The films of Costa-Gavras: New perspectives 9781526146939

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Un homme de trop (1967) and Section spéciale (1975): justice unravelled, a tale of two Frances (1941 and 1943)
Z (1969) and nationalism
The political efficacy of torture in The Confession (1970)
Thriller and performance in State of Siege (1972)
What’s missing from Missing (1982)
Selim Bakri’s quest for a Palestinian identity: Hanna K. (1983) and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’
Conseil de famille (1986) and La petite apocalypse (1993): comic melodrama
Betrayed (1988) and the ruptures of race and religion
Music Box (1989): melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust
‘Make humans the center of everything’: a cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City (1997) and The Ax (2005)
Eden à l’Ouest (2009): border-crossing odyssey and comedy
Representing the economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital (2012)
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The films of Costa-Gavras

New perspectives

Edited by Homer B. Pettey

Manchester University Press

Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4692 2 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: Still from Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

As always, to Jennifer, Melissa, and Josephine

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

List of figures page ix Notes on contributors xi Preface xiv Acknowledgements xvi 1 Introduction Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: the case of Amen. (2002) Homer B. Pettey 2 Un homme de trop (1967) and Section spéciale (1975): justice unravelled, a tale of two Frances (1941 and 1943) Susan Hayward

1

17

3 Z (1969) and nationalism Homer B. Pettey

41

4 The political efficacy of torture in The Confession (1970) Hilary Neroni

59

5 Thriller and performance in State of Siege (1972) Elizabeth Montes Garcés

72

6 What’s missing from Missing (1982) Thomas Leitch

89

7 Selim Bakri’s quest for a Palestinian identity: Hanna K. (1983) and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ Matthew Abraham

109

8 Conseil de famille (1986) and La petite apocalypse (1993): comic melodrama Jennifer L. Jenkins

123

viii

Contents 9 Betrayed (1988) and the ruptures of race and religion Ian Scott

137

10 Music Box (1989): melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust R. Barton Palmer

151

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11 ‘Make humans the center of everything’: a cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City (1997) and The Ax (2005) Allen H. Redmon 12 Eden à l’Ouest (2009): border-crossing odyssey and comedy Isolina Ballesteros 13 Representing the economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital (2012) Mark Bould

167 182

199

Filmography 216 Bibliography 219 Index 229

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures

1.1 1.2

1.3 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 5.1 5.2 6.1

6.2 6.3

Close-up of Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) witnessing Zyklon B gassing of Jews. (Amen., dir. Costa-Gavras, 2002) page 7 Long shot of human procession behind Cardinal Bishop von Galen (Bernd Fischerauer). (Amen., dir. Costa-Gavras, 2002) 9 Long shot of train with empty cattle cars. (Amen., dir. Costa-Gavras, 2002) 9 Diagram of Un homme de trop. (Dir. Costa-Gavras, 1967) 27 Section spéciale satiric poster representing Vichy violation of justice. (Section spéciale, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1975) 32 Z (Yves Montand) pushes through armed police into the 46 square. (Z, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1969) Mason (Maurice Baquet) fights with Vago (Marcel Bozzuffi) in the bed of the kamikaze. (Z, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1969) 46 The sadistic mock hanging torture of Artur Ludvik (Yves Montand). (The Confession, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1970) 64 Airport scene of arrival of Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand). (State of Siege, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1972) 77 Innocent young girl with obvious signs of torture by facial burning. (State of Siege, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1972) 81 Hostility and distance between Ed (Jack Lemmon) and Beth (Sissy Spacek) upon his arrival. (Missing, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1982) 96 Beth assumes a parental role by taking Ed’s arm. (Missing, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1982) 97 Ed bangs taxi door against jeep with soldiers shooting at fleeing protesters. (Missing, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1982) 98

x

List of figures 7.1

7.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 11.1

11.2

12.1 13.1

13.2

Selim (Mohammad Bakri) in truck with other political prisoners after Israeli Army round-up. (Hanna K., dir Costa-Gavras, 1983) 113 Bakri in background, silent, in first court appearance with appointed attorney Hanna K. (Jill Clayburgh). (Hanna K., dir Costa-Gavras, 1983) 114 Katie shoots Simmons (Tom Berenger). (Betrayed, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1988) 145 White supremacist campfire with Katie (Debra Winger) and Shorty (John Mahoney). (Betrayed, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1988) 148 Ann (Jessica Lange) with damning photos from the music box. (Music Box, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1989) 156 Newspaper revealing Mike Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl) as a war criminal. (Music Box, dir. Costa-Gavras, 1989) 159 Gérard Hutchinson (Ulrich Tukur) and Bruno Davert (José Garcia) commiserate in a department store dressing room. (The Ax, dir. Costa-Gavras, 2005) 178 Bruno Davert (José Garcia) faces his next rival, Prédatrice (Vanessa Larré), in the final moments of The Ax. (dir. Costa-Gavras, 2005) 180 Poster of Eden à l’Ouest. (dir. Costa-Gavras, 2009) 186 Marc (Gad Elmaleh) explains the Bull Funds scheme to his wife Diane (Natacha Régnier). (Le capital, dir. Costa-Gavras, 2012) 203 Computer screen showing plummeting Phenix stock. (Le capital, dir. Costa-Gavras, 2012) 204

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contributors

Matthew Abraham is professor of English at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine (Bloomsbury, 2013), Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave, 2014), the co-editor of The Making of Barack Obama: The Politics of Persuasion (Parlor, 2013), and the editor of Toward a Critical Rhetoric on the Israel–Palestine Conflict (Parlor, 2015). Abraham is the co-editor of the special issue of Cultural Critique on ‘Edward Said and After: Toward a New Humanism’ (2007). Isolina Ballesteros is professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Her teaching focuses on Spanish Cultural Studies (nineteenth and twentieth century literature and film), Comparative Literature, and Spanish and European film. She is currently the Chair of the Film Studies Program of Baruch College. She is the author of three books: Escritura femenina y discurso autobiográfico en la nueva novela española (1994), Cine (Ins)urgente: textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista (2001), and Immigration Cinema in the New Europe (2015). Mark Bould is reader in Film and Literature at the University of the West of England, and co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Film and Television and the monograph series Studies on Global Science Fiction. His most recent books are Solaris (2014), SF Now (2014), and Africa SF (2013). Elizabeth Montes Garcés is professor of Latin American literature and film at the University of Calgary. Her most recent publications are Relocating Identities in Latin American Culture (2007) and Violence in Contemporary Argentine Literature and Film: 1989–2005 (2010, with Carolina Rocha). Susan Hayward is Emeritus Professor of Cinema Studies at Exeter University. Her scholarly focus is French cinema and her publications include: French National

xii

Notes on contributors

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cinema (1993, 2005); Simone Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign (2004); Luc Besson (1998); French Costume Drama of the 1950s: Fashioning Politics in Film (2010); Nikita (2010); Les Diaboliques (2005). She is also the author of Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (currently in its fourth edition). Jennifer L. Jenkins is professor of English at the University of Arizona and Director of the Bear Canyon Center for Southwest Humanities. She is Principal Investigator on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant project to repatriate midcentury educational films about Native peoples by recording new, culturally competent narrations in a process termed ‘tribesourcing’. She holds the 2019 Cátedra Primo Feliciano Velázquez Chair of History at the Colégio de San Luis in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where she is developing a comparative study of theatres and cinemagoing behaviors in railroad towns in the United States and Mexico, 1896–1930. Thomas Leitch is professor of English at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (2014) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. He is currently working on The History of American Literature on Film. Hilary Neroni is professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont. She is the author of The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Film and Television (2015), Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (2016), and The Violent Woman (2005), and has also published numerous essays on female directors, violence in film, and feminist theory. R. Barton Palmer is an independent scholar. He is the author, editor, or general editor of more than sixty academic books on various literary and cinematic subjects, as well as the author of more than seventy-five book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. He serves as the general editor of Traditions in World Cinema and Traditions in American Cinema at Edinburgh University Press, and as general/founding editor of book series at four other academic presses. Homer B. Pettey is professor of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. With R. Barton Palmer, he co-edited two volumes on film noir for Edinburgh University Press (2014), which are now in paperback (2015). With Palmer, he also co-edited a collection on Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze for State University of New York Press (2016). They also have volumes on Biopics and British National Identity (SUNY, 2016) and French Literature on Screen (Manchester University Press, 2017). Pettey serves as the general/founding editor for two book series, Global Film Studios and International Film Stars, for Edinburgh University Press. Allen H. Redmon is professor of English and Film Studies at Texas A & M University, Central Texas. He is the author of Constructing the Coens: from Blood

Notes on contributors

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Simple to Inside Llewyn Davis (2015) and co-editor of Clint Eastwood’s Cinema of Trauma: Essays on PTSD in the Director’s Films (2017). Ian Scott is Distinguished Visiting Professor in Film and Culture at Central Washington University and senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of, among other works, American Politics in Hollywood Film (2nd edn; 2011), and has written extensively on Hollywood political movies. He also works in documentary film and his first collaboration with docdays Production, Projections of America was shown on ARTE in Europe in 2014, CBC in Canada in 2015, and at film festivals across the world in 2015–16. His book, The Cinema of Oliver Stone: Art, Authorship and Activism (co-authored with Henry Thompson) was published in 2016 with Manchester University Press and is the result of an extensive series of interviews with the director held over a number of years.

xiii

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Preface

The year 2019 marks two great distinctions for Costa-Gavras. In 2019, Z celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The worldwide success of this film, adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’s roman à clef about the political assassination of Greek Socialist Deputy Grigoris Lambrakis in Salonika, propelled Costa-Gavras’s international reputation. As of this writing in 2019, Costa-Gavras is filming his adaptation of Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis’s Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment, a personal account of the Greek government-debt crisis of 2015. Adults in the Room will be the first feature-length film that Costa-Gavras has shot in his native Greece. In so many respects, Costa-Gavras has come full circle in his career. Known for the advancement of the political thriller, Costa-Gavras remains a seminal figure in French and international cinema history.The only major academic study of his oeuvre, John J. Michalczyk’s admirable Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (1984), concluded with his first English language film, Missing (1982). Since the time of that Palme d’Or winner for best film and actor, Jack Lemmon, and since its three Oscar nominations and its win for Best Screenplay, Costa-Gavras has directed ten feature-length films that explore and expand upon his earlier socio-political themes. Still, scant recent scholarly attention has been paid to major films by Costa-Gavras. Beginning with his first political films, this collection of original chapters by prominent scholars charts and re-examines Costa-Gavras’s career from Un homme de trop (1967) to Le capital (2012). In this collection, new issues emerge that open up numerous approaches to Costa-Gavras’s career, among them: contemporary theories of adaptation, identity politics, reception, and affect. Costa-Gavras recontextualizes political history as individual human drama and thereby involves his audience in past and contemporary traumas, from the horrors of the Second World War through mid-century international totalitarianism to the current global financial crisis. In order to capture the feeling of a political era, Costa-Gavras employs cinematic techniques from La Nouvelle Vague for his early films, realistic re-enactments for

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Preface crucial moments of political tension of his renowned thrillers, Hollywood cinema aesthetics, and state-of-the-art technology for his latest ventures. Costa-Gavras remains one of film’s enduring storytellers, theorists, and political commentators. Contributing scholars for this collection were invited for their expertise in areas directly related to the subject matter, process of adaptation, or film techniques of Costa-Gavras’s works. This collection begins by re-examining his first major period. Prominent French film scholar, Susan Hayward, focuses on two Vichy-era early films of Costa-Gavras and places them within the shifting tonalities of historical truth in French culture’s self-reflections upon that dark period. Homer B. Pettey analyzes the abuses and ironies of nationalism in Z (1969). Hilary Neroni, an expert on torture in cinema, uncovers both the revelations about political torture and the occlusion of political reality in The Confession (1970). Latin American scholar, Elizabeth Montes Garcés, employs Richard Schechner’s performance theory to situate the audience as judges of the efficacy of political violence in her analysis of State of Siege (1972). Film theorist Thomas Leitch offers a new theory of adaptation in terms of conversion narratives that reveals Costa-Gavras’s political advocacy in Missing (1982). While the first half of this collection focuses upon the first twenty years of Costa-Gavras’s cinematic development, the second half explores his past thirty years of very productive filmic and thematic experimentation. These films are very often prescient social analyses of current issues facing twenty-first-century culture. Rhetorical theorist of Israeli–Palestinian conflicts, Matthew Abraham, focuses on problems associated with silencing Palestinian identity and narrative construction that emerge in Hanna K. (1983). Film historian Jennifer L. Jenkins uncovers another side of politics in Conseil de famille (1986) and La petite apocalypse (1993), that of the comic politics of domesticity. Ian Scott, known for his admirable work on Hollywood political films, situates Betrayed (1988) in terms of CostaGavras’s commentary on America’s past racial and religious ruptures and the film’s relationship to contemporary real and cinematic narratives. Noted independent film scholar R. Barton Palmer investigates war crime memorialization and its trauma in the only film to treat the Arrow Cross movement’s murders of Budapest Jews in Music Box (1989). Allen H. Redmon examines Costa-Gavras’s off-beat, uniquely original commentary on the violence inherent within capitalism in Mad City (1997) and The Ax (2005). Before the horrible autogenocide that tore Syria apart after the Arab Spring, leading to mass migration of its population, immigration cinema scholar, Isolina Ballesteros, reveals that Costa-Gavras anticipated in Eden à l’Ouest (2009) the epic and darkly comic, almost slapstick, circularity of immigration odysseys for the European Union. Mark Bould concludes this collection with the unnerving effects of the 2007–8 global financial crisis and the representation of neoliberal subjectivity in Costa-Gavras’s Le capital (2012). The editor and contributors hope that this collection will reignite critical assessment of this provocative, innovative, and always relevant Greek-French director. Homer B. Pettey

xv

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank John J. Michalczyk for his foundational book, Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (1984). His book covers roughly the first two decades of Costa-Gavras’s career, from Compartiment tueurs (1965) to Missing (1982). By defining the political fiction film, Michalczyk views Costa-Gavras as creating a new genre of the ‘political fiction film or the political thriller’: He goes one step beyond Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers by making his own films more spectacular, by adding a commercial note to them, and then concluding them with an epilogue that leaves the public in a reflective state. Each of these films has a thesis, for example, social justice versus blatant injustice, but the message is couched in dramatically appealing terms.1

