Debris, Heartbreak, Unhealed Wounds: The Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist

The Hollywood 19

 

These questions were sent to me by email by the Italian critic Maurizio Porro. If I have understood correctly, he used parts of my responses in his Corriere della Sera article on the forthcoming Hollywood Blacklist retrospective that I have curated for the Locarno Film Festival. — EK

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Are there obvious points of contact between the titles?

They’re all connected like the branches of a tree. Some of those branches are revealed to be connected by this programme for the first time.

The most immediate connection is the central narrative, which traces the cinema of the radical and the left in Hollywood from the US entry into the Second World War and its alliance with the USSR through to the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings for Hollywood, the blacklist that ensued, and eventually the gradual demise of this system of arbitrarily banning talent from working in the film and television industries.

These films are also connected by individuals—either in front of or behind the camera—who were targeted by the witch hunt. If you ask me why an Argentine film by a French director, such as Native Son, is in the programme, I would answer that the writer of the novel on which the film was based—the great Richard Wright—was also targeted during the McCarthy era. Unable to make the film in the US, it was produced in Argentina. Nobody dared to play the leading role, so Wright himself appeared in it. The programme therefore offers an expansive notion of the blacklist that even includes the jazz bandleader and clarinetist Artie Shaw. We will also screen one of his short films.

Like a Hunter at Night: Programming for Il Cinema Ritrovato

Screening of Guy Maddin's Careful at Sala Scorsese

 

I was interviewed by Spanish journalist David Pardillos Rodríguez for Infobae España via email. I share my responses here. — EK

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- Please introduce yourself to our readers who may not know you: what is your role, and what do you do for the festival? What is a typical day like for you as you prepare for this year’s edition?

Along with Gian Luca Farinelli, Cecilia Cenciarelli, and Mariann Lewinsky, I work as a co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato, the annual film festival in Bologna dedicated to film history, preservation, and restoration. There is no “typical” day in what we do. Our work more closely resembles the struggles of a hunter at night. You go out and seek the game. Many nights you come home empty-handed. Some nights you come home with something you believe can feed a large family with a large appetite for essential cinema. And then there are those rare nights when you capture the tiger. It involves watching a huge number of films and trying to figure out how they can be arranged into meaningful juxtapositions and illuminating strands.

Red & Black (2026) | New book on Hollywood blacklist

 

Red and Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist

Edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht

Published by Les éditions de l'oeil

Out in late July 2026 | Pre-order here (Shipped from August)

In the period now known as the McCarthy era, a climate of fear bordering on paranoia took root. Communists, it was claimed, had infiltrated Hollywood for its profits and its immense global propaganda power. They had to be purged. A series of governmental “hearings” followed, deliberately designed as, and functioning like trials. Hundreds suspected of being leftist “subversives” or “un-American” were effectively barred from employment in the film and television industries.

Red and Black, featuring a dozen new essays – several by leading scholars in the field – revisits the work of the Hollywood Left and the blacklist that haunted American cinema from 1947 well into the 1960s. It traces the careers of the blacklistees – from radical communists to committed liberals – before and during the witch-hunt, following them through years of anonymous work behind pseudonyms and, for some, exile.

The book presents a group portrait of figures such as Charles Chaplin, Dalton Trumbo, Joseph Losey, Adrian Scott, Paul Jarrico, John Berry, Hugo Butler, Cy Endfield, Bernard Vorhaus, and Irving Lerner at a moment when their civil liberties were under attack by the very institutions meant to protect them.

Full Line-up: Hollywood Blacklist Retrospective at Locarno

 

I have already shared news about Red and Black, a forthcoming programme on the Hollywood Left/leftism and the blacklist/McCarthyism, which will take place at the Locarno Film Festival from 5–15 August. (Previous posts included the accompanying podcast series, which you can still access here.)

Now I am delighted to share the complete programme.

