Resisting Disavowal

May 26th, 2026

Cannes 2026: I find the market that takes place at the same time as the festival to be, on the one hand, a collection of amicable meetings between potential collaborators and colleagues and, on the other hand, to be haunted — like in the kinds of films Jacques Tourneur made in Hollywood in the 50s — by the feeling that we are like cattle in a slaughterhouse. I have myself mostly been immersed in the first impression but occasionally sense the second poking through.

Thanks to my friend Tangui Perron, author and retired film archivist of the CGT (Conféderation Générale du Travail), I was able to join a packed audience watching a short amateur film made of the first Cannes film festival following WWII. In the images of this short film, edited in camera, there was all the frivolity that one expects from Cannes: on a pleasure boat, as champagne flows, young men and women joyfully exhibiting their bodies through revealing clothing, for each other and for the cameras. At the same time, there was the proximity of the unfathomable death and destruction of the war that had just ended. The silent film was simultaneously narrated by Comrade Tangui. He explained, at one unexpectedly solemn moment in the otherwise bubbling excitement on screen, that what we were watching was a minute of silence being observed for those who had died in the war that had recently ended. The final shots of the film captured the effects of an unexpectedly violent storm that had just passed through the Mediterranean seaside town of Cannes. These images showed floating in the water the remnants of exterior sets that had been built to mask the incompleteness of the renovations necessary to resurrect the festival. Pieces of wood floated in the water and I remembered going to the beaches of Normandy in 2014 and filming the waters where the Allies had landed and died in ways that still speak of the chaos that had accompanied their best efforts and sacrifices.

My purpose in Normandy filming the beaches with a local guide had been to make a short film for an American audience to underline that the return of fascism in Europe — starting in Greece — was not to be taken lightly.

French Philosopher Barbara Stiegler and historian Christophe Pébarthe write in their book Démocratie! Manifeste (Democracy! Manifesto, 2023) that ancient Athenian democracy cannot be seen for us today as a model — with its exclusion of women and the use of slavery — but as a starting point for the emergence, elaboration and articulation of the concept of collective power by a people sharing equal rights and assuming control over their own lives. For these two thinkers, both of whom have been recently active in the French political scene and still are, this starting point, this “seed,” ce germe, remains urgently relevant at our current moment, when representative democracy — a concept whose legitimacy even to call itself democracy they question — is in crisis.

A key value of their work, from my perspective, is to focus on the vital role for Athenian democracy of the annual performance of tragedies produced each year by a hybrid system of government and private financing. Similar to the role of tragedy for the demos of Athens — at least to my way of thinking — is the role of cinema for Africa, as the great African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (1937-2007) put forward and implemented around films as what he called education du soir. Although he admitted a preference for novels and writing, Sembene wrote that he had determined that cinema had a far wider reach into the working class and broader strata of African society than the novel. When I think of Greek culture from a longer historical perspective, the arguments of Sembene about cinema’s ability to reach an audience with significant levels of analphabetism remind me of the arguments made in favor of the Icons by the Iconophiles in the 15th century: precisely, that Icons could spread the gospels to the illiterate. Sembene labored to set up inside and outside of multiple metropolitan centers of Africa places in the evening to view and discuss films. The contemporary African artist Christian Nyampeta has translated Sembene’s practice into a less centralized practice. The work of Nyampeta thrives on what the art critic and writer Claire Bishop calls disordered attention in her eponymous book (2024).

I feel a solidarity and affinity with the approach of both Sembene and Nyampeta. As a boy, I remember Qgo (his name was Hugo but I called him Qgo because of a speech impediment I had). He was a Bouvier, a large sheep dog covered in long always-uncombed hair. My father, who by then had volunteered to serve in the U.S. Marines both during WWII and the Korean Conflict, was trying to make a living as a book publisher. A writer had abandoned the dog, leaving it, after abusing the animal, to starve, tied to a bed, while the writer had departed for overseas. The writer’s agent offered my father this dog who became one of the most important companions of my childhood. When Qgo and I would return, smiling broadly, from exploring the woods and running through fields of long grass, he would always be coated in burrs, seed pods that disseminate themselves through being carried away. This was the idea for me of how people could appreciate and take something away from Athens Sanctuary (2024), a video installation combining dance, techno music and Greek tragedies that we filmed in a marble quarry just outside Athens. My goal with this kind of work in media arts is akin to Nyampeta’s translation of Sembene’s project of education du soir. I want visitors to carry something away, un germe.

