Since 2004, the Cannes Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival has been presenting heritage films and masterpieces of cinema in restored versions, tribute screenings of classics, and new documentaries. A parallel and non-competitive section of the festival, it is supported by dozens of affiliated institutions from the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée to the Academy Film Archive and the Film Heritage Foundation. This year, the section celebrates its 20th anniversary with a series of screenings, including a 4K restoration of Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas”, winner of the Palme d’Or 40 years ago, and Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”, which will mark 70 years since the film’s release. The highlight of this edition, however, will be Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, the 18-minute short “Scénarios”, which was completed the day before his death in 2022. We took a look into the Cannes Classics archive and paid a small tribute to a few films that have donned the “emperor’s new clothes” in the digital age.

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Black God, White Devil / Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Glauber Rocha, 1964) – Cannes Classics 2022

Black God, White Devil is part of that bundle of masterpieces of political cinema (The Battle of Algiers, Oh, Sun, The Hour of the Furnaces, The Battle of Chile, to name a few) that, with unbridled speed and force, goes straight into your veins: a viewing experience that is both deeply unsettling and energising; even the simple act of being a viewer of such a film feels like a subversive act. The great Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s masterpiece could just as well be set in the distant past as it could be in the near one – its elastic temporality allowing the existentialist parable at the core of the film to feel as relevant today as it was in 1964. Few films capture so directly the tragedy of the classes living in poverty and the enormous violence (physical, social, economic, spiritual, symbolic) to which they are subjected, and the way this violence (eminently wielded by men) affects women – as well as the way religion, radicalism, and ideology bear down on the unfortunate. A magnum opus of the Third Cinema. (Flavia Dima)

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The Story of a Three-Day Pass (Melvin Van Peebles, 1968) – Cannes Classics 2020

Many know filmmaker Melvin van Peebles, with good reason, as the author of the cult classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), the most crazed American film of the decade. Fewer know that he had debuted a few years earlier in France, tracing the Parisian cabarets and the Normandy coast on the trail of an unlikely couple of floating lovers. Turner (Harry Baird) is not the first American character to magnetise a local sixties debut – it was already done by Frankie, the sailor in Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961). On the other hand, The Story of a Three-Day Pass is not necessarily comparable: a few years had passed since its predecessor, during which the equipment had become lighter, the scripts more permissive, and the sociopolitical issues more urgent. With the typical glee of direct cinema, Van Peebles  Van Peebles discovers that sometimes filming a body gliding across the dance floor for minutes on end is enough, because the film flows by itself, carried by the vital energy of new postures. Driven by a romantic impulse, the film advances laxly and all the more whimsically knowing that no amount of absolute love will be able to make the violence of the racial issue go away. The negative of these images represents the difficult struggle for the emancipation of people of colour. (Victor Morozov)

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The Moon Has Risen / Tsuki wa noborinu (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955) – Cannes Classics 2021

The Moon Has Risen could have been an Ozu film – truly, for in addition to the typical figure of Chishu Ryu as the family patriarch, the screenplay itself was co-written by the great master of Japanese classic cinema. That Ozu never made it and it ended up in the hands of actress-director Kinuyo Tanaka is a grace of fate, which has given us two of the most beautiful courtship scenes in the entire history of cinema: both by moonlight, with the celestial body watching from afar over the delicate, awkward, hurt, melancholic, hurried, wrong, small and big gestures that articulate love. Few films have captured the beauty of Nara with such tact and interest, and even fewer films directed by a woman in Japan at the time (Tanaka is only the country’s second female director). But it’s not the circumstances that make Tanaka stand out, and The Moon Has Risen is by no means an emulation of Ozu. The screen might open to classic and familiar narratives, but Tanaka steers it towards stronger, more subtle feminine sensibilities. Three sisters and three female portraits, at different stages of life and love, look at post-war womanhood through a prism of both candour and freedom. Setsuko, the youngest of the sisters (and the most rebellious), anticipates in Mie Kitahara’s performance the youth spirit that Japanese cinema will plunge into towards the end of the decade. Of rare beauty and deep melancholy, Tanaka captures in The Moon Has Risen the most universal gesture there is, that of looking up mesmerised at the sky: “What a beautiful moon,” says Setsuko. “I wonder how many couples have looked at it.” (Dora Leu)

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The Lady from Constantinople / Sziget a szárazföldön (Judit Elek, 1969) – Cannes Classics 2023

Hungarian filmmaker Judit Elek (b. 1937), celebrated in retrospectives last year at IFFR Rotterdam and this year at the French Cinematheque, is my great discovery of the past year. Less famous than her compatriot Márta Mészáros, Judit Elek has made both fiction and documentary films that are as incisive and attentive to the raw realities of her time, as well as to Hungary’s past. Her best-known feature is her debut, The Lady from Constantinople (1969), which was included at the time in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and was screened again in 2023 on the Croisette in a restored version. The film follows an elderly woman who changes residences and wanders around the city, all the while experiencing various bizarre situations, some even surreal. A mixture of cinéma vérité and fantasy that brings a fresh perspective on life in communist Hungary. (Ionuț Mareș)

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Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) – Cannes Classics 2024

“The film was made with a camera and a guitar,” said Wim Wenders about Paris, Texas, the Palme d’Or winner 40 years ago, which will open this year’s Cannes Classics in a restored 4K version – the vivid, isolated images and soundtrack are at least two reasons I envy viewers who’ll be revisiting the film on the Croisette. Then, there’s the wonderful performance by Harry Dean Stanton, playing Travis, a lost soul who “emerges” from the desert after disappearing for four years: he has no identification, has lost his memory and doesn’t speak, and his only wish is to find the family he abandoned. Travis roams the film like a ghost and gradually comes back to life with the help of his pre-teen son (Hunter), with whom he sets off on a journey to find his long-lost mother (the stunning Nastassja Kinski). And then there’s the moment of their reunion, with the scene set in a peep-show booth, each recounting how they loved when they loved and how much it hurt when everything fell apart, which takes your breath away. I couldn’t decide if the film is a good tonic for a romance or medicine for a love lost. (Anca Vancu)

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An article written by the magazine's team