Why have the producer been creating the program politics of film festivals on the Berlin-Cannes-Venice stretch for years?
Where are the Hollywood stars? For many years, this question has troubled the journalists who cover entertainment events on the Berlin-Cannes-Venice stretch. While the majority of our distributors still believe that stars in front of the camera are more important than the men behind it, the situation at film festivals is the opposite. There, film authors and independent producers are treated as royalty. Their entrance into the movie theatre is followed by ten-minute ovations. They are the ones who create the program politics of the festivals, functioning as members of a secluded and exclusive brotherhood. This is the reason why Hollywood stars feel a bit uneasy at these events, as if they were unwanted outsiders.
Along with the holy trinity, Celluloid Dreams/Wild Bunch/Pyramide, a sort of a Holy Grail of the untouchable uniqueness of producers, which embraces all those uncut East Asian, post-Soviet, and Iranian author diamonds, there is also the MK2. This enigmatic code remains crucial for the opening of the contemporary European film safe as a cultural, social, economic, and esthetic creation. The code holds the initials of the indestructible Marin Karmitz, a man who receives more than a thousand scripts a year. He is also the man who introduced an unwritten rule that not a single edition of Cannes may begin without his author protégé Lucian Pintilie (both of them are Romanians).
In order to resist the domination of American capital that started taking control of Asian and European film production, Karmitz went a step further in his role of producer: instead of taking the traditional approach by which the distributors gradually become producers, he went in the opposite direction. Parallel with his distributing activities oriented to European auteur film, he embarked on a megalomaniacal project of building a multimedia City of pictures and sounds, situated near the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Even though he always tried to stress that art film theatres are to multiplexes what delicates stores are to hypermarkets, it was his chain of film theatres, 14-Juillet, with 44 screening rooms spread out on nine different locations in Paris that became a sort of a supermarket for film auteurs. It all began in 1974 when Karmitz opened his first film theatre in the working quarter of Paris, Bastille, which with the emergence of Jack Lang became the true trendsetters’ Mecca.
Even though the beginning of this program of films takes us back to Karmitz’s shorter creative phase, when he joined the rebellious members of the New Wave of 1968, (Seven Days Somewhere Else), the rest of it presents him as a producer. These films reflect the most important stages in the genesis of the French auteur film. We have here the quintessential Resnais (Mélo), who preserved the theatrical conventions of Bernstein’s original, including the set and light design, and the falling of the curtain in between acts. Afterwards this program introduces us to the Karmitz’s collaboration with Chabrol, which started during the 1980s and is still active today. The 1990s brought on some new exotic acquisitions, such as Kiarostami’s contemplative miniatures (The Wind Will Carry Us), and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s three colors. Nevertheless, Michael Haneke’s (Code Inconnu) social engagement correspond the best with Karmitz’s mission as a producer. Light and rebellion. Love and quality. Film and democracy. His whole work rests on these words.
(Dragan Rubeša)