On systems of domination in the film industry

The film industry is built on deeply entrenched systems of domination. These hierarchical mechanisms legitimize violence, including sexist violence, and require structural overhaul beyond mere sanctions.

The Seductive Power of Domination

The world seems to be discovering in stunned disbelief, through various investigations and news reports, that the film industry is terribly domineering, sexist, brutal, and that it needs better regulation to prevent such excesses. It’s as if this were a recent revelation, dating back to #MeToo, that this industry—I don’t mean to say it’s worse than others, but here I’m talking about this one—is among the most vile in terms of social dynamics. And we must realize that, without excusing those who commit acts of domination, exclusion, rape, abuse, or other forms of degradation, such behaviors persist in this industry precisely because they are legitimized. Not just covered up or awkwardly excused, but fully legitimized by the system’s organizational structures. This doesn’t mean “everything is rotten” or that everyone in the film industry behaves horribly. It’s simply the majority, and it’s what’s considered legitimate.

For example—not to make a comparison between incomparable things, but to illustrate the kind of process—in Nazi Germany, the political system was utterly vile, as almost everyone agrees today. But as a German, if you weren’t a Nazi, you were de facto excluded from the system. Germans were forced, under threat of absolute social downgrading, to be Nazis. Much of the human behavior under the Nazi regime was vile, and it was what was legitimized. But that doesn’t mean every German wearing the eagle-adorned cap was without exception a brute. Some of them, obliged to exist socially within that system, privately thought otherwise and could, through particular attitudes—illegitimately and at great risk—defend values other than the dominant ones in their thoughts and actions.

I’ve always perceived the film industry as a world where systems of domination were the norm, ever since I began interacting with it as a young adult. For instance, at the university where I studied humanities and film, I saw students who dreamed of attending the Cannes Film Festival. Some managed to go occasionally. And when they described to me, in the late ’80s, the social organization of the festival—the systems of privilege, social hierarchies, the Canal+ parties you absolutely had to attend, their shameless and groveling efforts to secure the golden ticket for a seat in the grand theater, and the submission to a social order based on domination, humiliation, sexism, seduction… What my fellow students described as the pinnacle of their dreams—and it truly was their dream, as they poured all their energy into getting there—to me, their stories sounded more like a description of hell, from which I wanted to shield myself at all costs!

I much preferred waiting a few months to see the films premiering at Cannes, because our stakes as young people weren’t yet professional; it was cinephilia that drove their desire to attend. So I’d rather wait than submit to that system of domination, which, by the way, was exerted on bodies—and still is today, particularly on male bodies. To “walk the steps,” men must wear a standardized tuxedo. No tuxedo, no entry! When you think about it, it’s completely insane. To me, it was a vile madness that had nothing to do with my desire to contribute to making enriching films, the kind I loved as a viewer. I even made a short film about this in 1999, Climbing the Steps.

I also heard stories from young people starting out in the industry, on sets or at production companies, describing a hierarchical system of such violence I’d never encountered elsewhere. You had to start as a production intern, then become an assistant, then a production manager—years of swallowing insults. They told me how things worked on shoots, how people were constantly humiliated. Later, while working on my own films and others’, in various roles—cinematographer, director, actor—I came to despise the atmosphere. There were recurring codes. For example, the cinematographer was inevitably unbearable, hot-tempered, and everyone had to obey them, even the director if they were young. Because, especially on short films, the cinematographer was often the only one with a professional card at the time. So, thanks to them, the film could exist and be screened at prestigious festivals. And thus, they could get away with vile domination over others. And here, I’m not even talking about sexist domination—I’m talking about the entire system of domination, of which sexism is a part. This isn’t to minimize the trauma experienced by women but to contextualize how sexism and sexual violence are embedded in a framework of domination where they make perfect sense. If a social hierarchy based on domination exists, it will inevitably include sexist domination. You can’t dismantle one without dismantling the other. This isn’t to downplay either, but to understand the broader system enabling such dynamics.

A distorted vision of the measures to be taken

This is why I am quite saddened to see that in the recommendations made to combat sexist and sexual violence, the focus is most often entirely centered on the potential stick of punishment—whether it’s punishing perpetrators of violence or sanctioning organizations that allowed it to happen—without ever questioning the fact that the very logic of punishment, which is a logic of external control and in no way prevention, is itself, unfortunately, still trapped within the system of domination. Essentially, the system of domination is not challenged in its fundamentals by a new repressive legal arsenal. It’s a kind of new domination through punishment, which seeks to prevent other forms of domination. But philosophically, it’s the same logic! And that is why I feel compelled to take up the pen on this subject.

