Today Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes Film Festival,
gave details of a series of short films commissioned to celebrate the festival's 60th anniversary.
The list of directors who agreed to contribute is as follows:
Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Youssef Chahine, Chen Kaige, Michael Cimino, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Manoel De Oliveira, Raymond Depardon, Atom Egoyan, Amos Gitai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Andrei Konchalovsky, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Elia Suleiman, Tsai Ming-liang, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar Wai and Zhang Yimou.
It's a pretty awesome line-up of talent made up of the festival's favorite sons (and daughters), and all of the above directors' offerings will be shown together under the title
To Each his Own Cinema. Jacob revealed that each short is to be about the director's "current state of mind as inspired by the motion-picture theater", however the sheer volume of participants (35, including two sets of brothers) dictated that the running time for a segment was only to be a meagre 3 minutes. Apparently some of the locations chosen by the auteurs in question have been particularly creative - Wenders shot his contribution in the Congo, and Cronenberg in his toilet (!) - but my suspicion is that watching the film as a whole will be pretty frustrating. Filmmakers do some of their best work rhapsodizing about the movies, but surely watching a film with
33 different sections will be a stop-start, unsatisfying experience.
That said, the portmanteau film has always provided odd, unbalanced viewing -
New York Stories (1989), for example, has two great segments and one truly abysmal one - but the tendency towards roping in more and more directors for each film seems foolhardy. Is it because directors are too busy to offer more lengthy contributions, or is it because the feeling is that cinemagoers' concentration span is growing ever shorter? Or is it simply that the people in charge of portmanteau films are getting greedy by recruiting too many of their favourite directors all at the same time?
Even a few years ago, the directors who participated in movies like
Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet and
11'09''01 - September 11 (both 2002) were given twelve minutes to tell their individual stories on screen, whereas each of the 18 segments of the upcoming
Paris, Je T'Aime runs to just over 6 minutes. It all seems a far cry from two of the greatest portmanteau movies,
Dead of Night (1945) and
Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1962): in both films, each portion averages 25 minutes. But today, if you have to dash off to the men's room, you might end up missing all of the Coen Brothers' new movie!
# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/20/2007 03:05:00 PM
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