E-insight

Among the most prestigeous film festivals, Cannes Film Festival is the most superior one. It’s held annually in a small town name Cannes, south of France. Hundreds of most influential, stylish, master filmaker gather, and showcase their latest masterpieces. To some extent, I think Cannes gives a chance for filmakers all over the world to show their talent. In that sense, it’s more superior than the Academy Award Ceremony. The 60th Cannes Film Festival will be held in mid May. Where both the weather, and the peoples’ mood would give the tail wind to a journey of fantasy and pleasure.

PARIS — The Festival de Cannes will be ringing in its 60th anniversary with what promises to be a star-studded, U.S.-heavy official lineup as organizers announced the schedule Thursday.

The Riviera-set shindig will open with Wong Kar Wai’s “My Blueberry Nights,” finally putting to bed speculation that the director’s first English-language film wouldn’t be finished in time for a Cannes slot.

This year’s lineup is a heady mix of fest vets and fresh faces after last year’s lineup introduced a lot of newcomers. Of the 22 films In Competition, 13 are from directors who have never before vied for the Palme d’Or.

The lineup features a potpourri of international talent and, according to the festival’s artistic director Thierry Fremaux: “It’s becoming more and more difficult to say what nationality each film is.”

Returning to Cannes are previous Palme d’Or winners the Coen brothers with “No Country for Old Men” and Gus Van Sant with “Paranoid Park.” Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino is scheduled to bring to the Competition lineup a version of “Death Proof” the helmer created specifically for the festival that is different from the “Grindhouse” cut Dimension Films released stateside this month.

In this year’s Out of Competition category Brit Michael Winterbottom is the sole U.K. flagwaver, returning to Cannes for the sixth time with Paramount Vantage’s Angelina Jolie starrer “A Mighty Heart.”Steven Soderbergh is back with his much-anticipated star-powered “Ocean’s Thirteen” (Warner Bros.) and Michael Moore with his expectedly controversial health care documentary “Sicko” (the Weinstein Co.).With “Blueberry,” “Sicko” and “Death Proof,” the Weinstein Co. will have a particularly high profile at this year’s fest.

“We are so proud to have three films premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Official Selection, especially these specific three films, which were all made by filmmakers who have a long history with the festival,” Harvey Weinstein said. “We’ve never had this many films premiere in the Official Selection.”

Said Moore, whose “Fahrenheit 9/11″ took the Palme d’Or three years ago: “I’m honored to be asked again to Cannes. It’s been a good luck charm for us and the perfect place to present our work to the rest of the world.”

David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” a Paramount /Warner Bros. co-production previously tipped to be the closing film, also will cross the Atlantic to compete for the fest’s top prize.

While the American faces in official selection are recognizable, the selection committee opted for Gallic filmmakers never before seen In Competition, including Catherine Breillat for “Une Vieille Maitresse” and Christophe Honore for “Les Chansons d’Amour.”

New York artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel is bringing “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” while the black-and-white cartoon “Persepolis” will animate the Competition category.

Asian films are a noticeable minority In Competition this year, with only Korean Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine,” Japanese Naomi Kawase’s “Mogari no Mori” and Kim Ki-duk’s “Breath” making the cut.

And jury president Stephen Frears will find it easier to avoid judging his fellow Brits’ efforts with U.K. titles noticeably absent.

Eastern European filmmakers find themselves firmly in the spotlight with two Russian films in the running from helmers Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexander Sokourov, in addition to offerings from Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian directors.

Bela Tarr’s “The Man From London,” Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and Cannes pro Emir Kusturica with “Promise Me This” are all set to arrive in France.

Turkish-German helmer Fatih Akin’s “Auf Der Anderen Seite Des Lebens” and Raphael Nadjari’s “Tehelim,” an Israeli production, also will vie for the fest’s top prize.

Selectors sorted through 3,983 submissions, including 1,615 features from 95 countries before making the final cut, organizers said.

Midnight screenings include Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales” and a U2 concert filmed in 3-D. The festival will close with Canadian director Denys Arcand’s “The Age of Darkness” in an Out Of Competition slot.

From a director’s lesson with Martin Scorsese to a compilation of short films from the creme de la creme of international helmers and an homage to Henry Fonda, the festival will celebrate its 60th anniversary in style. Organizers also will add a new theater, christened the “Salle du 60eme,” in between the Palais and the Riviera.

“We wanted to combine tradition and modernity, major signatures and young sprouts,” festival president Gilles Jacob said at a news conference in Paris. “We want to adapt the festival to the future.”

The Festival de Cannes runs May 16-27.

A complete list of today’s lineup announcement follows.

