And at still other times, other preoccupations took center stage.

Never was that more true than in 1968, when politics went to the movies and protesters ground their axes at sundry Euro fests -- Cannes, then Mannheim, Spoleto, Pesaro and finally Venice, with an invasion of the Lido that September.

From early August on, dissidents of all sorts -- artists, filmmakers, politicos, activists -- threatened to bring what they considered a stodgy establishment event to a halt.

To get an idea of the ferment, one could do worse than to watch Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers," which interestingly had its world premiere in Venice in 2003. Whatever its limitations, pic managed to dramatize the vital link between movies and politics in that heady period.

The Italian director had himself manned the intellectual barricades of the time, along with fellow cineastes Marco Bellocchio, Liliana Cavani and Pier Paolo Pasolini. They served on the so-called boycott committee against Venice, with Pasolini at one point calling for the audience to leave the theater rather than watch his own film ("Teorema"). Few obliged him, a fact that quite possibly secretly pleased him.

Variety was there in full force to cover the proceedings.

"August in Italy," Rome correspondent Hank Werba wrote, "is traditionally a time of national lethargy, but summertime 1968 will long be remembered for its battle of Venice." That was on Aug. 14.

As it turned out, the opening of the 29th edition was delayed several days as protesters threatened to close the event down. After innumerable powwows and posturing on both sides, things quieted down -- or rather, the attention of the world shifted to Prague, where Soviet troops had just rolled in to squelch the political and artistic revival that was going on there.

"The focus on Prague," Variety wrote on Aug. 28, "stilled, almost to the point of obliteration, the loud, space-grabbing dispute between Venice fest director Luigi Chairini and the Italian cinema left."

Calls in Italy for filmmakers to withdraw their pictures from the Lido were thus only partially successful.

And some VIPs had no truck with the Lido leftists. Director Roberto Rossellini bucked the protesters, checking into the Excelsior Hotel and "wasting no time in calling press conferences to contest the contesters."

As for screenings, lagoon locals had to fill in for foreign dignitaries and no-shows, many of whom had canceled or taken a wait-and-see approach.

"Those who suffered beyond the call of duty," Variety wrote, "were numerous plainclothesmen strategically planted throughout the 1,280-seat theater. Gendarmes fidgeted through 90 minutes of French dialog track (without Italian subtitles). A cop in civvies reacted suspiciously to press note-jotting in the dark."

The various demands, counterdemands, carping and grandstanding by the protesters made the event more chaotic than it would have been by normal Italian standards.

Take the opening night competition film: "The projectionist proceeded to unspool 'Nude Childhood' for critics without the director's knowledge. Inside the palace auditorium (helmer) Maurice Pialat decided to sanction the screening only to discover that the film was being shown out of sequence."

And so on.

In its final commentaries Sept. 11, Variety noted that despite the protesters' derision of the old-guard film elite and "establishment" movies, it was "newness" that was the key trait of this bump-along but highly memorable fest.

New directors and new cinematic styles emerged from the confusion, including Alexander Kluge, Carmelo Bene, Cavani, Robert Frank and Robert Lapoujade.

Variety's headline summed up the verdict: "The Gondola Capsizers failed ..."

"Film festivals often stand in or catch the shadow of history," Werba opined in his final assessment. The fest, he went on, may symbolize "a vast confusion for outsiders, notably American film folk, who simply do not 'get' the splintered European politics."

But, he added, in 1,500 more words of political exegesis, the really worrying events weren't happening in Italy but over in Czechoslovakia -- and the film biz, he opined, would eventually feel the impact.

"Those talents brought on by the Czech film, theater and political renaissance may for a time be silenced, imprisoned, forced underground or obliged to emigrate."

He was talking about the crushing of Dubcek's Prague Spring and about talents like Jan Kadar, Jan Nemec, Ivan Passer and Milos Forman. And he was not wrong.