The actress who has never seen a film has invented everything

Satire

By Hilal EL AKRAMINE, chief editor and head of editorial

Glenn Close, during a visit to film enthusiast Criterion, declares without transition that she has never seen many films — a statement that proves cinema is a domain where humans are supposed to reveal themselves, and where actresses, instead of revealing themselves, simply choose to be forgotten. This is not a personal choice; it is a political strategy: not seeing is not judging, and not judging is being outside the system. Cinema is not an art — it is an exercise of self-assessment, in which one asks whether one had a good role, a good actor, a good scene, and to what extent one still remembers the smell of tea drunk during rehearsal.
Pr Edmond Vexé, director of the National Institute of Approximate Sciences, recently published a report in which he proves that cinematic experience is an approximate function of human intelligence, and that the absence of vision is proof of intelligence. He explains that watching films is being bombarded by images that are not truth, but repetitions of truths, and that never watching them is a liberation from this contamination. According to him, an actor who has never seen a film is a man of the ground — a man of the ground who has never made a sound, yet has managed to maintain total awareness.
Solange Lucide, a street sociologist, has immediately become the interpreter of a phenomenon: “The non-viewing of cinema has become a form of cultural resistance,” she stated. A resistance that, in an age when algorithms recommend films without explaining why, is gaining strength. It is no longer ignorance — it is a posture. A posture of non-conformity toward a world that believes it is coming to an agreement, but that never says what it thinks. A high-ranking official, demanding anonymity, revealed in an internal letter that the idea of watching a film has become, in some sectors, a form of intellectual torture. He cites a company that refused to screen a film due to the risk that its employees would stop thinking.
Thus, non-viewing has become a form of cultural governance. People no longer watch films — they ignore them, they destroy them in a silence so deep that it has become a norm. And this is not because they lack interest — it is because they have realized that cinema, in reality, never shows what it intends to show. It pretends to tell stories, but in truth, it only reveals that no one knows what it means.
The result? A country where people have never seen a film, yet still talk about “the beauty of cinema” as if it were something observable without participation. The proof? A 2024 film about a fisherman who discovers his sons are robots has been banned in three regions. Why? Because no one has seen the film — yet people talk about it as if it were true.

Satirical article. The truth hurts but it does good. So don’t take it too seriously.

Translated from French.