A few days ago, in the suburban surroundings of the Phoenix cinema in Finchley, north London, a major film by a great director that positively hums with contemporary relevance received its first, and by the looks of it, only showing in the English-speaking world.
Like so many examples of authoritarianism, the censorship is confined to the Anglosphere
The Jewish Film Festival finally found the courage that art house cinemas, the BBC, Channel 4, and all the streaming services lacked and put on An Officer and a Spy for one night only. And now it has gone again. Even Amazon Prime does not have it, and it is meant to have everything.
The suppression of the film version of Robert Harris’s novel about the Dreyfus Affair of 1894 to 1906 is the most glaring act of censorship in recent cinema history.
Like so many examples of authoritarianism, the censorship is confined to the Anglosphere. The French version, entitled J’accuse, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. It was nominated for a record 12 César awards, the French film industry’s equivalent of Oscars, and won Best Adaptation of a Book for Robert Harris, Best Costume Design, and Best Director.
And there lies the rub, because the director in question was Roman Polanski, one of the greatest directors of our time, but who also, in 1978, fled Hollywood after pleading guilty to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl Samantha Gailey (now Samantha Geimer.)
At first glance, the censors seem to have a rational case. Polanski is a fugitive and a sex offender. Samantha Geimer has forgiven him and they have reached a settlement, but strictly speaking, her views are irrelevant and do not expunge the offence.
Many would reply with the old argument that you must separate the life from the work, and that anyone looking for scenes of moral uplift in the private lives of artists is doomed to disappointment.
But the old arguments don’t apply in our neurotic age.
The banning of An Officer and a Spy has no rational explanation. The censorship is a random and arbitrary act, conducted in secret and driven by the real and imaginary fears of media bureaucrats.
At the screening in Finchley, the journalist Tanya Gold introduced the film and said that we live in “a time of censorship and idiocy and the two are not unconnected”.
Indeed they are not, as the history of this film proves. John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, has championed it in the US, but found that “film distributors were terrified of being denounced and picketed. Commercially it’s very viable because it’s a great film. It is an extraordinary thing that it has been banned: an illicit and hideous victory for the woke.”
Even right-wing Jewish organisations were frightened to touch it. “You can take Mein Kampf out of public libraries in the US,” MacArthur continued, “but you can’t watch a movie about the Dreyfus affair.”
The absurdities do not end there. Polanski has been cancelled – but not entirely. His 1974 thriller Chinatown is one of the best film noirs ever made. It’s still shown, and as late as May, BBC radio dedicated a 45-minute programme to discussing “one of modern Hollywood’s greatest and most controversial movies”.
Spoiler alert but the plot of Chinatown ends with a revelation of child abuse. Compare it with An Officer and a Spy, which tells the story of Georges Picquart, who is superbly played by Jean Dujardin. He is appointed head of the French army’s secret service. Gradually he starts to suspect that the army falsely convicted a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason.
Polanski captures the claustrophobia and the growing sense of menace as Picquart’s superiors insist that he cover up the scandal. Picquart refuses, and they turn on him. And when the affair breaks with Emile Zola’s thunderous J’accuse denunciation of a miscarriage of justice, a condemnation that is remembered to this day, reactionary France responds with a paroxysm of anti-Jewish hatred.
They are frightened that activists will denounce them
That Dreyfus is clearly innocent does not matter to the army, the mobs on the street or the right-wing press. He is a Jew and the attempt to clear his name is a Jewish conspiracy.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, heard the chant of “death to the Jews” at anti-Dreyfus rallies. French Jewry was the most assimilated and emancipated Jewish community in Europe, he reasoned, but still Jews were not safe. Only a new Jewish state could save them from racist Europe.
If you want to know a part of the reason why Israeli troops are fighting in Gaza and Lebanon today, you should watch this film. Except you can’t watch it. You can watch Chinatown even though Polanski abused a child and its theme is child abuse. But you cannot watch An Officer and a Spy, whose theme is the dangers of secrecy and censorship, because arts and media bureaucrats have secretly suppressed it.
I have saved the greatest absurdity for last. As far as I can see not one feminist group or organisation for the survivors of child abuse in the UK, US, Canada or Australia has called for An Officer and a Spy to be banned. As with so much modern suppression, distributors, channel controllers and film festival organisers have engaged in pre-emptive censorship.
They do not think that Harris’ and Polanski’s film should be banned themselves, but they are frightened that activists will denounce them if they do not ban it. And, they reason, those activists will in turn be frightened by the thought of other activists denouncing them if they do not denounce, and so on until the nth degree.
Dave Rich, the great authority on modern antisemitism, has noted how Jews are being written out of modern culture. He points to Lee, Kate Winslet’s portrayal of the life of the war photographer Lee Miller. She witnessed the Holocaust, but there is only, he says, one “explicit mention of Jews in a film that climaxes with the liberation of Buchenwald”.
None of this pathetic sanitising of history is on display in an Officer and a Spy. Polanski confronts racism and conspiracy theory with a directness liberals used to admire. When the generals question Colonel Picquart, for example, they accuse him of “being paid by a Jewish syndicate” to clear Dreyfus.
Maybe in these post-Gaza days, liberal audiences do not want to know about anti-Jewish hatred. Or maybe arts organisations are turning into the authoritarians they once despised.
“We are not policemen,” a festival organiser said to me. “The courts and the justice system should punish people, not the arts. People should be free to watch what they want.”
Except in the English-speaking world, we are not free. We are policed by frightened bureaucrats. The scandal of the Dreyfus Affair is not over yet.
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