Cannes in a wardrobe

How do you make an impression at one of the world's most glamorous events? Artist Rebecca Feiner set out to do just that with a Skoda and a piece of secondhand furniture, as Peter Hall reports



By Peter Hall
Published: 12:10AM BST 23 Aug 2003

Skoda is not a brand you might expect to make an impression among the in-crowd at Cannes, least of all during the world-famous film festival, where image is everything. The Czech company's range-topping Superb might offer all the space and comfort of a big Mercedes-Benz costing at least twice as much, but could it hold its own in an environment obsessed with status and ambition? I was about to find out.

It was 18 months ago that London-based installation artist Rebecca Feiner told me about her latest project, to convert a secondhand art deco wardrobe into a one-person cinema, drive it down to the Cannes Film Festival and mount an ironic, punk-rock challenge to the megadollar media conglomerates with an abstract, three-minute film. It was meant to be a reminder that cinema has hardly advanced - except in scale and expense ó since the travelling peep-shows of its 19th-century pioneers. But even this DIY movie premiere would require a limousine for the delivery of VIP guests, and if you're taking the mickey out of the money men with a cinema bought for £40 in a north London junk shop, what better than a Skoda Superb to challenge the Merc and BMW brigade? "Skoda's image is witty, cheeky and a bit subversive," said Rebecca, "and it has a heritage that goes right back to the early years of cinema."


That heritage, in the form of Skoda's collection of historic vehicles, suited her plan to document the journey to Cannes in the style of a road movie through the history of cinema, featuring a succession of suitably period cars, including a silent-era Tudor and a 1950s Felicia convertible that was perfect for a Jean-Luc Godard pastiche in Paris (all you need to make a movie is a girl and a wardrobe). Other locations en route would include the site of the factory in Lyon where the pioneering Lumiere brothers made their first film in 1895 (now a museum), Grenoble (with its groovy, 1960s cable-car) and the historic Route Napoleon (perfect for spaghetti westerns and American road movies).

An invitation to join the project as driver provided a challenge far removed from the average road test. Even assuming that the Superb was up to the job of towing a cinema to the South of France, we would have no official passes or permits, and it was entirely possible that the officious Cannes police would refuse to allow a mere Skoda to join the party.

There were other obstacles to overcome, not least a war in Iraq and the death of Rebecca's father in the midst of her hectic preparations. Nevertheless, with only a few days to spare, the wardrobe was successfully transformed into a miniature, velvet-lined movie theatre, with a single seat squeezed into one side and, behind a central partition, a budget TV set and DVD player on the other.

For stability's sake a four-wheeled trailer was selected, which accommodated the recumbent wardrobe with inches to spare. Packing all the other gear required for a self-contained, travelling movie premiere threatened to be a nightmare, but the Superb's carvernous boot swallowed the TV and DVD player plus a four-stroke Honda generator (plus petrol and oil) to power them, electrical cables, tools, assorted screws, fixings and sheets of timber with which to repair the wardrobe if necessary, a roll of red carpet, hundreds of invitations and press releases, a Canon XM2 video camera plus accessories and film, and enough clothing and personal requisites for two people - artist-director and driver-chauffeur ó to maintain a smart, public presence at the world's most glamorous film festival for five busy days (including formal evening events) while staying in self-catering accommodation that lacked a washing machine or an iron. Plus all the accessories required for Continental motoring, of course: maps, spare bulbs, first-aid kit, warning triangle and several cans of tyre-repair foam for the trailer (just try finding a correctly sized tyre in France).

Plus a couple of wheel clamps to secure the trailer when not in use. Oh, and two bags of builders' sand, used as ballast in the bottom of the wardrobe to counterbalance the weight of the audience, who, although singular, might be somewhat unsteady as a consequence of too much free champagne.

The time taken to pack the car before leaving London (having been unwilling to leave the entire project parked overnight on the street) spoiled our hopes of an early start, the consequences of which were felt that night in Paris, the first of two planned overnight halts en route to the Riviera. Dusk fell before we had found the charming Hotel Residence Foch, located on the narrow, one-way Rue Marbeau, close to the chaotic roundabout racetrack that is the Arc de Triomphe. We were already stressed to breaking point when we arrived to find Rue Marbeau blocked by an abandoned delivery van; a growing number of angry Parisian motorists were standing on the pavement, shouting and shaking their fists at an upstairs window.

