Notes

Since its inception, Cannes has been a source of contention. The first festival, founded by the French in response to the Venice Film Festival, which was being used as a vehicle for Nazi propaganda films, had to be cancelled when it began on the day WWII broke out.
Since its introduction in 1946, the festival has been a breeding ground for controversial films, wannabes stripping for a shot at fame, public spats between filmmakers and critics, and publicity stunts gone awry.
The newest controversy revolves around "Grace of Monaco," a biography of Grace Kelly, the Oscar-winning American actress who later became Princess of Monaco.
The Monaco royal family has condemned the film, claiming it contains "major historical untruths and a series of purely fictional elements." The festival refused to say whether Prince Albert and his sisters, Caroline and Stéphanie, would attend the gala premiere.
Altercations, controversies, and stunts are perhaps as important to Cannes as the films, and here are some of the best, in no particular order.
Starlet on the hunt for publicity Simone Silva removed her top during a picture shoot with Hollywood star Robert Mitchum and made international headlines for a brief moment during an infamous event at the 1954 festival.
The British B-movie actress and glamour model showed up on the Croisette hoping for attention and was promptly proclaimed "Miss Festival" by organizers who established the photo shoot on the beach.
"The photographers got down on their knees pleading with me to take the top off," she was reported as saying in The Daily Reporter, an Ohio newspaper.

She did, taking off her flimsy scarf top and cuddling up to Robert Mitchum with nothing but a grass skirt and her hands covering her breasts. Three photographers were thrown into the Mediterranean during the ensuing melee, while a fourth damaged his ankle and another shattered his elbow.
Some things you simply know are a poor idea, don't you? Apparently not if you're the up-and-coming cast of a hot British film.

In 2001, performers from the film "24 Hour Party People," which depicts the Manchester music scene in the late 1980s, fought one other on a private Cannes beach with dead pigeons, splattering customers at an upscale restaurant with fake blood, feathers, and worse.

Security personnel brandished mace at the actors, and they were expelled from the beach, along with the film team and an entourage of British media who had been watching enthusiastically.

The ill-advised marketing stunt was devised by actor Danny Cunningham, who played Shaun Ryder, the crazy lead singer of Manchester indie band Happy Mondays. He stated it.


Silva was forced to leave the festival a few days later, but remained defiant: "As long as sex is box office and I keep my figure, I'm out to be the sexiest thing on, oh, two legs."

A dead pigeon joke gone bad

Some things you just know are true.
He claimed it was inspired by an alleged episode in Ryder's adolescence, depicted in the film, in which he poisoned 3,000 Manchester pigeons with crack cocaine. For the stunt, the actors brought stuffed birds.

Cunningham, who was injured in the incident, told the BBC, "I think Shaun would have been proud of us." We came to Cannes to have fun, and now we're leaving."
On the beach, there's a new wave.

It was May 1968, and a revolution was brewing. Students were marching in the streets, while workers were taking part in France's largest strike in history. It was almost unavoidable that some of that passion would find its way into the exclusive cinemas of Cannes.

Politics erupted in the In solidarity with the strikes, a group of filmmakers led by New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut urged that the festival be closed.

"We're talking solidarity with students and workers, and you're talking dolly shots and close-ups," Godard famously declared from behind a pair of Ray-Bans. "You're a bunch of assholes!"

Godard and Truffaut interrupted the following screening by hanging from the curtain as it was being drawn back, and the festival was cancelled five days later, five days before it was supposed to end. There were no prizes awarded.

With films like "Easy Rider" and "M*A*S*H," counterculture infiltrated the festival's repertoire throughout the next few years.

at 2003, cult film director and actor Vincent Gallo arrived at Cannes.
The critics booed in boredom and disgust during "The Brown Bunny," a nonsensical road movie with a brutal, unsimulated oral sex scene, and Roger Ebert labelled it "the worst film in the history of the festival."

Gallo went to the United States and began a new cut of the picture, but not before engaging in a verbal brawl with Ebert, calling him "a fat pig" with "the physique of a slave trader," and then putting a hex on his colon and saying he hoped he had cancer.

"I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV," Ebert remarked sarcastically. It was more fun than "The Brown Bunny."

We're discussing student solidarity and and workers, as well as dolly shots and close-ups.

Jean-Luc Godard is a filmmaker.

In a nod to late UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he said, "It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'"

Surprisingly, the fight ended in a truce. Gallo concluded his re-edit and exhibited "The Brown Bunny" in Toronto, where Ebert viewed it again and gave it three out of four stars.

'OK, I'm a Nazi,' says Lars von Trier.

In 2011, the notoriously eccentric Danish director Lars von Trier told a press conference that he was a Nazi, understood Hitler, and that his next film may be The Final Solution.
"I comprehend Hitler. Yes, I believe he did some horrible things, but I can envision him sitting in his bunker towards the end. "I think I understand the man," Von Trier stated while the stars of his sci-fi drama "Melancholia," Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, stared on in helpless astonishment.

"How am I going to get out of this?" "OK, I'm a Nazi," he said shortly after, in what can only be described as a poor joke. Festival officials blasted his words, which he quickly regretted, but officials nonetheless banned him from the festival, which was an unprecedented measure.

Since he began screening films at Cannes in the 1980s, Von Trier has been a one-man scandal factory. enraged over having been passed over for the highest award in He referred to Jury President Roman Polanski as a "midget" in 1991, and Icelandic musician Bjork, who won Best Actress for her performance in his 2000 film "Dancer in the Dark," swore she would never act again.

But, aside from the Nazi joke, probably his most egregious scandal occurred in 2009, when it was reported that some audience members collapsed from shock after viewing a scene in his gruesome art-horror "Antichrist" in which Charlotte Gainsbourg mutilates her genitals. The ecumenical jury at Cannes dubbed it "misogynistic" and bestowed a special anti-prize upon it.