1. Gilles Jacob, "Citizen Cannes": La Vie Passera Comme Un Rêve (2009), or Life Will Pass Like a Dream
Cannes film festival director Gilles Jacob is an almost legendary figure in French and world cinema: a cool mandarin and king-maker who, before devolving a sort-of prime ministerial role to Thierry Frémaux, had an almost autocratic power over the festival. This is his Cannes autobiography, which has been wryly indulged by the French press for his dreamy subjectivity and swooning over the Hollywood superstars who have graced his festival over the years. His final chapter, a series of "I remember" epiphanies derived from a minimalist literary conceit devised by Joe Brainard and Georges Perec, includes a memory of Emma Thompson climbing the red carpet steps in bare feet and giving him a packet of biscuits.
2. Stephen Walker, King of Cannes: A Journey Into the Underbelly of the Movies (1999)
This engaging and often very funny book by writer and documentary-maker Stephen Walker about his experiences at the 1998 festival is a pretty shrewd guide to what actually goes on. He follows the director Erick Zonca, then in contention for The Dream Life of Angels, along with some weird and wacky hopefuls plying their trade in the commercial market section which happens alongside the main festival and its sidebars.
3. JG Ballard, Super-Cannes (2000)
This has to be Ballard's late masterpiece and is sometimes regarded as a companion piece to his (slightly inferior) novel Cocaine Nights. Ballard proposes a futuristic business park built in the hills above Cannes, a rational technopolis which, far from having "designed out" crime, has secretly designed in rage, anarchy and despair. There are some tart remarks about the festival, and the new Palais building – opened in 1983, in fact – and their faintly sinister aspect, gesturing at the unexamined neurotic dimension of cinema. Ballard's book offered cinephiles and francophiles a new, uncliched way of looking at the rackety side of Cannes, the endlessly rehearsed serious/trashy paradox and the seamy side of the business. (See the Grant and Scriven books below.)
4. Sadi Grant, Folly at Cannes: A Novel (1902)
I discovered this cheerfully trashy and utterly forgotten little potboiler in the Humanities I section of the British Library. It celebrates "naughty" Cannes as a playground for Britain's smart and wealthy sophisticates – a 20th-century reputation which probably went some way to making it an appropriate place to site an international film festival. A rector's daughter is taken to Cannes where she has adventures: the opening of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca was to play on similar themes in Monte Carlo. (Its heir is Wendy Holden's outrageously named chick-lit romp Azur Like It: Cannes Life Be This Nice? (2003), which crams three puns into one title.)
5. Marcus Scriven, Splendour and Squalor (2009)
Journalist and travel writer Marcus Scriven's forthcoming book on the decline of the British blue blood gives some lively accounts of the aristocrats who loved Cannes, which was effectively "discovered" as a playground for the wealthy classes by Lord Brougham in 1834. Edward Fitzgerald, seventh Duke of Leinster, was in Cannes after the war, with the third of his four wives, where he met the Duchess of Windsor, and experienced what was described as her "Shanghai grip". Victor Hervey, sixth Marquess of Bristol, made a fortune selling arms to both sides in the Spanish civil war, deals negotiated in a Cannes bar. The dissolute 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, was murdered by his wife's lover in his apartment overlooking the Cannes bay in 2004.
6. Kieron Corless and Chris Darke, Cannes: Inside the World's Premier Film Festival (2007)
Arguably the best and most serious recent history of Cannes. Corless and Darke's tremendous book is far more than just self-indulgence: they use their history to make a case for the rehabilitation of auteur film-makers once celebrated at Cannes, but now neglected, such as Turkey's Yilmaz Güney and the Philippines' Lino Brocka. (However, I can't agree with their contention that giving the 2004 Palme d'Or to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was just liberal posturing. The Iraq war was our generation's Vietnam, and at a time when anti-war protest in the cinema was conspicuous only by its absence, Moore boldly and brashly made a case which has now become the received wisdom among precisely those media classes who once pooh-poohed him.) Corless and Darke's bibliography is far more systematic and scholarly than this list – it includes two books I haven't been able to get my hands on: Séverine Caneele's Aux Marches Du Palais, her account of winning the best actress prize in Cannes in 1999 for Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité, and Emmanuel Ethis's intriguing-sounding Aux Marches Du Palais: Le Festival De Cannes Sous Le Regard Des Sciences Sociales.
7. Roger Ebert, Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook (1988)
The great Roger Ebert is not a great Cannes presence these days, but here is an amiable, conversational memoir of what appears to have been a very agreeable sojourn in the south of France. Engagingly, it includes Ebert's own line drawings.
8. Iain Johnstone, Cannes: The Novel (1991)
The Cannes film festival novel is a weird, minor but distinct genre. Critic and author Iain Johnstone wrote what at the time was a tongue-in-cheek futurist nightmare, imagining the festival in 1997, as Hong Kong is about to be handed back to China – with triad terrorists holding the event to ransom. There is also Sara Voorhees's The Lumiere Affair: A Novel of Cannes (2007), Robert S Hopkins's Riviera: A Novel About the Cannes Film Festival (2008).
9. Wes Herschensohn, Resurrection in Cannes: The Making of The Picasso Summer (1979)
Herschensohn worked on the now very dimly remembered Albert Finney movie The Picasso Summer, and here is his very long, voluble, excitable history of how he personally journeyed to the south of France, on a mission to meet Picasso himself and enlist his help in inducing Warner Brothers to make the film. A curiosity – the readability factor is low.
10. William Goldman, Hype and Glory (1990)
The renowned Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman gives his account of being the only person to have judged the Cannes film festival and the Miss America pageant in the same year (1988), a bizarre appraisal combo he accepted as a distraction from the heartbreak of divorce. It is rather padded out with irrelevant autobiographical flashbacks, but there are startling touches: Goldman claims to have literally screamed with delight in the final moments of the eventual Palme d'Or winner, Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror. There are interesting insights on what it is like to serve on an international jury: the lingua franca for their deliberations is French; each English-speaking juror has a translator whispering into his or her ear; the system works in reverse for French jurors while English is being spoken and jurors who speak a language other than French or English have to provide their own translator, whose announcements are then translated. Very brain-frazzling.
