Samir Farid reviews Cannes's 60th-anniversary special feature On its 60th birthday, both "international" and "film" were removed from the Cannes Festival title, to demonstrate that the event no longer needs to assert itself or its function; and it was in this celebratory context that Gilles Jacob, the festival president, thought of producing a special feature film not to celebrate Cannes per se, but rather to demonstrate the range and power of the medium to which it has been dedicated: Chacun son cinema or To Each His Cinema. To this end Jacob selected 35 filmmakers to make 33 three-minute pieces. Mostly winners of the Palm D'Or, among them is one woman, the New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion, also a winner, one Israeli, and two Arabs: the Egyptian Youssef Chahine and the Palestinian Elia Suleiman. Reviewing his own relationship with the festival, Chahine sought out a young man and woman to play himself and his wife when they attended the screening of his film Ibn Al-Nil (Son of the Nile) in 1952. At the time, however, Chahine had not yet married, and perhaps the young woman is in lieu of the film's star Faten Hamamah. He depicts his shock and dismay at the fact that only one French newspaper mentioned Ibn Al-Nil, saying that it was screened after the Czech feature and nothing more. Jump to 1997: Chahine is receiving a prize for his lifetime's achievement; we see footage of the filmmaker announcing that he had waited 47 years for that moment, among other things. Not unjustifiably, perhaps, Chahine's contribution to To Each His Cinema prompted the sarcasm of the critics, with Variety columnist Todd McCarthy going so far as to describe Chahine's exercise in self- promotion -- the only one of its kind in 33 pieces -- as a shameful disgrace. Soleiman's film is an exercise in the absurd -- in which Suleiman plays the lead, appearing in a film theatre, then in the bathroom at his home, when he drops the phone, and finally, following the credits, going up to the podium for a discussion which, rather than proceeding as expected, gives way to a porter rushing up to tell the coordinator that a car is blocking traffic outside the auditorium... Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai shows the audience in a Warsaw film theatre in 1936 and the same scene in Haifa 60 years later, when the screening is stopped due to an air raid: the theatre is bombed and the corpses of young viewers are shown scattered and bleeding. Only one critic mentioned the film in what was a rather negative review, perhaps rightly. The 30 remaining films were, however, of truly outstanding quality; the sight of the filmmakers standing together on a red carpet for a photo shoot prior to the screening was a truly riveting moment -- unprecedented in the history of cinema. (Chahine, Lars Von Trier and Zhang Yimou were unable to attend.) People who complained that the film should have been screening at the opening were right, and so was Roman Polanski leaving the press conference in protest: he would rather have lunch than answer such silly questions, he said; the festival organisers should have selected the journalists and critics more carefully to ensure an adequate level of dialogue. To Each His Cinema is dedicated to Fellini, whose death left a gaping hole in contemporary film. Two of the three- minute pieces were in fact tributes to the Italian: Andrei Konchalovsky showed an audience watching 8 1/2 and Theodoros Angelopoulos featured an incredible monologue in which Jeanne Moreau laments the death of Marcello Mastroianni. Many of the pieces are elegies to film theatres being closed down all over the world, with only one piece, the first, named Cinema Al-Saif ('open-air cinema' in Arabic) delivering an affirmative message. Shooting in Alexandria, Raymond Depardon shows a group of young men and women, some with headscarves, excitedly entering the venue. Others expressed individual perspectives on both cinema and the world: the Mexican Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñàrritu celebrates cinema through a blind woman following a film via an explanation given by her lover; the Japanese Takeshi Kitano films a single worker watching a film alone, in the rubble of a theatre (Kitano plays the projectionist); the Italian Nanni Moretti explores his relationship with his son through the Rome film theatre he owns in real life; and the Portuguese Manoel de Oliveira, 96, makes a black-and- white silent movie about the meeting of the Pope and the Soviet President Khrushchev (Michel Piccoli) in the 1960s. For his part Von Trier films himself waiting for a soirée screening at Cannes: sitting next to him is a businessman who tells Trier about himself -- how successful he is, that he has a different car for each day of the week, etc. Trier doesn't say a word until his interlocutor asks him what he does; then he replies, "A murderer!" and raises an axe to the businessman's head; while Polanski posits a man moaning during a porn film screening -- the manager thinks it is the work of the film, only to discover that the viewer fell and broke his bones. In the British filmmaker Ken Loach's piece, on the other hand, a man and his little boy are queuing up at the ticket booth, arguing which film to attend while they keep the others waiting. At the end the son suggests watching the football instead; the father agrees.
