Cannes 2017 creates a new language of world cinema
While politicians across the globe build walls between borders, filmmakers are trying to dissolve the idea of separation through images. At the Cannes film festival, the defining trend this year is the use of photographs by many directors to create a cinematic language. From the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to celebrated French filmmaker Agnes Varda, many auteurs have used the powerful voice of portraits to tell stories. Still images have given the 70th edition of the influential festival in the French Riviera a stroke of uninhibited imagination. And the audience are basking in the creative glory of these films.
Kiarostami, who died last year from cancer, has a posthumous show at his favourite festival that has premiered his movies like Taste of Cherry (1997) and Certified Copy (2010). His last film, 24 Frames, is literally a patchwork of frames, in the form of photographs. “For 24 Frames, I decided to use the photos I had taken through the years,” says a note for the film Kiarostami wrote before his death. The images are bridged by the director’s imagination of what might have taken place before and after each image he had photographed. The festival’s tribute to Kiarostami is two hours long and in colour and black and white images, stretching imagination to understand reality. “The use of still camera in many films is unique in Cannes this year,” says French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon, the former chief editor of film magazine Cahiers du Cinema that had once on its staff critics such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, before they became filmmakers.
Varda, who gave audiences films such as Happiness (1965) and Vagabond (1985), join hands with compatriot JR, an artist known only by his pseudonym, in Cannes for Faces Places, a film based entirely on photographs. When Varda and JR met for the first time two years ago, they immediately decided to work together. The images, far away from cities and shot in France, are borne out of random images and incidents. Part of the outside competition category of the festival, Faces Places has given a freshness to the festival, considered a fine balance beween arthouse and glamour depicted in its red carpet images and artistic works inside the theatres.
Another top director to use photography in her work is Japanese filmmaker Naoimi Kawase. Her new work, Radiance, is about communication, how the blind person can “see” a film. Kawase’s protagonist is a partially blind photographer, who calls for a space for imagination while a descriptive narrative structure is built in a studio for aiding cinema viewing by a visually impaired audience. Acclaimed South Korean director Hong Sangsoo casts iconic French actor Isabelle Huppert in his new film, Claire’s Camera. The camera carried by Claire, Huppert’s character, emits a unique power: to slowly look at things and transform them. Claire tries her luck with her new friend, a Korean girl who is fired by her employer while abroad at work. Interestingly, all the action takes place at the Cannes film festival, which the characters are attending.
The festival itself is a work in slow motion in its 70th edition. Happening in a country under a national emergency following the terror attacks in Paris two years ago, professionals and critics have been negotiating the layers of security at the festival venue like slowly turning the pages of a photo album. Many screenings have started late, something the Cannes festival has never known before. The festival also mourned the terror attack in Manchester, the global film fraternity assembled here observing a one-minute silence on Tuesday.
Film professionals are also awaiting a surprise on the last day of the festival today, the day of reckoning for the filmmakers when the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, will be decided. And the surprise lies there, in the jury. The competition jury this year is headed by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, the director of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), All About My Mother (1999) and Julieta (2016). With Almodovar, known for making movies based on women characters, at the helm, the Palme d’Or might just go to a woman director: the Japanese Kawase for Radiance, American Sofia Coppola for The Beguiled or the Scottish Lynne Ramsay for You Were Never Really Here, the three films in competition directed by women. Almodovar has never won a Palme d ‘Or himself, maybe all the more reason to stick to his cinematic plans of celebrating women in the world.
When the festival concludes tonight, it will also be known for American actor Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, Come Swim, a short film. Also, a Virtual Reality installation by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Inarritu, dealing with the refugee crisis in the world ravaged by civil wars and terror. The sevenminute Carne y Arena or the English title, Virtually Present, Physically Invisible, blurs the boundaries between reel and reality. It will also be known as the year when Cannes turned a blind eye to Indian cinema. Not even one film from the world’s largest film producing nation. This year was supposed to be a meeting point between India and Cannes, both celebrating a landmark 70 years, Cannes its 70th edition and India, the 70th year of Independence. Instead, Indian cinema had to contend with a short film from a Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) student in a section for film school projects, and a work-in-progress feature film in the Cannes film market.
FTII third-year student Payal Kapadia’s Afternoon Clouds examine feminity and loneliness through a middle-aged widow and a young housemaid in a Mumbai home while Assamese filmmaker Rima Das explores dreams of children in a remote village in Village Rockstars. It has been 23 years since an Indian film was screened in the competition section in Cannes. That was Swaham (My Own) by Malayalam director Shaji N Karun in 1994. It has been an unending wait for a slot in a section once dominated by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and Shaji. An Indian woman director is knocking on the doors though. Actordirector Nandita Das arrived in Cannes this time with actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui in tow for offering a sneak peak of her second feature film, which is nearing completion. The story is classic, that of Saadat Hasan Manto. Directors of many festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin, came to watch the trailer of Manto. Das says she is going to complete the film in a fortnight. Maybe the future glory of Indian cinema in Cannes wrests in the hands of a maverick Urdu writer.
The images are bridged by the director’s imagination of what might have taken place before and after each image he had photographed.
Faizal Khan is a freelance journalist