Film and TV Technician (1957)

FILM & TV TECHNICIAN June/July 1957 CANNES IN REVIEW by Lindsay Anderson IT all depends where you sit. " This Year's Flop," ran the headline of the Kine Weekly report on this year's Cannes Festival, and its correspondent went on to say: " This year I got the impression the festival was a ' has-been '." Yet to many of us (myself included), this tenth International Festival at Cannes was one of the best of the series, and certainly one of the most vigorous and encouraging in recent years. Encouraging, too, not merely for the quantity of good and promising work shown, but for the quite extensive reporting of the films in the more responsible papers. There was one aspect of the occasion, though, that largely escaped attention, and that is our own showing. Yet this is an important aspect, and one we should do well to consider. I wish indeed that more British film makers had been able to see that fortnight's bird's-eye-view of world production. There was much to learn from it. Disturbing Since I am writing as a technician, to technicians, there is no point in my straining for politeness. So I will kick off by saying that the really disturbing thing about Cannes this year, from the British point of view, was the faded appearance of our own contribution. As the young Argentinian director of The House of the Angel remarked to me after the showing of our first entry : " It reminds me of the sort of film you were making in Britain before the war." This perhaps comes as something of a shock to technicians at home, where certainly both High Tide at Noon and Yang-tsi Incident must be numbered among the more ambitious and respectable of our current productions. It is only when you get to an international festival, and see work presented not only by the big film powers like America, Russia, France, Italy and Japan, but also by countries with resources and experience far more limited, that you realise how far we in Britain are falling behind. It has been a swift reversal. The first time I went to Cannes, to the festival in 1949, our prestige was high : in fact we won th? Grand Prix, with The Third Man. Since 1951, however, when The fully, you must have some idea of what is being done in the cinema outside the industries of Britain and America — and this of course is one of the chief fascinations of these international festivals. Two or three years ago, the emphasis was all on the new techniques, and " DON QUIXOTE Browning Version was prized both for script and Michael Redgrave's performance, we have not won a single award, except for shorts — The Stranger Left No Card, The Pleasure Garden and Together. Yet people abroad still remember the palmy days of the British cinema in the immediate post-war years. " Surely," they ask, " Your selection must be badly made? Surely this isn't the best you have to send us?" Such questions are difficult to answer. To understand these criticisms . . Kl Ssl \ on colour and Cinemascope in particular. Every director, at every press conference, was asked what he felt about them : and of course every director made the same reply : " It depends on the subject." This year there was no need to ask such questions at all. It was obvious that the new techniques have been largely assimilated. They are no longer considered particularly exciting in themselves, and they do not atone for weaknesses in ideas, stories or direction. Films were shown at Cannes in