‘Artistic genius’: celebrity auteur-directors after #MeToo between Hollywood and Central Eastern Europe

An important ramification of the #MeToo movement has been its (re-)invigoration of debates about the cultural positions of arthouse cinema’s ‘problematic’ directors. While a somewhat peripheralised aspect of academic discourses about celebrity crises, ‘cancel culture’ and #MeToo, the question of whether (and how) works of ‘cancelled’ auteur-directors could or should be consumed and re-examined has gained public attention in recent years. Seen as symbolic figures whose cultural importance lies in their significatory power for cinema’s establishment as ‘art’ and for the maintenance of the cinematic canon, these figures’ validation is thrown into dispute when personal and/or professional behaviours and abuses of the power granted through that validation are exposed as morally unacceptable. Signalling the public visibility of this conflict, debates about the ‘problematic artist’ in the post-#MeToo and ‘cancel culture’ environment are ubiquitous in the public sphere and arthouse cinema itself (exemplified by arthouse success Tár [2022]), entangled with debates about the conflicted nature of how to approach the work with which these auteur-directors’ star texts are associated. This article interrogates these issues through focusing on how Central/Eastern Europe features into discourses around the ‘problematic’ auteur-director, and particularly these discourses’ entanglement with Hollywood’s cultural production and projection of #MeToo guilt.