On May 8, during the pre-opening of the Venice Biennale, the independent collective ANGA (Art Not Genocide Alliance), which brings together artists and cultural workers protesting genocide and precarity in the art world, organized a strike that revealed much about the current relationship between art and politics. While several national pavilions had already closed in solidarity with the strike, a group of pro-Palestinian activists entered the Arsenale, where part of “In Minor Keys”—the exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh, together with her collaborators, before her premature death last year—was installed, and carried out a modest act of disruption: They hung posters on several artworks in support of the strike, calling for the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation, denouncing the genocide in Gaza, and exposing what they described as the Biennale’s attempt at “art-washing”—that is, using art to cleanse Israel’s international reputation.
What made the scene particularly striking was that many of the works already addressed Palestine directly. Among them was “If I Must Die”—a poem by the Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, killed in an Israeli airstrike on December 6, 2023—which Kouoh had placed as an epigraph at the entrance to the Arsenale exhibition. The poem functioned as a declaration of intent. At a certain point, it became impossible to tell whether the Palestinian flags had been placed in the Arsenale by the activists or already belonged to the artworks themselves. There was something almost comical in watching police officers wander through the Arsenale in confusion, trying to determine the difference between what they regarded as a criminal act and what, instead, constituted part of the exhibition.
The line separating the supposedly free expression of art—rhetorically defended within a Habermasian marketplace of opinions, where all positions are flattened into the same condition of harmlessness—from the antagonistic, often violence-saturated terrain of political struggle has always been arbitrary. But in the past two or three years, first with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and then with the war in Gaza, it has become clearer than ever that many cultural institutions—starting with the Berlin International Film Festival and going on to include many more—have abandoned the pretense of neutrality. They have imposed increasingly rigid boundaries between the permissible and the impermissible, between what can circulate as legitimate opinion and what risks actually “making a difference” and must therefore be pushed into the unsayable, beginning with the very words “Palestine” and “genocide.” What happened in Venice—with the jury resigning in protest against this false neutrality, refusing the premise that the Russian and Israeli pavilions could be treated as equally “award worthy”—was only one among many recent attempts by artists, curators, critics, and cultural workers to contest this boundary and insist that art, like any intervention in the public sphere, cannot help but “make a difference” and, as Franco Fortini once wrote, “break false unities.”
Although the Cannes Film Festival has always been remarkably adept at avoiding positions that might carry concrete political consequences, this year’s edition could not entirely escape the pressures of the present. The festival opened with a press conference featuring the main jury, and nearly every question revolved around the relationship between art and politics. Amid the predictable stream of platitudes, the only participant who managed to articulate something genuinely substantive was Paul Laverty, the longtime collaborator of Ken Loach. Politics entered Cannes even more forcefully through a petition published in Libération on May 12, the festival’s opening day, in which more than six hundred French film professionals denounced the growing concentration of power exercised by the Vivendi group and the right-wing businessman Vincent Bolloré within the French cultural industry.
The petition emerged from concerns over the fact that the Bolloré group now controls not only Canal+, CNews, and Europe 1, but also Studiocanal, a substantial portion of French publishing through Hachette Livre and Lagardère, and, more recently, a major stake in the UGC theater circuit. The result is unprecedented vertical integration extending across nearly every level of cultural production: television, journalism, publishing, distribution, and theatrical exhibition. Bolloré’s presence in a vast number of productions premiering at Cannes already offers a sense of the scale of this phenomenon.
The issue concerns not only economic concentration but also the ideological radicalization of this media ecosystem. Over the past several years, numerous observers have emphasized the role played by Bolloré-controlled networks—particularly CNews—in normalizing far-right discourse in France and facilitating the rise of figures such as Éric Zemmour, within a broader shift of public debate toward identitarian, anti-immigrant, and nationalist themes. During the 2022 presidential election, the New York Times described Bolloré as “the man at the center of the French election,” despite the fact that he himself was not a candidate. French and international media have repeatedly portrayed his media apparatus as the French equivalent of Fox News. “We are not just risking a standardization of films, but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination,” the petition’s signatories warned, adding that “while the influence of this ideological offensive on the content of films has so far remained discreet, we are under no illusions: It will not last.”