I am in no way blaming the people who are trying their best to regulate and establish sanctions. I am not against punishment. I simply want to point out that, in my opinion, we should probably work even harder to deconstruct the entire set of working methods, to question them at their core, and in doing so, we would create a different relational ecology in these workspaces. This would prevent various dominating behaviors from arising, including those related to sexist and sexual violence, and regulation would become almost intrinsic. Again, sexist and sexual violence can only occur if they are permitted by a system. These acts would be infinitely rarer if the system were virtuous. As it stands, the system itself is sick—it’s the system that needs healing. And yes, we must also heal the people, but if we don’t question the system, we will never make much progress, in my view.
Even in a film school like La FEMIS, where I have frequently participated, I have observed in what young people absorb from industry professionals—since those who teach there are all working professionals, not tenured professors—a mimicry of roles among themselves, reproducing the social hierarchy that exists on a film set, for example, with an incredible rigidity that would never be tolerated in any other company if unions were present. Because unions in the audiovisual sector are not at all concerned with defending democratic issues on sets; they exist to negotiate financial matters, like technicians’ pay scales. So even there, in film school, I’ve seen how, very early on, there is not just a transmission of artistic and technical methods, but just as much a transmission of dominating behaviors—necessary, it seems, to find one’s place in the professional world and be legitimized within it. And that is the most terrible part: to be legitimized within the system, one must embrace the logic of domination. So the work of deconstruction that needs to be done is immense, and today, we are still very, very far from it. I’ll stop here for this article, which is an introduction—or rather, a call for awareness—to foster a slightly different perspective on the world of cinema and how it is sick. I’ll add two references to supplement this.

Film festivals

I’ll take a lived example, one I put into practice myself when I was a young man at university. As soon as I arrived there at the age of 18, I began organizing monthly public screenings of short films. It was well within my reach—I could use a university screening room for free. Before that, I had organized screenings at home for my friends, and suddenly it became something more public, which felt important to me. I kept it up for years, learning as I went. Later, thanks to that experience, I was able to organize far more ambitious film festivals.
Back then, in the late 1980s, I immediately noticed something I found troubling about film festivals. This was long before the digital era, and in theaters, commercial films had a mandatory technical requirement due to projection and commercial distribution: 35mm film, which was extremely expensive to shoot, edit, post-produce, and distribute. So professional cinema was shot and screened on this medium, 35mm film, which was prohibitively costly to produce and handle. As a result, there was a financial segregation in commercial cinemas. This was understandable for technical reasons within that commercial framework.

In a movie theater, whether privately owned or municipally run, there was only a 35mm projector. Video projectors didn’t exist in theaters back then. They did exist, but their quality was nowhere near that of 35mm, and there was absolutely no distribution network for video formats in theaters—it simply wasn’t legitimized as a medium (video stores were for home viewing, not public screenings). Legitimacy came from 35mm, initially for purely technical reasons, but since video already existed at the time, there was also, under the guise of technical constraints, a protection of the professional industry against newcomers who weren’t yet legitimized by money—particularly women.

This is why, incidentally, most of the women who picked up cameras starting in the 1970s did so with video, a cheaper medium and thus more accessible to underfunded initiatives. Unfortunately, their work wasn’t seen as legitimate as that produced on the expensive, male-dominated 35mm format. And today, since video formats from that era are far more fragile than 35mm film, there’s a serious issue with preserving women’s video productions from the 70s and 80s—many more films by women are disappearing than films by men. Restoring these formats is costly. And who today would invest money in restoring feminist video works from the 70s? It’s not exactly “sexy”... So we’re still not free from domination when it comes to the present and future constitution of our cultural heritage.

Let’s return to my short film screenings. I’m talking about a time that’s completely outdated in technical terms, even though it’s actually quite recent—just over thirty years ago. There was another, cheaper distribution format besides 35mm: 16mm. Since the image was half as wide as 35mm, the filmstrip was four times shorter for the same duration, making it much cheaper to develop, though still fairly costly. 16mm was used for institutional films, corporate films, propaganda, documentaries, newsreels, and TV documentaries.

So some theaters—not the big commercial chains, but certain venues—were also equipped with 16mm projectors, allowing them to screen other types of films made on smaller budgets. But these screenings were rare, because in France, to qualify for automatic public funding managed by the CNC, cinemas had to prioritize films from the “system,” approved by an exploitation visa (which wasn’t the case for 16mm films, or only very rarely, since they were harder to distribute). Some venues, like traveling projection networks, screened exclusively in 16mm. But 16mm, a semi-professional format, was still quite expensive and not accessible to everyone.

