I looked up Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Cien at the IMDB, and was struck by this bit in one of the user comments:

“It's an interesting and unpredicted twist of film history that in the video era, basically the past three decades, all manner of obscure and previously reviled titles (porn, cheap-jack horror, roadshow exploitation) have been revived and even taken center stage of cinema for a huge number of retro fans. At the same time, masterworks of previous eras, especially the foreign films that dominated art houses in the '50s, have fallen by the wayside to near-complete obscurity. For my pop quiz, ask any young film buff (under the age of 40) if they've ever heard of SUNDAYS AND CYBELE, once the prototypical art film.”

I think this is very true, and I have often thought that there are any number of exercises one can execute to demonstrate it. For example: Scan a year’s worth of New York Times reviews of foreign films from the 1960s. Many titles will be quite obscure. Or look at the hefty old rental catalogues such as Audio Brandon’s from the 60s and 70s. Same effect.

A favorite exercise of mine is to look up the titles in competition at Cannes during a random year - remembering, too, that Cannes is the high-water festival and therefore the films screened there should have more familiarity than those shown at “lesser” festivals.

But —— no.

Here is the competition roster from 1961. How many of these ring a bell? Five or six out of 30?

The Brute (Dúvad) by Zoltán Fábri
Chronicle of Flaming Years (Povest plamennykh let) by Yuliya Solntseva
The Cossacks (Kazaki) by Vasili Pronin
Darclee by Mihai Iacob
The First Mass (A Primeira Missa) by Lima Barreto
The Fourteenth Day (Dan četrnaesti) by Zdravko Velimirović
Girl with a Suitcase (La Ragazza con la valigia) by Valerio Zurlini
Goodbye Again (Aimez-vous Brahms?) by Anatole Litvak
The Hand in the Trap (La Mano en la trampa) by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson
Her Brother (Otôto) by Kon Ichikawa
Hoodlum Priest by Irvin Kershner
I Like Mike by Peter Frye
The Joy of Living (Che gioia vivere) by René Clément
The Judge (Domaren) by Alf Sjöberg
The Knife (Het Mes) by Fons Rademakers
The Last Witness (Der Letzte Zeuge) by Wolfgang Staudte
The Long Absence (Une aussi longue absence) by Henri Colpi
The Lovemakers (La Viaccia) by Mauro Bolognini
Madalena by Dinos Dimopoulos
The Mark by Guy Green
Mother Joan of the Angels (Matka Joanna od aniolów) by Jerzy Kawalerowicz
The Passionate Demons (Line) by Nils Reinhardt Christensen
Plein sud by Gaston De Gerlache
A Raisin in the Sun by Daniel Petrie
Sky Above and Mud Beneath (Le Ciel et la boue) by Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau
A Song About the Gray Pigeon (Piesen o sivém holubovi) by Stanislav Barabáš
That Forward Center Died at Dawn (El Centroforward murió al amanecer) by René Múgica
Two Women (La Ciociara) by Vittorio De Sica
Viridiana by Luis Buñuel
The Wastrel (Il Relitto) by Michael Cacoyannis