Auteur cinema at Cannes Film Festival and the Directors' Fortnight
Résumé
The Cannes Film Festival, through its international scope, generates a worldwide media buzz, symbolized by the famous red carpet as well as the celebrity performances and the glamor attached to them. This reality is not radically wrong, but it reduces the representation of the festival to a ritual ignoring other specificities. In this paper I propose to deal with a lesser known dimension of the festival in tracing the history of the Directors' Fortnight (La Quinzaine des réalisateurs). The creation of this independent selection is connected to the events of May 1968 and the blocking of the festival by filmmakers who subsequently wanted to propose an alternative selection. Since its founding in 1969, the Fortnight (La Quinzaine) has indeed positioned itself in opposition to the official festival. Pierre-Henri Deleau, the General Delegate who led the selection for 30 years, embodies this attitude by defending the idea that films are not mere products but works of art and that their creators are authors who share a conception of cinema as art. Since its inception 47 year ago, the Directors' Fortnight continues to provide a forum to unique films, playing its role as a spur in the heel of the official competition, while the film directors’ initiatives within the association ‘Society of Film Directors’ (SRF) create an open space that serves as a "school". The commitment of the members of the SRF and the team of the Fortnight thus created a dynamic which provides a constant defense of the moral authority of the film director. After reconstituting the advancements as well as the limits of the protagonists’ actions, this paper provides a look at the struggles for recognition and the forging of a conception of auteur cinema.
It aims to reconstruct an interpretative tissue guided by approaches in film and media studies and based on the study of archives and testimonials. It also deals with the questions of how different witnesses recreate representations and how the media did account for certain conflicts especially during the changes of general delegates. The research also highlights the outstanding role the Fortnight has played in the career of films and in the process of recognition of American authors such as George Lucas, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Sean Penn or Sofia Coppola. Beyond changes of the Fortnight at the margins of Cannes, the aim of this communication is to finally clearly expose the motivations for the actions of the members of the Directors' Fortnight and the effects of media processes that lead to its consecration and enabled this selection to maintain its influence in Cannes and in the world of international festivals.