Cannes’ Voyage to the Neverland of Irrelevancy

During the 1963 Moscow International Film Festival, few doubted Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” was a masterpiece. The film was not merely contending for the Grand Prize; it was clear that no conventional prize could put a tag on the sheer artistic genius and refreshing power of the movie. Threatened by Fellini’s highly formalistic language, the Communist Party’s movie department (who were making decisions behind the scenes), as usual, suspected something potentially harmful for the cause of the international proletariat. They put pressure on the head of the jury, a Soviet filmmaker Grigori Chukhrai, not to award the Grand Prize to “8 ½.”

Chukhrai was in a tight spot. He had his share of problems with the system with his 1959 war movie “The Ballad of a Soldier,” when he did not depict Nazis as stupid animals but rather as a highly organized and evil intelligence. Because of that, some in the government tried to ban Chukhrai and label him a Nazi sympathizer. They failed. First, Chukhrai’s movies about the war were Soviet classics and second, Chukrai himself was a war hero who fought through almost every battle of the war all the way to Berlin.

So when Chukhrai refused to back down on Fellini’s film, the pack sensed an opportunity for a sweet revenge. Chukhrai claimed that rejecting “8 ½ ” would not only be a blunt error of cinematic judgment but a political disaster for a Class-A festival. He claimed that when people see the movie in the West and learn Moscow did not award it, the credibility of the festival would be ruined beyond repair. Chukhrai got into a power play with some very dangerous people who warned him that if Fellini got the Grand Prize, Chukhrai would not be able to make another movie anytime soon, or ever…

Fellini’s ‘8 ½’ won the Moscow’s Grand Prize. It triumphed all over the world known as the masterpiece acknowledged first at the Moscow International Film Festival.

As promised, from then on, Chukhrai had to fight for his every subsequent movie and was sabotaged and attacked for years to come.

It is easy to underestimate the magnitude of Chukrai’s sacrifice. Yet, it was tremendous. He bet his career, fame and ability to create his own movies for the abstract ideals of truth and art. This was the character of a man who fought in World War II, a man who saw and knew evil and never gave in to it. He was a real judge, a judge whose verdict meant something. His judgment of life and arts had a repercussion for him but his judgment was substantiated by his character and he paid dearly for it.

However great “8 ½” was, Chukhrai’s action made it even more precious.

Now, what are the power and the value of Sean Penn’s judgment as the President of the Jury of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival?

This is a man who within two years met with three tyrants and validated (in an insignificant but well promoted way) regimes and people who have blood and repression of artistic and human rights as their basic operational procedure. Appointing Sean Penn Grand Judge of the Cannes film festival was like appointing Bonnie and Clyde as the secretary of treasury. Of all the politically active celebrities, Sean Penn was the only one who made the same idiotic move three times in a row.  If his fellow tyrant praising filmmakers, like Spielberg and Stone, had a crush on only one antiquated imbecile, namely Fidel Castro; Sean Penn felt it necessary to understand and shake hands with the whole trio: Castro, Ahmadinejad and Chavez.

I mean, Leni Riefenstahl was undoubtedly a much more talented filmmaker than Penn, but even Neo-Nazis would agree that she was not fit to judge a major film festival after she misjudged (or was forced to by history) the real character of that Austrian psychopath.

Okay, let’s put Sean’s politics aside. After all, celebrities (not artists) are usually aligning on the wrong tracks of a political locomotive. This is natural since they both rotate in the self-imposed sphere of worldly power and feel akin to each other’s contest to replace God.

Let’s leave the politics aside and look at the artistic merits by which Sean Penn was considered to lead the pack of jurors in an attempt to set the tone for the contemporary world cinema. Since I don’t think anyone in their sane mind would claim him as one of the greats, let’s assume he’s a fine actor (I personally think he brings a nervous, irritating energy onto the screen…kind of like his pal Ahmadinejad to politics) Okay, but there are many finer actors. So what separates Sean Penn from his colleagues, what is the criteria upon which he chose to establish the trend for contemporary world cinema?

Penn directed a movie, one may say. Oh, that’s right. Well, this surely separates him from the twelve fine actors remaining who haven’t yet tried to direct a movie based on an ‘edgy’ screenplay. Why didn’t Cannes choose George Clooney as the president of the jury? He’s another fine actor who directed a movie and loves foreign dictators.

