Kick the Cannes

BAM toasts four decades of daring Directors' Fortnight programming.

As mind-blowing as it may seem, in 1971 Susan Sontag, Werner Herzog, Nagisa Oshima, R.W. Fassbinder and George Lucas all presented their films at the same festival: the Directors’ Fortnight, then in its third year. Created in 1969 as a noncompetitive alternative to the Cannes Film Festival—which had been shut down the year before by Truffaut, Godard and others who not only wished to align themselves with the students and striking workers of May ’68 but were also outraged by the ouster of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque Française—Directors’ Fortnight takes place each May just a few blocks away from the older fest. “The Cannes Film Festival was a little bit archaic and old-fashioned at the time,” Olivier Père, the artistic director of the Fortnight since 2003, told TONY last month under the majestic white tent pitched outside the festival’s office, the Malmaison at 47 la Croisette. “The mission of the Fortnight was to support young directors from around the world, to be ‘unofficial’ and ‘unacademic’—to be quite revolutionary, to be interested in the new forms of cinema.”

To celebrate that radical spirit, BAM is hosting “Directors’ Fortnight at 40,” a collection of 19 features, including a weeklong run of Jacques Rivette’s 1974 masterpiece, Céline and Julie Go Boating, and two shorts—plus a documentary about the festival, Olivier Jahan’s 40 x 15—that kicks off Friday 13. Eight of those titles have bowed at the Fortnight during Père’s tenure. The five-person selection committee, Père, 37, explains, “doesn’t want mainstream films. We want films from the border.” The selection process leans toward spirited autocracy. “We don’t vote. If I am the only one to love a film, if I really think that it’s worth trying, I may argue with my partners, but if I think it’s the right choice, I will do it; I am the only one responsible for the final selection. We don’t want to have a consensus,” Père says. “We prefer ‘Either you love it or you hate it.’ That’s why the Fortnight is such a surprising selection most of the time; it’s not always the thing you expect. It’s something new, something original—that’s why we prefer to create debates as opposed to creating something very conformist.”

Two films from actor-directors that debuted at Fortnight ’07, Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget and Serge Bozon’s La France (both of which are in BAM’s tribute and will receive a proper theatrical release in New York next month), prove just how singular the festival lineups are. In the former, Nolot (whose first feature, L’Arrière pays, premiered at the 1998 Fortnight) plays a 58-year-old HIV-positive ex-hustler reminiscing about the past (“Those are the toilets where Roland Barthes and I used to go cruising”) while maintaining a mordantly witty outlook about his increasingly grim future. Its savage honesty and humor alone make Before I Forget a resurrection of the long-lost promise of queer cinema. Bozon’s film is sui generis: Nominally a film about World War I, La France, featuring two of Gaul’s greatest actors, Pascal Greggory and Sylvie Testud, becomes something else entirely once those soldiers break out into songs—which sound like outtakes from Rubber Soul or Pet Sounds.

To give a sense of the legacy Père inherited, the BAM series also features several titles from 1969’s inaugural Fortnight. In addition to Roger Corman’s psychedelia nugget The Trip and Philippe Garrel’s far-out Jesus and Mary story Le Lit de la vierge, the first Fortnight also included Carolee Schneemann’s essential “Fuses,” which shows the director and her boyfriend having sex, with nature photos superimposed over celluloid that’s been stained and burned. Schneemann isn’t the only female helmer in the series: Works by Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) and Claire Simon (2006’s On Fire) represent the Fortnight’s steadfast commitment to presenting work by female directors.

And what about the annus mirabilis of 1971, mentioned above? BAM’s tribute will showcase Alain Tanner’s The Salamander—“a color film in monochrome,” as a title card announces—whose star, the incomparable Bulle Ogier, playing the willful object of desire of two writers trying to script her life, will be present for a Q&A after the June 27 screening. Traversing several decades, styles and genres, BAM’s series sums up Père’s uiding philosophy: “I love cinema; I think cinema is one single, very beautiful thing with many different expressions.”

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