• 1939 The first Cannes Film Festival is planned for September as an alternative to the Venice Film Festival, founded in 1932, which has fallen under fascist and then Nazi control. Louis Lumière, the inventor of cinema, agrees to preside over the festival and a “steamship of stars” arrives from the U.S., carrying among others, Gary Cooper, Charles Boyer, Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power and Mae West. A facsimile of Notre Dame is built on the beach in honour of the opening-night movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame., starring Charles Laughton. But the invasion of Poland by Germany on the first day of the festival causes the event to be cancelled.
• 1946 The first complete festival is mounted, with Roberto Rossellini's Open City winning the top prize among 44 international films entered. The festival serves as a centre where press and filmmakers can exchange information about the lost film years of the war. Artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau calls the festival “a living comet that has touched down for a few days on La Croisette.”
• 1949 Ali Khan marries Rita Hayworth in Cannes, as the film festival becomes one of the social events for the nascent jet set. But the festival is cancelled in 1948 and 1950 because of financial difficulties.
• 1951 The festival switches from September, which conflicted with Venice, to May, where it remains.
The Carlton Hotel on the Croisette on the eve of the start of the 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. (AFP/Getty Images)
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• 1953 Brigitte Bardot appears on the Croisette in a bikini.
• 1954 Starlet Simone Silva drops her halter top for the benefit of Robert Mitchum and attending photographers, who send the picture on wire services worldwide. Interest in the festival skyrockets. Three years later, Silva commits suicide in anonymity.
• 1955 Grace Kelly, invited to Cannes to help clean up the festival's image after the Silva affair, meets Prince Ranier of Monaco at a photo-op arranged by Paris Match and they fall in love. Their lavish wedding a year later is held during the festival. Marty wins the Palme d'Or and later the best-picture Oscar. It is the only film to have won both.
• 1958 Film critic François Truffaut is banned from the festival for his vitriolic attacks on an event he considers bloated, commercial and stultified.
• 1959 Filmmaker François Truffaut wins the directing prize for his debut The 400 Blows. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless is screened off-site the same year, along with Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins, kicking off the movement known as the French New Wave.
• 1960 Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita wins the top prize, in a festival that also includes Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura and Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, ushering in a decade of historic cinema with films by such masters as Antonioni, Bergman, Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel, Jacques Demy and Andrei Tarkovsky. This is also the year the festival introduces its film market, a bustling commercial contrast to the world of high cinema, where porn and action films have literally been sold by the metre.
• 1968 Jury president Louis Malle, along with filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, close down the festival down in sympathy with the student and worker strikes throughout France, sending the international crowd packing early. The next year, the festival makes changes to counter the charges of elitism. Because of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, filmmaker Milos Forman is unable to return home. Instead. he goes to Hollywood where he directs One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. • 1970 Robert Altman's anti-Vietnam black comedy M*A*S*H wins the Palme d'Or, the first American film to win in 13 years. The seventies are dominated by American filmmaking.
• 1971 As the festival celebrates its 25th year, Charlie Chaplin is presented with the Legion of Honour. Fledgling director George Lucas shows THX 1138 at the Director's Fortnight. He returns to the festival in 2005 when Revenge of the Sith receives its world premiere at Cannes. 1972: For the first time, the Cannes festival administration decides which international entries will be chosen. Until then, each participating country could submit its own entry, which made the festival a forum for propaganda films. Cannes vaults beyond its rivals, Berlin and Venice, as the most prestigious festival for filmmakers to enter.
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