English Summary
Editor’s Letter
By Igor Garanin
I have always been delighted by the ability of certain very intelligent people to turn banal processes into mega-concepts. Las Vegas blew me away in this way. Clearly it’s a plastic amusement park, a fake city, but it’s also a wonderful business model that inspires imagination. Every building, each road is built so that you yourself don’t notice how you are parting with an impressive amount of money. They’ve thought of everything. If you’re not a gambler, you’ll give in to gluttony. If you have learned how to eat properly and limit your alcohol intake, you’ll lose your head at the number of shops with all the brands you can think of and then some. If you are indifferent to shopping, the concert programs at the grand hotels will force you to buy up tickets for every day of your stay, and then the promoters of Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez will try to sell you yet another baseball cap or a mug for your nephew. In one word, it is a delight.
But that’s in America, where everything is about money. How surprised I was to encounter a similar approach closer to us – at the Cannes Film Festival. The red carpet at Cannes is one of the most prestigious platforms for A-list stars. We have watched for a decade as they sedately drift by amidst a myriad of camera flashes, how they languidly smile from the steps of the Festival Hall. It is indelibly beautiful and incredibly dignified. Every three meters stands a person dressed in black whose job is to shout: “Keep moving, don’t stop! Faster, faster!” And if you, God forbid, decide to look around – after all it’s not every day you’re in the same place as Cate Blanchett and Javier Bardem – they will literally push you: please, move along, the red carpet doesn’t have endless room. And thus does a fairytale turn into a typical conveyer belt for the production of photos for the Internet. And after all, there are lots of