[From “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”]

Notre-Dame de Paris is a novel by Victor Hugo, published in 1831, that focuses on the unhappy story of Quasimodo, the gipsy Esmeralda and the archdeacon Claude Frollo in 15th-century Paris[…]
When I started watching the 1939 film after half a century of not seeing it, I detected some terrible messages from its opening

It didn’t take me long to discover that the director was born into a German family of Ashkenazi Jews and that he even returned to Germany after the Allied dogs won the war![…]
I only remember that as a child I was impressed by the story. But yesterday when I started watching it again, after so long, I realised, as I just said, that the movie starts with bad messages

In Paris, there is a new order preventing the passage of gipsies. True, the director cast mudblood actors to play them, but typically in Hollywood (and we’re talking about 1939!) he artfully chose an Aryan actress to play the gipsy Esmeralda[…]
Surrealism reaches the viewer when the movie’s bad guy, Claude Frollo, says ‘You come from an evil race’ to the Aryan actress posing as a gipsy

I stopped watching the film at that point and started watching the original film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I mean the one from 1923[…]
Although Esmeralda, in this century-old film, isn’t as Aryan as the other, in this version it is explained at the outset that her whiteness is due to the fact that she was born in a high cradle and, as a child, had been abducted by gipsies[…]
I don’t want to get too much into the film from the point of view of the sacred words. That would mean messing directly with Victor Hugo—and that would mean another entry: an entry of literary criticism rather than cinematic criticism. Suffice it to say that baby Quasimodo wouldn’t have been allowed to live in Sparta, and that Hugo is right that Notre Dame reflects the soul of France which, unlike the teen I was half a century ago, is no longer the soul that interests me