The 56th festival de Cannes was, like the previous 55, a quixotic act of horizon-gazing. Ten thousand delegates from all over the world gathered in the May sunshine in the idealistic belief that Lauren Bacall's famous maxim-"The film industry is shit, it's the medium that's great"-has something to it. Of the hundreds of film festivals around the world, Cannes remains the highest article of faith-the place where everyone still agrees that cinema is Art with a capital A. People queue in cocktail dresses in the hot sun for the honour of seeing a new Korean pansori film with no stars. Distributors get carried away with the high-mindedness and pay over the odds. Critics dust off a lexicon their editors normally delete. Actors and directors from Taiwan to Mauritania mount the red-carpeted steps amid cheers and adulation. American cinema gets more than a look-in, but doesn't dominate as it does almost everywhere else.
This year, however, many people felt that something had changed. Critics I spoke to found Cannes 2003 the most disappointing in years. The European movies on display were lacklustre, they said, and the more mainstream films lacked excitement. Few of the experimental films did anything new. The festival opener Fanfan la Tulipe, starring Penelope Cruz, was so bad that Lib?ration newspaper apologised to international delegates for the affront. Some of the criticism was merited, but the overall picture was more complex than the headlines would have it.
Back in 1946, when Cannes was first established as a rival to Venice, the awards went to French, Mexican and Soviet films, but also to Ray Milland, for his performance in The Lost Weekend, and to Walt Disney-a good mix of the international and the American. To cherry-pick the most innovative or star-studded US films has always been the selection committee's habit. The Matrix: Reloaded was too mainstream to be selected for a prize, but it played out of competition so that Keanu Reeves would climb those steps. Nothing new there, except that many critics were so bedazzled by the event that they forgot to explore the wider maze of the festival. The fact that The Matrix: Reloaded opened the next day in France did not dissuade the press corps from crowding into screenings of it. Of the 3,000 or so journalists in attendance, only one-the man from Prospect-saw Tasuma from Burkina Faso, which played at the same time. It will thus remain unmentioned except in these columns, which is a shame because its story of a former soldier who buys a mill for his village on credit, and is then hounded by his creditors, is quite lovely.
The fact that The Matrix and Tasuma played in parallel suggests perhaps that the commercial and artistic interests of Cannes are being stretched dangerously far apart, that now there are really two festivals: that of the industry and that of the medium. But look through the fog of commerce-at films from Iran, Turkey and Hong Kong; a film about contemporary Afghanistan; another about Istanbul as a hub for economic migrants; more on the nature of Asian communism-and it becomes clear that, far from belonging to an ivory tower, as some critics argued, many of the films in Cannes 2003 were both aesthetically challenging and responsive to world events.
What really made Cannes 2003 rancorous, and fascinating, was its relationship to America, and to American ways of making movies. The Matrix Reloaded was, in this respect, a distracting anomaly. The stylistic and thematic trends in Cannes 2003 otherwise represented nothing less than a wholesale rejection of the aesthetics of the US. Immediacy, sensation, conflict, violence, sexuality, fantasy, awe, sonic volume and visual kinetics-the things that make a multiplex film a multiplex film-were considered by serious film-makers throughout the world to be too familiar, prosaic and debased to be useful to them.
America has always been Cannes's "other," but it was last year, at the first post-9/11 festival, that the relationship turned intense. Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine, often denounced as anti-American, sparked the fuse. In my 12 years of attending, it was the first time things had got nasty. American critics interpreted European support for Moore, and what they saw as our lack of scrutiny of his arguments, as knee-jerk. In some cases it probably was.
This year's festival took place in a new cultural landscape. No less than four American or America-themed films addressed its perceived malaise: Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, Gus Van Sant's Elephant, Errol Morris's The Fog of War and Lars von Trier's Dogville portrayed, respectively, US violence among Boston gangsters, violence among teenagers in a high school like the one in Columbine, violence in the White House and Pentagon, and violence in a small town in the Rocky mountains. Three of these were honest or troubled works of self-criticism; the fourth was a howl of European invective. But what was fascinating about them was not so much the politics of their criticisms of America as the aesthetics of them.