There were times when Cannes was praising masters. People came here to tell the world something that the world didn’t know or didn’t know how to express. This was once a great cultural event that inspired people and made them see something that affected their minds and souls.

Today Cannes just signals the decline of the cinema as an art form. It shows how bankrupt the movies have become. And this, probably better than anything, explains the choice of Sean Penn as the chief justice of the festival. He is just perfectly representative of everything that went wrong with cinematic expression. The movies today communicate exactly what Sean Penn communicates through his life and on the screen: a confused and weak character moved by anger and immersed in despair; artistically dead and socially wired; cowardly to fight, yet, anxious for world peace; unable to discern good from evil, relative in truth and absolute in fallacy …and above all impure in every single move.

It is this impurity that leads to the clinically bizarre fascination with tyrants and mass murderers, like Che Guevara, by weasels like Steven Soderbergh. Think about Soderbergh, this Cannes’ usual, being able to make a movie about his private proletarian murderer hero. Once in a while, Soderbergh must make a movie about the pinnacle of American capitalism, a Las Vegas casino. Oh, wait, I get it, Soderbergh is a genius robbing capitalist Americans by selling them his crappy “Ocean” movies in order to make real movies about Communist heroes.

Shame on me! Now I sound like Senator McCarthy. Actually, yes, I do sound like McCarthy. I’m accusing a guy who made a movie about a Communist hero of being a Communist sympathizer. That’s unfair to Soderbergh. I hope I don’t hurt his infantile hunger for an international revolution that proved to be a mass murdering failure – let’s see, only about every time it was applied.

If these filmmakers continue to be the moral and artistic compasses of our time, our next stop is an iceberg.

Cannes, actually, lost its virginity when they gave the Palme D’Or to a McDonalds “aficionado” turned filmmaker, Michael Moore. His “Fahrenheit 911” was such a deceptive documentary that even professional Bush-haters detested it as a gross fabrication.

By the way, in the film, Michael Moore went into great length depicting pre-invasion Saddam’s Iraq as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Rosy cheeked happy children playing as their happy and well dressed mothers watch them with humility.  The part omitted by Moore was their fathers, players on the Iraqi national soccer team, being tortured by Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay for losing a World Cup qualifier to the Saudi Arabia team.

Not only did Cannes not bother to check the facts of Moore’s vomit, they didn’t even consider that what they were making was not a political statement by an artistic community,  but rather a primitive and partisan attempt to affect the political election of a participant country. Cannes basically ignored the tradition of a great movie event that had always praised an independent artistic spirit, in favor of …yes, the vision of a hysterical political hack who made an election propaganda documentary. How disrespectful that was to the filmmakers of other countries who watched their beloved festival sacrificed for the benefit of American political infighting. Then we wonder why people hate America.

By the way, the President of Jury that year, the man who awarded Michael Moore with a prideful smile, was a guy who turned watching Blockbuster movies for free into an art form, Quentin Tarantino. Here’s another psychopathic megalomaniac who marketed his sickness into a standard and was given the privilege to teach this year’s Master Class at Cannes.

Tarantino’s major lesson to filmmakers was to demonstrate that after you’re told you made it, it’s okay to swear in the presence of those wearing tuxedos and tell them how great you are because you worked in a Blockbuster for a year (as opposed to the mundane Chukrai who “made it” after spending four years in the trenches fighting Nazis). And, yes, I almost forgot another precious lesson Tarantino taught the budding filmmakers: ”Just do it,” he said, “just go ahead and do your f…g movie.” This is a Master Class? You don’t have to go to Cannes and spend a fortune on a hotel room for this. Nike has been saying this same crap on TV for years.

Wake up, people! Antonioni was a master. Kurosawa was a master. These people today are just tricksters.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that because of their moral bankruptcy these people are not good artists. They have their talents, they have their moments but they are not masters. They are not people who are supposed to set the bar. And setting the bar is precisely what festivals like Cannes do. They set the tone and they tell what goes and what does not.

Cannes is in part responsible for the visionary development of the human race. By entrusting the wheel to the filthy mouthed boatswain Tarantino and a Persian pirate’s parrot Sean Penn, Cannes gradually takes its ship to the “Neverland” of becoming an irrelevant film event that ignores real masters, people like Chukhrai who will prefer an oblivion to a festival that increasingly becomes to the art of movies what Michael Jackson is to child development.