CULTURE | FILM | POLITICS

Jekyll and Hyde: Is the Film Industry Two-Faced?

Fascism, the first Venice Film Festival and the ideas we consume

Here’s looking at you, kid. Sorry. Photo by Patti Black on Unsplash edited on Canva by author

A film and a glass of wine: this is how lots of us relax. “I am drinking the stars!” said Dom Pierre Pérignon, a French monk in a Champagne abbey, when he tasted the first sparkling wine they had accidentally produced.

And perhaps we drink the stars, too, as bubbles rise to the rim of our flute and we don’t mind what ideas fizz into us as the film rolls on: many images, a few words, and attractive bodies can lull us into a bubbly, generous hearted receptivity, with or without champagne.

As we enjoy being visually wooed, however, we can forget that people, parties, regimes and groups want their ideas to last; that everything intended to last is built on a structure; and that film can be that structure.

We all know, before we watch any film, that it can be exploited as an art form and used as a transport system for ideas that we may not normally accept. But does it matter? Do we care? Isn’t all art subversive in some way? The first Venice Film Festival made me think about this from a slightly different angle, not as individual subversion on a film-to-film basis, but in a broader, more co-ordinated sense.