The irony that a posthumous release from a revered independent filmmaker should not debut at the Cannes Film Festival because of its dispute with upstart distributor was not lost on Variety.
Film critic Owen Gleiberman deftly explained how Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind has become a casualty in the fight between Cannes and Netflix over the future of cinema in a column penned for Variety.
Gleiberman wrote, in part:
The Cannes Film Festival is still three weeks away, but we can already agree on its biggest disappointment: the fact that The Other Side of the Wind won’t premiere there. For years, it has been the Holy Grail of movie buffs to experience Orson Welles’ final film — or, at least, a scrupulously assembled version of what it might have been. The Other Side of the Wind has the potential to be the cinematic equivalent of the triumphant 2004 reconstruction of Brian Wilson’s album Smile: the fragments of a (possible) masterpiece pulled together and finally made whole. And Cannes has always felt like the right, reverent place for it.
The reason it isn’t happening, of course, is that The Other Side of the Wind is being distributed by Netflix, the streaming colossus that shepherded and financed the film’s reconstruction. Last week Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, announced that the company was pulling out of the festival entirely….
The conflict between Cannes and Netflix, which erupted last year when the inclusion of two Netflix films — The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and Okja — in the competition raised hackles among Netflix’s detractors, has now escalated into a full-fledged Cold War. This year, you can truly register the impact. Sight unseen, the recently announced Cannes lineup feels thin, quiet and a bit wan, like a Christmas tree without enough ornaments….
Yet savor, for a moment, the grand irony. The decision by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux and his executive board to maintain a hard line on the theatrical distribution question is Cannes’ way of keeping the big screen and the small screen separate. It’s the festival’s way of preserving the independence (and purity) of cinema. Yet the result of this policy is that Orson Welles, the filmmaker who invented independence in cinema, will not have his day at Cannes.
So who’s right and who’s wrong? Who’s winning and losing the war? And what, if anything, does the war mean?
Cannes, in my opinion, has every right to demand that the films that play in competition also play in theaters. No one would expect the Oscars to nominate movies that are available only through streaming services…..The real sticking point in this imbroglio is the stipulation that a film can’t stream in France until three years after it has played theatrically. To American ears, that rule sounds extreme — and, indeed, I’d call it a total anachronism. Yet it’s a law on the books, and Cannes, as long as it insists on theatrical distribution, has no choice but to play by it.
Of course, Cannes didn’t ban Netflix from the festival — just from the competition. And Netflix, while it has the right to be annoyed, if not furious, at France’s three-year theatrical/streaming rule, retaliated in a way that can only be called punitive….
You could argue that Cannes’ obsession with tradition is now hurting the festival; this year, it (willingly) sacrificed some of its own limelight. Yet Netflix, if it were truly the guardian of cinema’s future, might have agreed to let The Other Side of the Wind, at least, be shown out of competition….
Gleiberman’s entire column may be found at variety.com/2018/voices/columns/cannes-netflix-fight-1202756317/