Clearly, Costa-Gavras offered the film world a new perspective on contemporary political events and did so, as Michalczyk rightly points out, by aesthetic means. In his detailed analysis of these films, Michalczyk demonstrates the significance of Costa-Gavras’s role in revolutionizing this cinematic genre, not just in France, but worldwide. Costa-Gavras certainly considers the audience as an essential part of the political film’s experience, since that reflective state about oppression, violence, and tyranny comes without proselytizing. The combination of political fact with a humane ideology comes through in the detailed narrative that CostaGavras constructs: In the presentation of these sociopolitical concerns, Costa-Gavras’s ideology is consistent – liberal, left, and above all, humanitarian. The political scene he depicts is carefully documented. The resulting film thus goes beyond being fiction while still remaining commercial entertainment. His long-term research in conjunction with his screenwriters testifies to each fact that is presented. These accumulated facts, however, are colored, made more appealing and digestible for a mass public, not for a small, sectarian group. 2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements Much of Costa-Gavras’s cinematic technique owes much to the influence of Hollywood style. His new genre does not follow the confused, often self-indulgent avant-garde filmmaking of Jean-Luc Godard nor does it become militant propaganda. Instead, Costa-Gavras understood that political themes do not detract from cinematic aesthetics, a separation that seems to plague Godard and militant filmmakers. The political thriller for Costa-Gavras relies upon fast-paced editing, rhythmic montage, and the use of flashbacks to sustain the narrative. Since Z, music also serves to create a parallel narrative of mood that intensifies the political themes in his films. What Michalczyk offers in each chapter are just these kinds of ideological, production, and reception details that place Costa-Gavras in his proper place among the most engaging directors of world cinema. The editor’s appreciation of Michalczyk’s analysis led to consideration of this new collection that would take up the whole of Costa-Gavras’s career. The general lack of attention given to Costa-Gavras among scholars has surprised the editor and contributors to this volume, especially since Costa-Gavras has kept pace with his cinematic politics and film experimentations. The editor hopes that this collection will serve as a worthy companion to Michalczyk’s The Political Fiction Film. Notes 1 John J. Michalczyk, The Political Fiction Film (Philadelphia, PA: The Arts Alliance Press, 1984), p. 21. 2 Michalczyk, The Political Fiction Film, p. 237.

xvii

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1

Introduction Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: the case of Amen. (2002) Homer B. Pettey

I think the next step for the cinema will be to go to that new kind of film, one which tries to explain the historical situation and all the connections which lead to that kind of history. Costa-Gavras1 Exactness – accuracy – is impossible, given the time and space in which historical events take place and the time a film has available. But faithfulness to the ethic, to the human meaning, to the social significance of the historical events depicted in a film is absolutely necessary. Costa-Gavras2

The political dimensions of Costa-Gavras’s films constitute the main body of criticism and analysis about this world-renowned auteur and his cinematic agenda. Grounding Costa-Gavras’s films within a historical context also opens up the kind of dialogue with history that the director desires. Both approaches remain necessary for uncovering the meaning of his melodramatic narratives of personal, emotional history. Additionally, Costa-Gavras experiments with cinematic forms in order to present new perspectives on historical moments of totalitarian grabs, and methods, for maintaining ideological power. Many of his best-known films rely upon adaptations of actual events, often by reinterpreting romans à clef, such as Vassilikos’s retelling of the assassination of the Greek socialist Lambrakis in Z, culling from journalistic accounts, such as in Missing, or Dan Mitrione’s kidnapping and death by Uruguayan guerrillas in State of Siege, reframing autobiography, such as Artur London’s The Confession, or the director’s own interpretation of conflicts, as in Hanna K., The Music Box, and the American neo-Nazi group The Order in Betrayed. Costa-Gavras addresses fundamental historical events in the twentieth century through the plight of individuals willing to stand up to totalitarian regimes in fascist Second World War Europe, Communist Cold War Eastern Europe,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

The films of Costa-Gavras dictatorial South America, and the capitalist West. In essence, Costa-Gavras stands out as a cinematic historiographer, one whose emphasis lies more in creating narrative than in sustaining ideology. In 1976, James Monaco aptly revealed how American criticism of Costa-Gavras’s films placed them in conventional political camps, left, right, and center or rightliberal or left-liberal, with Monaco applying an older, more exacting positioning of liberal than in today’s media rhetoric. Left criticism scorns Costa-Gavras for bourgeois filmic elements that rely upon traditional Hollywood genres, such as melodrama and film noir, but which do not engage in extreme New Wave revolutionary experimentation. Criticism from the right, at least in the mid-1970s, remained a strongly conservative condemnation of political content of the films. Most critics, for Monaco, landed in the center political position, those who viewed the films as ultimately failures: The liberal esthetic is a Catch-22 for films like Costa-Gavras’s. The objections almost always take one of two forms: in the first of these, the critic reads into the film an ideology, then censures the film for being ideological. What is understood but never stated explicitly is that it is a particular ideology that is found distasteful. In other words, films that have an ideology the critic agrees with are not ideological, but films that exhibit an ideology the critic does not agree with are subject to this censure. It is this logical subterfuge that makes liberal centrist criticisms more insidious than the clearly ideological objections from the right. The second basic form of objection from the liberal viewpoint is really just a reversal of the first. Instead of discovering the ‘quality’ of ideology in the film, the critic discovers the lack of esthetic qualities. Thus the film is condemned as being not ‘real’ enough, or not ‘sophisticated’ or ‘complicated’ enough, and therefore a failure.3

What critics misunderstood, according to Costa-Gavras, was his reconstruction of the historical narrative, taking a historiographical shift away from ideology per se. Such a move can be found in Costa-Gavras’s choice for the narrative perspective of Z, not the leftist martyr Gregory Lambrakis, but a rightist judge investigating the case: ‘I wanted to study the mechanics. And the investigating judge was truly an incredible character. At any point he was free to halt his investigation. He was quite crucial to the exposé of the police. He was a man of the Right, a man of the Establishment, but he was an honest man.’ 4 Even Cinéaste took a left-leaning critical reaction to the portrayal of Lambrakis’s murderer as being a homosexual, to which Costa-Gavras explained, ‘His homosexuality was important because it was the factor that made him a lackey of the police. He was a victim himself.’ 5 The same historiographical shift occurs in State of Siege, in which Costa-Gavras avoided focusing on political ideology of the pro-Guevara movement, the Tupamaros who kidnap and eventually murder American police-torture advisor Dan Mitrione. Instead, he wanted to focus on what that situation revealed about neocolonialism, about the Mitriones still to come, rather than the precise type of neo-Marxist and quite vague revolutionary rhetoric of the Uruguayan National Liberty

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: Amen. Movement. Once again, Costa-Gavras thwarted critics left, right, and center by reconfiguring the narrative, not to fit presumed ideologies, but rather to create a new historical narrative, one seeking a larger truth: ‘Personally, I’m very suspicious of these ideologies, or at least the approach to them, how they are translated.’ 6 The advertisement for Amen. met with considerable publicity of its own, because the Christian cross appeared to morph into a Nazi swastika, a much more daring symbolic association than even the keffiyehs atop a cross for a pro-Palestine conference. Costa-Gavras defended this image because ‘elle correspond au problème posé par le film’ (it corresponds to the problem posed by the film).7 Ivan Rioufol in Le Figaro castigated this advertisement and revealed the predicament for the Church: Une injure. L’affiche représente la superposition de la croix gammée et de la croix chrétienne. Jamais l’Eglise, qui en a entendu beaucoup, n’avait été sans doute si violemment insultée. Doit-elle encore tendre l’autre joue? Les évêques, qui ont jugé l’image ‘inacceptable’ ne porteront pas plainte. Entre la liberté d’expression et le respect des croyances, la hiérarchie religieuse veut éviter la confrontation judiciaire. Mais sa prudence peut être comprise comme un manque de courage.8 [An insult. The poster represents the superimposition of the swastika and the Christian cross. Never has the Church, which has heard a lot, without doubt been so violently insulted. Should she turn the other cheek? The bishops, who judged the image ‘unacceptable’, will not complain. Between the freedom of expression and the respect for beliefs, the religious hierarchy wants to avoid a legal confrontation. But its prudence may be seen as a lack of courage.]

An association of Catholic traditionalists (L’Agrif), however, did bring suit before the first judicial tribunal in Paris, requesting that the advertisement for Amen. be banned, because the episcopal council of France and others deemed it ‘odious’, a ‘gratuitous offense’, and a ‘defamation to the respect of all Christians’.9 President of the tribunal Jean-Claude Magendie rejected the injunction to ban the advertisement in his order, stating that L’Agrif had viewed the message within the advertisement with a closed interpretation (‘lecture fermée’). Instead, Magendie offered an open interpretation (‘lecture ouverte’) that it was not the imposition of the swastika on the cross, but rather the ‘rehumanizing’ cross and its values placed upon that brutal totalitarian regime. Moreover, the Nazi swastika in the poster remained ‘incomplete’.10 In an ironic turn, then, Costa-Gavras, like his film’s protagonists, faced religious and institutional intolerance, and his own filmic microhistory played out a new narrative of freedom of interpretation of the past. Amen. serves as a relevant case in point that illustrates Costa-Gavras’s cinematic microhistoriography. Costa-Gavras takes on the Holocaust from a cinematic historiographic perspective, one that relies upon the transmediation of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy (1963) to film narrative, and imagistically providing filmic discovery of the atrocities of Nazism and the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church. His intention was not to film the play, but rather to present a

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

The films of Costa-Gavras microhistory of the Final Solution. Unlike in the play, Pope Pius XII is a background figure, since Costa-Gavras desires another form of history: not institutional, not a grand narrative, but a history that comes about through visual enactment of personal reactions. In this effort to combine narrative and image, Costa-Gavras interprets the conflicting political and theological reactions of those confronted with the horrors of the Final Solution. Hence, Amen. presents a fictional, dramatic, and yet realistic account of the gassing of the supposedly sub-humans, the mentally afflicted, Gypsies, and Jews from Germany and any of the Nazi-conquered regions of Europe. This approach to Holocaust history does not provide a wide-sweep of diaspora, migrations, or even colonization; instead, Amen. makes the social and religious the personal by concentrating on the movements and reactions of the two protagonists, a Protestant SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) and an Italian Catholic priest, Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz). Gerstein was an actual participant in the Zyklon B death campaigns of the Third Reich, but tried to stall efforts and to report this evil to ministers and the Vatican, hence, becoming a spy for God. Fontana is Hochhuth’s fictional guise for Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar and ‘Inmate No. 16670’ of Auschwitz, to whom the play was dedicated. For hiding Jews in his monastery, Gestapo agents arrested Kolbe and transported him to Auschwitz. When a prisoner escaped, the commandant SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch ordered ten prisoners to be placed in the starvation bunker, naked and without water, as examples. One of the prisoners, F. Gajowniczek, had a wife and children, so Father Kolbe offered himself in the man’s stead. In the agony of this starvation hell in Auschwitz, Kolbe maintained his duties as a priest by consoling the others and by upsetting the SS, who ‘could not endure Kolbe’s gaze’ and finally killed him with an injection.11 Hence, Kolbe’s recognition, quite ironically by Pius XII, in 1955 as a servant of God. As Costa-Gavras explained about the choice to deviate from The Deputy: ‘Our main decision was to focus on the two characters, Kurt Gerstein and Father Fontana. At the beginning I said to Jean-Claude that the Pope should become a secondary character because everything is said about the Pope. The important thing for us was to say that the Pope was silent about the extermination of the Jews.’ 12 In essence, the panorama of Second World War history becomes condensed into a private metahistory, rife with detailed evidence of the gassings throughout the Nazi empire, first-hand accounts of the slaughter and brutality of the camps, and a personal counter-narrative to propagandist and diplomatic reports. Moreover, Amen. offers a teleological history, one that inexorably propels the constructors of this metanarrative to resigning themselves to their own final solution. In keeping with the general chronology of the Nazi pogroms of euthanasia, Amen. begins within the milieu of Aryanism, with a parade of civilian Hitler supporters and Hitler youth, Swastika-flags waving and heil-saluting bystanders, all being curiously observed from the top of institutional wall by a group of mentally retarded Germans. The camera then follows these individuals through

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: Amen. their removal to a medical facility, their codification, and processing, their being stripped naked, and finally their execution by exposure to carbon monoxide gas. Eugenics served a twisted logic of Nazi scapegoating for the purposes of Aryan racial purity, which was first tried out at an asylum for the mentally ill at Mogilev near Minsk in 1941.13 Gerstein’s own niece was among this group of victims. Her death and the resultant preposterous official explanation propel him to seek out answers to such horrible deaths. This first scene of involuntary death serves as the mise en abyme of Amen. for the thematic horrors of the Final Solution. Even more so, this scene foreshadows the voluntary deaths of Father Fontana and Gerstein at the film’s conclusion. Unable to convince the Church of the Nazi atrocities against Jews and Catholic Jewish converts, Fontana volunteers to wear the yellow star and to submit, along with deported Roman Jews, to his own sacrificial death in Auschwitz. Equally unable to convince German Protestants and Vatican officials to act against the Nazi Holocaust, Gerstein, after the war, finds himself unable to convince allied forces of the scope of the Final Solution. He commits suicide before his war crimes trial as an act of atonement for his own guilt during the Final Solution. Before the mass genocide of Jews began in Europe, the Nazis had already commenced racial hygiene, particularly of the mentally retarded, then mentally disabled adults, as part of Aktion T4, a ‘euthanasia’ pogrom of fall 1939. Ridding Nazi society of the not useful, the non-Ayrans with hereditary defects, through Aktion T4 required the killing of infants born with physical ailments, then mentally retarded children, such as those with Down Syndrome, and finally included adults with physical, mental, or psychological disabilities, which essentially meant any person who needed state assistance either through prolonged stays at hospitals, nursing homes, or in institutions. Their eradication took the shocking and horrid form of carbon monoxide gassing, at first in death vans with hoses run from the exhaust through the wall, a process taking as long as half an hour to complete. The opening executions of Amen. re-enact this eugenic brutality. As the Nazis demanded more ‘euthanasia’, the vans became less efficient and larger physical plants needed to be constructed; they still employed the carbon monoxide method of murder.Victims underwent a farcical examination, had their photographs taken, a number marked on their backs for later identification, before being ushered, some 40–60 into cramped rooms with a pipe through which gas would enter. Often physicians would invite other people present to observe the gassing through a window: According to reports, the patients generally fell into a sort of stupor before collapsing or falling from the benches. But some of them, who realized that they were being murdered, screamed, raged, and beat their fists against the walls and doors in sheer terror of death.14 The Final Solution required the nefarious modern efficiency of Nazi Germany in order to perform such heinous and extreme form of mass murders: Nazi violence could only be so extreme precisely because it was so modern. To

5

6

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

accomplish it needed the planners and orchestrators in a multiplicity of state and party offices; it needed the academics … who put their intelligence and abilities to working out how to ‘de-judify’ (their expression) cities such as Warsaw and Cracow; it needed the data collectors using punch-card machines as a more efficient way of compiling lists of victims; it needed doctors at the forefront of their profession prepared to engage in the most vile of medical experiments in the interest of scientific progress; it needed the chemists of the Degesch company to produce Zyklon B, first for disinfection, then for human extermination; and it needed the engineers of Topf and Sons, Erfurt, who could design to order the Auschwitz gas chambers and crematoria.15

In Amen., most of these camp figures remain in the background, since the nefarious details initially unfold through Gerstein’s witnessing of the nightmare of Auschwitz. Auschwitz held the distinction of being the first camp to employ Zyklon B, first for killing Russian prisoners of war, then to eradicate Jews. 16 Until this point in the war, Gerstein’s role in Amen. had remained as a purification expert, the SS engineer in charge of providing sterile drinking water to soldiers in the field, and the one capable of ridding barracks of lice and other vermin with the use of Zyklon B pellets. Costa-Gavras includes one particularly disturbing scene in close-ups of Gerstein among SS officers at Auschwitz witnessing by turns at peepholes the first mass execution of Jews with Zyklon B. On this day, the officers witness the elimination of ‘400 units’, a bureaucratic euphemism sustained as Gerstein later learns of Hitler’s demand for the elimination 10–12 million ‘units’ in Europe by 1948. As the SS officers observe the death throes, they also feel the door of the gas chamber occasionally push outward due to the inmates pounding for release. Costa-Gavras includes the low-rumbling sound of train wheels on a track, with the moment of death accompanied by the sound of a train brake squealing to halt. Gerstein looks into the peephole and immediately jumps back, but tries to hide his dread and panic. After taking his turn at the peephole, the Doctor (Ulrich Mühe) remarks with mild surprise: ‘It’s rather horrible.’ Never once does Costa-Gavras show these monstrous exterminations; instead, the camera reveals Gerstein’s close-up reactions to these murders and in long shots shows what Gerstein sees of the disposal of bodies, often in burning mass graves, in the distance. Costa-Gavras’s treatment of the Nazis goes counter to usual representations in Hollywood and European cinema: ‘Another decision we made was not to show the horrors of the concentration camps and not to show the Germans like we’ve seen them in so many movies – goose-stepping, heelclicking, shouting “Heil Hitler”, and all that – but to show them as human beings like everybody else.’ 17 After the mass murders, bodies were routinely burned, while some brains were sent to universities for research on heredity. Certification of death and cynical condolences were sent to families of the murdered victims, usually in a form letter that stated that the son, daughter, or relative died on a specific date from influenza or another fatal disease, and the body was cremated in order to avoid

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: Amen.

