“When Gérard Depardieu is attacked like this, what is attacked is art.” The phrase is part of a controversial support forum signed this week by 56 artists, including Carla Bruni and Victoria Abril, in which they denounce a “lynching” against the actor, accused of rape and other sexual assaults by more than a dozen women. The text, which has unleashed a new wave of indignation in France, also defends the work of justice as an argument to stop criticism of the actor and highlights an old debate: should we separate the work from the artist? Does art justify everything?
The column, titled Don’t delete Depardieu, was published in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro a few days after French President Emmanuel Macron defended the presumption of innocence of the interpreter. The leader also stated that he will never participate in “man hunts” and ruled out the possibility of withdrawing the Legion of Honor from the artist, as the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, had suggested, as long as there is no judicial conviction. That distinction, the country’s maxim, “is not there to establish morality,” the president stressed.
Both Macron’s reaction and the column of support for Depardieu added fuel to the fire. The 75-year-old actor is at the center of the media whirlwind due to the recent dissemination of an unpublished video in which he makes sexual comments towards women, during a trip to North Korea in 2018. His statements have had a particular resonance in light of the accusations that exist against him and led the province of Quebec, in Canada, to withdraw his medal of honor and the Belgian commune of Estaimpuis to withdraw his title of honorary citizen. The Paris wax museum also decided to remove the artist’s figure.
Icon of the seventh art and protagonist of more than 200 films, Depardieu has been reported to the authorities by three women, one of them a Spanish journalist. The complaints are for sexual assault and rape. A court formally accused him in 2020 for one of those cases, which was initially archived. Another 13 women have accused him – without formalizing a complaint – of sexual violence during filming between 2004 and 2022. Crimes that the interpreter denies.
The case divides. On the one hand, there are those who defend his legacy and that he can continue acting, since he has not yet been judged. “No matter what happens, no one will ever be able to erase the indelible mark of his work, which has left an indelible mark on our time. The rest, all the rest, concerns justice, only justice,” says the letter, signed by prominent figures in the French cultural world. “To do without this great actor would be a tragedy, a defeat. The death of art,” they insist.
On the other hand, there are those who consider that it is the last straw and that both Macron and the signatories of the letter they despise the victims. “It is a very educational platform. What we see is how an environment is going to organize itself and use arguments like ‘he is a sacred monster, he is a genius’ to protect someone,” Anne-Cécile Mailfert, president of the Women’s Foundation, reacted to Agence France Presse.
Murielle Reus, vice-president of MeToo Mediaan association that fights against sexism and sexual violence in the media, recalled for its part Franceinfo that “there is a very strong social change towards sexual and gender violence” and that there is “a generation that still does not understand these social changes.”
After the publication of the column, explanations from some of the signatories followed. Some, like the actor’s ex-partner, Carole Bouquet, expressed their discomfort after the identity of the person who wrote it came to light. He is a very little-known actor, who writes for the far-right magazine Causeur, is a friend of Depardieu’s daughter, Julie, and close to Éric Zemmour, a former ultra candidate in the presidential election. The director Nadine Trintignant decided to withdraw her signature after her identity became known, as revealed by the weekly Le Point on Friday.
Depardieu “is indispensable to the artistic history of our country,” said Yannis Ezziadi, actor and editorial writer for the far-right magazine Causeur. The interpreter, known among others for his roles in Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) or the Asterix and Obélix saga (1999-2012), was aware of the letter before its publication, but insisted that he did not ask for help from the signatories. , according to what they collect local media. Several personalities refused to sign the tribune, the actor added, according to the same sources.
The actor and singer Michel Fau, one of the signatories, noted in an interview with BFMTV: “They try to tell us that the artist must be reasonable, a model for society. He is completely terrifying. I think that the artist must continue to be extravagant, scandalous, obscene and ungovernable.” Another signatory, Jean-Marie Rouart, an 80-year-old member of the French academy, he added: “The opinion [pública] is going down the wrong path. By foolishly moralizing these great artists, you are in the process of seeing a fundamental freedom suppressed and, above all, what makes France happy, the humor that we could have and the complacency that we had with the lives of the great artists.
The letter and their reactions are reminiscent of other cases and the complex reaction in France to the #MeToo movement. In 2018, a forum signed by 100 French artists and intellectuals, including the actress Catherine Deneuve, claimed the “freedom to bother” essential for sexual freedom and warned about the repercussions that the new climate could have on cultural production.
“The struggles for the autonomy of art dating back to the 19th century partly explain the reactions of intellectual and artistic circles to #MeToo. But the autonomy of art also serves as a pretext for those who want to maintain male domination,” French sociologist Gisèle Sapiro, author of Can the work be separated from the author, tells this newspaper? [traducido al español en ediciones clave intelectual]. And he adds: “The sacralization of creation, very strong in France, and the relationships of reverence and dependence that surround creators and performers, allow some of them to abuse their position and benefit from the law of silence and connivance. of those around them, as well as the tolerance of justice.”
The cases of the film director Roman Polanski, convicted of raping a minor 50 years ago, of the writer Gabriel Matzneff, accused of pedophilia, and of the singer Bertrand Cantat, convicted of murdering his partner, although very different, “show different facets of this impunity of artists,” highlights Sapiro.
Polanski, despite being persecuted in the United States since the late seventies, triumphed at the César gala. Matzneff still received a literary prize. And Cantat, sentenced to eight years in prison for the murder of Marie Trintignant, did not completely disappear from the public scene for many years. An aura towards the artist who, through social advances and the expansion of the feminist movement, is increasingly questioned. And he tolerates himself less and less.
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2023-12-30 06:01:57
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