The Palais des Festivals is the Cannes venue where Emmanuel Carrère’s book signing after a screening of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo became an ordeal of professional and social embarrassment. In the account, the building is not merely a festival setting: it is where the distance between the celebrated figures, the people seeking access to them, and a novice writer trying to sell his book becomes sharply visible.

Setting and Occasion

After Fitzcarraldo was screened in competition, Carrère’s publisher arranged a book signing at the Palais des Festivals. Carrère was seated behind a small table stacked with copies of his book, waiting for people leaving the screening to stop. The event placed a first-time freelancer—still near the bottom of the professional ladder—inside the festival’s most visible world, but did not give him the standing or audience that visibility seemed to promise.

The Book-Signing Ordeal

The people filing past Carrère had already been deluged with press kits, photo books, résumés, and brochures. Against that background, buying a book seemed incongruous to them. Most ignored the table. Some took copies in the weary, automatic manner of people accepting something free, then walked away looking for a garbage can where they could discard them. Carrère had to run after them and explain apologetically that the book was for sale.

Place in the Narrative

The scene makes the Palais a stage for an uneven encounter with cultural prestige: the festival’s proximity to stars and competition screenings offers no protection from being overlooked. Carrère had come to Cannes to interview Werner Herzog, whom he regarded as a formidable, almost superhuman filmmaker; the signing, immediately after the screening of Herzog’s film, instead exposed his own insecure position as a novice. The Palais thus anchors the contrast between the glamour associated with Cannes and the humiliating labor of trying to gain recognition there.