On May 10, 1968, while barricades were erected in Paris, stars and starlets flocked to the 21st Cannes Film Festival. But the wind of protest soon catches up with the Croisette. A small group of filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard at the head, will soon tumble at the festival and force its stop.
“The student and worker demonstrations in France had, for several days, created unease among the filmmakers and critics of the festival who, they said, offered foreigners a false image of France by its social receptions and its carelessness”, writes the AFP special envoy on May 18, 1968. The day before, the seething Estates General of French Cinema opened in Paris with the aim of “transform the system” which had resulted in a hexagonal cinema “cut off from all social and political reality”, then summarize the Cinema notebooksto which Godard collaborated for a time.
Three months earlier, in February, a defense committee for the Cinémathèque française had been created to support its founder Henri Langlois who had been sacked by the Minister of Culture André Malraux. It is therefore already heated by these mobilizations that Jean-Luc Godard and his protesting friends will carry out their action in Cannes. On the evening of May 17, a strike was decided on by film workers and the sending to the Croisette of a motion calling on all the professionals concerned to “oppose the continuation” of the Festival.
Dispatched to Cannes, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Lelouch – whose two films are in competition – will “create shock” which will allow this sudden stop, writes AFP at the time.
“We must demolish the structures of Cannes”, launches Godard during a public meeting on May 18. Faced with the recalcitrant, he exclaims: “I’m talking to you about solidarity with students and workers and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups! You’re idiots!”. Truffaut goes further, Lelouch proposes that the films programmed be “transported to Paris to be screened there for free”. Circonspect, the Polish director Roman Polanski judges him, “childish” to occupy the great hall of the Palace, as are the Odéon or the Sorbonne in Paris.
There follows a beautiful “chaos” reported live by AFP. We take over the large room where the film by Spaniard Carlos Saura is to be screened Peppermint hit. We shout at each other, we push each other, Godard clings to the red curtains to prevent the session from starting. Everything is linked. After Louis Malle, the Italian Monica Vitti, the English Terence Young and Polanski resign from the jury, which “gets scuttled”, writes AFP. Foreign filmmakers (Saura, Milos Forman, Richard Lester…) withdraw their films, like all the French programmed, Alain Resnais, Dominique Delouche and Claude Lelouch.
General delegate of the festival, Robert Favre Le Bret ensures that “Cannes is neither bourgeois nor proletarian”, and appeals to him “remains what it is, the most important annual meeting in the world of cinema”. But on May 19 at noon, he bows and proclaims “the final closing of the festival”. Deal with “saboteur” by part of the press, Jean-Luc Godard is celebrated as a hero by his friends on his return to Paris. He will use images from May 68 in several small films.
From that time, Anne Wiazemsky, who married him in 1967 and played the young revolutionary in her film The Chinese (1967), will draw an autobiographical novel (One year later), adapted into a film willingly piquant with regard to the director (The Redoubtable) by Michel Hazanavicius in 2017. She expresses her great regret at not having been present during the Cannes episode.