If you want to know why film festivals (even Cannes, the biggest of them all) are struggling to maintain their relevance, start with Jean-Luc Godard.

In Cannes next week, Godard, now 79, will be presenting what many believe will be his final feature: Film Socialisme.

In advance of the premiere, the arch-provocateur has made a subversive trailer, which lasts under two minutes and shows not just highlights but the entire film speeded up.

In the frenetic digital age, Godard is telling us, audiences don't have the time or the patience to go to festivals to watch 35mm prints of art-house movies in cinemas — they want instant 90-second gratification on YouTube.

In Cannes this year, the chasm between mainstream cinema and art-house festival fare is more gaping than ever.

The 63rd festival opens with Ridley Scott's version of Robin Hood.

That's just the kind of big-budget event movie that will provide the required images of stars on |the red carpet and of swarming paparazzi.

However, Scott's rip-roaring foray to Sherwood Forest isn't representative of the type of films that will be seen during the rest of the festival fortnight.

The outside world enjoys the diversion of Cannes.

Whatever Europe's economic or political woes, Cannes is a fixed point in the calendar: every May, there will always be topless starlets on the beach, egregious publicity stunts, crazy announcements and celebrity gossip.

The perennial challenge for the festival is to marry the worlds of business and cinephilia.

In strong years, this will happen automatically.

The films selected for the main competition will excite the critics, sell to distributors all over the world and eventually turn up at ‘a cinema near you’.

On paper, this year's competition looks very much flimsier.

The selection is tilted heavily toward esoteric art-house fare.

Plenty of this looks promising.

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's first (partly) English language film, The Certified |Copy, starring Juliette Binoche |as a gallery owner who meets |an English author in Tuscany, is intriguing.

Britain's former Palme d'Or winner Mike Leigh, who never makes a bad film, is back in Cannes for the first time since 2002's All or Nothing with Another Year.

And The Bourne Identity director, Doug Liman, is also in the competition with Fair Game, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. But even with these names, this year's Cannes looks short on real oomph.

The usual pre-Cannes hype hasn't been as strident as normal.

Hotel rooms and apartments are easier to book. Parties have been cancelled.

The lingering effects of the credit crunch are still being felt.

In the production sector, fewer movies are currently being made because they are harder to |finance.

It is hardly the festival programmers' fault that they have fewer films to choose from.

There is, though, a sense that they are still clinging to an old-fashioned notion of what cinema should be.

It is instructive to consider the ages of some of the directors in official selection this year.

Godard is in his late 70s. Kiarostami and Leigh are in their late 60s.

They are all still producing exceptional work — but they're hardly young Turks.

We are in a world of 3D and Avatar, of file-sharing and video on demand.

Cinema attendance may be booming, but big event movies are dominating at the box office, not art-house fare.

In the face of rapid and jarring technical change, the major European festivals are carrying on much as they have always done, showing 35mm prints of new films by venerable auteurs to audiences of critics who themselves appear to be growing older and older.

There was a time when these festivals seemed at the absolute centre of debates about cinema.

Whenever, and wherever, new talent emerged, whether it was film-makers from Iran or Romania or Argentina, the festivals would champion it — and the films would be given an international life on the back of their festival screenings.

Arguably, the role of film festivals is now changing.

Where once they showcased the new, they are now more concerned with protecting an old and increasingly endangered tradition of cinema.

Movies can now be watched |on phones, on TVs and on the |internet.

The technology of cinema has advanced in rapid fashion.

Whether the aesthetics of film-making have kept pace is another question altogether.

The 63rd Cannes Film Festival opens tomorrow