Cannes 1968 in THE INDEPENDENT
Geoffrey Macnab’s "The Day Cannes Burned," a highly entertaining look back at Cannes ‘68, in The Independent:
"Film-makers ‘occupied’ the festival’s Grande Salle, partly to prevent screenings and partly to hold a prolonged, open-ended debate. ‘Imagine a cinema about the size of a medium Odeon,’ the British journalist Peter Forster wrote of the scenes inside the theatre. ‘It is packed with people shouting and screaming. Nearly 100 people are milling around on the stage, trying to grab the all-important microphone.’ Gradually, directors began to withdraw their movies from competition; jury members resigned; critics fled town. The London Evening Standard couldn’t resist invoking the memory of Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens‘ A Tale of Two Cities: ‘Films roll like heads. Such is the guillotine atmosphere that some of the women’s eager faces look as if they were expecting the free distribution of knitting needles.’
"The comparisons with Paris during the 1789 Revolution weren’t that far-fetched: this was a very French uprising. ‘Every shade of lunatic-fringe opinion democratically — though often to derisive hoots and howls — had its moment," the International Herald Tribune reported of the marathon debate in the Grande Salle. There were moments of high comedy: when the festival organisers attempted to show Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé, starring Geraldine Chaplin, the actress, together with [François] Truffaut, clung to the curtain to try to prevent it rising and stop the screening, but were soon hoisted in the direction of the ceiling. ‘The mechanically controlled drapes began to move and the audience was amazed to witness the protesters literally swing from the sashes,’ Henri Behar wrote in his history of the festival."
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Sounds like the gay boycott at Sundance. Or perhaps not.