Figure 1.1  Close-up of Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) witnessing Zyklon B gassing of Jews

the spread of disease. Such an official note arrives about Gerstein’s niece. Of course, the Nazis knew that reports of large numbers of death would arouse suspicion, so they created Absteckabteilung (Equalization Department), ‘so that the death would be registered in a facility different from the one at which it had actually occurred’.18 While tens of thousands died under Aktion T4, Hitler had to suspend the operation entirely because of Bishop Clement August, Count von Galen of Münster, whose sermons denounced these mass killings of mentally challenged children and adults through the program of radical eugenics against ‘useless eaters’, as the Nazis dismissively referred to these patients.19 In a sermon in August 1941, Bishop Galen denounced the Nazis for criminal murder and demanded the prosecution of the physicians for murder: Once humans were treated like machines or animals that were no longer useful, there was no way of being sure where the killing would stop. Even invalids, cripples and wounded soldiers could no longer feel sure of their lives. Who could have confidence in a physician once doctors sanctioned and participated in the slaying of those deemed unproductive? Woe unto the German people, Galen declared, when innocents not only could be killed, but their slayers remain unpunished.20

Bishop von Galen’s attacks on eugenics, however, were clearly directed at policies that did not include Jews. In reality, these words indicated an ambiguous stance by the bishop toward the treatment of Jews, who remain unnamed in his castigations of racism under the Nazi regime. Like Pius XII, von Galen saw the greatest threat to Europe and Christianity coming from Communism or Bolshevism, which for the German propaganda machine were synonymous with Jew. Bishop van Galen cited Hitler’s Mein Kampf in his letters and petitions, often linking Jewishness with Communism. Like Pius XII, on the issues of brutal deportation resulting in

7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

The films of Costa-Gavras death camps, von Galen remained silent.21 Of the Roman Jews transported while Pius XII ignored their plight, ‘the estimated 1,060 deportees had been gassed at Auschwitz and Birkenau; 149 men and 47 women were detained for slave labor’, and only 15 survived the war, including Settimia Spizzichino, a victim of Dr Mengele’s experiments, who was found alive among a pile of corpses during the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.22 In Amen., Gerstein and Fontana surreptitiously listen to Pope Pius XII’s Christmas message on the radio and to their dismay find that the Pope offered no condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust. In fact, any reference to the Final Solution remained conspicuously absent from his message, which had to have been not a sin of omission, but one of deliberate exclusion: A specific reference to the Jews is striking by its absence. Yet a precedent existed for condemning anti-Semitism in a similar context among documents made available to Parcelli by the Holy Office almost six years before he delivered his Christmas message. Those documents did not only affirm that ‘the law of justice and law’ applied equally to the Jews. The commission also condemned, as un-Christian, the notion of a ‘master race’.23

While The Deputy concentrates on the Pope’s negligent refusal to condemn Nazi exterminations in the West, particularly the deportation of Roman Jews right below the Pope’s window, recent work has revealed the Church’s significant involvement with extermination in the East, in particular ‘la croisade contre les “judéo-bolcheviques”’, the greatest fear of the Church being Soviet communism, not National Socialism.24 The Pope’s silence, then, clearly indicated a political decision not to enrage the Nazi government in order, according to Vatican amoral reasoning, not to make Catholics the next target for elimination. Visually, Costa-Gavras draws comparisons between the Church and the Nazi regime in a series of long shots throughout Amen. After the opening sequence of the extermination of the mentally handicapped, the camera in a long shot follows Cardinal Bishop von Galen (Bernd Fischerauer), wearing red robes underneath an embroidered cope, donning a mitre, and carrying a crozier, as he leads priests and civilians from the cathedral grounds through the streets to the municipal hall. In a long shot, the procession moves through a huge Roman arched, domed central space, not unlike St Peter’s basilica in Rome, and then up a flight of stairs to the central magistrates’ council room. This visual motif of a train as the image of power Costa-Gavras will return to in Amen. Moving trains punctuate Amen. as long shots depict a procession of cattle-cars, doors open, and then another long shot of a procession of cattle-cars, doors closed, as the director explained: ‘The trains are the heart of ancient tragedy. By using the repeated images of the trains I wanted to emphasize the idea that this machine was continually working.’ 25 Here, Cardinal Bishop von Galen represents the Church’s power to condemn the ‘murder of unproductive citizens’, which must desist or ‘the Church will have

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: Amen.

Figure 1.2  Long shot of human procession behind Cardinal Bishop von Galen (Bernd Fischerauer)

Figure 1.3  Long shot of train with empty cattle cars

no choice but to inform the faithful’. As already explained, von Galen does not mean Jews at all, only German citizens. The dark irony of this scene remains the Church’s inability to express outrage at the persecution, then execution, of Jews throughout Europe. When Father Fontana first sees Pope Pius XII in his full white attire, the Pope leads a procession of priests through the Vatican. This time, however, the train imagery represent impotence not power, resignation not resistance, to the genocidal machine rolling through Europe. Costa-Gavras achieves a new type of cinematic historiography with his cinematic use of close-ups to represent personal experience, and long shots to stand for unstoppable institutional power. In Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White described historical narratives as ‘verbal fictions, the concerns of which are as much invented as found and the forms of

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

The films of Costa-Gavras which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences’.26 White went on to describe the process of narrative style and its meaning as movement: ‘the destructuration of a set of events (real or imagined) originally encoded in one tropological mode and the progressive restructuration of the set in another tropological mode’.27 This codification and recodification only explains a small part of Costa-Gavras’s historiological shift from events to cinematic adaptation. Unlike White’s four master tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony – grounded firmly in prose and making history essentially an abstract construct, Costa-Gavras relies on visual and aural techniques for his reinterpretation of real historically lived politics, of placing content within a context. Dominick LaCapra views this interrelation between text and context as ‘intertextual’ and not a ‘reductionist oversimplifications that convert the context into a fully unified or dominant structure saturating the text with a certain meaning’.28 Both text and context, however, rely on reception, which Costa-Gavras maintains as the province of the audience. Also crucial to Costa-Gavras is the narrative of individuals, not just grand abstract rhetorical narratives, within a socio-political crisis. Costa-Gavras’s historiographic approach, begun in the 1960s, shares similarities with the more codified late 1970s methodology of microhistory; that is, looking at an event within a greater context from the perspective of individuals caught up in that event or its aftermath. Microhistory often reads like a ‘detective story’, with the reader participating in the construction of the investigation, which is similar to the manner in which Costa-Gavras draws his audience into piecing together the story.29 Costa-Gavras focuses on secondary, sometimes incidental, characters as witnesses to a larger macrohistorical narrative, among them: the Examining Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Z, loyal Communist Artur Ludvik (Yves Montand) in L’Aveu, counter-insurgency expert Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand) in État de siège, bereaved father Edmund Horman (Jack Lemmon) in Missing, Israeli defense attorney Hanna Kaufman (Jill Clayburgh) in Hanna K., white supremacist Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger) in Betrayed, defense attorney Ann Talbot (Jessica Lange) in Music Box, former security guard Sam Bailey (John Travolta) in Mad City, SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) and Catholic priest Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz) in Amen., and illegal immigrant Elias (Riccardo Scamarcio) in Eden à l’Ouest. This same confinement of narrative to a limited perspective, a micro-view, affects Costa-Gavras’s not overtly political films, but his family melodramas: the lovers (Yves Montand and Romy Schnieder) face both love between them against deaths of their respective spouses in Clair de femme; the family of burglars within a larger class-conscious system in Conseil de famille; and, a bourgeois couple absurdly reacting to a supposed suicide attempt by the ex-husband (Jiri Menzel) at his ex-wife’s party, all while the Pope is honoring the world’s poor, in La petite apocalypse. In his films, Costa-Gavras examines an incident or a moment, sometimes provocative,

Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: Amen.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

sometimes trivial, through which he captures the passionate, very human experience of individuals in order to critique larger socio-cultural issues. Jacques Revel, a prominent microhistorian, explains this method of historical analysis in terms of visual, cinematic metaphor: The microhistorical approach is profoundly different as to purpose and method. It is based on the principle that the choice of a particular scale of observation produces certain effects of understanding useful in junction with strategies of understanding. Changing the focal length lens not only magnifies (or reduces) the size of the object under observation but also modifies its shape and composition.30

This narrative process offers new ways of comprehending history, as Christopher Browning articulates about his own method for depicting the murderous actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during the Holocaust: ‘Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving.’ 31 This sentiment certainly pervades Costa-Gavras’s work. In this manner, Costa-Gavras has radicalized filmmaking in terms of form and content without resorting to tropes of radicalism: There is no doubt a tension between content and form. One has to make choices. I always thought it was best to use the forms most understandable to the largest audience. Perhaps it’s the only thing I can do, but I am firmly convinced that political movies should reach a mass audience. Otherwise we speak only to the already convinced or informed. I know there are other approaches.You can be more specific, more exploratory, more experimental, but I like the cinema as a show, as entertainment. I like to compare cinema to the ancient dramas which were truly popular theater.32

Costa-Gavras quotes the microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg to reveal the relationship between film history and the audience: But films are not history books or universities. The Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg, explains it well when he says that movies can bring the audience into the historian’s chamber, where they can then try to learn more if they wish. He says that the distance between history and the moviegoer is too huge, but a movie can broach a historical subject by not attempting to provide all the elements.33

Carlo Ginzburg saw how a common audience member or reader can discern what occurred from fragments that create a new code. This in turn refers to a greater stratum of the culture, as Roger Chartier explains Ginzburg’s microhistorical method: ‘Indeed, as Carlo Ginzburg shows us, when the documents authorize it, it is entirely possible to explore, as through a magnifying glass, the way a man of the people can think and use the sparse intellectual elements that reach him from literate culture by means of his books and the reading he gives them.’ 34

11

12

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Siegfried Kracauer viewed distinctions between micro- and macrohistory as based upon what he called the ‘law of levels’, that paradoxical relationship, particularly employed by D.W. Griffith, between ‘close-ups and long shots (shots of ensembles) in cinematic narrative’.35 For Kracauer, Griffith’s intermixing of close-ups and long shots is analogous to the historian’s levels dilemma: On the one hand he (Griffith) certainly aims at establishing dramatic continuity … on the other, he invariably inserts images which do not just serve to further the action or convey relevant moods but retain a degree of independence of the intrigue and thus succeed in summoning physical existence. This is precisely the significance of his first close-up. And so do his extreme long shots, his seething crowds, his street episodes and his many fragmentary scenes invite us to absorb them intensely. In watching these pictures or pictorial configurations, we may indeed forget the drama they punctuate in their own diffuse meanings.36

While Kracauer did not consider it possible to truly combine micro- and macrohistory, historical construction in Costa-Gavras’s films allows for such an unfolding of these ‘levels’ to occur. In his attempt to define microhistory, Ginzburg found that the methodology could best be ascertained by Kracauer through the example of shot selection in film: This suggests that the reconciliation between macro- and microhistory is not at all taken for granted (as Toynbee wrongly believed). It needs to be pursued. According to Kracauer, Marc Bloch offered the best solution in his Feudal Society: a constant back and forth between micro- and macrohistory, between close-ups and extreme long-shots, so as to continually thrust back into discussion the comprehensive vision of the historical process through apparent exceptions and cases of brief duration. This methodological prescription led to an affirmation of a decisively ontological nature: reality is fundamentally discontinuous and heterogeneous.37

Costa-Gavras would not disagree with the heterogeneous nature of history, but that hardly precludes the director from trying to reveal the essential interaction between micro- and macrolevels. The shift between close-up and long shot corresponds to Costa-Gavras’s historical method in Amen., by which the effects upon the lives of the two protagonists stand alone both in their personal experiences and in relationship to the larger social and ethical contexts of the Final Solution. This micro–macro shift pervades much of Costa-Gavras’s treatment of twentieth and twenty-first-century history, as though, already recognized by Kracauer and Ginzburg, the cinematic is fundamentally the historic and not just in the sense of a biopic or heritage film. Moreover, for Costa-Gavras, the interrelationship between scales allows for cinema to capture history through new narrative expressions. Microhistory, as Francesca Trivellato explains, offers a narrative style that remains accessible for a larger audience as it recovers ‘the subjectivity, and even the interiority, of individual protagonists … whom microhistorians have sought to rescue from oblivion’.38 By defining the political in cinema, Costa-Gavras constructs a similar

Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: Amen. understanding of accessibility and especially the necessity of not allowing those who witnessed history to be forgotten:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Political films above all want to show – but there must be some meaning in what they show. You can take all sorts of artistic license, but there must be facts – and witnesses. That is to say, testimony from one who is a witness to what is going on. Memory is crucial (to people and cultures): film must never be allowed to forget.39

In this way, the political becomes the microhistorical; the microhistorical informs the political experience of the film, what Costa-Gavras insists can only be defined by what is accessible to the audience in the film’s narrative. Of course, such a historiographical process relies upon culminating personal events to resonate the great macrohistory of Nazi domination. To give an example, which Costa-Gavras includes in Amen.: as a prisoner of war in the spring of 1945, SS-Unterstrumführer Kurt Gerstein composed a detailed report for the Allies about his first-hand observation of Operation Reinhard, Himmler’s code name, at Belzec. He witnessed the arrival of a train of ‘forty-five freight cars with 6,700 people, 1,450 of them already dead’, the stripping of clothes, spectacles, and other materials, and women shorn ‘with two or three hacks cut off all their hair’, before being sent naked into the gas chambers.40 The obvious brutality of the SS, especially after lying to the Jews about promised work details for men and kitchen supervision for women, occurred at the entrance to the gas chamber, as Gerstein witnessed: A Jewess of about 40 years old with flaming eyes cried ‘Let the blood spilt here fall on the heads of the murderers’. She received five or six lashes in the face with a riding whip from Captain Wirth himself, then she, too, disappeared into the chamber.41

