Locarno's "Red & Black" Retrospective: The Hollywood Left, the Blacklist, and the Trump Era
This year's retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival looks back at the Hollywood blacklist from 1947 to 1960. Curator Ehsan Khoshbakht calls the selection "the most timely retrospective" he's ever worked on.
The 'Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist' retrospective at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival trains its lens on the persecution of Hollywood professionals suspected of communist ties, spanning from 1947 into the early 1960s.
As the festival describes it, the selection offers "a complex portrait of an era in which artists faced an unprecedented abuse of state and industry power, and responded with bold, fierce artistic resistance."
Produced in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Suisse and with support from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the program is once again curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht. Khoshbakht compiled more than 50 fiction films, documentaries, shorts, and newsreels, featuring figures like John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright, and Charlie Chaplin.
Films in the selection include Lewis Milestone's 'The North Star' (1943), Clifford Odets's 'None But the Lonely Heart' (1944), Edward Dmytryk's 'Crossfire' (1947), Abraham Polonsky's 'Force of Evil' (1948), Cy Endfield's 'The Sound of Fury' (1950), Fred Zinnemann's 'High Noon' (1952), Chaplin's 'A King in New York' (1957), Martin Ritt's 'The Front' (1976) starring Woody Allen, and 'Red Hollywood' (1996).
Khoshbakht told THR why he's bringing the project to life now: "I'd set this project aside for the future because it required serious research. But suddenly I thought it belonged exactly to this moment, because it's about what's happening right now. Even the terminology of that era is back in circulation." According to the curator, both the left and the right today have claimed the vocabulary of the McCarthy era for their own purposes. The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs August 5-15.