Hollywood Left, Blacklist, Locarno Retrospective for Trump

Locarno Film Festival is mounting a retrospective that refuses to let history sit quietly in the archives. The program, anchored by a conversation with its curator, draws a deliberate parallel between the Hollywood blacklist era and the present political moment - one the festival frames, pointedly, as "the age of Trump & Co." Ahead of the upcoming edition, the series positions the mid-century purge not as a closed chapter of industry shame but as a living reference point for how political pressure bends and breaks American filmmaking.

The Industry's Own Purge

In the late 1940s and through the 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee turned its gaze on Hollywood. Writers, directors, and actors were summoned to Washington, pressed to name colleagues, and punished when they refused. The Hollywood Ten - the contingent of writers and directors who stood on principle - became the movement's martyrs, serving prison sentences for contempt. But the wider carnage was staggering. Careers evaporated overnight. Some artists fled to Europe, working under assumed identities. Others survived by writing scripts that passed through "fronts," friends of convenience who submitted the work under their own names for a fee. The studios, meanwhile, issued the Waldorf Statement and effectively institutionalized the blacklist, agreeing en masse not to employ anyone with known or suspected leftist ties.

That machinery of exclusion sits at the heart of the retrospective. The curator's framing, evidently, is that the blacklist was never merely a cautionary tale about McCarthyism. It was a case study in how an industry polices its own. The parallels to today are not subtle: the resurgence of nationalist rhetoric, the mounting pressure on cultural institutions to perform loyalty, the velocity with which an artist can be turned into a liability. The "age of Trump & Co." tag is less an act of provocation than a diagnosis - an assertion that the conditions which produced the blacklist are forming again, in different shapes and under different rules.

Restoring Erased Names

The program reportedly emphasizes the resilience of blacklisted artists as much as their persecution. It lingers on the work those filmmakers made in the shadows: the genre pictures, the westerns, the thrillers that scholars have long read as coded responses to the era's paranoia. Much of that output was made under pseudonyms or through uncredited rewrites, and the retrospective is said to treat authorship as its central obsession. This is a corrective to decades of screen credits that lied about who wrote what, and a reminder that the blacklist's damage was not just economic but archival - it fractured the historical record itself.

There is also room in the series for the allegorical tradition. A western about a lone marshal abandoned by a cowardly town, or a science-fiction fable of emotionless doubles quietly replacing a community - these have been interpreted for years as anxiety about accusation and conformity, projected safely into distant genres. The retrospective appears to embrace that reading, inviting audiences to revisit the era's most commercial work as a shadow history of political persecution.

Why Now

The curatorial chat at the center of the event is described as a walkthrough of these selections and the reasoning behind them. The argument, broadly, is that the blacklist was never just about communism. It was about power: who gets to define patriotism, who gets to tell stories, and what becomes of the storytellers when they fall out of favor. That set of questions has an uncomfortable echo in the streaming era, where consolidation concentrates enormous leverage in a handful of platforms, and where a political controversy can get a project quietly dropped or an artist silently sidelined.

Locarno has long treated film as a serious cultural and political artifact, and a retrospective of this nature fits the festival's institutional temperament. By anchoring the series to the current climate, it is signaling that the past remains unfinished business. The timing - arriving in a year of deep partisan fracture - sharpens the point considerably.

What remains to be seen is how audiences in Switzerland and beyond receive the program's implied message. The blacklist is an American story, but its lessons travel. Locarno's gesture is a forceful reminder that the health of cinema, and of the society surrounding it, depends on the freedom to make uncomfortable work without fear of retaliation. This retrospective does not pretend to have solved that problem. It simply insists, with considerable vigor, that the problem is still with us.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter