The blacklist in retrospective and the money that closes a paper

Peter Thiel is not in Locarno and there is no connection between his case and the festival's retrospective. This piece places side by side two cases distant in time and different in nature, because both bear on the same question: what happens when whoever has the resources can decide who goes on working and who does not.

The retrospective of the 79th edition is titled "Red & Black - The Hollywood Left and the Blacklist" and comprises fifty titles, spanning fiction, documentary, newsreels and short films. The works come from seven countries and were made by filmmakers and professionals persecuted or placed on the blacklist during Senator McCarthy's witch hunt, or are dedicated to them. It is curated by the Iranian critic Ehsan Khoshbakht.

The second case

In 2016 Thiel confirmed that he had financed, with around ten million dollars, the wrestler Hulk Hogan's suit against the website Gawker. The proceedings concerned the publication of a private video. A Florida jury awarded Hogan 115 million dollars, later raised to 140. The dispute ended in a 31 million settlement, and the publication ceased.

Thiel explained that in 2007 Gawker had published an article revealing his homosexuality, and he described funding the suit as one of the more philanthropic things he had done. In later proceedings his lawyers also cited an economic motive alongside the protection of privacy.

The differences are substantial and should be stated. The blacklist was a political persecution coordinated between congressional committees and film studios, which struck hundreds of workers for their opinions and without trial. The Gawker case was a civil suit on a privacy question, decided by a jury, and third-party funding of litigation is a lawful practice in the United States.

Those who defend that funding also note that publishing a private video is not journalism, and that a judgment is not a proscription list.

The point of contact is nonetheless real, and it concerns the outcome rather than the law. In both cases a newsroom stopped existing and individual people lost the ability to work, without that following from readers' judgement or from the market.

Part of the retrospective's value lies here too. A programme that puts back into circulation films someone wanted to make disappear shows how long it takes for such work to become visible again, and how short a time it takes to make it disappear.