Those who love art feel it held hostage. By triumphant populism, which lowers the general level by stupefying the public. By algorithms telling people their cultural choices. By social causes, noble or not, come to hijack its free bird flight. In short, he is disrespected. Because everything is connected, a deficient education system in need of benchmarks to raise the spirit of children, unrestrained social media that walks on flowers without thinking and the spirit of the times gone in fear.
In such a climate, censorship strikes easily without offering protective beacons to works shaken after the misdeeds of one of their craftsmen. The creations are the work of imperfect, and sometimes criminal, human beings. Let them pay for their actions, and quickly! Sanctioning the works seems more delicate…
Should we marry art and justice in this way? This strange couple, by dint of stepping on each other’s toes, will end up killing each other. The cultural community, without an umbrella in the storm, has not provided protective beacons when everything goes wrong. The fear of being accused of tacit complicity is causing the industry to panic. Hands press the red button to remove the source of evil, improvising hastily, without using the discernment that requires time for reflection. Many countries would be ripe for a cultural summit on these delicate issues in order to offer common solutions.
Who is in favor of child pornography? No one, apart from the sad lords who indulge in it. She is at the heart of the reception of the film Bodice from the Austrian
Marie Kreutzer set in 1877, present on our screens. This biopic woven with Empress Sissi’s fiction, award-winning at festivals, is a feminist work. Far from the marshmallow image left by Romy Schneider in the iconic films of Ernst Marischka of the 1950s, Vicky Krieps brilliantly portrays the beautiful lady condemned to play the potiches, who rebels at the court of Vienna. We may or may not find in this sumptuous historical production airs of deja vu, estimate that our time rubs off on his. Still, the film is in the hot seat for quite other reasons.
Florian Teichtmeister, who plays Emperor Francis-
Joseph, husband of Sissi, was charged with huge possession of child pornography. A serious crime. The actor will have to answer in court next February and would plead guilty, according to his lawyer. We applaud. But the whole film suffers.
Austria-based Cineplex pulled it from the bill. Public television ORF, co-financier of the work, will not present it on its airwaves. The director, who has nothing to do with it, tears her hair out, deploring that her feminist work is so dirty and damaged by the horrible actions of a single person. The shooting had started upstream of the first rumors about the morals of the interpreter. Then the actor denied everything.
Other people in the industry invite people to differentiate between a film and the conduct of one of its actors. In Vienna, the Professional Association of the Film Industry intends to maintain Bodice in the Oscar race to represent Austria in the Best Foreign Language Film section. It is already in a preselection of 15 titles. Without much chance of appearing in the peloton of the works in the running after these terrible turmoil.
In front of the actor (in the unsympathetic role), some will only see the pedophile. The storm is accentuated by the social media, which encourages the boycott of the film, not generalized for the moment. Fallback reflexes are human in the face of the horror of a crime, but there is a way to look beyond it.
Because ethical questions loom around the bend. Should artistic companies act as police investigators before hiring performers and technicians for their projects to ensure their good character? This would lead to serious violations of privacy, soon denounced by all. So here is the environment at the mercy of a possible black sheep, likely to throw a whole production on the ground. An ambitious work like Bodice will have employed 300 technicians and interpreters. Discouraging! Members of the profession tremble. Why do you want to change jobs?
Already works from the past, deemed not to conform to the standards of the day, are being erased from distribution circuits without taking their historical context into account. Contemporary projects are threatened together. Couldn’t our societies learn to make allowances? If only to offer tomorrow, under other waves, a real cultural legacy to future generations? They will need lights to decipher an already blurred planetary horizon before their eyes.