ON its notepaper and on the logo which precedes all its official screenings, the event is known simply as Le Festival International du Film. No mention of Cannes or France. Just the film festival. There are hundreds of film festivals all over the world, but nothing compares to Cannes. Even Venice and Toronto, the next most important festivals, trail far behind.
Cannes is another planet. And this year, it celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Each year, the population of the small Cote d'Azur town doubles as film makers, distributors, journalists and wannabes of all sorts pour into the area from all corners of the globe.
The popular image of the event is one of sun, sand and sex but while all these are available in ample quantities, it is movies that dominate at Cannes round the clock, from the sadistically programmed first screening at 8.30 every morning to the wrap up of the last party 20 or more hours later. There are 152 screenings a day. And it's like that every day and night for 12 days, Sundays included.
It's very easy to spot the people who don't do any work at Cannes - they're the ones flying home with suntans.
In this distinctly unreal atmosphere, the outside world very rarely intrudes. It can, prove a daunting experience for first timers Cannes virgins, as they are popularly known.
Last year, more than 3,800 journalists received accreditation, but the main auditorium in the Festival Palais seats only about 2,000 and hundreds are turned away from the most attractive movies, and, regardless of the status of one's press card, getting into controversial films such as Pulp Fiction or Crash now habitually involves a great deal of pushing and persistence.
This year's event which opens on Wednesday with Luc Besson's mega budget futuristic picture, The Fiji 17 Element and closes on May 18th with Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power is expected to be the biggest, most high profile festival to date as a slew of former winners turn up to help Cannes celebrate its 50th birthday.
The first Cannes Film Festival was scheduled for September 1st, 1939. It was a response to the Venice festival, already seven years old, which had been dominated by Mussolini and the Nazis and had shunned such French classics as Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion.
The founder of cinema, Louis Lumiere, was to chair the first Cannes jury, and the United States sent a "steamship of stars" with Gary Cooper, Mac West, Tyrone Power, Norma Shearer, George Raft and Douglas Fair banks all aboard.
But on the opening day of the festival, Hitler invaded Poland. The festival was abandoned with only the opening film, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame starring Charles Laughton, having made it to the screen.
The first complete Cannes festival was held in 1946: the festival was not held in 1948 and 1950 because of economic problems.
Even in the very early years the extremes of the festival were apparent: guests ranged from Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the Aga Khan. The Aga Khan's playboy son, Aly Khan, married Rita Hayworth in Cannes during the 1949 festival.
In a still more glamorous wedding, Grace Kelly wed Prince Rainier of Monaco during the 1956 festival.
Meanwhile, Cannes' image as a place for photographing topless starlets was established in 1954 when, during a press lunch for Robert Mitchum, an unknown aspiring actress, Simone Sylva, dropped her top and the cameras popped. To this day, not a festival goes by without the paparazzi circling topless starlets on the beach at Cannes even though by now most of the sunbathers there are topless.
And however informal life on the beach has become, the festival has not relaxed its ridiculous rule that all evening screenings are strictly tenue de soiree, and improperly dressed guests are sent back down the red carpet in shame. In the late 1950s the elitism of the festival came under attack from the French critics, one of whom was banned from the festival in 1958. Not to be deterred, Francois Truffaut returned a year later as a director with his first feature, The 400 Block, and went home with the main prize, the Palme d'Or.
During les evenements of May 1968, as France came to a standstill during the protests by workers and students, Truffaut was centre stage again in Cannes, when he and JeanLuc Godard literally pulled the curtain down on the festival. The organisers had no choice but to give in and the festival ground to a halt at the half way point.
As the leading US critic, Todd McCarthy, noted in Variety recently: "Cannes has been the place, more than any other, where talents are discovered, reputations are made and deals are done, where someone can arrive a nobody and depart a star, where Hollywood began mixing with the rest of the cinematic world, where the true internationalisation of film took place. Cannes has been the place where film as business and film as art have most conspicuously commingled, with the art usually carrying the day by a whisker." Gilles Jacob, the festival's astute director since 1978, took up that subject when he quoted Andre Malraux's observation that "cinema is a business that also happens to be an art." Sometimes, however, so ostentatious is the nature of the business that the art can get overlooked.