To hide the physical extermination of people from the general public and the world, Nazi officials, particularly the Security Police, Security Service, and the Gestapo employed code phrases, such as Sonderbehandlung (‘special treatment’) for the initial state murders, then by 1941, Umsiedlung (‘resettlement’) and Aussiedlung (‘deportation’) for the first stages of camp gassings, before Operation Reinhard, Himmler’s code name, to cover the mass murder of Jews.42 Kurt Gerstein, the ethical hero of The Deputy and Amen., remains a complicated historical figure in terms of his decisions and actions leading up to and during the Final Solution, as Florent Brayard concludes in her study of Gerstein: In the three episodes that we have explored – the application to Waffen-SS in 1940, the mission to Belzec in 1942, and the Zyklon B deliveries to Auschwitz over the next two years – the final form of Gerstein’s actions was the result of a number of opportunities: accepting an order or a voluntary act; dealing with the situation that came about, through specific devices, sometimes offsetting possible negative effects; and implementing the action itself, where this tension is released, through an inextricable blend of chance and skill that chance might have chosen to thwart … Each time he

13

14

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

had injected a lesser evil into the evil, should it nevertheless come about: a spy in the service of good if he joined the Waffen-SS; more humane killings if these resulted from the Zyklon B transported by him. But this desire to master fate had its reverse side: for who would be the ‘spy of God’ if not himself? And the Jewish victims, one after the other, would continue to suffer unspeakable pain when they died in the gas chambers unless the irritant-free Zyklon B which he had ordered specially to avoid this were used.43

What Brayard points out has a visual component in the trains moving back and forth in the film, resembling the tensions of Gerstein’s shifting personal ethical conundrum and the unstoppable movement of history, Costa-Gavras’s ‘machine’ of the state. In Gerstein’s microhistory can be found the ethical and moral tensions of the world when confronted with an insurmountable evil like the Holocaust. At the end of Amen., prison guards find Gerstein hanged in his cell, an apparent suicide. His death, then, parallels Father Fontana’s sacrificial death at Auschwitz. Hochhuth, however, could never believe that Gerstein took his own life: he may have been ‘one more of the still uncounted Germans and Frenchmen who were arbitrarily killed in France after the liberation’; or, ‘he was hanged by hardcore SS men when they realized how committed he was to the “obligation of giving an accounting” to the Allies’.44 As in his other films, Costa-Gavras’s Amen. takes up that ethical commitment to ‘accounting’, to presenting the personal witnessing of reprehensible actions. With Amen. Costa-Gavras provides a microhistoriography of two complex men facing unspeakable depravity and suffering from the subsequent guilt that comes with failure, no matter how noble the efforts. The descriptors used in this chapter are the editor’s own. Notes 1 ‘“A Film is Like a Match you Can Make a Big Fire or Nothing at all”: An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cinéaste 6.1 (1974): 5. 2 Constantin Costa-Gavras, ‘Film and History: Questions to Filmmakers and Historians’, Cinéaste 29.2 (Spring 2004): 61. 3 James Monaco, ‘The Costa-Gavras Syndrome’, Cinéaste 7.2 (Spring 1976): 20. 4 ‘Costa-Gavras Talks About Z’, Cinéaste 3.3 (Winter 1969/70): 13. 5 ‘Costa-Gavras Talks About Z’, p. 14. 6 ‘A Film is like a Match’, p. 7. 7 Henri Tincq, ‘“Amen”, le prochain film de Costa-Gavras, dont l’affiche scandalise l’Eglise’, Le Monde, 14 February 2002. 8 As quoted in ‘Dans La Presse Française’, Le Monde, 16 February 2002. 9 Alexandre Garcia, ‘La justice examine la demande d’interdiction de l’affiche du film “Amen”’, Le Monde, 21 February 2002. 10 Garcia, ‘La justice examine’. 11 Rolf Hochhuth, ‘Sidelight on History’, in The Deputy, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 289.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Costa-Gavras and microhistoriography: Amen. 12 Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas, ‘Filming the Story of a Spy for God: An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cinéaste 28.2 (Spring 2003): 16. 13 Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adalbert Rückerl, eds, Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, trans. Mary Scott and Caroline Lloyd-Morris (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1993), p. 52. See also the first gassing of Jews occurring at Mogilev, Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 188. 14 Kogon et al., Nazi Mass Murder, p. 28. 15 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 373. 16 Former Dachau guard, Karl Fritzsch, having risen in the ranks to Auschwitz camp compound leader, supervised the first use of Zyklon B, and ‘he later boasted that he was the inventor of the gas chambers’, Christopher Dillon, Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 192. 17 Crowdus and Georgakas, ‘Filming the Story of a Spy for God’, p. 16. 18 Kogon et al., Nazi Mass Murder, p. 30. 19 Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (1964; Boston: Da Capo Press, 2000), p. 263. 20 Lewy, The Catholic Church, p. 265. 21 For a detailed analysis of Bishop von Galen’s blatant anti-Semitism and his lack of protest against mistreatment of Jews, see Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 22 John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope:The Secret History of Pius XII ([1999]; New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 310. 23 Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 104. Godman concludes his fascinating account of the original documents with the conscious decisions of both Pius XI and Pius XII to suppress all official Church condemnation of Hitler and the Nazi regime: ‘The German threat had to be weighed against Italian perils, and both played off against the “Bolshevik” menace. The stakes were high in this “double game”, and neither Pius XI nor Pius XII was a gambler. So it was that they chose, not once but repeatedly, to hide their hands. Despite the malice with which Mussolini attempted to stack the Vatican’s pack, the excommunication of Hitler – like much else – was never on the cards’ (171). 24 For a intriguing overview of Pius XII by historians and the role of the Church in Eastern Europe, see Annie Lacroix-Riz, ‘Pie XII, ‘pape de Hitler’, par Annie Lacroix-Riz –Avec l’appui de Pie XII, l’Eglise s’engagea activement à l’est de l’Europe dans l’extermination’, Le Monde, 25 February 2002. See also John Crornwell’s chapter ‘Friend of Croatia’ in his Hitler’s Pope. 25 Crowdus and Georgakas, ‘Filming the Story of a Spy for God’, p. 16. 26 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 82. 27 White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 96. 28 Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History:Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 117. 29 Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 76. 30 Jacques Revel, ‘Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social’, in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds, Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York: New Press 1996), p. 495.

15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

The films of Costa-Gavras 31 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992; London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. xviii. 32 Dan Georgakas, ‘There’s Always a Point-of-view – An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cinéaste 16.4 (1988): 20. 33 Crowdus and Georgakas, ‘Filming the Story of a Spy for God’, p. 20. 34 Roger Chartier, ‘Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories’, in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds, Modern and New Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 35. 35 Siegfried Kracauer, History:The Last Things before the Last ([1969]; Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995), p. 126. 36 Kracauer cites his own Theory of Film here in History: The Last Things, p. 129. 37 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know About it’, trans. John and Anna C. Tedeschi, in Robert M. Burns, ed., Historiography: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, Volume IV: Culture (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 194. Originally printed in Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 10–35. 38 Francesca Trivellato, ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’, French Politics, Culture & Society 33.1 (2015): 127. 39 Sally Sampson and Judith Vadal-Hall, ‘Interview – Constantin Costa-Gavras: Politics and propaganda’, Index of Censorship 24.6 (November 1995): 107. 40 Kogon et al., Nazi Mass Murder, p. 129. 41 Kogon et al., Nazi Mass Murder, p. 130. 42 Kogon et al., Nazi Mass Murder, pp. 5–7. 43 Florent Brayard, ‘“Grasping the Spoke of the Wheel of History”: Gerstein, Eichmann, and Genocide of the Jews’, History and Memory 20.1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 76–77. 44 Hochhuth, ‘Sidelight on History’, p. 294.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Un homme de trop (1967) and Section spéciale (1975): justice unravelled, a tale of two Frances (1941 and 1943) Susan Hayward

Introduction Only eight years separate these two very distinct films whose narratives are set in France’s period of Occupation by the German-Nazi enemy (1940–44). Both are based in historical fact. In the first, Un homme de trop (1967), the action unravels in the low mountain range of the Cévennes and centres around the liberation (in 1943) by Resistance fighters of twelve of their comrades who had been condemned to death by the German authorities. Somehow, however, a thirteenth man has infiltrated the group and is suspected of being a German spy. Over the course of the film, various raids and acts of sabotage are carried out by the Resistance group, but the moral and ethical question remains what must be done with the thirteenth man. The second film, Section spéciale (1975) is far more tightly located, primarily in Paris, in the corridors and courts of justice and the prison cells below, with a few cameo nods to Vichy in all its pomp, represented predominantly by the spas and the Grand Casino-Opéra theatre. In this film, the Vichy government’s compliance with the German authorities takes centre-stage. A special section of judges is nominated (by Vichy) to render ‘justice’ for the murder (in 1941) of a German naval officer by a group of leftist activists. The Germans demand that the French exact justice in the form of six executions, to be meted out without delay. To satisfy the occupying forces, the judiciary pass a ‘retroactive’ law which allows the tribunal to select a number of ‘expendable’ individuals (undesirables in the form of known communists or Jews) who have already been tried and sentenced for small misdemeanours (such as insulting a police officer, handing out anti-German leaflets, etc.), but who will now be re-tried for these same offences which, under the new law, render them liable to the death sentence. Thus, the moral fibre of the Resistance passes under scrutiny in the first film, the cowardice and mendacity of the French judiciary in the second.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

The films of Costa-Gavras Two core Costa-Gavras’s themes, history and the concept of justice, are confronted in both these films. Indeed, Un homme de trop marks the beginning, Section spéciale the end of the filmmaker’s first cycle of political cinema – ‘made in France’. As such, they bookend the more renowned trilogy: Z (1969), L’Aveu (1970), and État de siège (1972) (as we know, the second cycle, more international in production terms, begins in 1982 with Missing). This chapter examines the layered representation, in these two films, of this troubled period in France’s history in terms of aesthetic style and generic type (for example, Un homme de trop has been described as more of a Western, an action film than a political one; whereas Section spéciale has much in common with Costa-Gavras’s claustrophobic political drama L’Aveu).The chapter also examines the relationship of these narrative texts to France’s political culture over the thirty-year period that separates the events themselves from their representation on screen. Both films are adaptations of books. Un homme de trop (1958) is based in the real experience of its author, Jean-Pierre Chabrol (a Resistance fighter in the Cévennes).1 L’Affaire de la Section Spéciale (1973), written by the journalist Hervé Lamarre (under the pseudonym of Hervé Villeré), investigates the creation of the special court, the rubber stamping of a pernicious retroactive law and its subsequent implementation.2 The book was published (not without difficulty) some thirty years after the event (in 1973). Even so, these dates tell us that while it was acceptable within postwar French political culture to publish texts and make films about the heroics of the Resistance, it would take (as we now know) some thirty years before any real attempt at disclosure of the less savoury behaviour of France’s institutions and their representatives could happen. In this context, history has different tonalities of ‘truth’: lived experience versus journalistic investigation; documented truth in a period of rebuilding France as a nation, versus documentary truth revealed within a period of a nation’s self-reflexivity (in this latter regard, see for example, Le Chagrin et la pitié, Marcel Ophuls (1969), but not released on cinema screens until 1971 and not shown on French TV until 1981; Lacombe Lucien, Louis Malle, 1974). Costa-Gavras has repeatedly stated that all films are political.3 In that they speak to, reflect upon and/or impact upon the political culture of their times, this statement seems abundantly clear. The point is, however, that where CostaGavras’s films are concerned, while they are for the most part based in one contemporary political event or another, they, nonetheless, also transcend their times. In exposing all forms of abuse of power, be it political demagoguery, military totalitarianism, dictatorship and the ensuing denial of human rights and undermining of justice – in short, films that give testimony to the death of democracy – they issue a timely reminder as to the extremes to which illiberal regimes will go. Costa-Gavras’s political films are historical reconstructions that expose not just bad consciousness and its terrible impact upon democracy (the will of the people); they are also part and parcel of our devoir de mémoire (our duty to remember) even if we find the truth inconvenient.4 Of Section spéciale in particular, but referring also to his other political films, Costa-Gavras makes the point that it ‘is

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale revolutionary to show a part of life which politics doesn’t like to show. Something that even the newspapers don’t show’.5 In these two films, unlike the more famous trilogy mentioned above, it isn’t an individual’s courage or victimisation that is central to the narrative. It would be fairer to say that it is political engagement, moral values and ethical conduct that is at the very core. If Un homme de trop presents us with a group of men embodying a divergent set of ideals of republicanism (or what it means to be a Republic) as something worth fighting for, then Section spéciale shows us the obverse – a group of men prepared to violate the very constitution of the Republic, not just out of servility to the occupying enemy, but also because it serves both their own interests and that of a new (totalitarian) order, Pétainism. This is not to say that we are presented with two-dimensional characters which Costa-Gavras uses as pegs upon which to hang ideas – far from it (despite what critics of the time accused him of). Clearly, what interests Costa-Gavras is what drives human beings to adopt particular political or ideological values. Furthermore, what causes them to waver in their thinking is as intriguing to the filmmaker as is the fact that some can remain ardently aligned to their beliefs. Thus, just to illustrate, among the central characters, we witness, in Un homme de trop, the communist, Jean’s unwavering adherence to doctrinal lines, among which is the credo that the end justifies the means, and that, according to that logic, the thirteenth man must be eliminated because he constitutes a threat to the security of the group. Of the two other main characters, the group leader Cazal, a Gaullist, remains to be convinced and asserts that protocol must be followed and they should await directives from Headquarters. As for Thomas, the teacher and a socialist, he is the one who, in the name of a deep-felt humanity towards mankind, hesitates to bring judgment upon another. In Section spéciale, it is Pucheu, the Minister of the Interior, who is impelled by personal ambition and ideological fervour to perpetrate breaches of constitutional law. He is driven both by his belief in Germany’s supreme vision for a new Europe and by a complete adherence to the dictates of Pétain’s National Revolution (which totally rejected the Third Republic and its democratic values). In his desire to be part of a new elite,6 it is Pucheu who comes up with the idea of the special courts (Sections Spéciales) and rail-roads the legislation through, with Pétain’s complete support. Jean and Pucheu are far from cyphers, however. Jean is proud of the fact that he has pulled himself out of poverty, and that being a member of the Communist Party enabled that to happen. His is a pride which manifests itself in his immaculate dress-code – clean jodhpurs, polished boots, snug-fitting leather jacket, scarf neatly folded through around the neck and a trilby to top off the look! Conversely, it is also the case that this cleanliness and neatness encases and imprisons him as if holding him in a (mental) straightjacket. As the thirteenth man says of Jean, he is ‘le théoricien, mais il ne comprend rien’ (he’s all theory, but he understands nothing).7 True, which is why he is equally very sensitive to, and insecure about, his lack of education – something that doubtless contributes

