Arquivo

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the festival’s president Gilles Jacob invited nearly three dozen of cinema’s most esteemed filmmakers to make three-minute-long contributions to a collective work. The theme that unifies them is, naturally, the love of cinema. The sheer diversity of the films proves that while the enthusiasm for cinema may be universal, each culture’s experience of it – not to mention each spectator’s – is wholly unique. The roll call of canonical cineastes represents five continents and twenty-five countries. David Cronenberg stars in his provocative, unsettling At the Suicide of the Last Jew. Abbas Kiarostami offers a peek into women’s tearful reactions to the tragic close of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). Nanni Moretti’s hilarious autobiographical Diary of a Moviegoer is a typically persuasive spiel about the state of the cinema. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Electric Princess Picture House mourns the glory days of European art cinema as Robert Bresson’s Mouchette plays to an empty house. Tsai Ming-liang’s It’s a Dream is similarly wistful, looking back to his childhood experience of film going in seventies Malaysia (many of the highlights are by East Asian cineastes, including contributions by Wong Kar-wai, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Takeshi Kitano). In front of a Brazilian rep theatre playing François Truffaut’s 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups, 1959), Walter Salles stages a show-stopping Cannes-themed musical number in 8944 km from Cannes. Theo Angelopoulos even arranges a final meeting between Jeanne Moreau and the late Marcello Mastroianni in Three Minutes (the omnibus is dedicated to Mastroianni’s great guru, Federico Fellini). The list goes on. The directors’ names are usually only revealed at the end of each contribution, allowing you to test your cinephilic chops and figure out which filmmaker is behind each piece. A number of directors focus on the decaying state of the movie houses they have loved since their youth. As the communal experience of being in the dark with hundreds of other people gives way to solitary viewing on computer screens, many of these filmmakers are mourning the end of an era that defined them, while others are celebrating the radical changes that are ushering in a new age.