In the Cannes

Hear the word "Cannes" and the images that flash through the mind most likely progress across sun, sea and sand to alight at film festival. But do you remember it for an award-winning Algerian film about the struggle for independence seen through the eyes of a peasant or a bikini-clad Brigitte Bardot pouting and posing on the beach outside the Carlton Hotel?

Cannes Film Festival has always been a schizophrenic experience. Art movies nestle cheek-by-breast with topless starlets posing on the beach for the panting paparazzi, while multi-million dollar deals are struck in bars and restaurants along the Croisette.

This event dubbed "the grand-daddy of all festivals" - erroneously, as Venice Film Festival is older - celebrates high art and low commerce.

Actors and film-makers tread the red carpet as the business of buying and selling movies is carried out away from the prying eyes of the international posse of reporters and photographers.

The 60th Cannes Film Festival is under way, although what some regard as the most prestigious film festival - ahead of Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto - is in danger of losing its sparkle.

Not so much Cannes can as Cannes can't. Celebrity sightings are two a penny these days. Magazines, newspapers, TV and the internet offer numerous shop windows for the antics of the famous and infamous. No need to go to the time, travel and expense of the Cannes Film Festival, you can get plenty of exposure elsewhere.

Cannes can afford to get back to being a proper film festival, promoting and praising international cinema rather than a sun-kissed stage for the good, the bad and the ugly to sell their wares. It could strip away the glitz and concentrate on the art of cinema.

The festival was born out of politics in the pre-Second World War years. There was discontent that the Venice Film Festival was being used as "a stage for fascistic tub-thumping" by Italy and Germany.

The French Government suggested organising their own film festival, with the British and Americans letting it be known that they'd support the idea. Vichy, Biarritz and Algiers were rejected as locations in favour of Cannes with its sunny Mediterranean climate and refined atmosphere.

Things didn't start well. In fact, they didn't start at all. The inaugural festival, set to open on September 1, 1939, was cancelled due to a clash with the declaration of war against Germany.

"Action" was eventually called with the film festival relaunch in 1946 in the town's old casino. Even then the Minister of Commerce and Industry spoiled matters by declaring "the first festival of agriculture" open.

The delayed start hasn't been the only hiccup over the years. Budgetary problems resulted in no festival in 1948 and 1950.

The 1968 event was held against a background of riots by students and strikes in Paris. The unrest spread to Cannes with leading film-makers, including Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, occupying the Festival Palais and halting the projection of a film in a display of solidarity with the students and strikers. They succeeded in prematurely ending the festival.

Sometimes the films themselves have sparked protest. The People's Republic of China withdrew from the festival in 1957 because Taiwan was taking part.

Director Michelangelo Antonioni and leading lady Monica Vitti endured a hostile reception for L'Avventura in 1960. The jury tried to make amends by awarding the film a special prize for "its remarkable contribution to the search for a new cinemagraphic language".

The French film, The Mother And The Whore, was greeted by loud protests before and after its screening, mainly because of its crude language. Cries of "nauseating" and "disgusting" were heard during a screening of Blow Out, about four middle-aged men eating themselves to death.

As recently as 1994, Quentin Tarantino's Golden Palm winner Pulp Fiction was greeted by catcalls as well as cheers due to what some viewed as its excessive violence.

Some film-makers dare to answer back. Maurice Pilat, booed by some sections of the audience as he collected the Golden Palm for Under Satan's Son, raised his fist and told the detractors: "If you don't like me, then I can say I feel the same about you".

At least, this debate was about the movies. Too often Cannes has been hijacked for less worthy causes. A favourite trick is to jet in and announce your next project, as the Spice Girls did with their first (and presumably, last) movie. Or, like Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant, you can anchor your yacht offshore to draw attention to your new film, Extreme Measures.

Hollywood has always had a love-hate relationship with the festival. Actors, producers and directors enjoy being feted by other film-makers while realising that winning at Cannes doesn't boost the box-office figures. Quite the opposite, in fact. Mainstream movie-makers reckoned that a win could actually be a deterrent because people assumed a winner was an art film not a multiplex movie.

Some just can't resist an international stage with the prospect of a vast global audience to plug their wares. George Lucas sent in Darth Vader and his stormtroopers to let the world know that the Star Wars saga was continuing. Last year the makers of The Da Vinci Code took the Eurostar to France for the very first screening of the film. It ensured maximum publicity, a counterbalance to the bad reviews the movie received.

The off-screen antics began in 1954 when a starlet abandoned her bikini top on the beach and threw herself at Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum.

The photograph went round the world and gave many an ambitious, if talentless, performer the idea that breast-baring on the beach was a surefire way of getting exposure.

Nowadays this wouldn't rate a second glance. And celebrities can't expect automatic coverage just by treading the red carpet as their latest movie is premiered at Cannes.

The 60th Cannes Film Festival is welcoming the glamorous likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Sharon Stone, Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio. They're certainly among the cinema elite but sightings are two a penny, just open any celebrity mag.

Clooney, Pitt and Jolie aren't even in films in the competition. Cannes is split between those films going for gongs and those there to be seen or bought for distribution.

You don't even need to be in Cannes to enjoy the festival. Rowan Atkinson's bumbling Mr Bean goes there in his latest film, Mr Bean's Holiday. His dreadful holiday home movie is accidentally submitted in the competition and wins a standing ovation from the festival audience. That could never happen in real life, although given the Cannes festival's chequered history, I wouldn't be so sure.