Bernard-Henri Lévy and the success, in the United States, of “The Will To See”.

Films are like ideas: they often circulate, diffuse and infuse. All the more so when it comes to a film-idea, a film-advocacy. This convolution is to be rejoiced. A few months after its release in French cinemas under the title Another idea of ​​the world, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s work of committed cinema is broadcast across the United States. Across the Atlantic the film has become The Will to See“the will to see”.

What was a series of reports for the magazine Paris Matchthen a book, On the road of nameless men, and finally a heartbreaking documentary, which is reminiscent of the images of Joris Ivens or the Malraux of Sierra de Teruel and leaves the viewer speechless. It is the tour de force of BHL, to say this tragic invisible which escapes our eyes blinded until negligence. And there were many, those who, from Washington to the mythical Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village in New York, via the City of Angels (and from the 7^th art!) to San Francisco, have been shaken by the fate of the world’s forgotten. I am thinking of the Christians of Nigeria, of the starving Rohyingas, of the migrants parked in a camp in Lesbos, of the Libyans and the Somalis, of this young Massoud and his mujahideen abandoned in their fight against the Taliban, but also of the courageous Kurdish fighters . My thought goes, finally, inevitably – how to say the blood which, to this day, has covered these images? – towards the Donbass resistance fighters against Putin’s bloodthirsty troopers. America had its sights set on Afghanistan while withdrawing from the country. From one disaster to another, in the dark times of the aggression of Ukraine by the Ogre of the Kremlin, when the name of Zelensky was on everyone’s lips, when the images of Boutcha martyred, kyiv deserted and the exiled in Poland are in everyone’s mind, in these uncertain hours, the lucidity and foresight of The Will to Seeon the eastern front of Ukraine, trouble the United States.

Sold out everywhere it goes, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s film, a work of combat if ever there was one, is a success that awakens weary consciences in Roosevelt’s country on the one hand, indignant minds attentive to the world as it goes from there. ‘other. The alert in images of the activist but also the action of the philosopher, since the latter takes advantage of the meeting with his public to exchange with American decision-makers in order to plead the just cause of support for Ukraine, but also, and always, Kurds through his Justice For Kurds foundation. This is because the philosopher once again explores the master concept of his life: the Will to see. There were others, the concept of “Dangerous Purity”, “Fascislamism”, “French Ideology”, “Reparation”, “War without loving it”. The metamorphosis, the time to cross an ocean, from the title of his film, says the predominance of this concept in the life and work of Bernard-Henri Lévy: his “idea of ​​the world” is based on a “will to see”, “always go first,” he says.

And the American public has seen, and seen well, through the eyes of the filmmaker, the terrain of the forgotten wars. This same American public which had welcomed the translation of his last book – this “immersion in the most troubled and most critical corners of the world” declared Salman Rushdie – with the greatest interest, and which had already moved two years in cinemas in New York and Los Angeles for a retrospective of BHL’s previous films (bosna, The Tobruk Oath, Peshmerga and The Battle of Mosul), because History is catching up with us all, and because we can no longer pretend not to see or not to hear the cries of the wounded and the dead at the gates of Europe, willingly concedes: “of suffering outstanding, the facts proved Bernard-Henri Lévy in the right”.

A success then. New news for a film which is exported and which, sadly, intersects with the most burning news in this world.