2023-05-21 09:40:04
Dear Adele Haenel,
It is the news, as they say, that invites me to write to you. You are a French actress loved by the public and prizes. In 2020, when the César was announced for Roman Polanski, accused of sexual assault on a minor, you left the room, two days later with these almost planetary words from Virginie Despentes: “We get up and we break”. I don’t separate, either, the person, his acts and what he creates.
Your choice to stop the cinema was redoubled by a recent letter in the media. You are right to want to politicize your “Cinema Stop” to denounce the film industry’s silly complacency towards the violent and, by extension, towards ecocidal capitalism. Because everything is in everything. Cinema continues to make the patriarchal and neoliberal order desirable – we agree. The world of cinema, that of dominant literature too, prefer lightness. We are embarrassed at the corners. “How will it sell? This is not what we want to show, to read…” The world as it is has become awkward like an overly sober cousin in the middle of an endless party. He will end up ruining everything. Let us have fun!
I remember it: the Palme d’or at Rosetta was criticized because the Dardenne Brothers film was “sadly naturalistic”, hear: not recreational enough, killjoy. Rosetta spoiled the Rosette cocktail – kirsch, maraschino, and cherry cream. And now the Cannes Film Festival opened this week. The weather is not very nice in Cannes this Saturday, literally it is raining. The gentlemen are going to fade their hairstyles, we are going to take charge of her high heels. So be careful not to be turned away when climbing the stairs, like these women in 2015, because they weren’t wearing them. The little promotional scandal of Jean-Claude Van Damme brawling with Dolph Lundgren on the blood-red carpet still hid ordinary fascism from the male gaze. The problem is that the story sneezes: Johnny Depp, one of those violent ones, opened the festival on Tuesday; and the president of the jury, Ruben Östlund, does he not use the aesthetics of luxury and appearances that he seeks to criticize?
Dear Adèle Haenel, of course, when you say the cinema, the cinema industry, which by the artifice of beauty renews a deadly order, you have to understand – I suppose you mean – a certain cinema, a certain industry of movie theater. Because the Brussels International Independent Film Festival is not the Cannes Film Festival. Because the Polarise Nordic Film Nights are not the Los Angeles Oscars, and so on.
So there are two ways of confronting reality. Either we leave it. Ciao, it will be without me. Too many compromises. I no longer want to participate in this shame. Either we stay, we persist, we don’t let people say “Let her go, who is it? The party continues”. No, we stay and we disturb by his mere presence. We insist. We act from within. We don’t let say “She’s canceling us out of her world? So what? Good riddance”. No, we stay on board. We’re here and we fuck until the end.
Just as at the time of the Weinstein affair, it was necessary to “moment a move”, I would make your voice (to be heard) a path (to follow), to follow in the cinema. There is enough beauty, enough power in the head and the bodies for a truly contemporary cinema. The party is not to be abolished, perhaps, it is to be reinvented. As at the International Ecological and Social Film Festival which takes place in two weeks, in Cannes too, driven by the desire for a “more just and bearable world”. What you call for.
Dear Adèle Haenel, I would like to greet you by saying “Hello and Brotherhood”or rather “sorority” (for me, a historian, the word is synonymous with community of life). But there is another word that you probably know, more neutral, even more collective, more intersectional, and which I admit is timely. It’s adelphity, this word from the Greek, which means brother and sister at the same time, that is to say solidarity between similar people, between all the living – solidarity with which you associate the politicization of your life ‘artist.
So, dear Adèle Haenel,
Hello and Adelphite,
Gil Bartholeyns
1684676793
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