Locarno's 17 Blacklist Films Risk Confusing Persecution With Quality

# The Blacklist's Kinder Sequel

Locarno Film Festival has programmed 17 films made by blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters into its 2026 retrospective, framing them as suppressed urgencies finally restored to view. The festival's language carries moral weight. These are "daring" works, "silenced" voices, cinema that was "deemed dangerous" during the McCarthy era and after. Restoration as redemption. The implicit argument is clean: persecution was unjust, therefore the persecuted made art worth seeing.

This reasoning collapsed once before, and nobody learned.

In 1994, the Academy began posthumously crediting blacklisted screenwriters whose work had been credited to fronts. Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street got its real screenwriter's name back. Dalton Trumbo received formal recognition. The historical injustice was genuine and the gesture was earned. But once those scripts came back into circulation — once critics and scholars could actually read the work instead of just the suffering — a harder question surfaced. Several of the restored writers had been blacklisted partly because they were communists, yes. Several had also simply stopped writing well. The persecution was real. The talent was not equally distributed. The Academy had accidentally solved the wrong problem: it cleared their names without establishing that their names had earned clearing for reasons of craft.

What's dangerous about the Locarno program is that it might repeat this conflation through sheer emotional architecture. When you begin with suppression, you prime the viewer to read difficulty or failure as evidence of political threat rather than artistic limitation. The blacklist's actual mechanism was a cudgel applied without discrimination. Some crushed real talent. Some crushed genuine mediocrity that would have failed anyway. The ones that would have failed anyway deserve their obscurity. They don't become urgent because history was unjust to pursue them.

The honest retrospective would separate those claims explicitly. It would ask which of these 17 films were blacklisted because they threatened power. Which were blacklisted because they happened to be made by the wrong people at the wrong moment. That distinction matters now because we live inside the same machinery at different pressure. When you can't tell the difference between persecution of good work and persecution of bad work made by ideologically convenient victims, you lose the ability to defend either one. The viewer watching at Locarno should carry that tension forward into their own judgments about work that's currently being suppressed, cancelled, or deplatformed. Most of it deserves suppression. Some of it doesn't. Learning to see which is which. Not which person made it, but what it actually does. Is the real urgency nobody's naming.