22 h, sep 24, 2021 y - MINAMATA Acclaimed photographer Stephen Dupont denounces MGM’s burying of Minamata in North America

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FROM WSWS.ORG:

Acclaimed photographer Stephen Dupont denounces MGM’s “burying” of Minamata in North America

by Richard Phillips

Minamata, the latest film by director, producer and artist Andrew Levitas, was released this week in Japan, following successful screenings in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Russia and at several European film festivals in recent months.

Levitas’s 115-minute film is an authoritative and sensitive dramatisation of the decades-long industrial poisoning of the Minamata community in Japan by the Chiosso Corporation and the struggle by photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith and his wife Aileen Moiko Smith from 1971 to 1973 to expose this crime. Johnny Depp, one of the film’s producers, is compelling as Smith, backed by strong performances from a primarily British and Japanese cast, with cinematography by Benoît Delhomme and music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

While tens of thousands of people have so far watched Minamata, and reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, MGM has not yet released the film in North America.

In July, Andrew Levitas published an open letter revealing that MGM had decided to “bury the film” because it was “concerned about the possibility that the personal issues of an actor in the film [Depp] could reflect negatively upon them.” The popular actor, who has been subjected to a poisonous #MeToo allegation in the Murdoch media and elsewhere, has recently accused Hollywood studios of “boycotting” him.

During a September 22 press conference at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain, according to the Associated Press, Depp denounced the “cancel culture,” which he described as “this instant rush to judgment based on essentially what amounts to polluted air.” The actor, who received the prestigious Donastia Award at the festival, warned that the situation has “got so far out of hand that I can assure you, no one is safe. Not one of you, so long as someone is willing to say one thing.”

MGM owns Minamata’s distribution rights for North America, which includes the US, Canada, Mexico, Central America and most of the Caribbean, with a population of nearly 600 million people. The studio’s censorious actions are being opposed in social media campaigns, by a petition and through hundreds of letters to MGM management. Photojournalists and documentary photographers who have been inspired by Eugene Smith (1918–1978) are also speaking out over MGM’s actions.

The following interview was conducted with Australian photographer and filmmaker Stephen Dupont who bluntly denounces MGM’s failure to release Minamata in North America.

Dupont’s work has been featured in the New Yorker, Aperture, Newsweek, Time, GQ, Esquire, GEO, Le Figaro, Liberation, Sunday Times Magazine, Independent, Guardian, New York Times Magazine, Stern, Australian Financial Review Magazine and Vanity Fair and exhibited in Paris, London, New York and other major cities. He currently has a major exhibition in Canberra, “Are We Dead Yet” on the recent bushfires in Australia and the long-term impact of climate change.

Dupont has been a war photographer for three decades, reporting from Afghanistan in the 1990s, prior to and during the US-led invasion in 2001. In 2005, while embedded with US Marines outside Kandahar, he photographed and then released, images of troops burning the bodies of Taliban fighters. The horrifying images of this war crime further fuelled popular anger inside Afghanistan and internationally against the ongoing US-led occupation.

Dupont’s striking images have been rewarded with numerous international prizes, too many to list here. His most cherished award, however, was winning a W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography in 2007.

We began the conversation by discussing his impressions of Minamata and Smith’s influence on his work.

Stephen Dupont: I really liked Minamata, which I saw in a cinema and found it quite powerful and sad. It was quite personal because I won the W. Eugene Smith Grant in 2007, which was an incredible honour. This was one award that I’d always dreamed of winning and it was for my work in Afghanistan.

It was announced at the time my daughter was born and I still remember the phone call from David Friend, one of the judges. He was the creative director of Vanity Fair and an important person in the photography world. It was an incredible feeling and a great honour.

Gene Smith was someone whose work I’d grown up with and, more than anyone else in my late teens and early 20s, inspired me to become a photographer. I was carrying that connection to Smith with me as I watched Minamata.

I didn’t want to be too critical of the dramatisation—it’s not a documentary—but I felt Johnny Depp captured the personality of Smith really well—his movements, approach to photography, the darkroom work. I can imagine Smith being that kind of dark, broody, at times arrogant kind of personality, and Depp was believable and convincing.

I also learnt a lot more about Minamata and what happened and hadn’t realised that it kind of killed Smith in the end. I was quite shocked about some of these revelations. The film was an honest depiction.

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