In reality, the petition emerged out of an earlier and deeply troubling precedent involving Bolloré’s relationship to the publisher Éditions Grasset. Olivier Nora, a central figure in French publishing and the director of Éditions Grasset for more than twenty-five years, was removed following Vivendi’s acquisition of the Lagardère group, in a decision widely interpreted as evidence of the Bolloré system’s growing ideological control over the publishing sector. The reaction was immediate: More than three hundred writers and intellectuals announced that they would no longer publish with the house, among them Virginie Despentes, Emmanuel Carrère, Leïla Slimani, and Paul B. Preciado. At the center of the protest was the argument that Éditions Grasset represented one of the last major French publishing houses capable of sustaining genuine internal plurality, bringing together within the same catalogue conservative, feminist, queer, liberal, and radical voices alike, and that Nora’s removal signaled the end of a certain idea of cultural autonomy within French publishing.
It is perhaps significant that, within this increasingly explicit atmosphere of conflict surrounding the relationship between culture and politics, one of the films to generate the strongest consensus during the first days of Cannes was Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski. The film seems to offer the exact opposite fantasy from the one emerging in the protests at the Venice Biennale and in the petition against Vincent Bolloré: not the idea that culture is inevitably traversed by the antagonisms and force relations of history, but rather nostalgia for a culture imagined as spiritual, autonomous, and fundamentally superior to politics. As though the central problem of the twentieth century was the excessive politicization of culture, rather than the manner in which certain forms of European bourgeois culture themselves helped prepare—through repression, disavowal, and retreat from political modernity—the terrain upon which twentieth-century fascism emerged.
It is precisely this fantasy of a culture separated from history that Pawlikowski stages through his reconstruction of the journey undertaken by Thomas Mann in 1949, after years of exile in the United States. Now in his seventies, Mann travels through Frankfurt and Weimar—through both West and East Germany—finding himself equally estranged from both. Where is one’s home, one’s Heimat, in a world divided between the capitalist Americanization of Western culture and the ideological brutalization of the Eastern bloc? Mann remained deeply attached to the nineteenth-century German bourgeois ideal of Kultur and maintained a distance not only from the two Cold War blocs, but also from modernism and the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. He appears, in other words, perpetually out of place: not simply within a particular historical conjuncture, but almost structurally so, because of his very conception of culture itself.
Germany consequently appears in the film less as a concrete historical reality than as a spirit outside time: always already nostalgic, always already dead, something accessible only through melancholy. Pawlikowski constructs a grand midcult elegy for nineteenth-century German bourgeois culture, in which everything touched by politics appears inevitably degraded: on the one hand American consumerism, commercialized music, and mass culture; on the other socialist realism and the ideological reduction of art to propaganda. Mann becomes the emblem of a figure fundamentally displaced by modernity, as though authentic culture could survive only elsewhere, within a purely spiritual realm now irretrievably lost.
It is precisely here that the film reveals its central blind spot. Fatherland appears to exhibit this nostalgia without ever interrogating its historical implications. The film never seriously confronts the possibility that the crisis of German bourgeois culture itself—its inability to reckon with political modernity and with the irruption of the masses into history—helped pave the way for the petit-bourgeois revolt of fascism. As thinkers from Siegfried Kracauer to Theodor W. Adorno demonstrated, the problem was never simply the destruction of Kultur by political barbarism, but the extent to which a spiritualized and nostalgic conception of German culture coexisted with profoundly authoritarian and antidemocratic tendencies. Nostalgia for a culture supposedly “above” politics risks functioning retroactively as a form of absolution: as though catastrophe had arrived entirely from the outside—from propaganda, manipulation, or mass irrationality—rather than emerging from the internal contradictions of that very conception of culture.
For this reason, the success of Fatherland appears deeply symptomatic. At the very moment when concrete conflicts are erupting around Cannes concerning the ideological control of cultural institutions, the concentration of media power, and the relationship between art and war, Pawlikowski’s film offers the consolatory ghost of a pure culture now forever lost: a culture that seeks to stand outside history precisely when history returns with violence to demand an accounting of its material and political conditions of existence.
