There was no single “1967 Film Festival”
No event called the 1967 Film Festival existed. Cinema’s year was spread across several separate gatherings, each with its own jury, rules and character. The three that matter most for 1967 are the Cannes festival in the spring, the Venice festival in late summer, and the film programme at Expo 67 in Montreal, which was an exhibition of films rather than a competition.
Cannes: Blow-Up wins the top prize
The 20th Cannes Film Festival took place in the spring of 1967. Its top award went to Blow-Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. It was his first English-language feature, set in London and starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave. Its story of a fashion photographer who may have photographed a murder without noticing was widely read as a puzzle about seeing and evidence.
A naming detail is worth knowing. The Cannes Palme d’Or was the festival’s top prize in the 1950s and again from 1975. In between, from 1964 to 1974, the top award was called the Grand Prix of the festival. Blow-Up’s prize is therefore counted as a Palme d’Or today, though it was not given under that name.
The film also mattered outside the festival. It was released in the United States without the approval seal of the old industry censorship system, and its frankness fed the argument over the Production Code that was running through Hollywood in 1967. That change is a separate story; for the festival it is enough to say that Cannes rewarded a film the American system had trouble classifying.
Cannes would have a very different edition the following year. In May 1968 the festival was cut short as filmmakers joined the unrest of the May 1968 strikes in France, which is a 1968 event, not a 1967 one.
Venice: Belle de Jour takes the Golden Lion
The Venice Film Festival, the oldest of the major festivals, gave its Golden Lion in 1967 to Belle de Jour, directed by Luis Bunuel and starring Catherine Deneuve. The film follows a young, outwardly respectable Parisian woman and her secret afternoons working in a brothel, and it blurs fantasy and reality in a way typical of Bunuel’s later career.
Venice and Cannes are sometimes presented as rivals, but their calendars differ. Cannes sits in the spring and tends to set the tone for the year’s releases. Venice arrives at the end of the summer and has often been used to launch films before the autumn season.
Expo 67: films as part of a world’s fair
The third gathering was not a festival in the usual sense. Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal from April to October 1967, put cinema at the centre of many national and thematic pavilions. The fair is covered on its own elsewhere, but its film side deserves a note here.
The National Film Board of Canada contributed a pavilion known as the Labyrinth, in which visitors moved through chambers and watched films projected on several large surfaces at once. Czechoslovakia’s pavilion presented an interactive film, Kinoautomat, in which the audience voted at set points on how the story should continue. Many other pavilions used multiple screens and unusual formats.
Some of this experimentation is often credited, reportedly, with helping lead to the large-format IMAX system, whose creators included filmmakers who had worked on Canadian Expo projects. The link is generally accepted, though the details are best treated with some caution.
What the 1967 festival season shows
The honours of 1967 went to European art films about perception, desire and doubt, while the American commercial hits of the year were being decided by audiences elsewhere. The two worlds were not entirely separate. The same questions about what could be shown on screen appeared in Cannes, in Venice and in the American debates around Bonnie and Clyde. Alongside them, the underground film movement was growing outside every official structure, with its own screenings and few prizes.
For readers looking for the year’s popular favourites rather than its festival winners, those belong to the box-office record, not the festival circuit.