Sightlines · World & politics course
The Art of Getting Booed: A History of the Festival Scandal
There is a secret tradition in cinema, running like a fuse from Paris in 1929 to Cannes in 2009: the film made to be refused. Not the flop, not the accident — the deliberate provocation, engineered shot by shot to make a premiere audience whistle, walk out, riot, or reach for the censor's telephone. Follow that fuse and something surprising emerges: nearly every scandal in this course was, underneath the outrage, a formal invention — a new way of cutting, framing, or pacing that audiences experienced first as an insult and only later recognized as a language. This course traces how the scandal evolved from Surrealist ambush to state affair to auteur ritual, and how each film's offending technique quietly became everyone else's toolkit.
The founding gesture: Buñuel reportedly stood behind the screen at the Paris premiere with his pockets full of stones, expecting to need them. The provocation begins with an image of a blade approaching an eye — a literal declaration of war on the act of watching — but the deeper scandal is the editing, which chains images by dream-association rather than cause and effect: a door opens onto a beach, a fall indoors lands in a meadow. What makes it work is a paradox worth studying in every frame: Albert Duverger's photography is clean, plain, and well-lit, the ordinary grammar of a normal story, so the impossible arrives without any visual warning label. That trick — render the outrageous in a calm, matter-of-fact style — is the single most durable invention in this course, and you will see it return in Buñuel's own hands three decades later, and again in Pasolini and Haneke.
Here the scandal moves from the avant-garde cellar to the national stage: at its Paris premiere on the eve of war, the film was booed, slashed by its distributor, and eventually banned — for the crime of showing the French leisure class as a beautiful machine running on hypocrisy. The offending instrument was not shock imagery but depth: Jean Bachelet's camera keeps foreground and background simultaneously sharp and drifts through the corridors of a country house so that a flirtation up front and a betrayal at the rear register in the same breath. No one is singled out for blame, which is precisely what audiences couldn't forgive — the frame indicts everyone at once, viewer included. Watch how the constantly moving camera turns a comedy of manners into a group X-ray; the New Wave critics who later canonized the film learned their idea of directing from these corridors.
At Cannes in 1960 the audience jeered and catcalled — not at violence or blasphemy, but at slowness. Antonioni's provocation was to set up a classic engine (a woman vanishes from a volcanic island; a search begins) and then refuse to run it at thriller speed, holding shots long past the moment other films would cut, letting figures drift to the edges of the frame or be dwarfed by rock and sea. The scandal, in other words, was a new tempo: the film asks you to feel duration itself, and the Cannes crowd experienced that as an affront. A group of critics and filmmakers signed a statement defending it overnight, and the jury gave it a prize — the first time in this course that the scandal and the consecration happen in the same week, a pattern every later festival provocateur would learn to count on. Watch the framing: two people standing close together, composed so the space between them does the talking.
The scandal as international incident. Buñuel, the exile of 1929, was invited back to Franco's Spain to make a film; he delivered one, it shared the top prize at Cannes — and the Vatican's newspaper denounced it, whereupon Spain disowned and banned the very film it had submitted. The blasphemy that detonated all this is staged with the Un Chien Andalou method perfected: José Aguayo's photography is sober, deep-focused, and classical, the visual style of a respectable literary drama, so that when a rowdy banquet of beggars suddenly arranges itself into the composition of a famous religious painting, the image seems to have occurred naturally, without a wink. Notice how Buñuel lets charged objects — a skipping rope, a crucifix — circulate through the film plainly photographed and never underlined; the camera's refusal to editorialize is what makes the provocation deniable and therefore undeniable. It is the same weapon as 1929, now aimed at a state.
At Venice in 1966 the French delegation walked out before the screening even began — a scandal of subject rather than style, or so it seemed. The real audacity is technical: Marcello Gatti shot staged scenes with pushed, grainy stock and long lenses that catch faces as if unaware, so that every frame carries the electric look of news footage grabbed under fire — and Pontecorvo opens with a card confessing that not one foot of it is real newsreel. He announces the forgery so you'll trust the image, and audiences did, to the point that governments treated the film itself as a political act and France kept it off screens for years. This inverts the course's founding trick: where Buñuel filmed the impossible in a plain style, Pontecorvo films fiction in the style of raw evidence. Between them, the two strategies map nearly everything scandal cinema has done since.