19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

The films of Costa-Gavras to his need for rules. As for Pucheu, we get to see his private life behind the scenes of the terrifying (basically illegal) decisions he is taking. He is a family man, kind to his wife and children, someone who enjoys the somewhat chaotic nature of family life. Nor does Costa-Gavras neglect the historical truths behind the presence of some of the lesser characters. Thus, in Un homme de trop, one of the reasons why the Resistance group (maquisards) has some unruly members – even if the leaders manage for the most part to command successfully – is due to the fact that a considerable number of the newer resistors are young men evading the Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO, forced labour in Germany).8 They have joined up, yes, but at times their behavior is careless and exposes the maquisards to considerable danger (for example when two of them peel off during a raid to court their newly found sweethearts). In Section spéciale, the perilous condition of illegal Jewish immigrants is made explicit. Once Germany had invaded Poland in 1939, a number of Polish Jews managed to find their way to France (to rejoin family members who had already established a life in this country in the 1920s). Furthermore, in late October 1940 (a mere two weeks after Vichy had passed its first anti-Jewish law, loi sur le statut des juifs), the Germans, thinking nothing of using France ‘as a dumping area for German Jews’, dispatched six thousand to the occupied territory, further fuelling Vichy’s anti-Semitism.9 In an insidious way, therefore, the Jewish ‘illegals’ brought to justice under this new retroactive law and sentenced to death for lacking the appropriate papers, were doubly victims, thanks in the first instance to the Germans and, secondly, to the obsequiousness of the Vichy government. Texts and contexts The critical response to both these films in France was far from laudatory. ‘Un film de trop’ (one film too many) was Michel Ciment’s view of Un homme de trop in Positif.10 Jean Narboni in Cahiers du cinéma thought the film worthy of re-titling Si Vercors m’était conté with every intention of drawing an invidious parallel with Sacha Guitry and his historical films: namely, a film guilty of producing revisionist history with a taint of collusion with contemporary dominant ideology. In Guitry’s case the slur is in reference to his unproven collaboration with the Germans during the Occupation, in Costa-Gavras’s to his supposed endorsing of the Gaullist myth of la France Résistance – a myth De Gaulle mobilized when he came to power in 1958 in the interests of national unity.11 Indeed, as Jean-Pierre Jeancolas points out, in his extended essay on postwar films about the Occupation, De Gaulle used the Resistance as a political tool, both to legitimize his presidency and the new Fifth Republic instituted by him.12 Films showing the courage of the heroic Resistance undoubtedly served a salutary purpose, offering France an image of itself that differed from the one of humiliation and shame it sustained postwar. However, of the one hundred films

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale relating to the Occupation period released between 1944 and 1967, just twenty were about the Resistance. More significantly, of these twenty, only seven were released during De Gaulle’s presidency (so far from an overwhelming amount). Even so, Costa-Gavras’s film hardly endorses a Gaullist view of the Resistance. Rather, it shows the great diversity of political beliefs and personal motivations within these random, not to say, chaotic groupings of fighters. Interestingly, when Costa-Gavras was interviewed on location about his new film, Un homme de trop, he was asked why he was making ‘encore un film sur la Résistance’ (yet another film about the Resistance), he brushed the veiled criticism aside by saying: ‘Pourquoi pas? C’est très actuel en ce moment. Au Vietnam et aussi en Amérique du Sud des gens font de la résistance’ (Why not? It is still appropriate, because of Vietnam and South America where there are people resisting).13 The point of this negative criticism is surely twofold. First, the criticism of Costa-Gavras’s film that emanated from the two major film journals, Cahiers and Positif, came from an environment that was weary of the authoritarian presidential style of De Gaulle. It is also the case that, by the late 1960s, these two journals were clearly aligned with the intellectual Left (which included dialectical materialism, a branch of Marxist thought). As a popular political thriller, Costa-Gavras’s film hardly met their values of what a political film should be.14 Second, the youth classes were becoming restless and, as we know, the Événements de mai (1968) were just around the corner. The old guard, including those identified with the war and the Occupation, was on its way out. The new guard – coming in the form of first Georges Pompidou (1969–74) and then Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–81) as presidents – sought, with their different visions of a modernized France, to bury this divisive past – efforts which impacted in their own way on Costa-Gavras’s second film about France’s recent (inglorious) history, Section spéciale. Pompidou, who died suddenly in 1974, was a great modernizer. Nearly all the innovations he brought about were to do with speeding up (what he considered) a sluggish France. Thus, there came new clean energy in the form of nuclear power stations, faster transport via TGV trains, the Airbus, a revitalizing of the ailing car industry, super highways through cities and motorways. Now was not the moment to be looking back at the myths of a heroic France Résistante, nor indeed, a France crippled by factionalism over the Occupation. It was undoubtedly for these reasons, as a means of putting this past to rest, plus hefty lobbying from the Catholic Church, that Pompidou decided, in November 1971, to pardon (in camera) Paul Touvier – the head of the Milice in Lyon, 1943–44, who had twice been condemned to death for his war crimes. As Pompidou himself declared – once his act of pardoning became public knowledge in March 1972 – ‘le droit de grâce (revient) au chef d’État […] C’est une responsabilité parfois effrayante […] mais la tradition l’exclue de s’excuser. C’est purement un acte de clémence, c’est tout. […] Le moment n’est-il pas venu de jeter le voile, d’oublier ces temps où les Français ne s’aimaient pas, s’entre-déchiraient et même s’entre-tuaient? Si je dis ces mots […] c’est par le respect de la France’ (the act of pardon is the purview

21

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

The films of Costa-Gavras of the President. Sometimes, it’s a terrifying responsibility, but not one that has to be justified. It is simply an act of clemency. Has not the time arrived where we must throw a veil over this time, forget those years when the French no longer loved each other, tore each other apart, and even killed each other? If I use these words it is out of respect for France).15 The fact that this gesture of clemency was first hidden from the public domain and subsequently justified in the above terms led to it seriously backfiring – numerous associations protested against this scandalous pardon which became known as L’Affaire Touvier.These same associations, determined to obtain justice, then began to explore dossiers on Touvier and his acts against humanity so that he could be brought to trial (he was eventually arrested in 1989 and given life imprisonment in 1994). Even before the Touvier scandal, a shift had occurred in the political culture and the move was afoot to examine properly this egregious period in France’s history. By 1971, Marcel Ophuls’s film about the French collaboration with the Germans, Le Chagrin et la pitié, was released for public screening.16 For his part, in that same year, Hervé Villeré had begun his investigations into judiciary malpractice by the special courts known as Sections Spéciales. This was not an easy undertaking. The Minister of Justice (René Pleven) prohibited Villeré from having access to the files held in French archives, invoking Reasons of State (of all ironies, Raisons d’Etat had been invoked as the justification for these special courts back in 1941). Interestingly, Pleven used a language very similar to Pompidou’s: ‘Il importe en effet d’éviter au plus haut point, de porter préjudice à des intérêts privés, et de réveiller des passions dans l’opinion publique’ (It behoves us to avoid anything prejudicial to private interests and to reawaken strong feelings in public opinion).17 Villeré had to turn to unpublished German documents held in archives in (former West) Germany for details on the judicial process; he also managed to access the dossier on the victim of the assassination, Alfons Moser, held on microfiche in German military archives; finally, he successfully interviewed survivors of that period, including judges and magistrates who had served on the special courts, and family members of the executed men.18 By the time Costa-Gavras got to make his film, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was President, and a new era was launched for cinema in 1974, when censorship was officially abolished. Unlike Villeré, no impediments were put in his way – indeed, these new measures made it possible for Costa-Gavras to shoot scenes in places like the Palais de Justice. If the authorities had refused permission, he explains, ‘I would simply have to shoot in another place – and then have to explain to the press why […] In other words, it would be like censorship if they refused. So finally, they were very clever and gave me permission to shoot there’.19 This did not prevent the critical heavyweights, Cahiers du cinéma and Positif among others, from railing against the film. Serge Toubiana, in Cahiers, accuses Costa-Gavras of failing to expose the effects and practices of everyday Pétainism.20 This was an ideology that was determined to bring France into a new moral order (known as Nouvel Ordre Moral integral to Pétain’s Révolution nationale); an ideology that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale dictated that all misdemeanours were to be seen as disobedience to the State: an ideology that subscribed to the belief that the end justified the means; an ideology that arrogated to itself an excess of power and spread it systemically into all institutions (police, judiciary among others) and down into the grass roots of the population (whereby collaboration was de rigueur, and denunciation/délation was seen as a citizen’s duty). Worse still, Toubiana implies that Costa-Gavras’s film endorses a bourgeois consciousness, citing as prima facie evidence the fact that one of the magistrate-judges, Linais, finally has a prick of conscience, thereby (according to Toubiana’s reading) becoming ‘l’incarnation vivante de l’humanisme libéral’ (the living incarnation of liberal humanism).21 This is a grave injustice to Costa-Gavras, and to the truth. In terms of exposing everyday Pétainism, the film makes very clear the mendacious venality of this tyrannical New Moral Order (as I demonstrate in the section on this film). As for Linais’s liberal humanism, the whole point is that, at first, Linais submitted to the arguments of Raison d’État by voting his assent to the execution of the first two prisoners (whose supposed crimes were but small misdemeanours). But, as he increasingly sees the folly and the deep illegitimacy of what is taking place, he decides, when the third prisoner is presented, that he cannot in all good conscience endorse the calls for the death penalty any further. It is a slow process of realization that he can no longer perjure himself, rather than a question of bourgeois conscience (as Toubiana would have it). Jean-Pierre Jeancolas in Positif, while admittedly far less harsh, nonetheless points to many failings in the film. First, it is ‘porteur d’information’ (an information vehicle); second, it is old hat in its style (‘une manière qui ne passe plus’); finally, the use of well-known actors to play the main roles in his view was a poor decision (‘n’arrange pas les choses’).22 This last criticism appears in a number of other reviews, all of which claim that it detracts from the authenticity of the story. Thus, for example, to have Michel Lonsdale play Pucheu – which he does extremely convincingly (bringing out his driving ambition, his delusional conviction that he is doing the right thing, as well as his tenderness as a family man) – means that the audience won’t be able to accept the truth of the story. This is a bizarre criticism when we think that in all three of Costa-Gavras’s political thrillers which precede this film (Z, L’Aveu, État de siège), Yves Montand played the central characters (all based on real people) who were the victims of state injustices elsewhere in the world. Costa-Gavras is of the opinion that the French did not like outsiders washing France’s dirty laundry in public (as a refugee from Greece, Costa was a naturalized Frenchman; and Jorge Semprún, from Spain, was a refugee of the Civil War).23 Like it or not, the film was selected as France’s official entry to Cannes 1975, where it won the Prix de mise-en-scène. The impact value within the judiciary sector may well have been just as mixed, but the lawyer/barrister Robert Badinter, a long-time campaigner against the death penalty, gave Section spéciale a private screening for 300 magistrate-judges followed by a debate on ethics and justice.24

23

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

The films of Costa-Gavras Both these issues are clearly the central protagonists of this film. On the question of justice: within the film (and as recorded by Villeré), several judges exclaimed against the illegitimacy of this dreadful retrospective law instituted by Pucheu and Pétain. In legal terms, it is clearly in violation of Articles 5 and 8 of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme (the 1789 articles of law that are at the core of France’s legal system and penal code).25 Joseph Barthélémy, the Minister of Justice (Garde des Sceaux) who was asked to process and sanction this law (and which he did, albeit unwillingly), would have been well aware of this violation since (of all ironies) he had written his 1899 doctoral thesis on the unconstitutional nature of retroactive law.26 Furthermore, the Vichy government’s intervention to force through the law violated the constitutional separation of powers, whereby the State cannot intervene in judiciary matters. On the ethical front: this law was brought about by a cynical manipulation of the ‘permissible’ retroactivity of penal law for minor cases (such as fiscal fraud); a case of twisting the legal cloth to meet the ends sought by Vichy – namely, retribution to satisfy their German masters and a ridding of France of undesirables (Jews and communists). Of the films themselves, generically they are quite distinct. Whereas Un homme de trop is action-packed, Section spéciale is slow and cerebral. The rhythm of Un homme de trop marches in step with the speed required to carry out the raids (three in all) and get back to base. The narrative of each raid unravels much as a series of cliff-hangers: the attack, the difficulty of extracting the men back to safety, the disquisition on what to do with the thirteenth man. As adaptations go, Un homme de trop is a looser rendition of the original.27 First, for reasons of economy, not all the acts of sabotage could be included. More interestingly, however, is Costa-Gavras’s decision to make the one man too many a thirteenth man and to radically transform his character. In Jean-Pierre Chabrol’s novel, there are eleven resistors to be liberated from the prison and they end up with twelve in the escape truck – not thirteen. Furthermore, in Chabrol’s novel, ‘le type’ (the guy) is a simpleton, he has none of the strong traits of Costa-Gavras’s character who is a drifter but a man of many talents (he can fix things, he can administer medical aid, etc). Costa-Gavras’s ‘type’ is a man who refuses to take sides, who does not see the point of war, or the justifications for killing another human being. On this point of taking sides, in the novel, it is ‘le type’ who, taken captive by the French Waffen-SS, reveals (because of a simple mind) the whereabouts of the Resistance group.28 Conversely, in the film, he discloses nothing to his captors, but manages briefly to escape and warn the group before being re-arrested along with Jean, Thomas and Cazal. We might call him an anarchical pacifist, certainly not a conscientious objector. Michel Piccoli (who plays the role) refers to him as ‘un rêveur, un anarchiste’.29 In Costa-Gavras’s film ‘le type’ is profoundly inscrutable, ambiguous even. On the one hand, he is a jack of all trades, and turns his skills to help the group. Furthermore, there are moments (which Jean completely misreads) when he leaps

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale into action to save someone or prevent a situation that could put the group in danger. On the other hand, he is a chancer, a thief, and a predator on young teenage girls (all three of which got him sent to prison at different times). This ambiguity is underscored by the non-diegetic music that only comes into play on the two occasions he appears to be making his escape – a theme that becomes identified with him. Drums and strings intone a few bars of thriller-suspense music – yet on both occasions the music functions inappositely to him as a potential threat to the group. In the first instance, he has merely stepped outside the cabin to take a piss; the second time, more dramatically, he is endeavouring to escape from Jean’s determined pursuit to kill him. In short, on neither occasion is he the embodiment of danger, despite the signalling from the music. The shift from twelfth to thirteenth man also serves this sense of unknowing. To have been the twelfth man would immediately have identified him with the apostle Judas Iscariot – Judas the betrayer. However, by making him the thirteenth man, he becomes in apostolic terms the thirteenth apostle Matthias, the patron saint, among other things, of perseverance (readily identifiable with ‘le type’ then!).30 Piccoli suggests that he is ‘la conscience des autres’ (the rest of the group’s conscience).31 Possibly, therefore, he embodies the contradictions within us all. Certainly he is the moral question-mark presented to the group: by what right do they have the authority to execute him? Section spéciale, for its part, stays very close indeed to the original text. The dialogue is lifted verbatim from Villeré’s account. The only elisions made are of the letters from the wives to their men in prison. Costa-Gavras decided that the tone of these letters would have made ‘things more passionate’ 32 (as indeed occurs in the book); thus diluting the important message about constitutional injustice by romanticizing, even sentimentalizing the truth and so letting the spectator off the hook (a common feature of Spielberg’s political films incidentally, see for example, Schindler’s List, 1993). He did, however, acknowledge their presence, albeit indirectly, through the use of flashbacks on a couple of the prisoners’ former lives (a point I return to when discussing the distortion, through language, of the truth by the prosecuting judges). These flashbacks aside, the tone of the film is journalistic, an effect that is visually achieved by the fairly static camera-work of long takes. These film aesthetics produce a documentary quality, endorsed in turn by a script which, brick by brick, presents us with ‘several perspectives of the “truth”’.33 The architectural nature of this film is evoked by Costa-Gavras himself.34 This point is developed further in the detailed discussion that follows. Un homme de trop – a Western and a film on resistances Un homme de trop35 was Costa-Gavras’s second film. The idea was brought to him by the Canadian-American producer Harry Saltzman (famous for his Bond movies co-produced with Albert Broccoli) who owned the rights to the book. Undoubtedly, the American factor impacted upon the nature of the film, particularly