The retrospective features 26 films that will be screened in 35mm (including several photochemical restorations), one 16mm print, and the remainder in excellent DCP presentations. In total, fifty or fifty one titles.

Highlights include very rare films by Losey, Vorhaus and Odets; brand-new restorations of A King in New York and The Hat; newly scanned, rarely seen period newsreels; and the world premieres of two documentaries: Dangerous Citizen: The Life and Times of Abraham Polonsky and La Liste Noire d’Hollywood: Par ceux qui l’ont vécue, about a remarkable 1983 gathering in Los Angeles attended by many of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.

RIP Tony Rayns

Tony Rayns in Bologna in 2018

Il Cinema Ritrovato joins the international film community in mourning the great British film critic, historian, programmer, and lifelong champion of Asian cinema, Tony Rayns, whose passing was announced today.

Tony Rayns was the author of landmark books on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, In the Mood for Love, and Kenji Mizoguchi. His final book, published in 2024, was Just Like Starting Over: A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean Cinema.

Since the 1970s, Rayns played a decisive role in the international recognition of Asian cinema and in transforming the Western world's understanding of films produced across Asia beyond Japan. His influence has been profound and culturally significant—something repeatedly acknowledged by generations of Asian filmmakers, some of whom insisted that only Rayns should prepare the English subtitles for their films.

"Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist" Trailer

This project encompasses my curatorial work, including a retrospective of more than 50 films at Locarno, a book published in Paris, and a podcast recorded in London, all three on Hollywood radicals and the ensuing blacklist.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2026: Favourites & Discoveries Poll

Young Frankenstein turned 52; Mel Brookes turned 100; we turned 40. We're still the youngest.

"If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing," I once heard King Vidor say in a cameo appearance. This year in Bologna, we certainly took him at his word. Not only did we overdo it, but so did the generally inhospitable weather and the drifting audience navigating the scorched cityscape between the festival's nine venues. Even before receiving a single vote, I was certain that a programme of this scale would make any truly cohesive result impossible. I wasn't entirely wrong.

Jazz 625: An Illustrated Talk

Behind the scene of episode 1, feat. Duke Ellington

Jazz 625: Music Giants on the Small Screen

An illustrated talk by Ehsan Khoshbakht at Close-Up Cinema on July 20

Its title alludes to the new 625-line broadcasting technology, which provided higher image quality. Jazz 625 captured the excitement of the newly launched BBC2 and showcased the cream of American – and occasionally British – musicians during their UK tours. This talk sheds light on the history of jazz on television through a close examination of Jazz 625, accompanied by rare excerpts from its episodes, featuring jazz giants such as Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Erroll Garner, Ben Webster, Bill Evans, and many more.

Barbara Stanwyck: Fire and Desire (Richard Schickel, 1991)

This television documentary by Richard Schickel plays at Il Cinema Ritrovato on June 17, 2026. — EK

“Kiss me in my mouth as if we are lovers,” a 76-year-old Barbara Stanwyck – still provocatively breaking taboos – tells a priest (Richard Chamberlain) in the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983). Rejected by him, she lambasts a vengeful God who cruelly punishes bodies and beauty – in effect a God who undoes a star, though in Stanwyck’s case not entirely successfully.

Blur-ray Release of Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio

For the first-time ever on home video, this collection presents the complete output of the iconoclastic independent Iranian film studio founded in the late 1950s by a towering figure of Iranian culture, Ebrahim Golestan. The studio’s earliest productions were documentaries that helped bring Iranian cinema to international attention, including The House Is Black, directed by the poet Forough Farrokhzad. From 1961, the studio turned to fiction. Two feature films were completed, including the pivotal Brick and Mirror – both of which are presented here. After years of circulation in compromised versions, sometimes altered by censorship, these classics, which map the origins of the Iranian New Wave, are now presented in restored and definitive versions. The nine films in this set move fluidly from prose poetry to political allegory, achieving remarkable results that have inspired generations of filmmakers from Abbas Kiarostami to Jonathan Glazer.