#Bales2023FilmChallenge March 7: a town meeting for #NationalTownMeetingDay

Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de #Salem (FR/GDR, 1957) – , with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early #film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.

Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.

#ArthurMiller #JeanPaulSartre #TheCrucible #DDR #SimoneSignoret #YvesMontand @film