Veteran French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (1941–2021): In genuine appreciation

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Various points need to be made.

1. Tavernier’s orientation towards Hollywood has definite implications for the media of the 21st century. If the American empire controlled the means of production for film in the 20th century, they now control the production of internet content through Google, Facebook, and other multinational companies. Disqus.com itself is owned by a company under the CEO John Skully, former CEO of Apple Inc. and Pepsi Co. The decision to put the fate of the revolution in the hands of Apple and Pepsi, supposed defenders of some minority capitalist faction, actually shows complete disdain for the actual revolutionary struggle. Tavernier’s position did not represent simple idle opinionating but an active stance to suppress film content that openly challenged Hollywood’s dominance of the film-making apparatus.

2. The extremely sympathetic reception of Tavernier, (he even donated money!) serves to conceal the real role of French Imperialism in dividing the leadership of the Fourth International and suppressing it throughout the world. His contributions should go down in history as bribes that led to the collapse of the OCI and took with it revolutionary parties throughout the world. Besides Bertrand Tavernier, others such as French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin had participated and joined the OCI. The party had abandoned any opposition to capitalist control of the finances and organization of the party. Only a factional approach towards protecting the membership of the party could have averted the disaster that ruined the Fourth International in the early 70s, sidelining it from revolutionary politics and allowing its Goliath severed head to serve as a prop to pose with for the loyal imperialist “friends” of the OCI. This operation, the French Republic smashing a dictatorial regime, the nano-bureaucratic OCI factional tyranny, likely served as the blue-print for the operations carried out by the British state in the 80s against Gerry Healy.

3. The WSWS has a very important choice to make. It can stand with the champions of imperialism and erase socialists from history for daring to reject the advances of the old republic, or it can turn to the working class, as Lenin argued revolutionaries should do. No “star” or classical Roman philosopher and parliamentarian or turncoat general can ever replace the political contributions of the revolutionary who stood with the working class and sought at every opportunity to divide the government and the official culture whenever their weakness showed. The OCI should have demanded an immediate political break by Bertrand Tavernier from any association with the capitalist state and official culture that he used to dazzle them. The WSWS should similarly demand from any officially sanctioned cultural phenomenon that approaches it an immediate and total break from any association with the predatory corporate studio system, which in reality, even when compromises are made in words to socialism, is inseparable from the Democratic Party and the defense of capitalist rule.

4. Film that behaves as a thinking, feeling government response to social movements certainly has a place in film history. It is the history of the bourgeois liberal reaction. Considering the importance that the revolutionary holds in Marxist theory, the entry of a bourgeois political and cultural figures should raise alarms. An imposter has entered the castle and can open the gates in the event of an invasion. A revolutionary perspective would allow for a disdain, and even an open pessimism towards the media humanization project of the capitalist elite. We should see it as enemy propaganda or as the private propaganda of an oligarch. Without a revolutionary perspective in art, then the advanced workers will always forgive too freely the wavering, indecision, and inaction of their leaders. They will always see the monsters in history as internally conflicted, seeing in this hope, humanity. They will abandon hope, conversely, in their heroes, seeing their struggle as invisible, idle, and that struggle itself as tragically flawed, inhuman in its insistence on participation. In order to regain control of pessimism, we must redirect it towards the projects of the ruling class in its self-humanization of itself and its de-humanization and its demonization of its revolutionary enemies.