For Bérénice Hamidi, teacher at Lumière Lyon 2 University, this forum shows a “cultural exception in French cinema, which refuses to consider acts committed by artists as violence and to condemn them”.
Nathalie Baye, Carole Bouquet, Jacques Weber, Pierre Richard and even Gérard Darmon… So many actresses and actors who are among the fifty artists who signed a support forum entitled “Don’t erase Gérard Depardieu” , published Monday December 25 in Le Figaro. They spoke a few days after Emmanuel Macron defended the actor, indicted for rape and sexual assault since 2020, with words that sparked criticism.
The actor is once again at the heart of the controversy since the broadcast, on December 7 on France 2, of an issue of the magazine “Complément d’investigation”, in which we see and hear the actor making obscene remarks to towards women, as well as a little girl at a stud farm, in North Korea, in 2018. “Gérard Depardieu is probably the greatest of actors. The last sacred monster of cinema”, write in particular the signatories of the forum, who denounce a “lynching that befell him”.
How can we explain such support from part of the French cultural community, despite the impact caused by the #MeToo movement? Franceinfo interviewed Bérénice Hamidi, teacher-researcher and professor of aesthetics and policies of the performing arts at Lumière Lyon 2 University, to understand the slow awareness, or even its absence, in the seventh art in France.
Franceinfo: The #MeToo wave, which gave rise to a movement for victims of sexist and sexual violence to speak out publicly, came from the world of American cinema. But in France, this environment seems to show signs of deafness. Is this specific to our country?
Bérénice Hamidi: Yes, there is a desire to cover the voices of the victims by others, with strong media coverage, who deny and discredit these words. That the #MeToo movement comes from cinema is not trivial. It is an environment exposed to sexist and sexual violence, because these are precarious professions, because throughout the career selection is based on logics of seduction, because the border between private life and professional life is blurred, just like the border between reality and fiction.
But there is a real cultural exception in French cinema, which refuses to consider acts committed by artists as violence and to condemn them. It is explicitly said in the platform or in the speech of the President of the Republic: Gérard Depardieu cannot be treated like an ordinary man because he has talent.
“The scale of value is clear: the lives of women who say they are victims of the man Depardieu are worth nothing compared to what Depardieu the artist is worth, and to denounce the actions of this person is to attack the art.”
Bérénice Hamidi, teacher-researcher at Lumière Lyon 2 Universityat franceinfo
According to this conception, ordinary laws do not apply to artists. Our conception of art is still very marked by the figure of the cursed artist inherited from the 19th century and by the idea that creating would imply transgressing the ordinary laws to which ordinary mortals are subject, of connecting to dark forces, and therefore would necessarily involve suffering and violence. Hence this exceptional regime: this impunity only exists in France. This naive belief that one would have to destroy or destroy oneself to create a masterpiece or be a genius is one of the foundations of French rape culture.
What do you think this support for Gérard Depardieu reveals?
This forum can be read as a collective defense mechanism which starts from a feeling of guilt. All the people who witnessed Gérard Depardieu’s behavior know, deep down, that they were complicit. Actress Anouk Grinberg recently said that Gérard Depardieu was “one of the sacred monsters of cinema”what “allowed him to become a monster at all”. But he didn’t do it alone. The responsibility of the people who allowed his feeling of omnipotence to proliferate is immense: they are the ones who created the monster. Some let it happen out of cowardice, others defend themselves or defend through Depardieu loved ones who behaved in a similar way.
Is this not also the expression of a class struggle?
Indeed, we sense mechanisms of class alliance. This was already the case for the Roman Polanski affair. When, a few years ago, Fanny Ardant said that she would follow the filmmaker to the scaffold, it was a bit like seeing an unconscious person out in the open! She does not see herself as a woman but as Marie-Antoinette, hence her lack of empathy for socially dominated women.
As for the actress Carole Bouquet, she affirms that it is “incapable of harming a woman”, because she lived with him for ten years. But just because she hasn’t seen a side of him doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it. When she or others say: “It’s Gérard”, this formula also designates a fictional being. “Gérard” is not a person, it’s Colonel Chabert, Cyrano de Bergerac…
In the expression “It’s okay, it’s Gérard”, we find the classic argument of “French seduction” which sadly confuses seduction and aggression. We also hear a poor way of disguising the fear of displeasing a man of power as a defense of serious humor. But above all we hear of the impunity and even the specific immunity enjoyed by artists who commit sexual violence. This is explained by the fact that they are not considered as people but as beings larger than life, almost fictional characters. We cannot apply the ordinary law of men to him; he has, in a way, absolute immunity. He benefits from fear, which all men of power benefit from.
The signatories of the column write: “To deprive ourselves of this immense actor would be a tragedy, a defeat. The death of art. Ours.” Do you see a desire to “separate the man from the artist”?
After the broadcast of “Complément d’investigation”, some wanted to believe that the images were false, because it was still unbearable to them that Gérard Depardieu had indeed sexualized an 11-year-old girl. It has been proven that the images are authentic, so they move on to the unfounded argument of the presumption of innocence, art and seduction, when what they are defending is the freedom of the powerful to crushing the weakest and the freedom of men to verbally humiliate and psychologically, even physically destroy women, on the sets, behind the scenes, in the works.
Fortunately, voices are being raised, like those of actresses Adèle Haenel, Judith Godrèche, Anouk Grinberg or, in her own way, Isabelle Adjani. Let’s listen to them. The world they carry is much brighter and more desirable.