Opening night:
“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar Wai, Hong KongIn Competition:
“An Old Mistress” (Une Vieille Maitresse), Catherine Breillat, France
“The Love Songs” (Les Chansons d’amour), Christophe Honore, France
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” Julian Schnabel, France
“Auf Der Anderen Seite Des Lebens,” Fatih Akin, Turkey
“Breath,” Kim Ki-duk, South Korea
“No Country for Old Men,” Joel and Ethan Coen, U.S.
“Zodiac,” David Fincher, U.S.
“We Own the Night,” James Gray, U.S.
“Mogari No Mori,” Naomi Kawase, Japan
“Promise Me This,” Emir Kusturica, Serbia
“Secret Sunshine,” Lee Chang-Dong, South Korea
“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” Cristian Mungiu, Romania
“Tehilim,” Raphael Nadjari, France
“Silent Light,” Carlos Reygadas, Mexico
“Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, France
“Import/Export,” Ulrich Seid, Austria
“Alexandra,” Alexander Sokourov, Russia
“Death Proof,” Quentin Tarantino, U.S.
“The Man From London,” Bela Tarr, Hungary
“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant, U.S.
“The Banishment,” Andrey Zvyagintsev, Russia

Out of Competition:
“Sicko,” Michael Moore, U.S.
“Ocean’s Thirteen,” Steven Soderbergh, U.S.
“A Mighty Heart,” Michael Winterbottom, U.K.Closing night:
“The Age of Darkness,” Denys Arcand, Canada

Un Certain Regard:
“Calle Santa Fe,” Carmen Castillo, Chile
“Munyurangabo,” Lee Isaac Chung, U.S.
“Night Train,” Yinan Diao, China
“El Bano Del Papa,” Enrique Fernandez and Cesar Charlone, Uruguay
“Bikur Hatizmoret,” Eran Kolirin, Israel
“Mister Lonely,” Harmony Korine, U.S.
“Magnus,” Kadri Kousaar, Estonia
“Mang Shan,” Yang Li, China
“Mio Fratello e Figlio Unico,” Daniele Luchetti, Italy
“California Dreamin’ ” (Nesfarsit), Crisitan Nemescu, Romania
“La Soledad,” Jaime Rosales, Spain
“Am Ende Kommen Touristen,” Robert Thalheim, Germany
“Kuaile Gongchang,” Ekachai Uekrongtham, Singapore
“Le Reve De La Nuit D’Avant,” Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, France
“Et Toi, T’Es Sur Qui?” Lola Doillon, France
“L’Avocat De La Terreur,” Barbet Schroeder, France
“Les Pieuvres,” Celine Sciamma, France

Short films:
“Resistance Aux Tremblements,” Olivier Hems, France
“Run,” Mark Albiston, New Zealand
“The Oate’s Valor,” Tim Thaddeus Cahill, U.S.
“The Last 15,” Antonio Campos, U.S.
“Grandma,” Anthony Chen, Singapore
“Ark,” Grzegorz Jonkajtys, Poland
“Ver Llover,” Elisa Miller, Mexico
“The Name of the Sparrow,” Kyros Papavassiliou, Cyprus
“Looking Glass,” Erik Rosenlund, Sweden
“My Sister,” Marco Van Geffen, Netherlands
“My Dear Rosetta,” Hae-hoon Yang, South Korea

Midnight Screenings, Out of Competition:
“Go Go Tales,” Abel Ferrara, U.S.
“U2 3D,” Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington, U.S.
“Boarding Gate,” Olivier Assayas, France

Special Screenings, Out of Competition:
“11th Hour,” Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, U.S.
“The War,” Lynn Novick and Ken Burns, U.S.
“He Fengming,” Bing Wang, China
“Retour En Normandie,” Nicolas Philibert, France

Cannes jury:
President: Stephen Frears, director, U.K.
Maggie Cheung, actress, Hong Kong
Toni Collette, actress, Australia
Maria de Medeiros, director-actress, Portugal
Sarah Polley, director-actress, Canada
Marco Bellocchio, director, Italy
Orhan Pamuk, writer, Turkey
Michel Piccoli, director-actor, France
Abderrahmane Sissako, director, Mauritania

The only disappointment for me is that Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching will not be shown.

