The Locarno Film Festival is mounting a retrospective that draws direct lines between Hollywood's 1950s blacklist era and contemporary political repression. Curator Ehsan Khoshbakht programmed "Red & Black" to examine how censorship, ideological persecution, and creative suppression operated then, and operate now.
The retrospective spans canonical works by persecuted filmmakers alongside films that interrogated blacklist anxieties in real time. Charlie Chaplin's banned films sit alongside Fred Zinnemann's "High Noon," which functioned as an allegory for McCarthyism while it was happening. Noir cinema gets examined as a genre that emerged from and reflected Cold War paranoia. The program also includes work by Paul Thomas Anderson, positioning contemporary auteurs in conversation with artists who survived or were destroyed by the system.
Khoshbakht's curation method proves instructive. He's tracing how The Hollywood Reporter itself covered the blacklist era, documenting the trade's complicity in naming names and amplifying persecution. This institutional analysis grounds the retrospective in material history rather than abstract moralizing.
The timing arrives deliberately. With Trump's second presidency beginning and authoritarian rhetoric ascending globally, Khoshbakht argues the blacklist represents not historical artifact but recurring pattern. The retrospective asks audiences to recognize suppression mechanisms that repeat across decades. Chaplin's exile, Parker's marginalization, the careers destroyed by loyalty oaths and informants, the studios that capitulated to pressure, the press that enabled it.
"Red & Black" functions as both historical document and warning system. By programming films that engaged blacklist terror alongside work by those terrorized, Khoshbakht refuses separation between past and present. The retrospective suggests that understanding 1950s censorship helps citizens recognize when similar machinery activates in their own moment.