The official poster for the 2024 Cannes Film Festival is a serene, poetic visual, orchestrated heavily by the cinematic presence of Japanese movie-making maestro, Akira Kurosawa. For it is his 1991 feature, Rhapsody in August, that the scene in question is from. The design choice echoes prior Festival de Cannes posters that enrapture moments from film itself.
One of the French New Wave architects, Jean-Luc Godard, had his films appear twice on the walls of the Croisette – with the enigmatic stairs that Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot frequent from Le Mépris (Contempt), and that kiss between Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou. The illustrious image from In the Mood for Love, by Wong Kar-Wai. Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank on another staircase in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. The romantic intrigue between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. More smooching, this time with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in A New Kind of Love from Melville Shavelson. And two of the most iconic of all – super-cool Marcello Mastroianni from Federico Fellini’s 8½, and one of many gorgeous possibilities from Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, featuring the beautiful Monica Vitti.
