If you took wokism with a grain of salt, dear moviegoers, think again.
Wokism is alive and spreading in the cinema world like smallpox in colonial times. Last week I heard about the New York Times’ new list of the 100 greatest films in history, adherents of the Awakened Doctrine par excellence.
Thank goodness the venerable British Film Institute – it’s 90 years old – has radically cleaned up the list it publishes every ten years. Several films that were naively considered masterpieces have tumbled down the list or simply been wiped out. Creators and works that no longer correspond to the new dogmas have gone through the mill like victims of the plague and rubbish.
Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Lars von Trier and even old filmmakers like DW Griffith and Robert Flaherty, forever considered harmless and famous, are no longer showable. They went the way to nothing, like Claude Jutra in Quebec. Have you ever seen Flaherty’s docudrama Nanouk l’Esquimau or Jutra’s feature film Mon oncle Antoine? Otherwise, wait and see, and above all, don’t expose chaste teenagers to it, as I was in the college film club. These films that we once thought were masterpieces are poisonous. If not by their subject, then by those who created them.
LIKE THE ENCYCLICS!
Thanks to the vigilance of the British Film Institute, the list of best films is now being refined. Moviegoers can trust him as Catholics trust the gospel. The British Film Institute is to moviegoers what the Vatican is to Catholics. This venerable institute wrote the truth with a capital “V,” but since it only publishes its list every ten years, it fluctuates. Like the truth that the Pope fits from one encyclical to the next!
Women, blacks and “racialized” communities are the big winners of the new list. For the first time, a woman, Chantal Akerman, dominates the price list. The Franco-Belgian filmmaker who committed suicide in 2015, we owe him several documentaries, several artistic installations such as that of the Montreal artist Dominique Blain and the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels, which dominates the list. I remember seeing it in Paris some time after its release in 1975 or 1976.
SCREEN CLERGY
I have far from remembered it as a masterpiece, as I found it very long and rather boring, the film’s heroine (Delphine Seyrig) doing such mundane household chores as meatloaf, cleaning the bathtub, washing dishes for more than three hours seeing shoes shine, making the bed, shopping, etc. etc. Repetitive tasks, which she intersperses monosyllabically with her teenager, or by visiting “sexual” clients whose antics we carefully (or unfortunately) spare.
In times of heightened feminism that we’re going through, we shouldn’t be surprised if this film is presented as a masterpiece. He is the perfect example of female alienation. Like other films, they appear on the list primarily because they denounce racism and discrimination or deal with diversity, inclusion or decolonization. The standards of the new screen cleric are different, but their way of judging cinema, theater and television is becoming more and more like that of the Russian, Chinese and North Korean dictators!
