Cannes Fest: <i> Deja Vu </i> in Land That Invented It : Movies: A funny thing about the 48th annual event--there’s something pretty familiar about the people and activities.

As befits this venerable event, whose 48th edition began Wednesday night, the Cannes Film Festival is a place of rituals. Every year the same people revisit the same hotels and screening rooms and cheerfully endure the same splenetic mob scenes. The only things that change are the films. And the billboards.

One of the more pleasant rituals of this festival is the walk up and down the beachfront promenade called La Croissette, eyeballing the huge posters and trying to figure out which images will last as long as Clint Eastwood with his back turned from “Unforgiven,” which was first seen here, and which will be mercifully forgotten.

This year the oversized visuals range from Tom Hanks as a somber astronaut in “Apollo 13” to a classically sultry Pamela Anderson (of TV’s “Baywatch”) starring as comic book heroine “Barb Wire,” a glamorous hard case with a feisty “Don’t Call Me Babe” motto. Occupying what is traditionally the prime spot, the doorway of the Carlton Hotel, is a display for the Pierce Brosnan-starring James Bond film “Goldeneye,” tag-lined “You know the name, you know the number.” True enough.

Given that none of these films will actually be playing in Cannes, and in fact may not even be finished, the displays also have a symbolic value (this is France, after all), underlining the way the festival itself functions as an enormous billboard for world cinema. Any time 3,700 journalists from who knows how many countries gather in one place, it’s natural to attempt to get their attention.

Those vying for notice cover a wide range of tastes. The Independent Features Project, for instance, will screen a package of 14 films that almost by definition are pure of heart. Simultaneously, in the bustling Marche , the buying and selling adjunct to the festival, more dubious endeavors such as “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and the Tonya Harding-starring “Breakaway” (“There’s a time to fight and a time to die”) will try to scare up a little cash.

Most of the attention at Cannes will not be on these items but on the fortunate films selected for the festival competition and a pair of sidebar events, Un Certain Regard and the Director’s Fortnight. Here too that sense of running the gamut that characterizes Cannes is evident, as the Sharon Stone-starring “The Quick and the Dead” shares space with new films by Theo Angelopolous (“The Glance of Ulysses”), Hou Hsiao Hsien (“Haonan Haonu”) and Manoel de Oliveira (“The Convent”), demanding directors whose work rarely makes it out of festivals.

The odd couple of Stone and Johnny Depp, who has two films in competition (“Ed Wood” and a Jim Jarmusch Western called “Dead Man”), appear to be the cover people of choice for French magazines. The French are in general quite pleased this year because it’s the 100th anniversary of cinema’s beginnings in Paris, an event being commemorated on everything from T-shirts to designer Leimoges dinnerware. France has also contributed both the festival’s opening night film, “The City of Lost Children,” and Jeanne Moreau, the president of an eclectic jury that includes South African novelist Nadine Gordimer and American director John Waters.

Yet, despite all of France’s efforts, English-speaking films and performers are still a force at Cannes, especially with Harvey Keitel starring in the Angelopolous picture and John Malkovich doing the same for De Oliveira. Aside from “Ed Wood,” several Cannes selections have already been seen by American audiences, including “The Madness of King George,” “Jefferson in Paris” (which has been given a racier ad campaign over here), “Kiss of Death” and the Hugh Grant-starring “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain.”

Grant also stars in “An Awfully Big Adventure,” one of five films that came to Cannes after previously showing at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The others were “The Usual Suspects,” “Safe,” “Heavy” and “Kids,” directed by photographer Larry Clark. That film, which caused a stir after just one Park City midnight screening of an unfinished version, concerns teen-agers who apparently have never even heard of safe sex.

Of the English-language films that haven’t played anywhere, two of the best look to be “Carrington” and “Unstrung Heroes.” The former, the directing debut of Oscar-winning screenwriter (for “Dangerous Liaisons”) Christopher Hampton, deals with an unlikely romance between man of letters Lytton Strachey and artist Dora Carrington (Jonathan Pryce and Emma Thompson). “Heroes,” the story of a boy’s alliance with a pair of eccentric uncles, is the first nonfiction theatrical film to be directed by actress Diane Keaton.

And if that weren’t enough, there are more than half a dozen other English and American films scattered around. Among the more noteworthy look to be “Land and Freedom,” a Spanish Civil War drama from Ken Loach; “Angels and Insects,” adapted from an A.S. Byatt novella; “The Neon Bible,” Terence Davies’ first film set outside of Britain; John Boorman’s “Beyond Rangoon”; “Desperado,” Robert Rodriguez’s bigger-budget sequel to his bargain-basement “El Mariachi”; “To Die For,” the latest whatever from Gus van Sant, starring Nicole Kidman and Matt Dillon, and the intriguingly titled “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.”

Lest we forget that this is, after all, an international film festival, new films are expected from several prominent overseas directors. Most anticipated are “Shanghai Triad,” the latest collaboration between director Zhang Yimou and star Gong Li, set in the depraved 1930s, and “Underground,” from Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica, whose “When Father Was Away on Business” was the surprise winner of the Palme d’Or several years back.

And, ever mindful of history, the festival is not about to leave the centenary of cinema in the hands of the T-shirt makers. A series of specially commissioned shorts (titled “Preludes”) dealing with the anniversary will show before each of the competition films, and the Palais du Festival is host to a no doubt fascinating exhibit of “patents and trademarks dating back to the early days of the cinema.”

Perhaps most interesting of all will be the showing of part of an 18-film British Film Institute series in which celebrated directors (Martin Scorsese in the United States and Stephen Frears in Britain, for example) take personal journeys through their countries’ cinema. The past is often present at Cannes, and never more than this year.