25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

The films of Costa-Gavras in generic terms. Knowing the film was to have an American release with United Artists (thanks to Saltzman), the political thriller is somewhat transmuted by Western generic codes and conventions (groups of men going on raids in a barren landscape). Furthermore, because Costa-Gavras was obliged, by Saltzman, to move quickly,36 he decided to write the script himself, which was possibly a mistake: Costa-Gavras readily acknowledged the scenario needed more work, and the message ended up a bit thin due to the lack of psychological depth of characterization.37 Speed also impacted on the style of the film. On the one hand, it can sometimes seem too pacey for the plot to be easily followed. But, then again, the film has an energy we more readily associate with American practices of production: a swift editing style throughout, with a dramatic use of parallel sequencing in the final section of the film; mise-en-scène and locations acting as metaphors for, among other things, the cramped conditions of maquis life (holing up in mountainside cabins), the difficult conditions of combat (in the dry, arid, exposed spaces of the Cévennes) and, finally, the terrifying danger (as in the dénouement, and the grand finale on the enormous Viaduc de Gabarit – designed by Gustav Eiffel – a space that literally swallows up the only one to escape hanging, the thirteenth man). Costa-Gavras later admitted that the film was a failure in his eyes,38 although the French audience – at 931,526 – was not far behind the numbers for his first film Compartiments tueurs (1965) at one million (and of his three major films of this period only Z garnered a significant audience of 3.9 million).39 And the fact remains that the filmmaker retains a certain fondness for this film, doubtless because it was a ‘film d’amis’ (as with Compartiments tueurs, he was able to cast friends in many of the roles, including Julie Dassin in a cameo). It is a rich cast of major French actors, and American financial backing made that possible.40 On this point, there are some interesting anecdotes which point to Costa-Gavras’s way of working both as a loyal friend to a team of actors and technicians and a promoter of emerging talent. Saltzman insisted Costa-Gavras have Louis Daquin as his Director of Production. With a reputation as a great resistor during the Occupation, to say nothing of Daquin’s considerable talent as a filmmaker himself, Saltzman appeared to be untroubled by his communist affiliation. For Costa-Gavras, Daquin’s appointment was to be of great assistance (his knowledge of the Resistance and the maquis). As a nod of thanks, Daquin later re-emerges in Section spéciale in a cameo role.41 Costa-Gavras had his friend Bernard Paul (also a communist) by his side as assistant director – Paul had worked on Compartiments tueurs. Costa-Gavras brought in, as his second assistant director, Alain Corneau, primarily as a means of keeping his quite large cast of actors from running loose.42 But it was Corneau’s first film, and it helped launch his own successful career. The film breaks down neatly into three parts (more or less equal in time). Each part is composed of three sections. The third part is slightly more complex in that sections two and three are in fact occurring simultaneously (parallel sequencing). This is shown in figure 2.1.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale Part One 41 mins

Part Two 40 mins

Part Three 35 mins

10 mins

15 mins

10 mins

Freeing prisoners

Raid

‘Execution’ of 13th man

Not all goes to plan: one resistor

Not all goes to plan: thanks to two

Not all goes to plan: Thomas is

is badly wounded, and they leave

resistors’ indiscipline, the group

incapable of killing 13th man in

with a 13th man.

gets ambushed; one of the team is

cold blood, shoots in the air and

fatally wounded by a milicien;

forces man to run for freedom;

fatal mistake: 13th man

resistors take the milicien capve.

instead, 13th man makes it back to camp and warns the group the

fatal mistake: not geng all the

Germans are coming.

phone lines down (milicien calls the Germans); delay causes fatal wounding.

fatal mistake: furious at Thomas’s failure, Jean chases aer 13th man to kill him and puts everyone in mortal danger

15 mins

5 mins

25mins (a + b)

Escape

Escape

a) Seng mines for aack on

In three moves: first, to a

Dramac drive down mountainous

comrade’s house; second, to a

hairpin bends, Germans in pursuit

Germans Extremely tense as the Germans

convent; third, on a bus taking

coming up the mountainside; driver

open fire on resistors (most of

workers to their place of work (a

gets wounded, the 13th man takes

whom die); but the sabotage is

dam); 13th man hides gun clip

over and they make it back with

successful – Cazal and a few

when bus is stopped and

their wounded to camp .

others survive.

16 mins

20 mins

b) because Jean is determined

At camp

At camp

to catch and execute 13th

Interrogaon of 13th man; Jean

Death of the wounded resistor

man he causes:

demands execuon, Cazal says to

Philippe; his mate Klerk shoots the

wait, Thomas remains unsure

milicien.

searched by German Waffen-SS.

arrest of Leaders Jean, Thomas, Cazal, and 13th

what to do.

Plans are discussed for the next

man captured by French Waffen-

An elderly man, Passevin, ambles

acon: to blow up a pass to stop

SS, taken to viaduct for

by and is hauled into the camp

German munions geng through.

execuon; Cazal escapes, en

for security reasons – he seems to

route, and joins up with the men

know the 13th man …

on the pass (a); Jean and Thomas die, the 13th man escapes, though he remains stuck underneath the bridge.

Figure 2.1  Diagram of Un homme de trop

27

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

The films of Costa-Gavras In each part, we witness the chaos of Resistance existence, the messy incoherence of maquis warfare because, despite careful forward planning, so much has to be improvised, and the success of any of the raids ultimately resides in the surprise element. Much can go wrong; something overlooked, or a fatal error of judgment on the part of just one resistor can bring mortal danger in its wake. Furthermore, lack of adequate weaponry and equipment reinforces the evident vulnerability of these resistor cells. The first two raids in particular are edited in such a way that we feel we are experiencing events unravelling in real time. We are, as such, brought in as active witnesses to these acts of courage and violence. We also witness not just the physical nature of Resistance warfare, but also the men’s overriding humanity, even Jean. Many markers of authenticity give us a sense of the real. There is a strong sense of camaraderie and solidarity. The men in the group accept Cazal as their natural leader. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War and commands respect. Overall, they are tolerant (even of Jean: ‘oh celui-là!’/ oh him!); accepting of difference (as evidenced by the songs in various languages, Ay Carmela, for example), camaraderie knows no borders (a Spaniard and an African-Swiss are part of the group). At times, the men display emotional fragility, as a means of dealing with the awful reality of how precarious their life is. Emotional fragility is particularly present in relation to women (including desire as evoked by Groubec in a haunting poem, or banter about sex, or indeed a relative ambivalence towards women). But there is fragility also in relation to each other, showing tenderness to their wounded comrades; for example, in the scene between Kerk and his dying friend, Philippe, when Kerk brings him a violin to play; or when Philippe talks to Cazal, as a son might to a father, of carnal love he has never known; or again when Groubec distracts one of the wounded by talking about sex as he has a bullet extracted from his leg. Even Jean is capable of showing care and concern for the men. Knowing how slim their chances of survival are, he makes every effort to lead them well and protect them when wounded. Parts One and Two are fairly similar in rhythm. The first raid, conducted at night, begins much like the opening of Roger Corman’s 1967 Saint Valentine’s Massacre in terms of the exchange of gunfire and continues in organized chaos (so it’s little wonder a thirteenth man gets caught up with the men who are freed).43 Ultimately, the raid is successful; no resistor dies. Fast editing prevails during this attack on the prison, with predominantly medium shot to medium close-ups on the resistors and medium to long shots on the Germans – an interesting means of establishing a point of view for the spectator. We readily identify with the maquisards, and wonder at the speed, ingenuity, and adaptability of their raid. The escape, which at first looks as if it will be foiled by the Germans (who are quickly in pursuit), is again a case of extemporizing. First, the resistors go to a safe house; then a couple of nuns help them on to the next stage; finally they get driven to safety disguised as dam workers. What becomes clear is that the effort to escape is a great deal harder and liable to failure than the attacks.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale The second raid is conducted in full daylight. Knowing the Germans are held up elsewhere, Cazal launches a tripartite attack on a local town. He dispatches his men to the post office (to cut off telephone communications), the gendarmerie (to prevent any counter-attack), and the tax office (to get money for the Resistance). Until the closing moments of this raid, the tone is considerably lighter than in the first. In the gendarmerie, the resistors frog-march all the gendarmes outside, then force them to strip off their boots and stand facing the wall (looking more like naughty children than men in danger of their lives). Inside the gendarmerie, these same resistors trash all the offices, yet leave the wind-up gramophone playing a lively, jolly song that accompanies their vandalism. The song, La Chanson du maçon sung by Maurice Chevalier, is a song of solidarity, a hymn to workers united in building a better world. So, at first, the song could seem like an ironic commentary on all the smashing up that is going on. The song was written by Chevalier in 1941 and was a popular hit when it was released in November of that year. However, the tone of the song, which calls for unity and reconstruction, was closely identified, postwar, with Vichy’s Révolution nationale. But, even during the Occupation, Chevalier himself was perceived by certain resistors as a collaborator and Vichy supporter. Certainly, there is little doubt that the German Occupier exploited Chevalier’s fame and his marriage to a Jew to put him in an invidious and ambiguous situation in which actions could be read as supporting collaboration with the enemy – even though this was not the case. The facts were that, under considerable duress from the Germans, Chevalier went (in the very month of the release of this song) and sang in a French prisoner of war camp; he also sang a handful of times on Radio-Paris (a tool of German propaganda). And it is also a fact that, despite the German effort to target Chevalier as a propaganda tool and spread doubt in the minds of the French about their national icon, their strategy failed. The singer remained extremely popular with the majority of the French both during and after the war and, in 1945, was exonerated of any guilt by the Comité d’épuration (Cleansing Committee). The choice of this song, therefore, becomes more complex, for it also echoes the body politic of the film’s narrative, on four counts. First, as Groubec says (as they leave the trashed building), things must be broken, the better to rebuild. Second, in times of great chaos, the line between collaboration and resistance becomes a very murky one, as indeed the milicien and his mother point out as he lies captured and wounded in the resistors’ truck. Third, it is easy to make incorrect judgements based on appearances and rumours, as Thomas reminds Jean (who in the past had hastily executed some people, but, as it turned out they were not guilty of betrayal or treachery). The thirteenth man is an unknown quantity, therefore ambiguous, but that is not a reason to condemn him to death. Fourth and finally, worker solidarity prevails in a charming scene in the tax office. Cazal organizes taking the money but insists on signing an IOU which will be honoured by the Free French. Meantime, his fellow resistors are busily stamping

29

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

The films of Costa-Gavras ‘paid’ on the tax forms of the locals standing in line to pay their taxes (chanting, nothing to pay this time). Part Three is differently represented, not in linear time so much as in parallel moments, and produces a sense of fragmentation, right from the start. Thomas is dispatched with the thirteenth man under orders to execute him, he rushes down the hillside in the wake of his victim, but ultimately cannot kill him and forces the man to run off; simultaneously, a motorcyclist speeds into the camp informing the group they must move on as the Germans know where they are. This helterskelter scattering is reprised once the thirteenth man returns to camp to warn the group that the Germans are nearby. This time it is Jean who chases after him, fatally triggering the events that will lead to the capture and hanging of some of the group, and also to the premature engagement with the German mighty machinery before the various sabotage mechanisms have been fully secured. This thereby causes the slaughter of virtually the whole Resistance cell – even if the pass is successfully blown up. The fragmented edited rhythm of this third section of the film becomes, therefore, a metaphor for the fragmentation of the group that occurs (unlike the more linear, fast-paced rhythm of the first two parts of the film, which created an aura of collective cohesion). The closing shot of the film, a gradual zoom-back from Gustav Eiffel’s Gabarit viaduct with the thirteenth man stranded within the girders of this enormous structure, is hugely suspenseful – where on earth, indeed, to go from here? Section spéciale: Justicia in ruins When Costa-Gavras spoke of the architectural nature of Section spéciale, he was alluding to the construction of the film script in particular.44 But it is the case that architecture serves us well, both as a concept and a metaphor, in a discussion of this multi-layered film. First, let us consider the script. It is built upon the foundation of considerable detailed research. Brick by brick the story is constructed from five elements of found truths:Villeré’s book, German official records, interviews with survivors, the French government’s official publication Le Journal officiel, and Pétain’s speeches. Second, the film itself reveals how, piece by piece, the edifice of the special court is put in place (in much the same way as at the end of the film we witness the guillotine being assembled piece by piece). As we know, architecture is about design in terms of forms and space; it is also about construction with trustworthy materials. For it to hold true, any edifice must be placed upon firm foundations. This entire process takes time – thus an architectural process from design to implementation is about duration as much as it is about sound practices and materials. Similarly, legal process is a slow and arduous affair. Due care and attention has to be paid to procedure, including reference to the Constitution as a legal guide. The French penal code is one of the most ethically stringent in Europe, and Articles already inscribed in law cannot be overridden, nor new ones written in when exceptional circumstances arise without the unanimous

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale agreement of the L’Assemblée Générale du Parquet Judiciaire (The Court of First Instance). Justice, as we are reminded by the former Garde des Sceaux, Christiane Taubira (2012–16), is the very backbone of democracy, its foundation stone.45 What then do we make of what we witness in Section spéciale where an entire architectural process (writing and sanctioning a law, summoning and constituting a law court, implementing the law, and imposing the sentences) is executed with indecent haste – in seven days to be precise – and with no reference to the Assemblée Générale. Furthermore, what do we make of the materials introduced to ensure the right outcome will be obtained? That is, the appointment of judges all associated with the extreme right, with self-serving ambition and who, moreover, served under Pétain in the First World War, all of which guarantees their allegiance to his will. Furthermore, it is evident that the recruitment of defence counsel from a very inexperienced pool of barristers will ensure a minimum of resistance to the prosecution counsel. All principles of law are defiled by the judges who implement this retroactive law; all principles of democracy are violated by Pétain who, having arrogated supreme executive power to himself as head of state, now overrides the constitutional law of separation of the powers. Christiane Taubira is correct when she says that all the men of law involved in this sombre story have perjured themselves.46 As if to echo this perjury, the various buildings involved in this breach of constitutional law (Article 4 of the Code Pénal)47 are also in contradiction, forced as they are into bearing false witness to their stated function. Thus the Palais de Justice is transformed from its purpose as a court of justice into a court of judgment. Worse still, by overriding due legal process, criminal law is replaced by criminal practice, namely, the illegal re-sentencing of already sentenced men. The various offices within the Palais ooze with legal malpractice. Three High Court judges (Gabolde, Cavarroc and Villette) draft the tenth and most pernicious of the articles of this new law on the back of an envelope in the Justice Minister/ Garde des Sceaux’s office; the Attorney General (Dupuich) cynically conducts a triage of the top-shelf dossiers chaotically stuffed into the armoire (a cupboard where appeal cases are held), thereby deliberately limiting his selection of the twelve prisoners to be re-tried to communists and Jews. In terms of malpractice, then, the corruption of law degrades the function of this place of Justice. Furthermore, the switching of materials, from sound to unsound, means that a distortion of justice, based on race and class, has replaced the ethical concept of equality before the law; such an edifice cannot help but crumble. For its part, the exquisite Art Nouveau Grand Casino-Opéra in Vichy had already been transformed, on 10 July 1940, from a theatre into a parliament – the Assemblée Générale of the two parliamentary chambers (Députés and Sénat) gathered there to vote full powers to Pétain, thereby witnessing the death of the Third Republic and the beginning of an executive dictatorship – in which Pétain established himself as the supreme patriarch-leader of his country (LE Chef de l’État/THE head of state; a man moreover committed to the cult of his personality ‘je fais à la France