Clint Eastwood's film is about how one act of child abuse in the 1960s infects a group of friends and a community in such a way that decades later, it is implicated in new tragedies. Like Michael Moore, he suggests that the roots of US violence lie below the level of sociological explanation. Eastwood has often played the Old Testament vengeance card and, here, his central metaphor suggests that the will to blood-let flows inexorably through generations, just as Boston's Mystic river, the recurrent image of his film, flows through the city. It is not clear whether Eastwood sees this ancestry of violence as an especially American phenomenon, but Mystic River-which was cheered and booed by the press-was taken by some European critics as a vapid tract about violence being beyond analysis. What was indisputable, however, is that this is a film shot in a traditional way. Eastwood used all the techniques of mature action cinema to explore his point. In aesthetic terms, it is perfectly comfortable with America.
Errol Morris's The Fog of War is less conventional but still sticks to a recognised palette of film-making techniques. An illustrated 95-minute distillation of 20 hours of interviews, it is a vivid account of the career of the 87-year-old Robert S McNamara, often thought of as the hawkish architect of the Vietnam war. McNamara brilliantly analyses his own decisions as defence secretary between 1961 and 1968 during the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination and the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam. Reflecting on US military history in the 20th century, he questions whether the second world war was indeed a "good" war. Many of the conclusions he draws are pertinent to recent events in Iraq.
Like Eastwood's movie, The Fog of War is an indictment of the US's irrational attachment to guns. Both films worry about the society in which their directors live. But both do so using that society's dominant film aesthetic: the gripping narrative, the involving character study, the rollercoaster ride of emotion. The two most talked-about films on the Croisette, however, went further. Dogville and Elephant were not only worried about American violence, they implicitly rejected the rollercoaster aesthetic. In doing so, they implied that this aesthetic is itself a form of that violence. It is this insight that sets them apart. As such, Dogville and Elephant brought Cannes' relationship with America into a new focus. The first should have won the Palme d'Or; the second did.
Dogville was the first film in a trilogy by Danish provocateur Lars von Trier. The foundation myths of the US have not been popular cinematic subjects for some years so it is ironic that a European like Trier (he added the "von" as an affectation) should be rewinding to the start in a search for answers. He did so by imagining how an archetypal small town-like those in the films of John Ford or the plays of Thornton Wilder-might react to the arrival of a strange, beautiful young woman (Nicole Kidman) on the run from gangsters. Reluctant to shelter her at first, these pioneer townsfolk are persuaded to by a Henry Fonda-like liberal (Paul Bettany). In turn, she does domestic chores for them. But their kindness sours with time and they begin to take her for granted, make demands, then humiliate her. Finally, astonishingly, they fashion from the metal in the town a dog collar which, welded around her neck and attached to a heavy metal wheel, enslaves her. The men of the town begin to rape her. Eventually Bettany calls the gangsters; they come for her; she discusses with them how she might avenge the cruelties of Dogville and then orders them all killed, children first, in front of their mothers.
Such hyperbole angered many US critics, including Variety's influential Todd McCarthy-except that the film didn't appear to me or to many others to be anti-American so much as anti-small town: Dogville could be in Denmark. Only when we read the press book did we discover Trier specifying that it was his intent to indict America, a country in which he has never set foot. Then, at an angry press conference, the director said that the film wasn't an attack on America as much as his perception of the country, gleaned from its popular culture.
While it is interesting that such profoundly different directors as Trier and Eastwood see the US in a similar way, as an incubator of violence, the more important point is that Trier's denunciation of America is aesthetically minimalist. That country's acting icons-Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara and James Caan-performed throughout on one single set. There are no location shots, not even walls or doors to represent the town's various houses and stores. There are only chalk marks on the floor, like a rehearsal for a theatrical production. It is hard to imagine a more complete reversal of American cinematic hyperrealism, of its addiction to spectacle and spatial expansion. Trier is refusing all the filmic codes popularised by the country. The result is electrifying, but didn't win a single award, not even for Kidman's extraordinary performance.
