“The Canal spirit still breathes on the Croisette. Faithful to his sense of insolence and his taste for flashes, his boss Maxime Send a répliqué à la tribune anti-Bolloré published by 600 professionals in the sector: “I will no longer work, I no longer want Canal to work with the people who signed this petition.†The biggest financier of French cinema now has its blacklist of artists and technicians. What will become of our dream factory? Here are some ideas.
May 19, 2027. At the Cannes Festival of Nations, there is excitement. The new President of the Republic, handsome as a young premier, climbs the steps with the princess he married in the middle of the electoral campaign. On the program, Nicholas’ Storya moving story of a young farmer who fights to save the family farm from the clutches of globalized speculators, European standards and the intimidation of migrants living in the town. Will a French and patriotic film win the prize this year? It’s up to the jury, co-chaired this year by Nikita Mikhalkov et Emir Kusturicato decide. Those who are not lucky enough to be in Cannes choose their session of the day. There is a choice, especially if you have the UGC card. A biopic from the Italian mystic Padre Pioand remake hilarious Crazy cage “50 years later†, an action film on the anti-jihadist fight in the Sahel, an intimate drama about an abortion that turns into a nightmare, a scathing satire of the bobos living in the countryside… There is somewhere an old cinema that shows independent films: a low-budget political fable with Juliette Binoche as an associative activist and Swann Arlaud in néoréac’ repenti, a documentary éniéme of Raymond Depardon on reformatories for minors (even though they are popular with public opinion), Souleymane’s Fight of Boris Lojkin. But the places are rather expensive and we are so poorly installed…
In Russia, Iran… and France?
The directors and artists I have just mentioned have signed the forum on the bollorization of cinema. Unless they phone Maxime Saada to apologize, they are now excluded from the Canal circuit. I called my producer friend Laurent Daniélouwho is in Cannes at the moment. He confirms to me that the channel is by far the leading financier of French cinema, that Vincent Bolloré is increasingly interested in the content of the proposed projects, that the cinema community is stunned and worried by the exit of the boss of Canal. No one expected such a radical response. Only foreign filmmakers present on the Croisette and having lived under authoritarian regimes recognize proven methods: establishing a blacklist quite simply allows actors or directors to be excluded from cinemas and screens. television. It happens like that in Russia or Iran. What if it was happening to us?
What could a French cinema subject to ideological control look like? via its financing and distribution system? If we refer to great examples from the past, this is, on the surface, not so dramatic for cinematic art. In the Soviet Union, Mikhaïl Eisenstein managed as best he could, despite fierce censorship, to make a film about the paranoid and cruel tsar Ivan the Terrible. In France, cinema under the Occupation prohibited Jews from working in this sector and pushed the greatest filmmakers into exile. However, it contains several masterpieces. Since American cinema is banned and spectators are not enthusiastic about German films, French directors film, and sometimes trick the censors. Some see discreet symbols of resistance, for example in the final sequence of Evening visitors (1942) Marcel Carnéa historical-fantastic film where the hearts of the statuary lovers continue to beat… like that of Free France. Even a filmmaker working for a production house created by Goebbelsas Henri-Georges Clouzot, shows in The Raven a France spineless and contaminated by denunciation.Â
Cut out the sensitive
The current situation is both better and worse. Better because we do not live in a cultural dictatorship. Worse because the expulsion of hundreds of professionals for offenses of opinion leaves them stunned and defenseless. With the gesture of the management of Canal+, the links between aesthetics and politics appear starkly. It is not so much a matter of discussing the political exploitation of cinema as of understanding that art depends above all on what Jacques Rancière – whose masterclass we invite you to review here – calls “sharing the sensitive†(this is the title of one of his books). This term designates “the fact of being or not visible in a common space, endowed with a common word…. This is fundamentally political, because “politics is about what we see and what we can say about it, about who has the competence to see and the quality to sayâ€. Today, a businessman exercises increasingly brutal control over media, publishing houses and now over cinema. He authorizes himself what Rancière calls “the sensitive division of the common of the communityâ€by making invisible those who oppose his conception of the world.
Certainly, this aesthetic-political fight is far from over. And I wonder if the businessman in question is not sacrificing all the media and cultural industries that he controls by wanting to impose his line on them. It’s not like we’re lacking in conflict these days. But here’s a new one: the war of the canvases.»
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