LES MARCHES DU PALAIS

English description

English title: STEPS OF THE PALACE Original title: LES MARCHES DU PALAIS Directed by : Bernard Dartigues with : Philippe Caubère France, 1997, DVD 9, 16/9 comp 4/3 - 175 min zone 2, color, Dolby Stéréo Official selection, Cannes Festival 1997 In 1978, the French well-known actor Philippe Caubère, one of the founding members of the Cartoucherie de Vincennes Theater Company, presents in Cannes Film Festival Arianne Mnouchkine's first film MOLIERE. In there, he plays the leading role. The film is booed; Mnouchkine is attacked; the producer Claude Lelouch is insulted and Caubère is almost driven out of the town. After this shocking experience, he stops making films, quits the Mnouchkine company and becomes one of foremost one-man-show performers in France. Presented in the "Un Certain Regard" selection, performed by Caubère and directed by Bernard Dartigues, STEPS OF THE PALACE (LES MARCHES DU PALAIS) is a ferocious retelling of the entire adventure. Basically, this film is a hymn to the rejected persons - penniless actors, exhausted journalists, ruined producers, overworked press agents, film fans, people who get up at seven in the morning to watch films from all around the world, those who never get in the theaters... A hymn to the true madness of Cannes Film Festival, its baroque, pathetic and cruel-madness. "How could I talk about STEPS OF THE PALACE and its screening in Cannes? Through films and theater, I have attempted to relate the unfortunate experience of the film MOLIERE in Cannes Film Festival in 1977, twenty years ago, from the viewpoint of the most humble, modest and pathetic character: the actor. Not the star, the actor. (...) I have nothing to do with all that, nothing at all. I don't even act in the film. I'm a stage actor. That's my trade and my passion. But, since I love the cinema in a different, more secretive but furious, obsessive and contradictory way, I've worked for the cinema with the help and support of Bernard Dartigues. Like a vice. This is an outlandish and borderline form of cinema with a terrible reputation. Worse than porn movies, war reports or Nazi documents, worse than advertising: the filmed theater. But there again, that doesn't matter since what I'm dealing with here isn't theater but filmed cinema: the Cannes Film Festival." (Philippe Caubère)