Perhaps, then, the decisive point is that the conflict emerging around Cannes this year does not concern merely the “politicization” of cinema in the traditional sense of the term, but something even deeper: the transformation of the regime of images within contemporary capitalism. Behind the protest against Vincent Bolloré lies not only fear of economic concentration and of the far right’s growing cultural hegemony, but also anxiety that the world of images is entering a new historical phase, one in which platforms, algorithms, generative artificial intelligence, vertical media integration, and engagement-driven logics are producing a far more capillary and pervasive form of control over the social imaginary. No longer simply propaganda, but something closer to what many now describe as “techno-fascism”: a fusion of technological power, capital, and the affective management of subjectivity in which images no longer function primarily to represent the world, but rather to modulate behavior, desire, attention, and perception itself.
It is perhaps significant that, within this same festival traversed by conflicts over the political control of cultural institutions, some of the most compelling films begin precisely from this altered condition of the visual. If Fatherland responded to the contemporary crisis through a nostalgic retreat into the fantasy of a spiritual culture detached from history, films such as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun—and, as we will discuss in our next dispatch, The Diary of a Chambermaid by Radu Jude—depart from the opposite premise: There is no longer any outside to images. There is no innocent reality that cinema might still simply represent or redeem. Life itself is already entirely immersed within the self-referential circuits of the contemporary visual regime.
Indeed, the premise of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma—which opened the Un Certain Regard section—is that everything has already been said, every image has already been created, “every film is a remake.” Schoenbrun does not use a single image that cannot somehow be traced back to something already seen: Sunset Boulevard, Halloween, Scream, David Lynch, Wes Craven. But the list could extend indefinitely, and every spectator will inevitably discover their own chain of references. Schoenbrun tells us this in every possible way, even rendering it ostentatiously visible through the film’s obsession with snacks and junk food: We inhabit a world in which everything has become commodity. Not only images, but also food, language, time, and ultimately life itself.
The premise is deliberately paradoxical: A twenty-nine-year-old queer filmmaker—a transparent alter ego for Schoenbrun—is hired to give a “woke” rebranding to a slasher franchise that has entered a stagnant phase. By now, the film suggests, we live in a world where sequels never end and franchises never die. We live, in other words—as Fredric Jameson might have put it—in a world without historicity. Within this endless hall of mirrors, where everything appears as the eternal repetition of itself, where everything is meta, where every sentence spoken by the protagonist sounds like an inside joke referring to something else, where culture has become so self-referential as to revolve endlessly around itself, is it still possible to tell a story in a spontaneous, non-meta way? Is it still possible to encounter a moment of authenticity?
This is a question that cinema—and perhaps every cultural form emerging after postmodernism—has been confronting for some time. Lars von Trier, for example, already suggested years ago that even when cinema exposes its own artificiality—he constructed deliberately unrealistic sets marked only by chalk outlines on the floor—narrative nevertheless remains powerful enough to produce identification. In other words, despite every ironic or metafictional distancing device, storytelling continues to compel belief, independently of context. Likewise, filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg have remained faithful to the idea that even in a cynical and disenchanted world, it is still possible to believe in the power of images and stories. Even hyper-contemporary—and arguably overrated—filmmakers such as Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the directing duo behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, ultimately reassure us that by traversing the babel of commodities, signifiers, and contemporary chaos, one can still arrive at a space of authenticity, in their case through a surprisingly conservative family melodrama. As though it remained possible to discover some sentimental point of anchorage capable of carrying us beyond the ambiguity of images. This is the spontaneous ideology to which Hollywood has often accustomed us: Human emotions can still be transmitted authentically, even within a world saturated by commodities, deception, false consciousness, corrupt producers, manipulative media, and charlatan directors.
But this is not what Schoenbrun tells us. On the contrary, their film pushes the indistinction between reality and the narration of reality to its limit. Not only is every film always already the remake of another film; life itself has already been included within cinema. Existence has already become spectacle, and nothing any longer separates life from film because our emotional alphabet has always already been formed through images. There is no cinematic representation of life anymore, only continuity between the two. The Gloria Swanson of Sunset Boulevard—repeatedly evoked throughout the film—no longer watches the films of her life as though they belonged to the past. Life itself exists inside the film she is watching, and vice versa. The result is a kind of Möbius strip in which one watches oneself watching the film from within the film itself, leading to the paradoxical conclusion that the subject and object of vision exchange places and activity and passivity become indistinguishable. (If these formulations sound vaguely Lacanian, it is because the film contains a wink in this direction: The protagonist’s first film is titled Jouis-sense, or “jouissance,” and consists of a remake of Psycho retold from the point of view of the shower curtain.)
