Gilles Jacob Speech at the Presentation of the Palme d’honneur to Bernardo Bertolucci

Good evening all.

Imagine the foyer of a large Italian hotel at the beginning of the 1980s. Next to me, stands an elegantly dressed man, who I do, of course recognise: a film director. He smiles at me. I lean towards him and I say to you – because you were this film director, dear Bernardo: “It wasn’t too difficult in Prague?”. Somewhat tight-lipped, you reply: I think you must be confusing me with someone else. True to form, I had, in fact, confused you with Milos Forman. Ouch! I cringed, but if we follow the theory of six degrees of separation, we were, from that moment on, united for better or for worse.

The better took the form of the magnificent years when cinema mania was at its height and your films alongside it. The precious moment when I asked you to receive on set, the Great Kurosawa. He had reviewed a wealth of directors – with his self-conscious modesty – and you rose to the challenge of such a compliment. You learnt a word in Japanese, just one word, but you repeated it three times: thank you, thank you, thank you, followed by a phrase you had learnt by heart, but this also barely captured your emotion and your affection. In fact, just like back then, in the name of world cinema and the Festival de Cannes, I want to say to you this evening – grazie, grazie, grazie.

When you first began, it was not difficult to identify your influences: “Before the Revolution”, was Stendhal, “Partner”: Godard, “The Conformist”: Moravia and Visconti was dotted about. And then, you took flight with your own wings, on the wings of poetry with political conscience. As we have just seen in this splendid extract from “1900”: you continue to restore the physical presence of places with their scents and colours. You continue to adopt family themes: the search for lost identity, partisan love choices and the hero who draws his metamorphosis from a historical context.

The things that move you are the angry young, the desperate outbreaks of revolt, the refinements of a dying society, the individual who falls apart in a collective saga: that’s what makes you one of the greatest directors of our times. It is said that art, provokes emotions that life itself cannot come close to. For the masters of cinema, this is obvious. The tumultuous force of your images and soundtracks is found in the close-ups of the human face or of a desert, as well as in the luxurious shots from your camera. It is found too, in the elegance of your fully choreographed directing. Thanks to you, human adventure will flicker forever on the screen, in a “Last Tango” which will never fail to bowl us over. (I will take this opportunity to pay tribute to the ever emotive Maria Schneider).

This Palme d’honneur, your honour, does not seek to canonise a film director during their lifetime. My wish is that you triumph over your back pain, so that you can provide us with a new “The Spider’s Stratagem”, a different “The Last Emperor”, several more “Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man” and another “The Sheltering Sky”. Today we are celebrating a major and consistent body of work, works which as an audience makes us happy, all the while leaving an indelible trace in the history of cinema.

Gilles Jacob