This outbreak of Gallic road rage was enough to dissuade me from attempting at that moment to reverse, in darkness, a large, right-hand-drive car and wayward trailer into a barely adequate space that was in any case festooned with parking interdit signs, but by the time we had escaped the jam and driven around the block (including another crazy circumnavigation of the Arc de Triomphe), the space had been filled by another car. At the third attempt, that car was being physically dragged and manhandled on to a tow truck by a lone parking warden, prompting yet more horn-tooting and arm-waving from an ever-lengthening queue of traffic. Fearing that we might end up sleeping in the car, Rebecca jumped out to check in at the hotel, only to discover that - contrary to what we had been led to believe ó it had no car park; we would have to use the underground public facility on Avenue Foch. That meant another trip around the Arc de Triomphe, finding the car park, negotiating its subterranean confines, searching out two adjacent spaces, unhooking the heavy trailer and securing it with wheel clamps, driving the car back to the hotel to unload our luggage and the irreplaceable TV, DVD player and camera, then returning the Skoda to the car park. Needless to say, our attempt to explain the logic of all this to a car park cashier who spoke no English was a comedy of linguistic errors.

I would now try to dissuade anybody from towing a trailer through the Paris rush hour (we avoided it altogether on the way back, taking the much quieter A31/A5/A26/A4 route from Beaune via Dijon, Troyes and Reims), but the remainder of the journey was uneventful. On the autoroute down to Lyon, where our second halt at a cheap and surprisingly cheerful Ibis motel just north of the city would confirm the qualitative gulf between French and British cuisine, the Superb's 2.5-litre V6 made it easy to maintain speeds close to the 130kph (80mph) dry-weather limit; beyond that velocity, the trailer was prone to weaving, a white-knuckle experience that did nothing for my peace of mind. Covering a few hundred miles per a day at sensible speeds with plenty of refreshment breaks, the big Skoda proved to be a supremely comfortable conveyance. My wallet, too, would survive relatively unscathed: over the entire, 2,000-mile round trip the heavily laden car returned an average fuel consumption of about 25mpg; a slight improvement was gained by propping a wooden panel at an angle in front of the wardrobe, thereby improving the aerodynamics.

But proof of real-world practicality was only part of the story. We still had to discover how the Skoda would be received in Cannes, where the powerful scent of cash and celebrity has a way of distorting perceptions and inflating egos. Within minutes of his arrival, for example, the cameraman who had been engaged and paid in advance for the final, cinÈma vÈritÈ section of the documentary road movie, Mark Duffield, announced his intention to breach all his contractual obligations and promptly disappeared to walk the streets in a desperate search for fame and fortune with his ambitious new wife, Bangkok Charlie, who appeared to have delusional designs on a more glamorous existence than could be provided by her husband's pitiful job in a video shop, the reality of life as a British film-industry freelancer.
The show, of course, went on without him.

Having installed the wardrobe cinema in the beachside British Pavilion, a few yards from a hugely extravagant animatronic display promoting Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the Superb now faced its own identity crisis as it delivered guests to the premiere of Rebecca's film, Skin-Code.

On previous visits, Cannes has always reminded me of Southport with more sunshine, but the film festival changes its complexion. In the blue distance, expensive yachts float on a glittering sea like a mirage of champagne icebergs. On the Croisette, thick heat swirls lazily between fronded palm-trees, bright flowers and crowded, chattering pavement, shimmering above a slow-moving procession of expensive motor cars that quietly push their way through an insect buzz of weaving scooters and waves of lush orchestral music - Bentley, BMW, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, SkodaÖ As we roll along, tyres sizzling on hot tarmac, a bespectacled celebrity groupie on the kerb turns, looks, raises his camera, crouches and fires off a couple of shots at the young couple in the back seat.They must be famous, riding in the back of a limo like that.

The car glides to a halt. Heads turn. Curious eyes squint at its green and silver badge. Doors swing open and the couple step out easily on to the sudden heat of the pavement. A diaphanous blue dress flutters against her golden skin; his black-suited, bow-tied formality stands tall against the streaming crowd that parts and eddies around them as they stroll across the road. A scruffy little man with a large video camera appears, following and circling. Cameras are pulled from pockets. Click. Click. Paparazzi emerge from nowhere, spinning into action, jostling for a better view. Over here! The woman is inscrutable behind her shades and the invitation card she holds to her cheek; the man spreads his hand at a lens, quietly amused. "Back off, will you?" Pandora Hampton-Gill and Timothy Cranleigh-Ward have better things to do than swat photographers and autograph hunters. They are here for one reason only: the opening of a wardrobe.

