The 69th Cannes Film Festival is officially here, so to close out our set of features about it (here’s our Ranking of the 21st Century Palme d’Or Winners, the Best Breakout Films From Un Certain Regard, and 20 Movies Booed At Cannes) we turn our attention to the smaller, but often more genuinely innovative sidebar, the Directors’ Fortnight (known locally as the Quinzaine).
Established in 1969 by the French Directors Guild (and therefore not part of the festival’s Official Selection which reportedly leads to a little friction between the two entities), the parallel festival, held simultaneously with Cannes, has hosted some of the most exciting talents to have shaped modern film culture. The boost that the Quinzaine slot provided such filmmakers, often at an early stage of their careers, in many cases proved formative for their future prospects. Here are just 20 of the biggest standouts from the Director’s Fortnight from 1969 to today — we’re pretty sure you’ll be surprised by the caliber of talent it has fostered over the years.
“Head” (1968)
Though it’s far from the most celebrated film in the entire Director’s Fortnight roster — if anything, it may be the most maligned — Bob Rafelson’s giddy flower-age musical “Head” ended up first on the list for a number of reasons. For one, “Head” marks the formidable Rafelson’s debut as an American filmmaker. Of course, he would go on to follow this horribly misunderstood film with “Five Easy Pieces,” widely regarded as one of the milestones of its era, and then the moving and under-seen “The King Of Marvin Gardens.” Rafelson also penned the film’s script with “Five Easy Pieces” star Jack Nicholson, though judging by the proudly plotless and overwhelmingly absurd schematics of the story, it’s anybody’s guess exactly how many illicit drugs were consumed during the initial stages of writing it. The movie was conceived as a sort of star vehicle for British pop megastars The Monkees, probably with the hope that the group would enjoy the same success that the Beatles tasted with “A Hard Day’s Night” or even the lesser-liked “Help!” Alas, domestic audiences were not kind to Rafelson’s playfully scatterbrained film when it was first released, so imagining how the famously critical audiences at Cannes might have greeted it is indeed something to ponder. Nevertheless, “Head,” in spite of not exactly being a great movie, is a still-relevant and endlessly fascinating cultural artifact: an undeniably dated product of its time that accidentally ends up saying a lot about how and why we watch movies.
“Putney Swope” (1969)
The DNA of “Putney Swope” can be seen in everything from “Louie” to “Boogie Nights,” and even still, it must have been quite something to have actually been there to witness the reactions that those on the Croisette had when presented with Robert Downey’s surreal and confrontational comedy classic. In a body full of work that defies categorization on every level, “Putney Swope” still stands out as being one of the strangest and funniest films of its time: an unruly work of renegade art that takes aim at the white power structure, the corporate culture of mid-’60s America, and about a dozen or so other targets as well. The story of a radicalized African-American executive at a mostly white New York advertising firm called Truth and Soul, Inc., “Putney Swope” is both undeniably a product of the irreverent counterculture mindset it depicts, and also, somehow, a weirdly timeless work of art. While Downey may not boast the recognizability as other more reputed filmmakers of his era, his influence is considerable: The director’s anything-goes approach paved the way for a new kind of gonzo D.I.Y. filmmaking that trickled down to everyone from Woody Allen to Jim Jarmusch.
“THX 1138” (1971)
Cannes is the last place you expect to see a name like George Lucas, let alone in one of its more arcane and cinephile-y sidebars. Lucas is, after all, mostly known for his unapologetically commercial brand of blockbuster filmmaking that hit its peak with 1977’s “Star Wars.” Six years earlier, though, Lucas brought a quieter, more unclassifiable film to the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes in the form of his out-there science fiction piece, and proper debut, “THX 1138.” Perhaps when you’ve spent more or less your entire career elaborating on the same fictional world as Lucas has, an atmospheric, sophisticated work like “THX 1138” could unfortunately get lost in the muddle. The story of a terrifying future dystopia where sexual intercourse is outlawed, humans are given names that consist of a random series of letters and numbers, and mind-bending hallucinogens are all but forced upon the populace at large, “THX 1138” seems almost purposely antiseptic at first. It has the glacial, patient pace of a Tarkovsky film, and its world of glistening, sterile surfaces seems a far cry from those fashioned by the bawdy pop filmmaker who made “American Grafitti.” And yet, before he eventually became pickled by the world he helped to create, Lucas was an exciting and relevant visual artist. For a feature-film debut, “THX 1138” might be polarizing, but you can’t deny the clarity of its vision.
“Mean Streets” (1973)
Back in 1973, Martin Scorsese was just another restless aspiring director with merely two credits to his name (the autobiographical “Who’s That Knocking At My Door?” and the Roger Corman-produced “Boxcar Bertha”). These days, of course, it’s easy to take for granted what we now consider to be the Scorsese “hallmarks”: the lightning-quick bursts of tough-guy talk and horrific violence, the seething Rolling Stones songs on the soundtrack, and, of course, the profound moral anguish at the core of it all. While all those elements are certainly present in “Mean Streets,” the movie most cinephiles consider to be his breakout, what ultimately makes the film so memorable and enduring is the sense of authenticity at its center. It has the sense of ugly reality that can only come with experience, and the kind of blistering honesty that no amount of filmmaking pizzazz can fake. We’ve seen so many Scorsese imitators in the last few years that it’s easy to forget just how fresh it all seemed back in 1973. The film is packed with immortal moments — though perhaps none more so than the early image of a porkpie hat-wearing Johnny Boy (a then-unknown Robert De Niro) blowing up a neighborhood mailbox just for the hell of it —and if nothing else, the film’s Cannes screening helped to cement Scorsese as one of the defining artists of his generation among international audiences.
“Black Jack” (1979)
One of the many things that director Ken Loach is known for is for bringing a kind of ground-level realism and a sense of sociopolitical awareness to whatever project he tackles. This would make him an ideal fit for a festival like Cannes, which so frequently pays tribute to social cinema. And yet his beguiling children’s period drama “Black Jack” is dominated by a mood of capriciousness and mischief, even when things get grave (and they do). Reportedly a looming influence on Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” — not the least bit because both films feature teenage runaways in their plots — “Black Jack” was released at a time when Loach was trying to transition out of television and into motion pictures. Though the film was not widely acclaimed upon its release, “Black Jack” has enjoyed the status of a rediscovered classic in subsequent years, and it’s very much a transitional point between Loach’s early work and the films that would go on to color his legacy. The harshness of the sound mix and the grain of the 16mm film on which Loach and cinematographer Chris Menges shot the film’s verdant exteriors add to “Black Jack”’s rough-hewn luster, solidifying it as one of the director’s most entertaining and approachable films.