Boycotts, (self)censorship, pressure from all sides… French cinema is going through a period of turbulence. It’s not so much about culture as it is about politics and powerlessness.
Cinema is a battlefield. Not just because it is one of the most powerful tools for telling the world. But because those who do it are ordered to solve it.
EVERY DAY, FIND THE ESSENTIAL POLITICAL NEWS IN OUR NEWSLETTER
💉 IT’S HERE AND IT’S FREE
In recent days, after the controversy concerning Bolloré’s growing influence over the entire cinema chain – from its production to its distribution – three other conflicts concerning the 7th art have crossed the public debate. Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu and exiled in France, is forced to resign from the jury of the Marseille Film Festival. A call for a boycott targets him because his latest film received financing from the equivalent of the CNC in Israel. In Cannes, actor Gilles Lellouche, who plays Jean Moulin on screen, was pilloried after he refused, at a press conference, to say that he supported La France insoumise to fight the RN. Finally, Céline Sciamma, to whom a tribute was paid this week during a retrospective, removed scenes from two of her films, “Band of Girls” and “Tomboy”. She judged that certain passages no longer corresponded to her current outlook.
Three different stories that tell the era, each of which has its own logic and has neither the same gravity nor the same consequences. But all of them tell of a pressure exerted on creation. However, a film is neither a leaflet, nor a tribunal, nor a political program. Cinema is first and foremost a way of “revealing the world” rather than correcting it. Cinema of course participates in the public debate, it sheds light on the tensions of its time, but it does not merge with them. Its role is not to produce slogans. It is powerful when it shows, disturbs and complicates.Â
Cinema is one of the places where a society works on its imagination. The films participate in this collective production. They express our desires, our fears, our contradictions. But what’s happening here doesn’t say much about cinema: few have seen “Yes” by Nadav Lapid, “Moulin” with Gilles Lellouche has not yet been released and the Céline Sciamma retrospective is confidential across the country. But it says something about our political impotence.
When a society asks artists to repair what politics can no longer transform, it entrusts them with an impossible mission. Cinema becomes a substitute ground for political struggle.
Let’s take the controversy over Nadav Lapid’s cinema. It is rooted in the conflict in Palestine and the destruction of a people. What can French citizens do in the face of this genocide? Demonstrate, sign petitions, challenge elected officials. And often find that nothing changes. So some turn to what they have left. Among the tools available: cultural boycott. Clumsy, sometimes unfair weapon. But gun all the same. Not because they sincerely believe that preventing the screening of a Nadav Lapid film will stop a genocide, but because they are looking for a lever for action, a sounding board.
The sudden arrest of Gilles Lellouche is part of this same logic. As the far right approaches power, many once again have the feeling that political tools no longer work. Some seek to drag everyone into the battle, in the same tone as them, with the same arguments as them, in the same militant temporality as them. Each artist is seen as a potential relay. Each ambiguity denounced as a fault, each silence a complicity. Basically, it doesn’t matter which Jean Moulin Gilles Lellouche embodies in the film, what some wanted to see, in this reality of the press conference, was a Jean Moulin of flesh and blood.
Finally, at the heart of the issues of defining identity and gender in childhood and adolescence, Céline Sciamma’s films are always objects of projection. We can understand her gesture of reassembly which involves the elimination of scenes. She claims to modify her own work and express a personal evolution, a transformed outlook. She chooses to give more importance to political or symbolic battles than to the integrity of a past creation. In 2022, she explained that she had heard the criticisms made about the film: “For me, it’s really simple. If people you consider political allies tell you: “This doesn’t help the revolution. “It even slows down the revolution,” so they are right. HAS” Today, she is doing it.
When a society asks artists to repair what politics can no longer transform, it entrusts them with an impossible mission. We expect them to compensate for our collective inability to act on reality. We consider artists less for what they create than because they can be, at a given moment, megaphones, signatories of petitions or media transmission belts. Cinema becomes a substitute ground for political struggle.
The controversies linked to Nadav Lapid, Gilles Lellouche and Céline Sciamma do not talk about cinema: they talk about our helplessness. Opening a political horizon also means giving artists the opportunity to create. Some people think that this is not the urgency of the moment – and there we can begin the debate.
