VIVE LE ROCK
Cannes may be known for solemn arthouse
In 1971, the Cannes Film Festival opened with a screening of Gimme Shelter by Albert and David Maysles, an immersive, vérité depiction of two weeks in the touring life of the Rolling Stones. If that was all it did, it might have been forgotten by now. But by a terrible freak of chance, the lmmakers followed the band to the most notorious concert of their entire career— the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Livermore, CA, where the Stones, along with Santana, Je erson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, were set to perform a free concert for 300,000 people on Dec. 6, 1969. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” Albert said later. “We just had a childish faith that having seen the Stones and getting along with them, there might be a feature lm there.”
At the apparent suggestion of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead (who were originally set to perform at the festival but ended up steering clear due to serious concerns about violence), the Stones had the bright idea to hire Hell’s Angels to police it, a calamitous decision that would lead to chaos and even murder. Gimme Shelter
juxtaposed the devilish high of the band’s performance with Mick Jagger’s ashen face as he later watches—and rewatches—blurry footage of the incident on a Moviola. When Croisette, one of the audience members was the Beatles’ John Lennon, who was quoted as saying, “My God, this was a real
No offense to Lennon, but those soplace at Cannes. This year’s festival, in fact, features three rock and roll entries. Playing Out of Competition is Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis,
a gold lamé fever dream of the star’s rise to fame that promises to be as subtle as the director’s hip-hop take on 2013’s opener,
The Great Gatsby. In Special Screenings is Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, Ethan Coen’s portrait of Presley’s surly rockabilly rival. And for the Midnight crowd is Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream, an “expethousands of hours of live performances by David Bowie. (Bowie is unusual in Cannes history, having also acted in at least two Competition entries—1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and 2002’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me—and he had signalled an interest in being on the jury not long before health issues ruled it out.)
Rock music found its way to Cannes in 1967, when Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Blowup entered the competition two months after its premiere in swinging London. The mystery thriller that starred David Hemmings as a photographer who may have accidentally photographed a murder also featured live footage of the Yardbirds in a studio-built replica of the London’s cool nightspot The Ricky-tick. The ecstatic performance by Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar with Keith Relf on vocals comes to a halt in the film when Beck, annoyed by a buzz in his amplifier, smashes his guitar on stage and throws its neck into the crowd. A riot ends up breaking out, an eerie presage of the Stones’ experience in Gimme Shelter.
Two years later came Dennis Hopper’s
Easy Rider, the story of a drug-fueled biker who wore black ties with Civil War suits instead of tuxedos to the premiere, were as bespoke mix of the Band, the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Steppenwolf, topped off with a theme song (“Ballad Thanks to its depiction of the cocaine trade promptly banned—no mean feat in permissive France.
Easy Rider also began the trend of the curated soundtrack, which not only sent the cost of music licensing through the roof mistaken as rock musicals, but what would Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (Directors’ Fortnight, 1974) be without the crashing or Phil Spector’s thunderous intro to The Ford Coppola’s 1979 Palme d’or winner
Apocalypse Now have endured without the the opening shots of a helicopter attack on
Vietnam? And would Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 Palme d’or winner Pulp Fiction be the Annette Annette Tommy Pink Floyd: The Wall Tommy and The Wall were based Velvet Goldmine Madonna: Truth or Dare In Bed with Madonna 24 Hour Party People U2 3D Rocketman Amy Whitney Gimme Danger The Velvet Underground in