t is an expression engendering intense feelings one way or the other. Unpredictably and at the drop of a hat, it can be perceived either as a major and evident stake or as an outdated quibble; it is perceived either as the essence of the most noble of modern battles or as the hobbyhorse of technocrats whose claim to intellectualism may simply mask narrow mercantile interests. But the idea of cultural exceptionalism, since that is what we are talking about, does not merit such great swerves of popularity and hostility. The expression designates today two distinct things. It is first of all a principle: works of art should not belong solely, neither for their production nor for their circulation, to the law of the market. The expression is also a legal designation: the one on which is based all regulations tending to validate other criteria than those of the market in the production and diffusion of works of art. This legal means is at the service of a goal: cultural diversity, that is to say, the possibility of encouraging the production and diffusion of works of art having different aesthetics.
This history has known many ups and downs, and it is today at a decisive crossroads. At this turning point, which can either kill or rescue the principle of cultural exceptionalism, film festivals, and above all Cannes, have a very important role to play. To take full stock of Cannes’s importance, we need to make a brief historical detour.
Cinema, Nation, Economics
The construction of the critical role of the arts in a world dominated by market forces is a recent phenomenon, linked to the domination of market economics as the foundational element of the organization of collective life. This role concerns all the arts, but the cinema’s role therein is decisive, due to its particular industrial and commercial relations. This construction was largely developed for a number of reasons in France. First of all, during the first century of cinema there existed a particular complicity between the cinema and the organization of companies into nations.
Subsequently, among the great nations of film, France historically maintained a particular rapport to its culture. This rapport is signaled by a political centralism: for a long time French culture was the prerogative of kings, later of the Republic. It is a conception directly linked to the French nation’s ambition to occupy a preeminent place on the international scene, indeed to transmit its values to all humanity-a conception that we the French have a tendency to take for granted, but it’s worth remarking that Swedes, Bulgarians, or Australians have never felt a similar penchant. The end of France’s territorial empire and its concomitant loss of stature as a “great power” decisively marked its ascendancy in the cultural sphere in the world. But it can no longer do so by pretending to a cultural supremacy over all others; the tragic aftermath of its colonial ambitions forbid any such pretensions. Today it’s a question of affirming the protection of all cultures, in the face of a hegemony which France has no longer any chance of possessing.
The cinema found itself in the situation of playing a major role within this history, as an art tied to industry and as an art tied to the nation. There was thus a convergence of political interests (the French State counts on the cinema to increase its sphere of influence and to maintain the imaginary collective) and economic interests (professionals energetically align themselves under this banner allowing them coincidentally to defend their capacity of production, that is their part of the market indeed to conquer from the exterior). This convergence gained in force thanks to another convergence, which caused a fusion of the political-economic couple with the rapport of intellectuals to the cinema: the cultural legitimacy conferred by the activity of the intelligentsia in the cinematographic domain (the long history of criticism) provided the best weapon in the conflicts through which were defended the political and economic goals of the French, confronting other political and economic interests, essentially those of the United States and those that fall under the influence or the intimidation of the U.S.
This skein of convergences, where diverse ways of thinking get mixed up, constituted in the course of the 20th century a singular alliance (and one that we have also been in the habit of taking for granted) between national interests (economic and political) and aesthetic and moral interests which are not, in principle, linked to any particular nation: the love of cinema, the critical labor that it inspires, and the hope that its diversity helps each individual to best develop his own rapport to the world and to others implicates in and of itself France and French cinema no more than any other film production and country, for the simple reason that the stakes are universal.
Hollywood Goes Global
But in the course of the last decades and in a decisive manner since the 1990s under the effect of phenomena as different as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the digital and the Internet revolution, there developed what we call globalization. Globalization calls into question the organization of modern societies into nations, at the profit of other structures, coming under other scales of grandeur (supra or infranational). This phenomenon evidently affects the organization of cinema, historically structured into national filmmaking practices. It particularly affects the most powerful and dynamic cinema, and the one most in synch with this evolution, that which we call Hollywood. For a long time, this word designated the industry of the Unites States; today it designates the dominant cinema in the era of globalization. Hollywood has become synonymous with globalization in the entertainment industry. Henceforth, Hollywood signifies and will increasingly signify, besides mass production, a globalized imaginary, that is to say an imaginary structured according to the interests of the global market.
One of the effects of this evolution is the breaking of the alliance between the interests of the French industrialists of the cinema and the aesthetic and ethical stakes of a cultural exceptionalism. If the sector is no longer structured by nations, the entrepreneurs of cinema have no reason to not become a participant in the process of globalization, and that’s just what they are in the process of doing,(the naturalization of Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles is but the most recent and blatant example). Those in charge politically find themselves obliged to maintain the fiction, which is becoming more and more difficult, of a joint defense of material and ideal interests henceforth diverging. The defense of cultural exceptionalism now needs to rely upon another alliance. Even if the support of political leaders who define themselves essentially always by their national membership remains indispensable to it, cultural exceptionalism also needs to go global. Certainly political leaders have a role to play in these actions other than simply at a national level (see page 38), but it is at the level of cinema where the reorganization is occurring.
The Strategic Role of Film Festivals
It is in this context that film festivals acquire a new and very important role. Formerly a showcase for the different national filmmaking practices exhibiting their best jewels, they become the intermediary of an uninterrupted circulation of another idea of cinema than that favored by the market. Beyond the numerous differences (in length, subject and tone) between the various festivals, they constitute a planetary network where a different kind of cinema is possible. Cannes, the preeminent festival in the world, plays an important role both as a model for others and as a particularly powerful echo chamber, indeed as an anchoring point of initiatives, of which it isn’t always the first to be in the know, but to which it lends a supplementary weight, beyond that of simply showcasing films.
This phenomenon bears two specific dangers. The first is aesthetic: there is the risk of creating “festival films,” simply a variation on Hollywood mass production but equally simplistic. Those in charge of selecting films for festivals and film critics have the duty to work tirelessly against such a tendency. The second danger is economic: there is the possibility of creating two distinct systems and of unequal weight, a powerful global market and a festival bubble where “artistic” films and their makers can exist in a state of weightlessness, thanks to grants and sponsoring. The cinema is only alive in a rapport-albeit conflictual or minority-to the public’s desire, which in our secular world, translates commercially, specifically by the purchase of ticket or a DVD. The question of inventing new modes of diffusion presents itself to the festivals, as well as to all those (filmmakers, political and cultural leaders, distributors and exhibitors...) who hold dear the future of this circulation between films and audiences.
In the future, these will be structured less and less by the old models of organization, based on national audiences. We have the habit of granting a great importance to the rapport between and an auteur and his/her audience. But how to define in the current circumstances an audience? Is it one’s compatriots? It is less and less clear. The majority of Kiarostami’s audience is not in Iran, nor is Edward Young’s in Taiwan, nor Gus van Sant’s in the United States (Woody Allen was the first to embody such a disconnection). It is not a question of pleading for a break between films and reality (a deadly hypothesis), but of taking into account that this reality is no longer only defined territorially. There exists, and there will exist more and more other forms of articulation to reality. That’s what the best recent films show us; it is also what must be invented as an economic and structural environment for the cinema of tomorrow.
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