ABSTRACT
The festival is an apolitical no-man’s land, a microcosm of how the world would be if people could have direct contacts and speak the same language.
( Jean Cocteau)
As an idealistic project for conflict resolution, it is said that the Cannes Film Festival is part of the public sphere, as Jean Cocteau asserted in 1954. The quotation remained on the front cover of the festival statutes until the mid 1980s. Yet the history of the festival does not entirely fit in with this idealistic framework – neither at the time of its inception nor later. Instead, the Cannes festival is exemplary of the way in which film and the arts more generally are entangled with political and economic interests in addition to representing an arena for debating the meaning and scope of cultural values within national and international frameworks. Furthermore, these debates during a film festival constitute a good example of affective modes of communication, both aesthetic and emotional, in the cultural public sphere (McGuigan 2005).