At Cannes this year, as I travelled from one stand to another, from one party to another, from one pavilion to another, meeting people and carrying on conversations, I imagine myself and my interlocutors — in a time when most of us at the Cannes film festival carry video cameras built into our portable phones — were potentially part of the extended renaissance of Sembene’s idea, disseminated through new kinds of translation enabled by new forms of technology.

On the other hand, there is the use of AI by monstrously large and narrowly controlled concentrations of capital to replace labor in making films. Godard once said, if the companies that control Hollywood could make more money producing only one film a year then they would only make one film. Although Hollywood’s presence this year at Cannes was significantly diminished, this logic has continued to expand. I associate this with the omnipresence of what I started by describing as a slaughterhouse — the French word forces itself on me — un abattoir.

At the Palestine Pavilion in Cannes the name of a group of French film professionals advocating on behalf of Palestine is Palestine sauvera le cinéma. Translated into English, this is “Palestine will save cinema.” That feeling of being in a slaughterhouse clearly brings to mind Israel’s destruction of Gaza using methods that it has now extended to Lebanon. It also carries associations with the effect of AI on the future of employment in the film industry.

Dan Georgakas, (1938-2021) was a Greek American poet, editor of the magazine Cineaste and anarchist historian from Detroit: He was my friend and a mentor. Our discussions and his support for my work remain immensely important to me. He was perhaps best known as the co-author of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (1975), a history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to many of whose leaders he had become a friend and ally as a student at Wayne State University in the late 60s and early 70s. In his book, Georgakas cites the expression coined by members of the League: ni***rmation. This term was meant to refer to what was called by management in the auto industry “automation” and that, it was said, would speed up and lower the labor costs of the manufacture of automobiles. This was being trumpeted just as Black workers were gaining traction in the unions. The League’s use of the term occurs to me now as I think of the role of AI in the film industry. Its expansion coincides with the rise of ethnonationalisms in many parts of the world but most pertinently in the U.S., where laws passed to counteract the racism of Jim Crow are being dismantled as the ideology of the U.S. becomes openly modeled by Trump and his allies on The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D.W. Griffith — a film that both notoriously mythologized the origins of the Ku Klux Klan and, hosted by President Woodrow Wilson at a screening in East Room, was the first feature film ever screened at the White House.

What will be the first Christian nationalist remake of The Birth of A Nation to be shown in Trump’s new Ballroom? Perhaps it will show how the risk posed by people of color immigrating has been stopped by Trump’s brand of fascism. The Trump Ballroom has been described as being outfitted like a bunker and having attributes of Ancient Greek architecture. The associations with Hitler’s bunker, I suppose, are purely accidental but they are nevertheless evocative. As I have written elsewhere in connection to my film Foreclosure, The Birth of a Nation contains a representation of the white sheet of the Klan implicitly analogous to the white screen of cinema and advocating that cinema can play a defining role in the construction of an ideology of race.

This is not to blame the technology of AI anymore than to blame cinema itself for how it is used. I think Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) was making an important point when he borrowed the Greek term pharmakon from the use Socrates makes of it in Plato’s Phaedrus to describe writing. Therein Socrates retorts to the enthusiasm evinced by his young companion for writing by referring to it as a pharmakon, meaning thereby that it can be either a medicine — an aid to memory — or a poison — destroying memory. Stiegler takes pharmakon more widely to apply to the contrasting ways technology can be used. AI can be seen as having this same contradictory set of possibilities. However only a multipolar effort to turn it away from the role of poison that it otherwise will have in the hands of the vanishingly small oligarchy that now determines its use will succeed. For this, both as film viewers and makers, we can take inspiration from Nyampeta’s work, for example from Sometimes It Was Beautiful (2018) and find new ways of translating into contemporary practices Sembene’s education du soir, with its echos of the role of Greek tragedy in regard to the democracy of Athens. More data will not do it. The work of the Slovenian writer and critical theorist Alenka Zupančič has made clear in her book Disavowal (2024) that knowledge in the form of information can be perversely disavowed, acknowledged cynically and used paradoxically as a strategy against doing anything. What is needed is not just the right information but works of art, including cinema, and audiences brought together as they pass through a field of aesthetics and through Leaves of Grass.