Three restored classics in the square and the stagnation thesis

Peter Thiel is not in Locarno. This article takes one of his public arguments and applies it to the programme of the 79th edition, to see what comes out.

The argument is well known. Founders Fund, the firm Thiel launched in 2005, summed it up in a line that became a slogan: we wanted flying cars, instead we got one hundred and forty characters. The claim is that outside computing, technical progress has slowed since the 1970s, and that contemporary culture confines itself to rearranging existing material.

Locarno79's programme appears to confirm it. Piazza Grande is screening three restored classics: David Lynch's "Wild at Heart", Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves" and Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver". The retrospective adds fifty films connected to the Hollywood blacklist. The tributes include Roger Corman's "Frankenstein Unbound" from 1990, John Landis's "An American Werewolf in London" from 1981 and Safi Faye's "Kaddu Beykat" from 1975. A homage is devoted to the Swiss pioneer Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch, who died in 2003.

Why the confirmation does not hold

The arithmetic, however, says something else. Of the 233 films in the programme, 103 are world premieres, and 7,759 entries were received, 21% more than in 2025.

The ratio between old and new therefore does not point to production drying up. It shows that the festival devotes a deliberate share of its space to circulating films that already exist.

On the retrospective the argument reverses entirely. The fifty titles assembled by Ehsan Khoshbakht are works made by people shut out of employment, and many never had the circulation they would have had without the persecutions. For the audience seeing them this year they are not old films: they are films that never arrived.

Restoration is itself a technology. Bringing a 1940s print back to projectable quality requires tools that did not exist twenty years ago, and the work produces copies that were not there before.

It follows that the Locarno case offers neither a clean confirmation nor a clean refutation of the stagnation thesis. What it shows is that the measure chosen for innovation settles the answer in advance: count new titles and you get one result, count works made available for the first time and you get another.