Class War on the Red Carpet
The Cannes Film Festival might seem like an elite event, but it has deep roots in anti-fascism and the labor movement. Its early history in the years after World War II tells us how cinema can truly belong to the working class.
From left, French actors Jean Marais, Simone Signoret, and Roger Pigaut attend a demonstration to protest against the invasion of French screens by US films following the so-called Blum-Byrnes agreement in Paris on January 4, 1948. (AFP via Getty Images)
The Cannes Film Festival might sound a world away from socialist politics. Yet it has a far more radical past than the glitz and glamor of today’s red carpet might suggest.
Tangui Perron is a historian specializing in the connections between the labor movement, trade unionism, and film. In his latest book, whose French title reads Red Carpet and Class Struggles, Perron tells of how the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union federation, the French Communist Party (PCF), and the Left emerging from liberation from Nazism in 1944–45 shaped the festival’s origins.
In an interview with Le Vent se Lève’s Raphaël Martin-Dumazer, historian Perron discusses the festival’s roots, French cinema’s battle to defend itself from Hollywood, and how the cultural values of the postwar years survive even into the present.
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