to something which humanity today is desperately in need of, as the film so clearly makes us feel.

That seemed to echo the very heartbeat of Cannes 2004. For many of us, the most beautiful and heartwarming movie of the Festival came from Brazil: Walter Salles' Motorcycle Diaries, a film about Che Guevara, a true episode in his early life, and a film without a gun shot or one word of doctrinaire ideology.

What it did communicate was a young man's break-through in social consciousness as he and his best friend (both upper middle-class medical students nearing graduation) go on a long holiday motorbike tour of South America, discovering, along with the viewer, the unspeakable misery of many people and finally, to help out, staying for months in a leper colony run by nuns.

No Che political posters here, no dogma, no hatred for others, but life, sensitivity, love for one's fellow human beings, miles removed from cinema violence, touching us instead with the spirit of human compassion. Inexplicably unrewarded by the Official Jury, Motorcycle Diaries nevertheless did win the top prize awarded by the highly-regarded Ecumenical Jury, which rewards films with a spiritual dimension. Manchester film maker Ken Loach has often won this award.

A new affirmation of human values

In the last half-dozen years, in my experiences at Cannes, I have been discovering a growing affirmation of this return to some kind of belief in basic human values.

It has been a rejecting of the previous decades' overwhelming spirit of confusion, despair, cynicism. I am using the most dramatic words I can find to describe a complex cultural phenomenon that was the dominant force in western culture from the 1970s through the 1990s, expressed in the loss not only of what we used to call social consciousness, but also the loss of the very possibility of human meaningfulness. In these recent years we may very well be coming out of the ever-so-clever cultural impasse that characterized so much of what we called postmodernism. Cannes 2004 goes still further towards positive affirmation.