Volodymyr Zelensky spoke via video at the opening gala of 75and Cannes Film Festival: “We need a new Chaplin who will prove that cinema is not silent” in the face of the war in Ukraine. He added: “I’m sure the ‘dictator’ will lose,” referring to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Charlie Chaplin’s eponymous masterpiece. The Ukrainian president being himself a comedian, an actor, a director and a statesman, he knows what he is talking about.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Putin has transformed the nascent and fragile democracy he took over in 2000 into a quasi-dictatorship, and Western cinema has not taken this into account, this is what Zelensky tells us. Even James Bond failed. The aspiring tsar has fooled us to such an extent that it is only today that Finland and Sweden are asking to join NATO.
Chaplin saw it coming. Since the IIIand Reich banned The gold Rush for Semitism (!), he realized in the 1930s the danger that Hitler represented for freedom.
He will make a film against him (he is almost the only filmmaker to dare to stand up). His project as soon as known, we gang up against him. The German government officially protests.
In the same period, England and France let Hitler take control of Austria and the Sudetenland (just as the West let Putin wage war in Georgia, annex Crimea and kill in the Donbass), while ‘a Gallup poll reveals that 96% of Americans declare themselves hostile to their country’s entry into a war in Europe (we would have liked the same to be true of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq ).
Zelensky knows that Chaplin has long been obsessed with silent films, but that for his new film, he needed to speak. He completes the scenario of the Dictator 1er September 1939, the very day Hitler invaded hapless Poland. He gave himself a dual role: a Jewish barber and Hynkel. It is easy to recognize behind the characters of Adenoïd Hynkel, Garbitsch (contraction of ” garbage ” and ” rubbish “: garbage), Herring (herring, contraction of “Hermann” and “Göring”) and Napoloni (contraction of “Napoleon” and “Mussolini”) Adolf Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Mussolini. In the name attributed to Germany – Tomania – nestles the English word “ mania »: dementia; in the one lent to Italy – Bacteria: bacteria.
PHOTO UNITED ARTISTS, ARCHIVES LA PRESSE
Charlie Chaplin in the great dictator
The film got off to a bad start in the United States, but was screened triumphantly in London during the Battle of Britain. Of course, it was banned in Germany (however, it is said that Hitler had it thrown at him twice). He left for France at the end of the war. Chaplin confided to journalists: “My patriotism has never been inspired by a country or a class, but by the whole world. »
When will there be a film giving bad roles to Bottine (Putin), LaSorve (Lavrov) and Ploukàleau (Lukashenko), proud representatives of Roussie and Belleroussie? I very well imagine Zelensky’s double throwing at the end of the film, like Chaplin in The dictator “We must unite, we must fight for a new, decent and humane world which will give everyone the opportunity to work, which will bring a future to youth and security to old age. These bullies promised you all these things so that you would give them power – they are lying. They don’t keep their promises – they never will. Dictators free themselves by taking power, but reduce the people to slavery. So let’s fight to fulfill this promise! » 1