Jean-Luc Godard: "Cannes Festival is a propaganda tool - Zelensky a bad actor"

The 75th annual Cannes Film Festival  kicked off on Sunday 22 May, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appearing on a video message during the opening night, giving a speech about the importance of film-making in the midst of war. 

Commenting on Zelensky's propagandistic appearance at Cannes, the legendary French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential European filmakers of the 20th century, wrote:

"Zelensky's intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called "staging": a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics what… 

Realizing it is not a big deal but it is already that. The truth of the images advances slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “in interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators… you like me. I hear that we often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder.“

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©