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Why can we tolerate Polanski's fictions, but not his realities? (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
This is a tale of censorship. In 2019, Roman Polanski’s film about the Dreyfus Affair, An Officer and a Spy, was nominated for 12 César awards and won the Grand Jury prize at Venice. But, due to #MeToo, it was never released in America, Australia or Britain, where distributors feared boycotts and social media mobs. This week, the UK Jewish Film Festival dared to screen it in London, and they were right. It needs an audience.
The de facto ban is hypocrisy, because on some subjects Polanski will be heard. Chinatown is about child abuse, which is the very thing Polanski did: in 1977 he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in America and has lived as a fugitive in Europe since, dogged by accusations of predation. Chinatown was 50 this year, and there are public screenings in its honour. But An Officer and a Spy cannot be shown when it is urgently needed. This makes no sense. If you are prepared to allow Polanski’s work to exist — and filmmaking is a collaborative effort — why not show the truth of the Dreyfus case? If you are for censorship, censor all his work. Or none of it.
Its story is this: in 1894, the French army knew there was a German spy in their midst. They scapegoated Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), the only Jew on the general staff; when they realised the case was weak, they falsified evidence against him. “The idea of the Jew, took hold of them, seized them, dominated them,” wrote the historian Joseph Reinach. “My only crime,” Dreyfus said, “was being born a Jew.” He was convicted, and, at the official degradation ceremony, his sword was broken and the crowd shouted, “Death to Judas, death to the Jews!” He was imprisoned in French Guiana on Devil’s Island — how apt — and as Polanski pulls the camera back from the island to the ocean, Dreyfus’s isolation — his Jewishness — is explicit.
France was the first European country to give equal rights to Jews, and this was the revenge. It was also an epigraph to the Holocaust, in which many French people colluded. Eventually, due to the diligence of Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), a fellow officer and repentant antisemite, and the activism of the novelist Émile Zola, Dreyfus was pardoned, then exonerated. This is an old European story, ever revived: a Christian nation divines itself through the prism of the Jew.
Polanski does not place Dreyfus at the centre of his film: he is the man things are done to, in cinema and life. But at least he does justice to the antisemitism that destroyed him. “How does he look?” Picquart is asked of Dreyfus’s degradation. “Like a Jewish tailor weeping over his lost gold.” “What was the mood like afterwards?” “As if a healthy body had been purged of something pestilential so that life could resume.”
The Variety critic described The Dreyfus Affair as “fabled” and “legendary”. Subconsciously, at least, he could not accept that Dreyfus was real. The IndieWire critic could not bring himself to review the film: rather he reviewed Polanski and called it “a film-length tantrum” from “cinema’s most-storied rapist… as nakedly autobiographical as anything Polanski has ever made”.
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SubscribeConflating art with the sins of its creator is a difficult one, and I have no definitive answer myself. Eric Gill was also a monster but we still use his fonts and view his sculptures. We are still watching the movies made by Miramax. Let’s face it, the US has just elected as its president a self-confessed, and legally confirmed, sexual predator. Polanski obviously hasn’t come to terms with his own sins otherwise he would have gone back to the US and faced the music – and probably got off rather more lightly than most people think that he should have (it beggars belief that the incident for which he was caught was an isolated one).
On a note in the piece which grated with me, Ms Gold says that the Poles were ‘nothing of the kind’ as ‘rescuers’ of the Jews. Well they were at least something of the kind – there were many, many Poles who helped Jews during the German occupation (that’s not to deny the opposite of course).
Polanski obviously hasn’t come to terms with his own sins
That’s not something you can know.
Geimer, the young girl, has said, “What happened with Polanski was never a big problem for me … I was fine, I’m still fine.” She said she “was not a child at 13.” “ … she feels more wounded by what she calls the “victim industry”: the lawyers, judges and journalists …” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2023
She has since said she forgives Polanski. Maybe you could climb down from your sanctimonious position and learn something from Geimer herself.
Perhaps Polanski’s mistake was to inflict his criminal lusts on the opposite sex?
The beau monde is, it seems, far more forgiving of criminal deviancy if only it is conducted within the established pederastic perameters – that is with underage boys, not girls – as in the case of Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Benjamin Britten, W H Auden etc. etc.
Wilde’s long and notorious career of child abuse is even mystified and dignified with the name of ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.
he didnt have ‘unlawful intercourse’ he raped and sodomised a 13 year old girl after getting her high on hard drugs. he should have been extradited and jailed for a very very long time. sod his work and the libtard obsession with this talentless pervert.
Being a rapist certainly doesn’t make him “talentless”. Maybe try to separate those two things in your mind.
Unlawful sexual Intercourse is having sex with someone under age. Rape is without consent. So stop frothing at the mouth and learn a few things in the process.
A child is, by definition and in law, unable to give consent.