Hating Cops and Raping Women at the Venice Film Festival
The sewer of the entertainment industry fouls the canals of
Venice.
September 20, 2019
Daniel
Greenfield
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the
Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the
radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
In 1999, Nate Parker was
accused of raping a woman. In 2012, his alleged victim, who testified that she
had tried to kill herself twice after the assault, took her own life. In 2019,
the Venice Film Festival gave a standing ovation and an award to Parker’s movie
glamorizing a terrorist attack on a police station.
The Venice Film Festival
has always been a sewer where Eurotrash effluent and Hollywood slime back up
into Venice’s disgusting canals. Last year’s Venice Film Festival had seen a
“Weinstein is Innocent” t-shirt. Polanski, a Venice Film Festival regular
wasn’t there, because he feared being extradited to the United States over his
alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl. And this time, Weinstein, who had
spearheaded a campaign to get Polanski off the hook when he was nearly
extradited from Zurich, can no longer count on
the support of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, and Darren
Aronofsky.
Well, maybe Woody Allen.
There were no “Polanski
is Innocent” t-shirts on display when the infamous director skyped in to avoid
the long arm of the American law. But, Venice went one better by giving him the
Grand Jury Prize.
Like Parker, Polanski
also got a standing ovation.
“The history of art is
full of artists who committed crimes but we have continued to admire their works
of art and the same is true of Polanski," Alberto Barbera, the festival's
director insisted.
Barbera compared Polanski
to Caravaggio. An important point in Caravaggio’s defense is that he died in
1610. It’s one thing to admire the work of an artist who died four hundred
years ago, and another to continue promoting the work of a living predator
whose alleged targets had included models and actresses whom he had gained
access to because of his role in the film industry.
But at Venice, the
mythology of European cinema with its parties and payouts is all that matters.
Last year, Moritz de
Hadeln, the festival's former director, had defended Harvey
Weinstein by arguing that, "no one has done as much for European
cinema."
If the Venetian house of
European cinema is built on Harvey Weinstein, maybe it deserves to sink.
But what of Nate Parker,
whose latest black nationalist screed, American
Skin, was widely panned by even leftist critics? American Skin depicts a black father
whose son has been shot by police, storming a police station and putting the
officers on trial at gunpoint. Critics had few problems with glamorizing Black
Lives Matter violence against police officers, despite the murder of five
police officers in Dallas by Micah X. Johnson, a black nationalist, and Gavin
Long’s murder of three police officers in Baton Rouge.
Instead, they took issue
with Parker’s acting, the technical execution and its general terribleness.
But at Venice, American Skin’s depiction of a black
nationalist assault on a police station, got a standing ovation from Polanski
and Weinstein’s fan club. Parker was praised by Spike Lee, the movie’s producer,
who had helped him break out with
a role in Red Hook Summer the
year his accuser committed suicide.
And American Skin won the Filming Italy
Award for Best Film despite not actually being filmed in Italy.
But geography, like
consent and the age of the girls you assault, is often a technicality in Venice
where the canals run with sewage and the film festivals with slime who give
sewage a run for its money.
What little there is of American Skin’s "Italian"
heritage comes from Tarak Ben Ammar, the Tunisian Muslim who controls Italian
film distributor Eagle Pictures.
Tarak Ben Ammar was there
alongside Parker and Spike Lee when the latter insisted that, “we’ve got to
move forward.” That’s something that the dead woman whom Parker allegedly raped
is unable to do.
“My hope is that I can
make more films that speak to times that need attention in a way that inspires
people to do better," Nate Parker told reporters.
“Gun violence needs attention in our country… what happened to the indigenous
people in America, we need to know more about it and have an opinion about it.
The plight of women globally - there are so many stories that have not been
told."
It's much easier to talk
about the plight of women globally, than the plight of women locally.
After the accusations
began coming out, Harvey Weinstein also urgently wanted to talk about gun
violence. “I am going to need a place to channel that anger, so I’ve decided
that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention,” the alleged rapist had
declared in his statement.
While rattling off his
list of politically correct talking points, Parker left out the one story that
he is truly qualified to tell. Not the plight of women globally, but the plight
of one particular woman. Not the story of gun violence, but of his own violence.
And that’s the one story that he has no interest in telling.
Spike Lee implied that
Parker had unfairly lost out on an Oscar for a previous movie because of racial
bias in handling accusations against black and white Hollywood figures accused
of sexual misconduct. But Weinstein and Polanski are also out at the Academy
Awards. Like Parker, they’re still popular in Europe.
"We have to assume facts:
One, he was acquitted and is innocent. Two, he's a great film director,” Tarak
Ben Ammar insisted.
Spike Lee began ranting about
President Trump. “I hope people register to vote because this guy has got to
go. He has done many evil things but one thing that has really struck me is
infants being torn out of the arms of their mothers.”
The suicide of Parker’s
alleged victim had left her ten-year-old son without a mother.
Spike Lee, Nate Parker
and the rest of the gang at the Venice Film Festival, couldn’t care less.
Instead, Parker and Polanski cynically make movies about
racial injustice in order to wrap themselves in the cloak of an unearned
martyrdom.
Polanski is not a victim because he’s unable to hear the cheers of the Venice
Film Festival audience in person. And despite Parker’s insistence on playing
oppressed men driven to the breaking point, his film office boasts an address
near the Woodland Hills Country Club.
American Skin’s reception at the Venice Film Festival does tell a story.
Not about racism, but about its uses. It’s not just a story about Venice, but about the
entire movie industry whose moguls and directors tell the stories of underdogs
while bullying, terrorizing, raping and assaulting real-life underdogs.
The movie industry’s value system is a narrative invented
by predators who want to seem like heroes.
Hollywood heroes are
always fighting injustice in front of the camera because the industry’s figures
are constantly committing injustices behind the camera while hiding behind
their lawyers. They’re always rebelling against social norms because the
industry doesn’t believe in norms that restrict their appetites. They’re always
leading the battle against bigotry, sexism and homophobia because the attacks
on the morality of the country provide them with cover for their own horrifying
crimes against everyone.
These truths are not as
obvious as they are at the Venice Film Festival. But they ought to be.
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