Dogville's attack on the content and form of America could be dismissed as one-off prejudiced virtuosity if another-American-film in the same year hadn't done the same thing. Produced by US cable channel HBO, Elephant was a loose remake of a brilliant Northern Irish television film (see "Widescreen," Prospect May 2003) which consisted almost entirely of forward-tracking shots of gunmen shooting people. Devoid of psychology or narrative, the original 1989 film by Alan Clarke raised questions about the nature of empathy in cinema. Louisville-born director Gus Van Sant took the form of this film and applied it to a high school where two teenagers are about to shoot their friends and teachers. Using Clarke's detached techniques, he follows his teenagers as they walk through the school. We see them watching a documentary about Nazis and, before they don their combat gear, showering together and kissing, because they have never kissed anyone before and this will be their last chance. Yet, in a tentative showering sequence, Van Sant's camera stays well back, so that there is only the hint of a kiss. The whole thing is de-dramatised.
This is the crux during the killings themselves, where the film becomes even more minimal. In the aesthetic rule book of American cinema-look at Hitchcock's Psycho, which Van Sant once remade, shot for shot-taking things very slowly during the set-up sequences of a film adds to the impact of the violence when it comes (the shower sequence in Psycho). But, rejecting his master Hitchcock, Van Sant does the opposite. There is no screaming during the shooting, no frenzy. The pace of shots slows down. The teenage actors are without expression of fear, panic or hatred. This was the most radical sequence in the festival. Van Sant was rejecting the aesthetic of American screen violence more completely than any director in recent memory.
Given the transatlantic tensions of the last two years, it is no surprise that films like Bowling for Columbine, Dogville and Elephant had an explosive effect. The culture is ready for such provocations and Cannes delivers them exquisitely. But the real value of Cannes does not lie in such brouhaha. The experience of Dogville and Elephant this year is, crucially, a reminder of how this festival can be a launching pad for films that question the dominance of mainstream cinematic form. Beyond political argument, in good years or bad, Cannes attempts to extend film aesthetics. The most distinctive indication of this-as well as, for me, the best film in the festival-was Father and Son, Alexander Sokurov's follow up to his landmark Russian Ark ("Widescreen," July 2002), one of the most experimental films in movie history. In Russian Ark Sokurov captured the pathos and subjectivity of 19th-century Russian history using a single choreographed camera shot through the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg. Jaded distributors everywhere, including many in Britain, saw it as an expensive folie. They were quietened when it broke specialist records and was a huge hit for British distributor Artificial Eye.
That Cannes launches films like Russian Ark justifies its existence alone. Sokurov's new film, Father and Son, was its experimental high-water mark in 2003. This time, the Russian director takes as his subject a father and son who live together in a small rooftop apartment overlooking a distant sea. Foregoing the predictable oedipal themes, he portrays them instead as entirely in love with each other, so much so that each cannot break the other's gaze. They live in a paternal-filial force field which most men would recognise-often the force is repulsion-but few artists in any medium have addressed. The outside world hardly impinges on this field. They are so physically intimate that they almost kiss, adoring the perfection of each other's bodies. There is no plot to speak of and the dialogue, like that in Russian Ark, sounds like ripples from indistinct thoughts. The quietness of their reverie, the muted sepias and distortions of the imagery, the hushed-soaring music by Andrei Sigle, constitute the aesthetics of this masterpiece-one of the great contemporary films. Sokurov led the way this year in filming the unshowy, barely definable aspects of behaviour and identity which mainstream cinema usually blasts aside.
Others followed suit. The grand jury prize winner Uzak, by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, eschewed broad expression for intimism, as did 84-year-old Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries's Mansion by the Lake and, in their different ways, the three post-apocalyptic films on show, Michael Haneke's Austro-French Le Temps du Loup, Yu Lik Wai's Hong Kong-produced All Tomorrow's Parties and Samira Makhmalbaf's Afghanistan-set At Five in the Afternoon. Not one of these derived their power from the roaming cameras, handheld movements or shock editing which unites mainstream and "independent" cinema these days. Each used whispering, darkness and understatement to render the movie screen delicate. The unseeable and unhearable is what film-makers this year were interested in.
In his Cannes press conference, Alexander Sokurov said that the western mass media constituted a greater threat to Russian culture than did the Soviet period. This is fighting talk, but worth listening to because the man is one of the most original artists working in any field. In their very different ways, the films of Sokurov, Van Sant and von Trier, as well as those of Makhmalbaf, Peries, Haneke, Ceylan and Yu Lik Wai, this year showed that the mainstream American film aesthetic is ethically unable to deal with the inaudible and unfamiliar aspects of human life. The violent has had its day. What appeared to be anti-Americanism in Cannes is really a renewal in film language.
