The “Red Scare” and the infamous Hollywood blacklist of the McCarthy era will be the timely topics of the retrospective at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. Under the title Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist, the Swiss festival’s Retrospettiva, once again curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, will put the spotlight on “one of the most turbulent and politically charged periods in the history of American cinema.”
Last year, the festival revisited the “Great Expectations” of British postwar cinema. This year, it focuses on a politicized time in Hollywood postwar history. During the period from 1947 to the early 1960s, Hollywood professionals suspected of communist ties faced a crackdown. Produced in partnership with the Cinémathèque Suisse and with the support of UCLA Film & Television Archive, the program will paint “a complex portrait of an era in which creatives were confronted by unprecedented abuse of state and industry power and which they met, courageously, with fierce artistic resistance,” Locarno highlighted.
“As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union swelled into a defining feature of world politics, right-wing voices in the American political system alleged communist infiltration of Hollywood,” the festival explained. “Hearings that more closely resembled prosecutions followed, instigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The industry responded in fear and enforced a blacklist that upended careers, forced artists to adopt pseudonyms, stifled free expression, and exiled creators overseas. Guilt by association tore families apart and films with left-wing ideas – real or imagined – were suppressed.”
Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist will “re-examine this repressive yet defiantly creative era, which mirrors the political attacks on free speech and artistic freedom seen again today,” Locarno concluded. The program will include films from such directors, writers, and stars as John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright, and Charles “Charlie” Chaplin.
No films featured in the retrospective were immediately revealed. But spanning fiction, documentaries, newsreels, and shorts from the U.S., Britain, Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, and Argentina, Red & Black will serve up digital restorations and archival prints, accompanied, as in previous years, by a book featuring contributions from international film scholars and critics published by Les éditions de l’œil. In a first, a podcast related to the retrospective, written by Khoshbakht, will also detail some of the history and context of the blacklist era.
Said Khoshbakht: “If you insist on calling classic Hollywood a ‘dream factory,’ you have also to see how that notion was hammered into pieces by some of the most politically progressive figures in the history of American cinema across the more than 40 films brought together in this retrospective. It is the timeliest one I have worked on in my life. The imaginative ways of incorporating political consciousness into film, and the tragic consequences of that political determination, form the thrilling story of this program, offering new angles on the witch hunts of the McCarthy era.”
Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno festival, added: “This retrospective will be a unique critical and historical endeavor that sheds new light on a grim passage of Hollywood history. This program will provide a new context to reframe the conflicts of the time through a wider lens, allowing audiences to grasp the impact of political persecution. This historical context is supported by a wide and compelling selection of films and, as a supplement, rarely seen documents. A pivotal moment in cinema history will thus be brought back to life all while celebrating some of the most daring, searing, and audacious films ever made in Hollywood.”
The 79th Locarno Film Festival will run Aug. 5-15.
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