Donald Clarke in Cannes: High and low culture fight it out

To the 68th Cannes Film Festival. This year, much of the chatter has concerned the ancient battle between high and low culture.

Are those the right words?

There's nothing much "low" about the ecstatically reviewed Mad Max: Fury Road. George Miller's post-apocalyptic road movie would have served as a very suitable opening film.

Following the pocket catastrophe that was last year's Grace of Monaco – notable only for the adjacency of its locations – the folk at Cannes decided, however, to go with a furrowed French film entitled La Tête Haute by the little known Emmanuelle Bercot. Mad Max did his thing on the second day.

Almost everybody will be aware of Max. Next to nobody will know about Ms Bercot's very impressive coming-of-age picture. In the opening days we also saw the lovely Our Little Sister by Hirokazu Koreeda and, an Irish co-production, Yorgos Lanthimos's magnificently barmy The Lobster.

Do you care? The Cannes Film Festival is one of the few points in the year when – this is the current buzz phrase, I believe – “cultural cinema” receives significant coverage beyond the arts pages.

The winners of the Venice and Berlin Film festivals also attract a bit of notice. The race for best foreign language picture at the Oscar may also sneak into news reports. For the rest of the year, art cinema makes little more impact on the mainstream than water polo or dendrology. It is interesting that it was not always thus.

New Wave

From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, world cinema experienced the most rare of booms. Any half-educated person knows about the New Wave that transformed French cinema 50 years ago. At about the same time, British social-realist directors such as Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson began breaking through in the UK. A little later, film-makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog began addressing the compromises of post-war Germany. Ingmar Bergman was at the height of his powers. Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura were at work in Japan. In the 1970s, Senegal went through a well-remembered “golden age”.

It would be absurd to suggest that any of the directors mentioned above registered with the public in the way that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were about to. Indeed, many more millions saw François Truffaut play a confused scientist in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind than ever saw his own Jules et Jim or The 400 Blows. But the influence of those film-makers showed through in popular cinema. A picture like The French Connection – with its faux-vérité camera moves and busy location shots – could never have existed without the influence of the French New Wave.

The Godfather nodded towards the luscious later pictures of Luchino Visconti. For a few years, mainstream cinema and (let's try this again) "cultural cinema" were in such close harmony that the distinction almost ceased to matter.

More to our point, in Anglophone countries, interest in "foreign-language" cinema was as common as an interest in literature or the more outré corners of popular music. The same sort of people who cared about the next Gabriel García Márquez novel gave hoots about the new films from Michelangelo Antonioni or Jean-Luc Godard. Cultural cinema once sat within a high- to middle-brow loop that subsequently contracted to leave the current highbrow greats in the same ghetto as conceptual artists and avant garde composers.

It is hard to know quite how this happened. The films haven't got significantly more "difficult". There was a time when slightly risqué films such as I Am Curious (Yellow) attracted modest crowds in mainstream cinemas. Later this week at Cannes, Gaspar Noé's Love, a sexually explicit 3-D puzzler from a repeat offender, will unspool at a midnight screening. There will be mutterings in fashionable places. But it seems unlikely Mr Noé's picture will trouble more than a few punters at the multiplex.

Modernist tendencies

Over a century ago, modernist tendencies pushed away significant sections of the audience for new classical music. Something a little similar happened in the visual arts, but no such lunge towards abstraction has hit cultural cinema since its high period 40 years ago.

The rise of video and the rapacious advance of the multiplex had something to do with this. Mighty corporations promised to set aside one small screen for the latest Spanish entertainment, but, instead, ran three extra screenings of Jurassic Park. Older audiences, less prone to venturing out, caught the Pedro Almodóvar on home entertainment.

All the more reason to savour our surviving centres of cultural cinema: the Irish Film Institute and the Light House in Dublin; the Triskel in Cork and the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast.

All the more reason to allow the militantly highbrow corners of the Cannes Film Festival their period in the (literal and figurative) sun.