Top 10 books about the Cannes film festival

Earlier this year Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's film critic, came up with a top 10 list of books "to help you imagine yourself" at the Cannes film festival.

One book on the list:

JG Ballard, Super-Cannes (2000)

This has to be Ballard's late masterpiece and is sometimes regarded as a companion piece to his (slightly inferior) novel Cocaine Nights. Ballard proposes a futuristic business park built in the hills above Cannes, a rational technopolis which, far from having "designed out" crime, has secretly designed in rage, anarchy and despair. There are some tart remarks about the festival, and the new Palais building – opened in 1983, in fact – and their faintly sinister aspect, gesturing at the unexamined neurotic dimension of cinema. Ballard's book offered cinephiles and francophiles a new, uncliched way of looking at the rackety side of Cannes, the endlessly rehearsed serious/trashy paradox and the seamy side of the business.

Read about the other books on Bradshaw's list.

--Marshal Zeringue