Locarno Retrospective Titled ‘Red and Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist’ Will Focus on ‘Fierce Artistic Resistance’

The Locarno Film Festival’s upcoming edition will feature an extensive retro focused on the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, one of the U.S. entertainment industry’s darkest chapters.

Titled “Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist,” the timely retro — which is being unveiled on Thursday at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles — is curated by Locarno’s Ehsan Khoshbakht, who is also the co-director of Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival. Locarno is producing the retro in partnership with the Cinémathèque Suisse and with the support of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

“As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union swelled into a defining feature of world politics, right-wing voices in the American political system alleged communist infiltration of Hollywood,” the fest said in a statement. “Hearings that more closely resembled prosecutions followed, instigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The industry responded in fear and enforced a blacklist that upended careers, forced artists to adopt pseudonyms, stifled free expression and exiled creators overseas. Guilt by association tore families apart and films with left-wing ideas — real or imagined — were suppressed.”

The “Red and Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist” program will “paint a complex portrait of an era in which creatives were confronted by unprecedented abuse of state and industry power and which they met, courageously, with fierce artistic resistance,” the statement noted.

The retro will feature still unspecified key films from a wide range of directors, writers and stars comprising John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright and Charles Chaplin, tracing “the Red Scare’s origins and aftermath across the United States, in Europe, and beyond,” according to the statement. It will span fiction, documentaries, newsreels and shorts from the U.S., Britain, Spain, Italy, France, Mexico and Argentina.

“Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist” will assemble digital restorations and archival prints for a unique examination of the films of the period and will be accompanied by a book featuring contributions from international film scholars and critics on the films of the Hollywood left and a podcast, written by Khoshbakht.

In the statement, Khoshbakht called this retro “the timeliest one I have worked on in my life.”

“The imaginative ways of incorporating political consciousness into film, and the tragic consequences of that political determination, form the thrilling story of this program, offering new angles on the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era,” he noted.

Commented Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro: “This retrospective will be a unique critical and historical endeavour that sheds new light on a grim passage of Hollywood history.”

The 79th Locarno Film Festival will run Aug. 5-15.