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Jane Clark - Cannes Journal
Day 6
 Jane Clark is in Cannes Writing about the Daily happenings at the Cannes Film Festival
DAY 6 Let’s talk about the white elephant in the room: the lack of female directors. Yesterday throughout the day, The Cannes Film Festival screened a film that they made in celebration of their 60th year in business. The film was comprised of 3-minute shorts made by directors that had played at Cannes throughout the years, about the state of cinema today. There were 35 shorts from directors like Gus Van Sant, David Cronenberg, Lars Von Trier, The Coen Brothers, Wong Kar Wai, Roman Polanski, Atom Egoyan, Walter Salles, plus a lot of Asian male directors who’s names I can’t spell…and Jane Campion. Yup, that’s right. That’s it. One woman. One lone woman’s voice represented the history of cinema at Cannes. That’s not to say she’s the only woman director to have screened here. But she is one of the very few (Sofia Coppola comes to mind) that has achieved a level recognition and respect. Which means she is one of the only ones to be able to get her films made, have wide distribution and advertising dollars. Most of the films in “Chacun Son Cinema,” (“To Each HIS Own Cinema”) were amusing, some were provocative, and most because they were made by men were male slanted – male protagonists, masculine behavior, which is reflective of cinema as a whole. Women make up something like 55% of the world’s movie going audience and yet there are very few films released each year that reflect that and even those films are rarely made by women. And the lone female voice in the mix of shorts, spoke up with humor to that fact. Jane made a film, “The Lady Bug,” about a ladybug in a theater. She was played by an actress in a ladybug suit and she is lying around in a vent, when a male janitor spots her. He takes his broom and tries to poke her, but can’t get the handle far enough back. Later the ladybug goes out on the stage and begins joyously dancing around and singing a song about being happy, when the janitor comes along and stomps the back half of her. With her legs squished (and her voice squashed) she drags herself off the stage. Most of the directors listed above were answering questions at a news conference. One reporter asked Jane about the fact she was the only woman. She admitted, wryly, that it was “strange to be with this great big football team…but I’m making the best of it.” She went on to say that the lack of women directors is ‘sad’, but that probably the men on the panel would agree with her. “I think it is just a reflection of how things are now…everywhere,” in societies in general, in corporations etc. She wasn’t bitter or angry, simply stating the truth as she saw it, which is how I feel. Rather than get angry and bombast against the reality, I figure as a collective group women need to find a way to change the situation. As Jane put it “…the feminine is such a strong and important aspect to all humanity,” It would be a shame for 55% of the world’s population to continue to have little representation in a medium that causes so much change and is so culturally important to our society.
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