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2007, E-insight

Peter Greenaway Takes On Morality, Genitalia, and The Thirty Years War

Brandon Judell

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(indieWIRE/5.26.2000) –If you have trouble following a Kevin Smith caper, by all means drive full speed away from a Peter Greenaway offering. This most intelligent of directors readily creates features that entwine the more complex elements of mathematics, science, architecture, psychology, philsophy, film history, art and especially the metaphysical. Luckily, he also relishes with great glee sex and romance. Otherwise, his audiences would be totally comprised of Film Forum subscribers, film festival cognoscenti, and aging deconstructionists.His latest effort, “8 1/2 Women” (Lions Gate Films) besides being a deliciously immoral tribute to the Fellini classic “8-1/2,” is an often hilarious study of men’s sexual fantasies about women. The father/son protagonists here soon learn that wealth, whiteness, and the penis only wield so much power, and the power game can be surprisingly turned against them with unexpected results.indieWIRE caught up with the director of “Darwin” (1993), “M is for Man Music,” “Mozart” (1991), “Drowning by Numbers” (1988), and “The Belly of an Architect” (1987) at the Paramount Hotel coffee shop in New York City.indieWIRE: Your films deal a lot with “what is life?” especially in “A Zed and Two Naughts” (1985) with its whole obsession with decay. Nowadays, in such a film as “American Psycho” and the novels of Dennis Cooper, people are being sliced open in search of their souls. The heroes here are looking a for a cure to their own and society’s soullessness. The answer, they feel, maybe just below the flesh. Have you wondered where the soul is?

Peter Greenaway: Well, you’re obviously primed to ask exactly the right questions. I made a trilogy of films of which the third part is incomplete, and it was about the self-same subject. The trilogy of films was “Prospero’s Books” (1991) about the uses and abuses of wisdom, the “Baby of Macon” (1993) which is about uses and abuses of religion, then there was a film which is basically about necrophilia and was about searching the soul.

It is interesting in European history how the soul has traveled from the belly where it used to be with the Romans up to the heart where it was with the Christians to up here in the sort of I suppose the 19th century post-ancien r間ime. Now presumably its up here somewhere and its outside the body all together. But the story was set during the Thirty Years War when Europe was filled with corpses, and an anatomist is looking for the soul. He still believes that the soul could physically be an organ like a spleen or part of the brain. He’s determined to find the seat of the soul as a physical organ and possibly to be able to eradicate evil by creating some form of manipulation or experiment or physical operation on it. But people around him are also very keen to help him find the soul, so they trick him. Men and women are tricking him into finding the soul, but I won’t elaborate.

I was also interested in necrophilia. and I also wanted to make a film, since it was set during the Thirty Years War, about the problems of war. And since war is conducted by old men, and we have an extraordinary number of ancient very, very good male actors in England, I wanted to utilize them. So my entire cast was over 65, and because we would have problems with all the prosthetics because it’s difficult opening up all these corpses with the sort of budgets that we have, most of the film took place in the dark. So you can imagine what my financiers thought about a film about necrophilia with all the actors are over 65, and the entire film happening in the dark. So we have not yet found the money to make it. But it’s on the drawing board, and we’ll make it sooner or later.

iW: Maybe we can ask the kind folk reading this interview to donate to the project.

Greenaway: Their bodies?

iW: Bodies or money. Moving on to your current release, the hero, the father, in “8 1/2 Women” is 55. I’m not sure if you’re near that age.

Greenaway: I’m 57.

iW: You describe Philip Emmenthal in your published screenplay as a very handsome man which describes you more than the actor you cast in the part. So how autobiographical is the film?

Greenaway: I’m basically an English, London-born and bred bourgeois. There’s a way, of course I suppose, if we create an alter-ego, he’ll always be larger than life than we would see ourselves. So the circumstances and the adventures that my alter-ego would be subjected to would be far more fantastic than I could ever create for myself. It’s the Fellini/Mastroianni situation maybe. Fellini couldn’t fuck all the women he wanted to so he sent Mastroianni out to do it instead.

iW: Jeanne Moreau once said, getting John Frankenheimer in trouble at the time when she was making his film “The Train,” that she has affairs with all of her directors.

Greenaway: Uhhmmmm.

iW: Has that situation happened to you?

Greenaway: Mmmmm. By no means as large as the circumstances that some of my characters would suggest.

iW: There are scenes in “8 1/2 Women” that are quite shocking.

Greenaway: Like what?

iW: Well, first of all, the father and son here have sex together. Then there’s a speech in the published script (Dis Voir, 1999; $19.95) which I’m not certain made it into the final film, about how a character loves vaginas and wishes he could cut them off so he could look at them whenever he wanted to. (Philip, after one of “his women” commits suicide: “It’s a terrible waste of the most beautiful vagina I have ever seen. That’s not true. Palmira’s is bolder and bigger and more embracing and smells like heaven. And grips me like an octopus. I wonder if you could cut it out and keep it? In a fridge perhaps . . . “)

Greenaway: That didn’t make it into the film, no.

iW: In a sense these scenes shouldn’t be quite so shocking in the year 2000 but we’re奺specially in America, every time an actress has a nude scene and there’s a press conference, the question is always asked, “What was it like playing without your clothes on?” So do you find it odd that the idea of relishing sex so openly as you do is considered unconventional or at times offensive by so many?

