Long before it began, the 50e edition of the Deauville American Film Festival made headlines: following the ouster of its director Bruno Barde, for alleged sexual harassment, the reins of the festival were entrusted to his close collaborator Aude Hesbert, who had to endure a series of controversies following the reshuffle of her jury. In the cinemas too, a clear and eloquent transfer of power was being plotted between two moments in American cinema: its history – proud, conquering, predominantly male and white. And a present obsessed with the question of the representation of its minorities and determined to twist the stick in the other direction.
At the Morny cinema, you could travel through the history of American cinema at full speed in fifty emblematic films: there were also Rambo (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), thatIntolerance (1916), de D. W. Griffith, Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) facing Gone with the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming). Next door, there was a complete retrospective of James Gray, who came to give a master class and inaugurate – as tradition dictates – his beach hut.
History and present
In this small New York Jewish world that the filmmaker has never stopped exploring, his latest film, Armageddon Time (2022), saw the emergence of a pure otherness, a reversal of perspective: suddenly, the Grayian microcosm was observed from the shore of the black condition. Institutional racism infiltrated to the point of destroying a childhood friendship. Armageddon Timeit is a bit of a pivotal work, the bridge that connected the two sides of this program, history and the present, which was played out in official competition.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers The Deauville American Film Festival is undergoing its post-#metoo makeover
Add to your selections
Out of fourteen independent films, five of them had a common program: that of following African-American characters who are no longer apprehended as otherness by a “white gaze”, but seized for themselves, at the heart of their intimacy. To the same exercise, several responses ranging from naivety to the most perfect pessimism.
In Color Bookdirector David Fortune films a wildly simple story: that of a black father, recently widowed, who takes care of his little boy with Down syndrome alone. Between daily difficulties and paternal epiphany, the film runs along a tenuous issue: a crossing of the city of Atlanta so that the son can attend his first baseball game. Here, the handicap relegates the question of race to the background, but everything is bathed in a light of benevolence and surmountable difficulties. Captured in a cottony, almost sleepy black and white, the film falls into a pitfall: believing that loving its characters consists of making them exemplary, angelic – soon mawkish.
You have 49.24% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
