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Roman Polanski's 2019 film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, only recently made it's U.S. "premier," running for a few weeks in August at Film Forum in New York City. When it originally was released, it couldn't find an American distributor (and likewise was shunned by streaming services), a consequence of the MeToo moment meeting Polanski's criminal past—in 1978 he fled to Europe after being indicted for the rape of a 13 year-old girl in the United States. Polanski's past is particularly relevant for his film about the falsely accused Jewish officer in the French military, to whom, in publicity materials circulated when An Officer and a Spy came out in Europe in 2019, the director explicitly compared himself.
Of course, we couldn't possibly have had on any other guest than John Ganz to help us understand the politics of the Dreyfus affair, both in 1895 and 2025, and what to make of Polanski's cinematic rendering of it. Topics include: Polanski's life and crimes; Hannah Arendt's treatment of the Dreyfus affair in The Origins of Totalitarianism; anti-semitism in 19th and early 20th century France; the way Polanski largely ignores the political convulsions caused by the Dreyfus affair, instead handling it more as a crime procedural, and why he might have done so; and more.
Sources:
John Ganz, "Reading, Watching," Unpopular Front, Aug 10, 2025
— "Gramscians vs Sorelians," Unpopular Front, Jan 23, 2021
— "The Third Republic and Today," Unpopular Front, Jan 27, 2021
— "The Century of Rubbish," Unpopular Front, Feb 2, 2021
— "From Republic to Reaction," Unpopular Front, Feb 4, 2021
David Bell, "An Officer and a Spy," H-France, March 2021
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
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