31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 2.2  Section spéciale satiric poster representing Vichy violation of justice

le don de ma personne’/I gift myself to France). Subsequently, even if by 1941 the theatre resumes its function as a venue for theatrical performances – including the opera, Boris Godunov, by Mussorgsky which opens the film – to which the great and the good of the Vichy government attend, it, nonetheless, becomes the platform used by Pétain to broadcast one of his most stringent speeches. This is heard at the beginning of the film, Le Discours du Vent Mauvais, banning political parties as part of the necessary drive to rid France of those who would destroy the Nouvel Ordre of the Révolution Nationale (i.e., the Bolshevik threat, embodied by communists, Jews, and the Resistance). The theatre becomes an echoing chamber of repression, therefore (just as Pétain becomes the modern equivalent of the tyrant Boris Godunov). It is, then, the site that, twice over, marks the end of democracy. Furthermore, as we are reminded at the end of the film,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale not only is this a theatre, it is a casino, a house of haphazard chance in which outcomes are arbitrary rather than arbitrated. These two functions merge when, in response to the barrister Lafarge’s attempts to obtain clemency for one of the condemned men, his request is bounced about between Pucheu and Barthélémy (in attendance at the theatre), much like a ball on the roulette table. The theatre thereby becomes the space wherein the fate of those sentenced to death by this iniquitous law play their last hand – unsuccessfully as we know. This book-ending of the film with the Casino-Opéra means that, from the beginning to end of the film, it is as if we are bound within the theatre of the macabre. Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov opens proceedings after the requisite three knocks on the floor that precedes all theatrical performances in France – a sound immediately counterpointed by the conductor’s baton, also tapping three times. Both sounds call people present to order, to pay attention. The opera is sung in French. The opera itself is one of treachery and false pretenders, of ruthless executions and murder all in the vainglorious belief that Russia will some day rule the world! It seems an extraordinary choice of opera given that Russia (then known as the Soviet Union) had, only two months earlier (in June 1941), joined the Allied Forces in direct response to Hitler’s invasion of their country. Only the american Ambassador seems to grasp how prophetic it all is. Meantime, the great and the good remain steadfastly and pompously convinced of the wisdom of their leader, Pétain. This view is endorsed by the performance concluding with Pétain’s speech, in which he declares that ‘notre démocratie parlementaire est morte’ (our parliamentary democracy is dead), adding that the Nouvel Ordre must be maintained and that he, Pétain, will save the people of France from themselves. As the film concludes, there is yet another performance at the theatre: this time in honour of Pétain. Paul Claudel’s poem, Paroles au Maréchal, is declaimed from the stage as the barrister Lafarge desperately runs from one theatre box to the next, seeking clemency. The poem asserts that Pétain is France’s only saviour (resuscitator is the word used) – and that France must yield to this patriarch’s wisdom (implicitly his Nouvel Ordre). This then is the New Order (also talked of by Pétain as Nouvel Ordre Moral) of the Révolution Nationale in which no one can speak, all political voices having been silenced; no one can demonstrate their discontent (for to do so risks execution, as we witness in the fate of some of the demonstrators early on in the film). It is small wonder that we only hear Pétain and see his hand manipulating his pen, for his is a New Order in which the executive word is mighty enough to annul the legitimacy of the Republic and replace it with the État français that has no legitimacy in law;48 a New Order in which an executive hand can, at a single stroke of his pen, sanction any number of illegal articles of law. This limiting the representation of Pétain to his hand and the spoken word point to the power of his tyrannical omnipresence – as if his lack of corporeality becomes an extraordinary dematerialised transubstantiality of his ideological Trinity of Travail-Famille-Patrie (the motto he coined to replace the Republican: Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité). Just as

33

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

The films of Costa-Gavras the Main de Justice (the Hand of Justice), the insignia of royal power dating from the thirteenth century, was the symbol of judiciary authority, so now is Pétain’s hand the one that, alone, can mete out justice – and his word that of the Supreme Ruler who is the sole conduit of the law. What mightier symbol to enforce this terrifying silencing of dissent, or ‘disorder’ as Pétain calls it in his speech, than the guillotine – the silent machine of mass execution which we witness being assembled at the very close of the film? The precision of the assembly, the use of the spirit level to ensure that all is equilibrated is markedly ironic, surely, given the lack of justice we have seen performed before our very eyes (‘une parodie de justice’/a parody of justice as one barrister puts it). The tumbrils resonate as the guillotine, piece by piece, is mounted, recalling of course its use in the Reign of Terror of 1793. As Barthélémy exclaims to Pucheu, in his early attempts to prevent this retroactive law being instituted, ‘vous voulez décidément nous ramener à 1792, aux Massacres de Septembre’ (you’re determined to drag us back to the September Massacres of 1792) – this was the first cycle of politically sanctioned terror (by Robespierre and his Minister of Justice, Danton) whereby ordinary citizens were given carte blanche to enter prisons and kill ‘enemies of the Revolution’; shortly to be followed by the official Reign of Terror which Robespierre instituted, in the interests of the nation, to rid France of its enemies. All of this echoes sinisterly with Pétain and Pucheu’s ideological drives. Last, but by no means least, underscoring the masquerades performed by those occupying these formerly venerable buildings, lies language as the final material of this architectural monstrosity. Language is the very tool of lawyers, the tools of their trade. And yet how do they use it? Not to plead for truth, that’s for certain. Instead, it is used at two discursive levels: perjury and injustice. First, there is the reiteration throughout the film of army discourses, rallying the judges to the cause – to persuade them to perjure themselves. De Brinon the French Ambassador to the Occupied Zone uses it; once convinced of the necessity to implement the iniquitous law, Barthélémy also invokes it. The terms employed are clear: ‘il faut mobiliser’ (we have to muster our troops), ‘vous êtes mobilisés’ (the High Court judges are ordered to write the 10th article), ‘il faut mobiliser pour le Chef de l’État’ (we must mobilise for Pétain). Now we see how canny the ambassador was when he suggested that Barthélémy should select his judges from former veterans who had served under Pétain. Indeed, once the court is sitting, the presiding judge, Benon, dismayed at Linais and Larrocq’s refusal to impose the death sentence on one of the prisoners, accuses them of being ‘déserteurs’, declaring, ‘nous sommes des soldats’ – doubtless convinced he is back at Verdun serving under Pétain. Then there are the lies used to convince the judges of the necessity of the Section spéciale. De Brinon sells the idea to Barthélémy by telling him that there is no other solution since the Germans will take fifty hostages (from high-ranked and prominent French personages) and execute them if he refuses to set up the court and arrange for

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale six prisoners to be executed. By the time Barthélémy turns to persuade the three High Court judges the number has swollen to one hundred hostages. Second, within the discursive patterns of injustice, perhaps the most foul of all is the rhetoric of justification used by Pucheu and Benon in particular with regard to the selected prisoners: they are, the assembled judges are told, ‘de qualité humaine médiocre’ (of mediocre value), and ‘d’une qualité humaine inférieure’ (of inferior value), or again ‘la lie de la terre’ (the dregs of the earth). Not only are the prisoners pre-judged verbally here on a ‘justice’ system based on class and race (working class and Jewish), there is also the unpleasant suggestion that some lives are more worthy than others – the inhumanity of justice malpractised bares its ugly teeth here. Bit by bit these special court judges use their linguistic tools to bend and twist truth. The presiding judge, Benon is especially talented at this. Determined to obtain the death penalty for Trzebrucki, he interprets his crime of carrying false papers as evidence of his being an agent for the Commintern. Similarly, with Bastard, Benon reworks the truth to claim that the presence of a typewriter in Bastard’s home is evidence of his owning a clandestine printing press. In ironic counterpoint to Benon’s deliberate misconstruing the truth, flashbacks of the lives of these two accused men run in parallel with his censorious words – showing precisely that, and how, he is distorting the truth. As for the prosecution, on the flimsiest of demeanours (such as handing out leaflets) the two advocates Guyénot and Guillot persist in hammering for the death penalty (‘je ne peux demander que la peine de mort’ they declaim). Language has entered the realm of madness, it would seem. Fancy sleights of tongue render legalese deadly through misappropriation. Cowardice impels these men of law into acts of bad workmanship, to the point that what was once true becomes the complete opposite. Judge Cottin, who had previously lightened the sentence of one of the prisoners (Bréchet) for which he is being re-judged, remains silent during the hearing and then votes for his execution. Even Barthélémy is incapable of getting words in the right order any more, such is the disarray into which justice has been thrown. He misquotes what the ambassador had told him as a means of persuasion, the words: ‘quand le mal a toutes les audaces, le bien doit avoir tous les courages’ (when evil is bold, good must be courageous) becomes in his mouth ‘quand le mal a tous les courages, le bien doit avoir toutes les audaces’ (when evil is courageous, good must become bold). Unwittingly, of course, he is reasonably summing up precisely what is going on – indeed evil is being most audacious. If legal discourse is the mortar of justice, then we can see what little chance the overall structure of this grotesque construction has to hold together and perdure. What kind of edifice is this? It appears to go round and round on itself, much like an Escher graphic design (his Relativity comes to mind). Indeed, architecturally speaking, the whole film feels like a moebius strip of mastodon proportions – exposing, much like a dragon eating its tail, the denial of democracy

35

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36

The films of Costa-Gavras and the erasure of humanity. The moral force of Justicia (the last word we see in the film), blind unprejudiced Justice holding the scales of impartiality, which is at the very foundation of the legal system, has been bulldozed into oblivion. The prisoner Sampaix is right to refuse to be judged by such a travesty of a court that is no more than a puppet of the German enemy, and his timely warning: ‘je vous préviens, vous qui allez, comme vous le dites, me juger. Je vous l’annonce: le peuple français jugera lui-même un jour. Et les juges eux-mêmes seront jugés’ (I warn you, you who, as you say, are going to judge me. I tell you, one day the French people will judge for itself. And the judges themselves will be judged). In short, democracy will reassert itself and those judges guilty of such miscarriages of justice will in turn be judged.49 Conclusion: a duty of memory Political films that reconstruct historical events have a moral obligation to represent the complexity of events, the diversity of ‘truths’. At their best they should serve as a prompt to our duty of memory. Lest we forget, the Touvier Affair was not a single event. Other presidents also found themselves entangled with unpleasant reliquaries of the Occupation and Vichy. Maurice Papon, one of the most notorious collaborators had an illustrious political career postwar, he was mayor and deputy from the late 1960s until early 1980s. He was Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing’s budget minister (1978–81). He was only finally brought to justice for crimes against humanity in 1998. Mention can also be made of René Bousquet, the former Chief of Police to the Vichy Regime (1942–43), who was responsible for the deportation of some 60,000 Jews. Postwar he was given the lightest of sentences (under the premise that he had helped the Resistance) and as early as the mid-1950s was re-instituted within the establishment. He became a successful businessman, his Légion d’Honneur was returned to him, he frequented with François Mitterrand at that time (when Mitterrand was a cabinet minister) and later when he became president in 1981. Only towards the end of the 1980s, as evidence was mounting of his crimes against humanity, did Mitterrand distance himself from Bousquet (who was never brought to trial, for he was assassinated prior to being brought to court). Costa-Gavras’s two films remind us of the dreadful perils of violating due legal procedures either by imposing an iniquitous and illegal law (as with Section spéciale), or by deciding to arrogate to oneself the right to judge another outside a court of law (as in the case of Jean in Un homme de trop). Heads of governments have not stopped their practice of introducing illiberal laws via executive powers; so it behoves us the democracy (the rule of the people) to ensure proper vigilance which begins with the duty of memory. Pétain was guilty of lèse-République not just because of his egotistical vanity, but also because the institutional practices of the four estates (legislature, executive, judiciary, and press) did not hold him in check. We currently live in times where the four estates are under siege yet

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale again and where sleights of hand are being manoeuvred by many democratic governments since the start of the ‘War on Terror’ to convince citizens that we need to set aside our principles in the name of security (just as the French set aside their principles in the name of Pétainist ideology).50 By such arguments do we find ourselves on the brink of dictatorships.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Jean-Pierre Chabrol, Un homme de trop (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). 2 Hervé Villeré, L’Affaire de la Section Spéciale (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1973). 3 Most recently, in a radio interview on France-Inter with Augustin Trapenard, CostaGavras declared: ‘Le cinéma a toujours été politique. Je l’ai compris quand je suis venu en France’ (Cinema has always been political. I understood this when I came to France). (France-Inter, Boomerang, Augustin Trapenard, 4 April 2018). 4 Daniel Serceau, film review of Section spéciale, CinémAction 103 (2002): 144. 5 Costa-Gavras quoted in an interview, Bette Jeffries Demby, ‘Costa-Gavras Discusses Special Section’, Filmmakers Newsletter 9.4 (March 1976): 28–32 (32). 6 Imaginary as it transpires, since the Germans saw collaborationist France, and the Vichy government as very secondary to their cause. 7 All translations are mine. 8 STO, though in practice as early as June 1942, was made law by Vichy under duress of the German-Nazi Occupier on 16 February 1943. 9 John J. Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984), p. 189. I recommend reading Michalzyck’s excellent study of this film (pp. 184–284). 10 Review of Un homme de trop, Michel Ciment, Positif 86 (July 1967): 64. 11 Review of Un homme de trop, Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma 190 (May 1967): 72. 12 Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, ‘Fonction du témoignage (les années 1939–1945 dans le cinéma de l’après-guerre’, Positif 170 (1975): 45–60. 13 See on location interview by ORTF Journal de 13h, 22 September 1966, www.ina.fr/ video/CAF97063364 (accessed 21 November 2018). 14 Costa-Gavras came to the cinema via the more traditional route: first, training at film school (L’IHDEC), then, as assistant director to René Clément, Jacques Becker, Jacques Demy, Henri Verneuil and production assistant to Georges-Henri Clouzot – directors not associated at all with the Nouvelle Vague/New Wave, nor indeed the emerging trend of Marxist ideology that inflected some of the New Wave filmmakers. When Costa-Gavras came to France he fairly quickly fell in with Simone Signoret and Yves Montand’s crowd of intellectuals. Signoret took him under her wing when they worked together on Clément’s film Le Jour et l’heure/The Day and the Hour (1963). 15 Georges Pompidou cited in ‘Paul Touvier: une grâce accordée en 1971 par le Président Pompidou’, broadcast on France-Inter, in the radio series Histoire et Politique, edited by Claude Askolovich, 1 January 2017, www.franceinter.fr/emissions/histoire-etpolitique/histoire-et-politique-01-janvier-2017 (accessed 16 October 2018). 16 Even though he had actually completed the film in 1969. 17 Villeré, L’Affaire de la Section Spéciale, p. 17. Even the Resistance hero Colonel Rémy tried to dissuade Villeré from writing this account (p. 13). As an indication of how complex this whole period was in the minds of the French, it is worth noting that Rémy, for all his heroism, was nonetheless an apologist for Pétainism and moreover supported Touvier’s pardon. See: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Rémy (accessed 21 November 2018).