Greenaway: I presume you are asking that rhetorically because you know the answers. Your puritanical background. You’re Protestant, maybe Calvinistic sort of, concerns for all those sorts of difficult problems that you have. The way that I would answer those sorts of questions is that I’m a European. I suppose we would see these things from a different perspective. I was trained as a painter. I’m very familiar with the nude body, masculine and feminine. I do I suppose have a soapbox position, and I want to be certain that the human body is in the center of the frame. Its physicality is important and is always very, very strongly positive because I think that that physicality would begin to lose perspective over all the other senses. So these are almost polemical positions as well as I suppose positions of enormous personal curiosity about gender situations and gender politics.

iW: I’m not sure if you saw Lars von Trier’s “The Idiots” where all of the penises of his actors are blocked out with black rectangles. With you, penises are just a normal thing. There’s a great speech here where the father says how the penis inspired him to become an architect. (Philip: “Contemplating my father’s prick, I often think that was how I got interested in engineering奣he penis — if you think about it — is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable — cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive — practically every engineering characteristic — towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships — no man-made engineering structure to match it”). Did the penis inspire you to become a director?

Greenaway: (laughter) Well, again a sense of irony. Well, this film has irritated and exacerbated a lot of people because of its sort of up-front male sexual fantasy but I think if you’re going to deal in male sexual fantasy, you better come out with it. You better be there because we have organized, for example, nine sexual male stereotypes which are pretty frank in their concerns: Wishing to fuck a nun, wishing to fuck a woman who’s always astride a horse奅tcetera. Etcetera. I suppose it’s deeply politically incorrect to even imagine a scenario where two men, leave alone a father and his son, have the means to create a private bordello which is deeply妛hich should not be considered in civilized circumstances. Though again it might be a sexual dream by either or both sexes.

iW: All the men in your films tend to be normal or well-endowed. One would think that if you were a director with a very small penis, none of this male nudity would be so easily bandied about.

Greenaway: You think so?

iW: Yes, one gets the sense from your films’ sensibilities that you must be very satisfactorily endowed.

Greenaway: I feel very comfortable about discussing sexual matters under these circumstances in context. I suppose also I’ve created for myself now a platform on a rostrum whereby the confidence grows picture by picture by picture. The very fact that you are asking me these questions suggests there’s a legitimacy which is perfectly possible to discuss. Where speaking with other directors under other circumstances, it might be more difficult to make that as an open subject. I suppose on another level, I’m often irritated that, basically, certainly should we say Hollywood orthodox cinema deals in nudity primarily from the point of the view of the female body and she has to be aged between 16 and 30. What happens to the rest of us? What happens to the whole mass of man/female, masculine/feminine kind who do not get represented in this context? We ought to be there along with everybody else.

iW: How do you react to charges of misogyny in your films? Do they bother you?

Greenaway: Well, there’s a thin edge all the time. I suppose you’ve got to be very, careful how to play it. I remember in “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (1989), which might be a film you saw, there is a way in which the Helen Mirren character certainly ends up literally and metaphorically on top. She’s a victor but she has to be incredibly humiliated in order to get there. Now is my sense of humiliating Helen Mirren part of a misogynist plot or is it a natural path taken in order for us to reach closure. I would of course fall down heavily on the second part of that.

iW: That film spoiled a date of mine. It’s definitely not a first date movie I found out the hard way.

Greenaway: (laughs)

iW: In “The Pillow Book” (1996), you treat homosexuality and bisexuality so naturally, so wonderfully. Few other directors would be capable of making these acts seem so natural, such a part of everyday life. Is that because anything dealing with sex is normal to you?

Greenaway: Yes, indeed. Could I pick up on how you talked about perversity? I mean what is perversity?

iW: Things your parents don’t want you to do.

Greenaway: (Laughs) The other curious comment often made which surprised about me about American commentators is how they regard me as “fetishistic.” I can see by the way they use the word, it has deep in their minds pejorative overtones. But why should we believe that fetishism is pejorative? Why would an American think that fetishism is pejorative?

iW: We’re just a very uptight nation. We’re quite afraid of sex.

Greenaway: Why is this? We can talk about inherited Puritanism and the pilgrim fathers and the values of the family and so on, but it still doesn’t really answer the question.

iW: Well, our ancestors came here supposedly to separate religion and state, and they failed. And just as long as religion is involved?/B>

Greenaway: But that was such a long time ago.

iW: Edmund White once said that Frenchmen think we Americans are crazy because 3/4 of our population insist they talk to God. So we really believe in sin. Maybe sin makes sex more pleasurable to folks when they think they will be punished for doing the nasty.

Greenaway: Maybe.

iW: Well, I want to thank you for?/B>

Greenaway: It’s been my pleasure.

[Brandon Judell is a regular contributor and critic for indieWIRE. He has been a contributing editor to Detour since 1992 and also contributed articles to The Village Voice, The New York Daily News, FILMMAKER Magazine, The Advocate and Prevention's Guide to Weight Loss.]

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Peter Greenaway, a controversial director/artist. One of the three directors among Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock whom I respect and admire.

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E-Insight, 2007