CANNES, FRANCE — In a mildly tongue-in-cheek 1955 essay titled “The Festival as a Religious Order” the French critic André Bazin likened the Cannes International Film Festival — only a decade old at the time — to a monastic institution, devoted to the cult of cinema, or as he put it, the “holy worship of a common transcendent reality.” The festival’s 65th edition gets under way Wednesday, and in many ways Bazin’s analogy still holds.


The festival universe is a great deal larger today, but Cannes remains the center of it, as bound as ever to ritual and tradition. When a French blog posted a fake list of competition titles as an April Fools’ prank, the festival reacted as if to the commission of a cardinal sin. “There is a code for conduct for Cannes and it must be respected,” the festival’s director Thierry Frémaux told the film Web site Deadline. “Those who don’t respect the code will never come back to Cannes.”


Cannes’s sense of itself as an institution never really fades, but these are especially giddy times. When Mr. Frémaux, announcing the 2012 lineup at a news conference in April, declared last year’s festival a “triumph,” he was merely echoing the assessments of many in the film press and industry.


The 2011 Palme d’or winner, Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” while divisive, was widely seen as a creditable pick. “The Artist,” the breakout crowd-pleaser, cleaned up at the Oscars, and “Midnight in Paris,” which opened the festival last year, became Woody Allen’s biggest hit in decades. The competition slate included many of the past year’s best-reviewed films: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s “Kid With a Bike,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia.” And when Mr. von Trier dutifully put his foot in his mouth at his news conference, calling himself a Nazi, it supplied the requisite dose of controversy.


In short, last year’s edition was an object lesson in reconciling the festival’s multiple roles as a bastion of high art, a beacon of glamour, a media event and a vast marketplace — and needless to say, it is a tough act to follow. (The current issue of the venerable French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinéma leads its Cannes coverage with an essay by the editor in chief, Stéphane Delorme, headlined “After the Triumph.”)


If there are grumblings this year, they will probably sound familiar — is Cannes too elitist? Too populist? Predictable? Out of touch? — and they are unlikely to stick. The most prestigious of the major festivals, Cannes tends to attract the loudest criticisms but also to float above the fray. And for all the complaints about its crasser, circus-like aspect, the festival’s insistence on treating movies with reverence, as an event, with exceptional theaters and projection systems and a black-tie dress code for red-carpet evening premieres, seems both quaint and noble in this day of instant access and shrinking screens.


“Cannes is a wonderful break from reality,” said the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’or in 2010 for “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” and returns this year with “Mekong Hotel,” screening out of competition. “I like to see people in uniforms going to see movies. It’s so ancient and beautiful.”


Supplemented by the Cannes Marché du Film, the largest film market in the world, the festival is where specialty distributors make many of their most crucial deals. Jonathan Sehring, the president of IFC Entertainment, which typically releases four to eight Cannes titles a year, called the festival “the cornerstone of my professional year.” (He has been attending for 31 years.) IFC has already picked up two anticipated competition titles, Walter Salles’s adaptation of the Jack Kerouac classic “On the Road” and “Beyond the Hills,” from the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who won the Palme d’or in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.”