Candyman (2021)

In advance of the Aug. 27 release for Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman,” Universal Pictures and Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Prods. have launched a social impact initiative connected to the film, with the hashtag #TellEveryone.

Directed by DaCosta, the new movie stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris and Colman Domingo and paints a new picture of the Candyman urban legend with a focus on the social justice elements of his story.

On Friday, the companies unveiled a social impact website, which serves as a singular hub for the conversation to live through the designated hashtags #CANDYMAN and #TELLEVERYONE.

Robinson added: “... The real threat here is this kind of unaddressed, ongoing systemic and structural violence from white institutions.”

Why politics should not go to the cinema

It is with the most awful dread that you sense cinema becoming another field of politics in these over-politicised times. Detectable in the pre-Oscars mood is a creeping indifference to art as art — a demotion of aesthetic judgment to tests of ideological soundness. Even if the intentions are mostly good, it amounts to philistinism by another name. A critical culture that rates work by what it says about populism, identity and the rest of the nightly news will end up begetting a lot of “woke” but low-quality film-making.

There is vainglorious talk of culture, especially a chastened Hollywood, as the “resistance” to populism. Yet culture is much more precious as the escape from it. A working definition of civilisation is the availability of space away from politics. It is the failed state and the autocracy where politics permeates everything — where all acts, however creative, involve taking a position. People who have never had to flee their homes to avoid life-and-death governmental strife under-rate what it is to make or consume art without a political thought in your head. Let us not trade in the Hollywood of Wes Anderson and peak-era Steven Spielberg — of entertainment, interpreted as such — for a joyless scrutiny of every film for the hidden power relations of a rigged superstructure, or whatever.

Famously, the great Irish novelist John Banville fears for any aspiring young writer who tells him that they have important things to say about the world. Describe a familiar object in an original way, is his preferred test of suitability for his profession. The essence of art is the technique, not the message.

Literature went through the crisis of politicisation long ago. In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom chastised the professors who taught the western canon as something that was compromised by the unconscious biases of its privileged authors, not as an aesthetic creation on its own terms. If the same priggish habit spreads to our appreciation of film, we are in for a dreary time just as we need the consolations of art. We will be left with — what? — instrumental music as the only one of life’s creative endeavours that cannot be analysed for its political content. Even then, some people will find a way.

Famously, the great Irish novelist John Banville fears for any aspiring young writer who tells him that they have important things to say about the world. Describe a familiar object in an original way, is his preferred test of suitability for his profession. The essence of art is the technique, not the message.