Curator Chat: Hollywood Blacklist & Trump Era

The Locarno Film Festival has long treated the past as a live wire, but this year's lineup might carry more voltage than usual. A newly announced retrospective devoted to the Hollywood blacklist will dig into the political purge that gutted the American film industry in the late nineteen-forties and fifties, and the festival's curators are drawing explicit lines from that era of loyalty oaths and ruined careers to the current political moment. The show's stated frames of reference, which include the age of Trump "and company," make clear the festival sees the blacklist not as museum history, but as a preview of what cultural industries can do under pressure.

The program lands as political anxiety around media and entertainment is once again thick in the air. The retrospective's organizing conceit is that the blacklist was never really about communism alone. It was about conformity, about the punishment of dissent disguised as patriotism, and about the willingness of powerful institutions to abandon their own people when the state comes knocking.

A wound that never quite healed

The history at the center of the program is familiar to film scholars but deserves repeating for a Swiss audience that may know the movies better than the politics. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee began summoning Hollywood writers, directors, and actors to testify about their political affiliations. Ten artists who refused to cooperate were cited for contempt of Congress, sentenced to prison, and effectively exiled from the industry. Studio executives, anxious to protect their business, responded by issuing a statement that sanctioned the firing of subversive employees. The result was a professional death sentence for hundreds of people.

Some blacklisted figures kept working in secret, writing scripts through friends and pseudonyms or accepting wages far below their value. Others, including directors like Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey, fled to Europe, where they built second careers that often outshone their American ones. A handful of films from the period, such as the independent drama "Salt of the Earth," were made by blacklisted crews and became cultural symbols of resistance. The retrospective is expected to pull from this complicated archive, pairing major studio pictures with outlaw independents, and to consider what was lost when a generation of American talent was told their politics disqualified them from their own profession.

The ultimate tragedy, as the curatorial framing suggests, is that the industry mostly complied. The blacklist was not a government project alone. It was also a self-inflicted wound, a purge enforced by the very companies that claimed to love nothing more than artistic freedom.

Why now? The age of Trump and beyond

Locarno has never been a neutral festival. It has given space to dissident filmmakers, championed politically urgent cinema, and used its retrospective slot to re-examine the blind spots of film history. This year's choice, with its pointed reference to the former and current president, feels deliberate in its provocation. The "and company" in the title is a wink at a broader global pattern. The curator's argument, as presented in the program notes, is that the mechanisms of the blacklist now operate in new shapes across the world, from cultural boycotts and cancellation campaigns to state pressure on individual artists.

The parallel is not exact, and the curators appear to know it. No one in contemporary American cinema is going to prison for their screenwriting credits. But the conditions that allowed the blacklist to succeed, an intimidated industry, a polarized press, and a political class eager to weaponize cultural loyalty, are recognizable again. The retrospective is thus not a lecture about the past, but an invitation to ask who gets to decide what speech is unacceptable, and who pays the price.

The festival has also scheduled panel discussions with historians and descendants of blacklisted artists, making the program more than a screening series. In that sense, the retrospective is a reminder that the blacklist's final chapter is still being written. The stories of ruined reputations and secret scripts continue to surface, and the questions they pose about moral courage and institutional cowardice have not lost their sting.

What the program ultimately offers is a mirror. Locarno, a Swiss festival located in a city known for its international identity, may seem an odd place to relitigate American political trauma. But the themes of the blacklist, fear, silence, complicity, solidarity, are exportable. And in a political season that keeps producing new loyalty tests, the timing could hardly feel more pointed.

Source: Hollywood Reporter