To analyse. What was François Hollande doing on Tuesday March 29 at the Cinéma des Cinéastes in Paris? He discussed cinema with the directors Pierre Jolivet and Nicolas Pariser (author in 2019 of a little gem entitled Alice and the Mayor), on the initiative of the ARP (civil society of authors, directors and producers), which, as the presidential election approached, had put the relationship between cinema and politics on its agenda. The former president rightly regretted that French cinema did not focus more often on the functioning of politics, dreaming of a film which, entitled Decisionwould reconstitute this process in its collective mysteries, so we generally only know the result.
Such encounters are too rare. The reason is, no doubt, that cinema and politics share the same stage (that of representation), use the same techniques (the art of staging and storytelling), cultivate the same secrets (illusion) . The rapprochement is not new. It was the rise of totalitarianism in Europe in the 1930s that gave rise to its most precise theoretical formulation. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin (The work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility, 1936) and the French critic André Bazin (“Pasteche et postiche ou le neant pour une mustache”, 1945) thus, each in his own way, emphasized the deadly rivalry between these two powers of incarnation, their magnetic conquest of hearts and souls, the empire they exercised over the masses.
An actor president
the “ontological burglary” that André Bazin denounced in his time, arguing that Adolf Hitler had stolen his mustache from Charlot before Chaplin took his revenge triumphantly in The dictator, finds a certain echo in the Ukrainian situation, where a Jewish comic actor, Volodymyr Zelensky, elected President of the Republic, defies the dictator Putin (who seems to be playing Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove on his side) on the field of arms, then , dressed in a military T-shirt in a presidential palace transformed into a bunker, knocks him out. on that of storytelling.
Under the now proliferating empire of images, cinema and politics never cease to stare each other down. At the time of the queen of communication, everything is “pitched”, whether it is a film scenario or a political scenario. All that remains for President Emmanuel Macron is to wear, under the gold of the Elysée, a black sweatshirt with the logo of the number 10 air parachute commando and a three-day beard to pose as a warlord. And to actor Sean Penn, who unexpectedly finds himself a documentary filmmaker on the Ukrainian front, only to threaten to melt his two personal statuettes if the Academy of Oscars does not allow President Zelensky to intervene. Wanting to throw his Oscars into the fire, Penn dreams of himself as a Caesar here. Compression, however, is long overdue.
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