2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel.

To celebrate the anniversary, we are presenting an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange.

Each month we’ll be sharing a highlight from the Burgess Foundation’s archive. Expect literary manuscripts, vinyl, books, audio, journalism, music scores, photographs and more. For more information on the items discussed in the series, please contact our archivist.

The Clockwork Collection: Anthony Burgess photographed at the Cannes Film Festival

In the spring of 1972 Burgess received an urgent telegram from Warner Brothers, inviting him to attend the Cannes Film Festival to promote Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. The spelling mistakes appear in the original text:

HAVE WRITTEN YOU BUT UNDERSTAND MAIL VERY SLOW STOP EVERYONE WOULD BE MOST GRATIFIED IF YOU AND FAMILY WOULD TRAVEL TO CANNES FEWTIVAL AS OUR COSTS FOR SUN SAND SURF AND NUMBER OF INTERNATIONAL PUBLICITY INTERVIEWS STOP

Although the film was not nominated for an award, the festival marked an important stop on the official press tour. He wrote in You’ve Had Your Time: ‘with the entire cinema world present, [it] was the place for the, so to speak, ultimate press conference.’

It was Burgess’s first time at the festival and our photographic collection offers a less well known insight into the experience. The visit is documented in a series of approximately twenty 35mm slides, mostly taken by Liana Burgess, and six black and white photographs by the professional photographer Leo Mirkine (1910-1982), who had followed the festival since 1946.

The images document the range of Burgess’s activities over the busy two-week period, viewed from the photographer’s own perspective. Mirkine expertly captures Burgess’s public persona during lively appearances in front of large audiences, and Liana provides a glimpse of more unguarded moments alongside those of Burgess at work.

In Liana’s slides, we see Burgess about town with his family; at the train station; relaxing in his hotel; and taking part in a variety of interviews with the press. Billboards for the films Hellé, The Godfather, and Jeremiah Johnson are visible as Burgess walks along the seafront, and these add to the flavour of the period.

By the time the festival took place, Burgess had been heavily involved in the press tour for A Clockwork Orange for several months and he was becoming increasingly exasperated by the experience, particularly as he tried to balance its demands with other projects, such as Oedipus the King and the Broadway musical, Cyrano. Reflecting on his time in Cannes in his autobiography almost two decades later, Burgess would describe the high-point as an impromptu meeting with one of his comic heroes, Groucho Marx, at a formal lunch party.

He would return to the festival three years later, this time invited to join the judging panel alongside the director André Delvaux and the actress Jeanne Moreau, among others. They judged films such as Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Jack Gold’s Man Friday, and Liliane de Kermadec’s Aloïse before awarding the Palme d’Or to the Algerian film Chronicle of the Years of Fire. In an article for the New York Times titled ‘Opening A New Cannes of Worms’, Burgess describes his two weeks on the jury as being characterised by ‘scintillant mediocrity’, and leaving him with concerns about the extent to which effects and technical expertise in film were outstripping narrative skill. In a private letter sent from Cannes to his ten-year-old son, Andrew, Burgess included a hand-drawn illustration of ‘Mummy & I having to watch films.’

In 2011 a newly restored version of A Clockwork Orange was unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the Cannes Classics series, marking the fortieth anniversary of its original release. It was screened alongside Once Upon A Time … A Clockwork Orange, a documentary by Michel Ciment and Antoine de Gaudemar, featuring archive material relating to both Kubrick and Burgess, and exploring the cultural and historical contexts of the work.

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