New movie festivals spring up every year and pictures can achieve fame and reach large, if not especially lucrative, audiences by playing on the worldwide festival circuit without ever getting into normal commercial cinemas. But pace John Huston, who over half a century ago described Edinburgh as ‘the only film festival worth a damn’ (a tribute the organisers repeat annually), there are still only three that truly matter, and all began with political motivations. Mussolini launched the world’s first film festival in Venice in 1932 to advertise his Fascist regime. Six years later, when Nazi Germany joined in to make Venice an Axis occasion, France, Britain and the United States got together to launch a liberal-democratic countervailing festival at Cannes, though it was aborted on its opening day by the outbreak of the second world war and didn’t really start until 1946 as a defiant announcement that France and its culture were liberated and restored. A creation of the Cold War, the third major festival was established in West Berlin in 1951, the cultural showcase for Western democracy.
A high-minded occasion held in wintry February, Berlin is a serious enterprise that commands immense respect but little affection. Staged in September, Venice has a beautiful setting, a reputation for poor, often chaotic, organisation, and is currently being challenged by the newly instituted festival in Rome. Neither can be said to impinge greatly on the general public or the culture at large. But Cannes, which runs for a sun-drenched fortnight in mid-May, is an affair that everyone everywhere knows something about, even if it is only that moment in 1954 when the starlet Simone Silva sought to advance her career by casting aside her bra and hugging Robert Mitchum at what was supposed to be his photo opportunity.
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