Venice’s Golden Lion Goes to Cinema’s Old Guard: Clooney and Burstyn Honored

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival, running September 2-12 under jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal, opened its lifetime achievement honors this year to two very different careers. George Clooney received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the September 2 opening ceremony, using the stage to warn about censorship and “authoritarians.” Five days later, on September 7, 93-year-old Ellen Burstyn received the same honor for a screen and stage career spanning more than sixty years, tied to a Marilyn Monroe tribute film that gave her one more role to disappear into.

Clooney’s warning from the red carpet

Presenting the award, festival artistic director Alberto Barbera called Clooney “a complete and charismatic artist,” pointing to his range across war dramas like Syriana, comedies, and science fiction, and to directing work – including Good Night, and Good Luck and The Ides of March – that reflects what Barbera described as “a demanding and generous concept of cinema.”

Clooney’s acceptance was warmer than a typical trophy speech. “This festival is without question my favorite and to be given the Golden Lion is a tremendous honor,” he said. “It also probably means I’m old, but I’ll take it.” He then turned pointed, telling the crowd that “the first people that authoritarians try to shut down are not politicians. They’re journalists who ask questions” – artists and writers, he argued, because “stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear.” He added: “The people who are afraid of books and music and stories, they’re never the heroes in history.”

Burstyn’s quiet triumph

Where Clooney’s moment was a rallying cry, Burstyn’s was intimate. Barbera introduced her as “an actress of rare intensity and truth,” whose work “could illuminate pain and everyday resilience with dignity, irony and courage” across more than fifty years in American cinema. The ceremony, held at the Palazzo del Cinema on September 7, coincided with the premiere of director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film Flesh Impact, made for the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, in which Burstyn stars alongside Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, and Sepideh Moafi as a version of Monroe the world never got to see.

Accepting the Golden Lion, an emotional Burstyn kept it simple: “I not only get to travel to one of my top most favorite cities in the whole world. I get to return home carrying a Golden Lion in my arms!” She was reportedly moved to tears during a lengthy standing ovation before her remarks.

A festival still finding its center

Two lifetime awards, four days apart, framed a festival otherwise consumed by its main competition

• the Golden Lion for Best Film is decided by a jury that, besides Gyllenhaal, includes

filmmakers Kaouther Ben Hania, Daniel Blumberg, Francesco Casetti, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat, and Johnnie To. But the honorary prizes did more than pad the schedule between premieres: Clooney’s speech landed amid wider festival discussion of press freedom and political tension, and Burstyn’s tribute to a screen legend from a century ago was a reminder that Venice’s oldest ritual

• honoring a body of work rather than a single film – still lands, even in a program built around

what’s new.

Header photo: Venice 2020 Red Carpet by Pietro Luca Cassarino, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped; this crop is released under the same licence.

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