In October 2021, the freshly-created New People’s Cinema Club (NPCC) held its week-long, inaugural film festival in New York City. The NPCC was a project of a California nonprofit — itself also freshly-created — “dedicated to promoting and developing transgressive and discounted art and film.” The NPCC courted controversy; it was labeled the “anti-woke” film festival.
Shortly before the festival, Cinefamily Accountability had reported on the connection between NPCC and Cinefamily’s Hadrian Belove. NPCC officials did not respond to questions, and Belove both denied and acknowledged a connection to festival organizers.
Months later, in February 2022, Cinefamily Accountability received an unsolicited 1,000-word email from Belove. The email did not mention NPCC — it featured a collection of long-standing gripes about this website — but NPCC was likely on Belove’s mind at the time. Belove likely knew that another shoe was about to drop, because he had seemingly talked to the reporter who wrote it up.
On March 3, 2022, Buzzfeed published a remarkable longform account of the NPCC. The festival ended tragically, with the death of NPCC’s creative director Trevor Bazile on the final night. Bazile was 25.
The article by Joe Bernstein is a great piece of journalism and the entire thing is well worth your time. It details how “Belove didn’t want to run the festival, in part because he knew his name would be a distraction” — so Bazile was installed. It discusses the dangerous and nuanced connection between (some) outré art and (some) right-wing politics. And it addresses power relations, showing how Bazile understood that risk and responsibility were pushed downward:
[Bazile] also made it clear that his relationships with Belove and [Peter] Thiel were transactional. He knew he was a convenient face for the festival, but he knew NPCC was an opportunity. That was the exchange: Use and be used alike.
Trevor Bazile (photo: Ian Schultz)
So what’s the lesson here?
Should we avoid transgressive art? That seems silly. (Although we should hope it will be good art.)
Should we condemn the ongoing existence of the NPCC? That also seems silly. As best as I can figure, these are earnest people trying to make art. In June, a representative from NPCC acknowledged over email that “Hadrien [sic] was a sponsor of the initial NPC Fest, and we haven’t worked with him since.”
Is it that we should not work with Hadrian Belove? Well, maybe, but that’s not actually the point. Cinefamily and NPCC both ended in tragedy in part because the people in charge thought their art allowed them to bypass certain rules. (That Belove is connected to both tragedies is, in some sense, incidental.)
The point is that no artistic vision is more important than the health and well-being of the workers who realize it. Creative workplaces are still workplaces, and when the people in charge believe the normal rules don’t apply (because, say, “we’re artists” or “we’re a nonprofit”), workers get hurt.