THE cineastes who founded the Cannes Film Festival in 1939 surely must have been turning in their tombes over the weekend as the event was hijacked for publicity purposes, first by Michael Jackson and then by the Spice Girls, causing chaos on the Croisette.
After all, the Spices have never been in a film longer than a three minute pop video, although they were in Cannes yesterday to announce their first feature film, Spice The Movie, which shoots next month and is described as their Hard Day's Night.
In a festival which uneasily blends art and commerce at their most extreme, art reclaimed the spotlight last night when the festival pulled out all the stops to mark its 50th anniversary with a night of lavish celebrations.
The centrepiece of the celebrations was the stage ceremony where French actor Jeanne Moreau introduced one by one over two dozen former winners of the festival's principal award, the Palme d'Or, who had travelled from all over the world to attend the event.
The ceremony was followed by the world premiere of The End of Violence, the new film by another former Palme d'Or winner, Wim Wenders, who attended along with his film's stars, Gabriel Byrne, Andie McDowell, Traci Lind and Daniel Benzali.
Over 100 people had to be turned away from the world premiere of the new Irish film, I Went Down, when it was screened in the market at the festival last night. Priority admission was given to international film distributors who were seeing the film with a view to buying the distribution rights to the film in their countries.
"Basically, we had buyers here from the entire world," Ms Alison Thompson, chief executive of The Sales Company, which is selling the international rights to the film, told The Irish Times when the screening ended at midnight last night.
The Americans in attendance included Mr Harvey Weinstein, cochairman of the powerful Miramax Films which released Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot and Neil Jordan's The Crying Game in the US with considerable Oscars and commercial success.
The young Irish team - writer Conor McPherson, director Paddy Breathnach and producer Rob Walpole - behind I Went Dawn were delighted at the reaction as they sat nervously on the floor at the back of the cinema.
Meanwhile, the other Irish film receiving its world premiere in the Cannes market at the same time last night suffered by comparison. The film, The Last Bus Home, written and directed by Johnny Gogan, was about half full for the screening, but its sales agents, Beyond Films, expect bigger turnouts at its two afternoon screenings later this week.