When I arrived a Cannes virgin in 1982, it was impossible not to be distracted by all the hoopla. Posters lined every available space on the Croisette, many of them promoting movies which were merely wishful thinking in the minds of their producers and would never go into production. Then there were all the planes hired by producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind to strafe the beach at lunchtime every day and distract alfresco diners with their streamers publicising the Salkinds's Superman pictures or their wretched Santa Claus, The Movie. And there was Cannon, the company run by the publicity hungry Israeli producer and distributor, Menachem Golan who threw dozens of parties, ranging from the lavish to the tackiest, to promote his mostly low budget movies.
At one particularly gaudy party a themed event to promote Cannon's King Solomon's Mines remake featuring Richard Chamberlain and a then unknown Sharon Stone - Golan came up with a gimmick to make it seem more exclusive than it really was: guests would gain admission only by producing their invitation and their passport. Another Cannon stroke was when Golan signed a contract on a hotel napkin with Jean Luc Godard, to make a film of King Lear that would star, among others, Woody Allen. To everyone's amazement, the project actually became a reality, but so few people saw it that the joke going round Cannes was that the napkin was worth more than the finished film.
That year, the jury which included Geraldine Chaplin, Jean Jacques Annaud, Sidney Lumet and Gabriel Gareia Marquez decided to share the Palme d'Or between two fine political films, Missing and Yol. It was the year when an unknown Irish film, Neil Jordan's Angel, became the discovery in the festival's crowded market place so much so that a number of prominent critics and distributors were willing to stand throughout its screenings in cramped market cinemas.
The honorary Irish consul in nearby Antibes, Pierre Joannon, organised a small but delightful party for Angel at the Rivera's most fashionable hotel, Hotel du Cap, a 25 minute drive from Cannes. As the sun declined on the horizon, the guests who included Graham Greene, Bertrand Tavernier and John Boorman mingled on a marble terrace overlooking the Mediterranean and consumed Irish smoked salmon, wine and Jameson while Clannad music played on tape in the background. Afterwards, we all went to dinner at what became and remains my favourite Cannes restaurant, La Mere Besson.
And 1982 was the year when the festival closed with the world premiere of E.T I went into that screening bleary eyed after a long, late night party, and emerged two hours later exhilarated, walking on air.
One of the great pleasures of Cannes is seeing outstanding movies such as E.T when they are fresh, before any hype gets out about them.
MY most emotional memory of the festival is the 1985 screening of Vivement Truffaut, a documentary tribute to the director who had died some months earlier at the age of 52. At the end of the screening, a host of stars from Truffaut's films came on stage one by one, ending with the arrival centre stage of the director's lover and regular actress, Fanny Ardant. I still feel tingles when I recall the surge of emotion as the tear swept audience rose to its feet and resoundingly cheered one of France's and the world's greatest film makers.
I have covered Cannes for 15 consecutive years that adds up to more than half a year of my life and what a year.
Reflecting back triggers a collision of flashbacks, and these are just a few that stand out for different reasons:
I recall, in 1983, sitting behind the ultra chic Catherine Deneuve at a late night screening of The Hunger, in which she played a vampire. As the credits rolled, Deneuve rose elegantly from her seat and produced a cigarette while a profusion of lights were proferred by the men sitting around her.
Then there are the many wild and crazy parties organised towards the end of each festival by the trade paper, Moving Pictures, at the Chateau de La Napoule, a vast estate west of Cannes where hundreds of guests carouse until dawn and where anything could happen and probably does.
In 1988, there was a rooftop midnight party for John Waters's campy Hairspray. Retro music rocked the roof and arriving guests were fitted with beehive wigs. My incriminating photo memento of the night is securely locked away.
Returning home in 1990 and finding myself sitting next to David Lynch and Isabella Rossellini on the flight from Nice to Paris. Lynch's only hand baggage was the Palme d'Or he had won the night before, for Wild At Heart, and while Rossellini immersed herself in a book on Louise Brooks, Lynch gave me an exclusive interview.
At the 1991 awards ceremony, Lars Von Trier expressed his disgust at receiving just a runner up prize for Fumpa by kicking his scroll off the stage and sarcastically thanking "the midget (Polanski) and his jury".
In 1992, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory hosted a lunch after file press screening of their Howard's End. The venue was an idyllic villa where 16 or so guests dined in the shade of a huge pine tree planted by Queen Victoria 101 years earlier.
And, of course, the 1994 press conference for the dreadful Color of Night, when the blandness of the exchanges was disrupted by an American woman who demanded of the movie's star, Bruce Willis, "Don't you feel guilty about taking money for making shit like that?"