Then there was 8mm or Super 8. This was a completely amateur format. No reputable theater had a Super 8 projector. You might find one in a youth center (MJC), for example, and there were even exploitation films in Super 8—short cartoons, Charlie Chaplin films, etc.—that you could screen in your bedroom or at home for friends before VHS tapes appeared in the late 70s. So Super 8 cameras enabled amateur filmmaking, like home movies, as well as the amateur screening of certain commercial works. But there was no large-scale public screening of films shot on Super 8—it was completely devalued.

If someone made a film on Super 8, they would never—and I mean never—have gotten it into any film festival, except maybe amateur or experimental festivals (avant-garde works more suited to art museums). But mainstream cultural events open to cinematic creativity didn’t even have Super 8 projectors. In fact, they were hard to find because very few Super 8 projectors could handle large screens. Most were small home projectors that couldn’t produce a bright enough image for a theater.

So Super 8 productions were automatically dismissed as amateur due to their technical choice, which was really a financial one. If you didn’t have money, Super 8—though still relatively expensive—was more accessible. Another key difference between Super 8 and the other formats (16mm and 35mm) was that 16mm and 35mm were negative stocks requiring prints to be made. That alone doubled the material cost (negative + positive). These prints also preserved the original, stored in a professional lab. We didn’t have digital yet, where you just copy a file. You had to make physical prints, and then new ones as the old ones wore out.

In contrast, most—99%—of Super 8 film sold was reversal stock, meaning there was only one copy of the film. You couldn’t make additional prints. So you had a single copy that degraded with each screening. If you sent it to a festival, it couldn’t be shown elsewhere at the same time.

Then, in the early 70s—but especially the early 80s—video arrived. Its image quality wasn’t even as good as Super 8. Video produced strange, unfamiliar images that looked like TV news. It was hard to take video fiction seriously. But video allowed for unlimited copies. The technical quality was poor, and the equipment was expensive—much more so than a Super 8 camera. Editing was complicated, requiring dubbing from one VCR to another. In short, the setup was costly, but once you had it, you could create almost as much as you wanted, just like with digital today! The tapes were cheap but, unfortunately, very fragile.

And in cinemas and festivals, video was even more frowned upon than Super 8. No one would deign to watch video on a big screen. The first film shot on video and transferred to film for theatrical release, openly acknowledged as amateur, etc., was Alain Cavalier’s La Rencontre in 1996. But that was actually shot on a digital DV camera—an inexpensive video format introduced in 1996 with surprisingly good quality. That marked the arrival of digital in video, since DV was a digital format. Before that, there had been experiments, but a full-length video film in theaters didn’t exist. And it showed onscreen—the image wasn’t sharp enough, etc.
And me, a naive young man wanting to open doors to creativity free from domination—meaning, primarily, money, as the film industry was structured back then—I insisted on mixing formats in my screenings. Technically, I could do this because the venues weren’t too large. In every one of my programs, I gave equal legitimacy to 35mm films, 16mm films, Super 8 films, and video works (I had a video projector), even slide shows with synchronized soundtracks. I absolutely didn’t want audiences to devalue a work based on its financial backing. A Super 8 film had to be as legitimate as a 16mm or 35mm film. That was crucial to me. I also mixed documentaries, fiction, experimental films, and activist works in every screening. I was adamant about blending techniques and genres to erase any trace of the system’s dominations. Today, thankfully, the technical aspect has changed a lot. But back then, I think my screenings were among the very few places with such attention to diversity—stylistic, technical, financial, and gendered, since there were many films by women, too. I wanted to make cinema, create films, and show films outside the system of domination.

The family model

I would like to add one last point, which is undoubtedly the most pernicious aspect of systems of domination—what makes them, in my opinion, so difficult to dismantle—and that is that domination is also an extremely effective seduction. A dark seduction, admittedly, but a powerful one. Why? Because the promise of domination is the chance to be among the dominators. This is one of the things that makes people accept the worst humiliations and even support the system, even by those who are its primary victims. There is hope, the promise of escaping the role of the victim to step into the role of the oppressor—the gleeful oppressor. We see the world through this lens. And that is why the system is so rigid. Because if we observe what happens in families, for example, we can find similar systems. Parents hold power over their children, including the power to beat or punish them. And one day, those children gain that same power over their own children and repeat the system they believed was the only one—where they had to carve out their place, claw their way up, and become dominant to no longer be dominated.