Now the scandal becomes a matter for customs officers and courtrooms. Ōshima's gambit was jurisdictional as much as artistic: he made the film's explicitness legally possible by routing production through France, and prints were seized, screenings blocked, and the director prosecuted for obscenity in Japan — the festival scandal expanded into a years-long legal performance about who is allowed to see what. The formal invention is the collision at the film's heart: Hideo Itō shoots the lovers with the stillness, frontality, and lacquered color of classical Japanese art — deep reds, patterned fabrics, compositions like woodblock prints — applying the most refined pictorial tradition to the most forbidden subject matter. Watch the one scene where a man walks against a marching column of soldiers: history flows one way, the film turns the other, and you understand why the state took it personally.
The same year, in Italy, the tradition reaches its coldest point — a film banned in country after country, seized and prosecuted for decades, its director murdered before it reached the public. What shocks in Salò is not frenzy but composure: Tonino Delli Colli's camera holds measured, symmetrical medium and wide shots, even light, elegant rooms — the visual manners of high civilization applied to the conduct of monsters, with a structure borrowed from Dante's graded circles instead of a plot. Pasolini's most unnerving device is distance itself: at key moments the film watches people watching, through windows and lenses, making the act of civilized spectatorship — yours — the true subject. It is Buñuel's plain-style blasphemy and Renoir's indicted-audience frame pushed to their limit, and it marks the moment the festival scandal stopped being survivable as mere mischief.
At Cannes in 1997, walkouts again — but engineered by a director who considered every walkout a correct response. Haneke's home-invasion film is built as a booby trap for the thriller audience: Jürgen Jürges shoots in long, static, frontally composed takes under flat light, refusing the shock cuts and darkness that make screen violence pleasurable, and the worst events happen off-screen while the camera holds — and holds — on an ordinary room in which nothing advances. The provocation is duration weaponized: Antonioni's dead time, which scandalized Cannes in 1960, returns here as a moral instrument, forcing you to sit in the aftermath you came to be entertained by. There are moments when the film seems to glance directly at you, breaking the pane between screen and seat; whether that's a game or an accusation is exactly the question Haneke wants ringing in the lobby afterward.
Cannes 2002: hundreds of walkouts, reports of fainting, medics in the aisles — the most physically literal scandal in the course, because Noé attacked the audience's body, not just its taste. In the early stretches, Benoît Debie's camera corkscrews and tumbles through space, unmoored from any human viewpoint, while a deep sub-bass tone rumbles at a frequency engineered to induce nausea; the film runs its long unbroken sequences in reverse order, so that dread flows backward into innocence and the gentlest images arrive already poisoned. The structural idea — time itself as the antagonist, announced by the maxim le temps détruit tout — belongs to the same family as Antonioni's tempo and Haneke's held shot: pacing as provocation. Notice how the camera gradually calms as the film travels toward its beginning; the style itself performs the arrow of time being unwound.
The tradition arrives at full self-awareness: by Cannes 2009 the festival scandal had become a genre with its own liturgy — gasps at the screening, a combative press conference, a jury inventing a special "anti-prize" to condemn the film even as the festival honored its lead actress. Von Trier's contribution is the scandal of beauty: Anthony Dod Mantle opens with a lustrous black-and-white slow-motion prologue, balletic and shallow-focused, every water droplet legible — a consciously gorgeous overture built so the rest of the film can corrode it, as a couple's grief drags them into a forest that seems to seethe with blind, tireless production and rot. Listen for the acorns falling on the cabin roof all night: nature as a sound design, indifferent and fertile, doing the film's arguing for it. The film is dedicated to Tarkovsky, and that dedication drew jeers of its own — a scandal within the scandal, over whether provocation may claim the mantle of the sacred.
What holds this line together is a repeated discovery: the fastest way to invent a new film language is to commit a breach of manners with it. Buñuel's deadpan surrealism, Renoir's all-seeing deep frame, Antonioni's held time, Pontecorvo's forged newsreel, Ōshima's classical eroticism, Pasolini's composed atrocity, Haneke's punitive long take, Noé's assaultive camera, von Trier's corroded beauty — every one entered cinema through a door marked outrage, and every one is now standard equipment, taught in film schools and borrowed by prestige television. The scandal itself evolved too: from genuine ambush (1929), to affair of state (1939–1966), to legal battleground (1976), to a ritual the festivals learned to host, market, and even give prizes to. The through-line is the audience: each of these films treats the people in the seats not as customers to be pleased but as participants to be implicated — and the boos, seen from this distance, were simply the sound of that implication landing. Watch them in order, and you can hear cinema learning, decade by decade, exactly how much truth a room full of well-dressed people can take.