Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox. He has just published
War Journal.
It is the West that is being assassinated
(Fayard).
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I would be lying if I wrote that the artistic world inspires me with immense moral or intellectual esteem.
A fortiori that of the cinematographic world.
I do not consider the French actor to be much more generous than me, beyond his munificent but inexpensive speech.
No more conformist than a talkative nonconformist full of bravado.
I saw him neither of immense courage during the occupation here, nor during the McCarthy affair there, where his progressive comrades were denouncing each other.
As for his political intelligence, it never jumped to my mind since his fairly unanimous support for Stalinism.
One wonders, in passing, if the President of the Republic is not more an artist than a politician, when we see him granting an interview, to celebrate the spirit of resistance against Nazism, to a newspaper using the beautiful word “humanity” but who welcomed the German soldiers, or when we hear it, to pay homage to Manouchian, sing this
“communist ideal”
which caused 100 million deaths.
It is therefore with this rather unadmiring spirit, and which many French people now share, that I watched the Caesar Ceremony on Friday evening.
My first reason for annoyance in the face of the dangerous conformism of false generosity concerns violence against women.
Already, during the previous ceremony, I had devoted an annoyed column in these same columns.
The cause ?
The attitude of Adèle Haenel, whose angry aggression towards Roman Polanski was matched only by her infinite indulgence for Ladj Ly.
Both men having been convicted in cases involving women.
The angry person who signed this article thought it necessary to explain this cruel difference in treatment by a particular prejudice towards an old white male, whom his youth in the Warsaw ghetto did not alter in any way.
The author of Dreyfus was guilty, the author of Les Miserables could only be kind.
Note that the conformist environment, which speaks more than it thinks, was in no way disturbed by this difference in behavior.
This year, once again, violence against women was the main theme of the ceremony.
Judith Godrèche, whose accusations against two filmmakers had shortly before hit the headlines, was cheered standing up by the audience.
We would like to excuse the lawyer who signs this column, for not dwelling on the merits of a case before the courts, in the name of the denials of the two accused as well as a presumption of innocence which is not not, at least still for him, a notion that has fallen into disuse.
Throughout the ceremony, we were able to measure the weight of a left-wing ideology and therefore in conformity with the conformist artistic milieu.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
But in the midst, therefore, of an irresistible and tempestuous artistic and media conformism, he dared to go against the wind with some ungrateful reflections.
An actress proposed
“putting aside”
all the accused actors and filmmakers who have not been convicted, for the duration of the legal proceedings.
This really ignores the current duration of a criminal proceeding, in the context of paralytic justice, which can perfectly well, all appeals combined, exceed a decade.
This proposition, whether stupid or hypocritical, is therefore equivalent to civil death.
I would add by way of observation, that even the accused who are judicially exonerated are not professionally rehabilitated either, both the media and ideological trials are carried out without any reason.
In this area where good faith is an obscene notion, the adage
“Woe to whom scandal comes”
tragically takes on its full meaning.
As if certain males, innocent but guilty of being accused, had to be sacrificed in public on the altar of a sacred cause.
My second ungrateful remark concerns this cruel paradox: ideology, particularly artistic, seems to be more passionate about old affairs, sometimes forty years old, affected by statute of limitations, subject to speculation through denials, rather than for atrocious violence against women that is much more recent and more indisputable.
Furthermore, in the context of the aforementioned Godrèche affair, as painful as it may be, no one will be able to prevent me from observing that in 2010, during a television interview, and even though she had already largely reached the age of maturity, the accuser held a much less accusatory speech towards one of the accused... In this irrational as well as paradoxical framework, and with regard to the cruel as well as indisputable and recent fate, reserved to certain women, a lunar spirit, coming from another planet, could have hoped that we would pay homage to all these old ladies, sometimes in their nineties, raped and assaulted by young OQTFs.
Likewise, our disarmingly naivety, ignoring the weight of ideology, could have expected some words of compassion, which artists are sometimes not sparing of, with regard to the raped and disemboweled women of the kibbutzim.
But our naive man did not know that these Jewish women were white and that their tormentors were not... And I enter through this door of hell inside my second motive of anger towards the unbearable moral lightness of artistic being.
It therefore touches on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Throughout the ceremony, we were able to measure the weight of a left-wing ideology and therefore in conformity with the conformist artistic milieu.
This is how, on several occasions, we mourned Gaza, but never the tortured people of Hamas.
Worse still, Kaouther Ben Hania, César for best documentary, was allowed to say:
“The massacre must stop in Gaza... This is the first massacre live on our phones and it must stop”
.
This declaration would have earned the Caesar for indecency since the first live massacre was recorded on the phones of the massacrers and rapists of an Islamist terrorist movement whose name was never spoken, let alone vilified.
Finally, when Agnès Jaoui was rewarded for all of her work, she who had just filmed in the film “The Last of the Jews” in these Islamized French suburbs, could have uttered a few words imbued with humanity towards certain of his parents massacred on the morning of October 7.
Have I told you that the artistic world does not inspire immense moral or intellectual esteem in me?