Like the Skoda, the portable cinema is not the sort of thing that people expect to find at Cannes and it has already caused controversy, prompting the town's mayor to order the removal and destruction of the red carpet that lay outside. With Skin-Code, billed as an abstract celebration of masculinity, Rebecca had hoped to perplex the movie industry's big-budget storytellers, confuse the money men (the talent market traders and dream dealers were invariably rendered speechless when she promised not to sell them anything) and discomfit male audiences by reversing the camera's traditional gaze to present a female point of view, while undermining commercially driven preconceptions of physical beauty.

But offending the local civic bureaucracy had not been on her agenda; even though there is no official "Fringe" at Cannes, the idea that anyone might be misled by a red carpet and so mistake a secondhand wardrobe for the festival's official, 2,000-seat movie theatre seemed ridiculous. Fortunately, we carried a spare carpet.

The film itself successfully provoked an audience reaction that swung from one extreme to another. "Where's the car chase?" complained an impatient American producer who had flown over to "do" the two-week film festival in 24 hours and was incensed that he had wasted a whole three minutes at the world's smallest movie premiere. His rather more relaxed and perceptive compatriot Henry Turner, a director and an aficionado of Russian cinema, compared it to the films of Sergei Paradjanov and the painterly art of the Dutch masters.


A glamorous young blonde declined to climb into the wardrobe but professed great affection for Skodas: "I love my Felicia," she beamed. "It's very fast!" So much for glamour; finding a would-be screen goddess who drove a pre-VW-renaissance Skoda was a bit like the revelation that one of the unfailingly charming British Pavilion staff, a treacle-voiced, beach-bronzed Adonis called Benny, used to be a dustman in York. But in a world that sells ideas for fictions that might be portrayed as tricks of light to mesmerise the impressionable in return for hard cash, image is everything; wherever you go, impossibly beautiful people smile at you like long-lost friends, just in case you can make them famous. Had Timothy Cranleigh-Ward been a tree surgeon rather than a man in a tuxedo, nobody would have admired his tricks with a Zippo lighter, asked for his autograph or rushed to capture his photograph for the celebrity gossip pages, and when Pandora Hampton-Gill casually announced that she was producing a new film project ó Canvey Island, a tale of chip-shops and tattoo parlours ó the sudden rush to exchange business cards, telephone numbers and previously exclusive party invitations was hilarious.

The festival crowd's hunger for automotive status was no less blatant, yet people constantly stared at the Skoda's badge as if they couldn't work out what type of Mercedes it was (indeed, on one occasion even I was embarrassed to realise that the black limo I had been trying to unlock for five minutes was actually a car costing twice as much). The Superb might be unfamiliar in a place like Cannes, but generous proportions, tinted glass and creamy leather upholstery trigger assumptions of prestige that overwhelm reality. Of course when people learn that they could buy a fleet of Superbs (at £14,200-£24,500 each) for the price of one S-class (£45,515-£89,765), their ambition changes gear and they covet the German, much as Schwarzenegger branding will win a huge audience for Terminator 3, and perhaps even the governorship of California.

But we did prove that you don't really need millions of dollars to make an impression in Cannes, nor a Merc to attract the attention of the paparazzi. All you need is an idea and the confidence to follow it through: the rest is all illusion, of one sort or another. "Who needs a multiplex when you've got a wardrobe?" laughed Rebecca as she watched her portable cinema being loaded back on to its trailer and pocketed her festival prize, a glittering Palme d'Or keyring.

Rebecca Feiner will present an exhibition based on her journey to Cannes at a major London venue to be announced later this year; you can see more of her site-specific installation art at www.feinerart.freeola.com.

Thanks to Skoda UK (www.skoda.co.uk), Trident Trailers Ltd of Kent (www.car-trailers.com), P&O Ferries (www.poferries.com), the staff of the Beachside British Pavilion in Cannes (www.goodeffects.com) and all who assisted with this project - not least the staff of the Grey Gables Skoda dealership of Witney, Oxon; Andrew and Tom of Milbank Carpets, Hampton Hill; and Mr John Hayes of St James Boys' School, Crossdeep, Twickenham.