37

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

The films of Costa-Gavras 18 Over a hundred witnesses in all (Villeré, L’Affaire de la Section Spéciale, p. 14). 19 Costa-Gavras quoted in Demby, ‘Costa-Gavras Discusses Special Section’, p. 29. 20 Serge Toubiana, ‘Mais qui raisonne (Les Ordres, Section spéciale)’. Review of Section spéciale, Cahiers du cinéma 258/9 (1975): 43–46 (45). 21 Toubiana, ‘Mais qui raisonne’, p. 45. 22 Jeancolas, ‘Fonction du témoignage’, p. 60. 23 Costa-Gavras, Va où il est impossible d’aller: Mémoires (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2018), pp. 269–270. 24 Costa-Gavras, Va où il est impossible d’aller, p. 270. 25 These articles state: Article 5 ‘La loi n’a le droit de défendre que les actions nuisibles à la société. Tout ce qui n’est pas défendu par la loi ne peut être empêché, et nul ne peut être constraint à faire ce qu’elle n’ordonne pas’ (The law may only prohibit those actions which are harmful to society. All that is not proscribed by law cannot be prohibited, and no person can be constrained to go against what is not ordained by law). Article 8 ‘La loi ne doit établir que des peines strictement et évidemment nécesaires, et nul ne peut être puni qu’en vertu d’une loi établie et promulguée antérieurement au délit, et légalement appliquée’ (The law can only establish laws that are strictly necessary, and no one can be punished except by an existing law that was promulgated prior to the offence, and legally ratified). 26 As mentioned by Joseph Barthélémy in Villeré, L’Affaire de la Section Spéciale, p. 179; and in Frédéric Saulnier, ‘Joseph Barthélémy 1874–1945: la crise du constitutionnalisme français sous la Troisième République’, unpublished doctoral thesis, 1996, p. 1. 27 As Costa-Gavras readily admits in interview by ORTF Journal de 13h, 22 September 1966, www.ina.fr/video/CAF97063364 (accessed 21 November 2018). 28 The French Waffen-SS did not actually come into being until July 1944, so their presence in the film is something of an anachronism. However, as with Section spéciale where there are also some anachronisms (such as the presence of the Milice sitting at the café, actually a cameo role for Yves Montand), these anachronisms, while temporally inaccurate, nonetheless point to the core issue of the affect and effect of the collaborationist psyche. The French Waffen-SS was a by-product of the anti-Bolshevik legion founded in July 1941(and approved by Vichy) – the Légion des volontaires contre le bolshévisme – which, interestingly, struggled to recruit. Only 12,000 volunteered. By the time it was absorbed into the Waffen-SS, this number had dropped to a mere 1,200. 29 Michel Piccoli interviewed by ORTF Journal de 13h, 22 September 1966, www.ina.fr/ video/CAF97063364 (accessed 21 November 2018). 30 As we know, Judas hanged himself; something ‘le type’ miraculously evades as we see at the end of the film. 31 Michel Piccoli interviewed by ORTF Journal de 13h22 September 1966, www.ina.fr/ video/CAF97063364 (accessed 21 November 2018). 32 Costa-Gavras quoted in Demby, ‘Costa-Gavras Discusses Special Section’, p. 32. 33 Michalzyck, Costa-Gavras, p. 193. 34 Costa-Gavras quoted in Demby, ‘Costa-Gavras Discusses Special Section’, p. 30. 35 Costa-Gavras in his autobiography (Va où il est impossible d’aller, p. 144) refers to this concept of plural resistances (pointing to the different motivations that impelled men and women to join the fight against the occupying enemy): ‘Un homme de trop […] c’était pour moi la possibilité de faire un film sur la Résistance, je devrais dire sur les Résistances’ (Un homme de trop was a chance for me to make a film about the Resistance, I should say the Resistances). 36 Costa-Gavras, Va où il est impossible d’aller, p. 144.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Un homme de trop and Section spéciale 37 Costa-Gavras in an interview on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDu0kOgJA_0 (accessed 22 October 2018). 38 Costa-Gavras, Va où il est impossible d’aller, p. 150. 39 Figures are: Un homme de trop, 931,526; Z, 3.9m; L’Aveu, 2.1m; État de siege, 1m; Section spéciale, 814,048, www.cbo-boxoffice.com/v4/pageraw.php3?raw=1&aid=14 (accessed 18 October 2016). 40 Costa-Gavras, Va où il est impossible d’aller, p. 146. 41 Given Daquin’s difficulties with the censorship board after the war, especially with regard to his film Bel-Ami (1954, but not released until 1957), there is something delicious in giving him the role of ‘Bâtonnier du barreau de Paris’/President of the Bar. 42 Costa-Gavras, Va où il est impossible d’aller, p. 148. 43 Costa-Gavras’s film came out in April 1967, Corman’s in November of that same year. 44 He was also referring to his practice with film scripts in general (Costa-Gavras quoted in Demby, ‘Costa-Gavras Discusses Special Section’, p. 30). 45 Christiane Taubira in conversation with Costa-Gavras on the DVD of Section spéciale. In the box-collection Costa-Gavras Intégrale Volume 1/1965–1983, Arte Editions. 46 Christiane Taubira in conversation with Costa-Gavras on the DVD of Section spéciale. 47 Article 4 of the Code Pénal states quite clearly that ‘nulle contravention, nul délit, nul crime, ne peuvent être punis de peines qui n’étaient pas prononcées par la loi avant qu’ils fussent commis’ (No offence, crime can be punished by sentences that had not been dictated by law before they were committed). 48 See the Ordonnance du 9 août 1944 relative au rétablissement de la légalité républicaine sur le territoire continentale. Article 1: ‘La forme du gouvernement de la France est et demeure la République. En droit celle-ci n’a pas cesser d’exister’ (The status of the government of France is and has always been the Republic. In law it never ceased being so). Article 2: ‘Sont en conséquence, nuls et de nul effet tous les actes constitutionnels législatifs et réglementaires, ainsi que les arrêtés pris pour leur exécution […] promulgués sur le territoire continental postérieurement au 16 juin 1940 et jusqu’au rétablissement du Gouvernement provisoire de la république française’ (As a result, all legislative and regulatory constitutional Acts, as well as all measures of their implementation, promulgated on the territory after 16 June 1940 up and until the re-establishing of the French Republic, are null and void), www.legifrance.gouv.fr//affichTexte=LEGITEXT0000 06071212&dateTexte=20090620 (accessed 9 November 2018). 49 At the end of the Occupation retribution was not as complete as Sampaix would have wished. Pucheu was executed. Barthélémy died before he could be brought to court. Dayras (who organised the special court) was condemned to death but the sentence was not carried out and he soon returned to work. Gabolde (who actually wrote the 10th article) was condemned to death in absentia (he escaped to Barcelona). Various others were forced into retirement, Villette, Cavarroc, and Guillot. Benon, Guyénot, Larricq and Cottin were given various sentences in prison, but soon released. Only Linais was not prosecuted (Villeré, L’Affaire de la Section Spéciale, pp. 371–373). On the other hand, this heinous special court was not able to fulfil its ugly purpose with any great conviction over the three years of its existence. Of the 8,398 cases brought before the special courts (in both zones), 45 were condemned to death, of which 20 executions were carried out: http://familles-de-fusilles.com/histoires-portraits/sections-specialesseveres-en-1941-reservees-en-1943 (accessed 6 November 2018). 50 As the British novelist Kamila Shamsie points out in her article, ‘Citizen of nowhere’ (Guardian Review, 17 November 2018, pp. 7–11), since the ‘War on Terror’ UK legislation

39

40

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

on depriving people of citizenship has escalated. The National Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 became law in 2003 and ‘for the first time since 1948, it became possible to deprive any Briton of their citizen status’ (10, my emphasis) if it proved to be in national interests. So not only naturalised British citizens, but British-born citizens could be stripped; at this point, the law stated that these citizens could deprived, provided they had a second nationality. In 2014, a further law changed this latter proviso stating that ‘in the case of naturalised citizens without another nationality, citizen deprivation was possible’ (10). Quite possibly the next step will be that British-born citizens of naturalised citizens can be deprived of citizenship in the interests of national security/interests; and then perhaps British-born of British-born.

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z (1969) and nationalism Homer B. Pettey

We must admit, once and for all … that cinema, politically oppositional or not, is politics. Costa-Gavras1

With Z (1969), Costa-Gavras created a nationalist response to the decade-long political abuses in Greece. Thematically, Z concerns conflicting tenets about leftwing and right-wing nationalism and their struggles for political dominance in Greece during the 1960s. The film also alludes to nationalistic upheavals and assassinations occurring in the contemporary Cold War world of the 1960s. Z, an adaptation of Vassilis Vassilikos’s 1966 novel, recounts the political assassination of leftist activist Deputy Grigoris Lambrakis after giving an anti-American, antinuclear speech in Saloniki (Thessaloniki) on 22 May 1963. Two right-wing thugs in a kamikaze truck struck Lambrakis on the head with a club; the brain injuries he sustained led to his death five days later. The aftermath of the Lambrakis assassination revealed the deep ideological divisions within Greece.The governmental investigation into the assassination revealed unsavory, corrupt connections between the constabulary and the army. In response to the assassination, the Lambrakis Democratic Youth organization came into existence and elected Mikis Theodorakis as its first president. Theodorakis’s music would serve as the score for Z, clearly indicating to the Greek world Costa-Gavras’s nationalism. In 1967, two years before the filming of Z, a far-right military junta, the Colonels’ Coup, took over the reins of government and imposed draconian restrictions on the press and individual liberties in Greece. The epilogue to Z presents some of the more absurd restrictions of the junta, and that epilogue serves as a coda to the Lambrakis assassination. In addition to recasting the political tale of Lambrakis’s political murder, its subsequent intense investigation, and the Colonels’ coup d’état, Costa-Gavras’s Z recounts the rise of nationalism and, ironically, feels

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

The films of Costa-Gavras the effects of industry nationalism associated with the film’s production and distribution. In that sense, Z itself became caught up in the ever-present intrigue of conflicting nationalist ideology and practices. Economic and political contexts help explain the period of Z in modern Greek history. At the time of Z, both novel and film, Greece had experienced paradoxically a rather miraculous, if centralized, economic boom for a small elite sector and simultaneously an economic downswing because of protectionist policies. Like much of Europe, Greece benefitted from monetary infusions via the Marshall Plan, which gave solvency for debts accrued by deficits, monetary destabilizations, and trade imbalances, all of which allowed for expansion in investments. In the 1950s, for example, Greece’s dependence on foreign aid declined dramatically to ‘more than 50% while a growth rate of 6% was maintained’.2 Between 1960 and 1970, inflation remained relatively low and that, in turn, allowed for greater capitalization of credit across economic sectors: ‘A new industrial sector emerged, accounting for 25 per cent of GDP in 1961 and reaching 33 per cent in 1973, while large gains in productivity were made in agriculture.’ 3 With surging economic and infrastructural gains occurring in the postwar period, the early 1960s saw political-economic divisions deepen as royalists on the right contended, often in street violence, with newly advancing centrist and leftist-socialist party followers, particularly over the precarious control of the state military. This is why both the novel and the film begin with the Assistant Minister of Agriculture discussing how to eradicate the foreign infestation of ‘Peronosporaceae, or downy mildew’ by spraying grapevines with copper sulphate solutions, ‘called burgundian because it was first concocted in French Burgundy’.4 The root of troubles in modern Greece, according to the unnamed General, who employs downy mildew as a metaphor for communism, requires indoctrination to the ‘right path of our Hellenic Christian civilization’ at the schools, universities, and among the working classes, so that ‘the illnesses of our time – Communism and mildew – will vanish finally and forever’.5 Rural Greece witnessed extreme intimidation of voters under a cooperative military and police ‘Pericles Plan’ to use ‘party strongmen and village militia’ to switch votes from newly empowered Center Union back to the conservative ERE (National Radical Union).6 Vassilikos uses this opening agricultural lecture to reveal the violent political turmoil of 1960s Greece that would culminate in the assassination of EDA (United Democratic Left) deputy Dr Grigoris Lambrakis by right-wing party hooligans at an abortive peace rally in Thessaloniki. Moreover, this assassination and its subsequent investigation ‘called into question the government’s competence and honesty as well as its control over Greece’s security forces’.7 Costa-Gavras, however, bookmarks Z with this opening lecture and the April 1967 coup d’état of the Colonels that eventuated in martial law, the suspension of political expression, and the arrest of political opponents. Essential to both Vassilikos and Costa-Gavras remains the display of two conflicting forms of nationalism in postwar Greece: the rise of conservative militarism and its clash with the new Left and communist-leaning

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z and nationalism organizations. Military nationalism based itself upon status quo ethnocultural values set against Soviet outside influences, while the new Left, following a similar nationalist logic of exclusion, sought to create a modern Greek state free of American influences.8 Z’s speech at the hall concerns the history of the ‘Friends of Peace’ movement in Greece, which comprises most of chapter 18 of the novel, and models a new nationalism in the form of placing Greece within a globalized disarmament movement, unlike other movements that are ‘Greek, local, oriented toward internal affairs’.9 To Z’s mind, the world no longer breaks down in terms of simplistic binary oppositions of ‘East and West’, which curiously his speech belies. The new nationalism that Z desires would be one free from American influence, particularly free of a proposed US Polaris missile submarine base. Z still views nationalism in binary terms, between local politicians and military influenced by the US military-industrial complex and the other Greece, seeking Cyprus-like ‘self-determination’: Our Western allies, I say, and their Greek flunkies, who show the excessive zeal of the slave eager to curry favor with his master, so excessive indeed, so blatantly cruel that even their master is often compelled to disavow them – well, our Western allies and their local flunkies look upon peace as a threat levelled directly against themselves. Because peace in the world would sound the knell of the big monopolies whose power and growth depend on the armaments race. Throughout the eighteen years of peace since the end of the Second World War, some eighteen localized wars have taken place, and if they remained localized it is only because the fear of universal devastation serves as a counterweight to the warlike tendencies of the Great Powers.10

Z refers to the right-wing protestors outside the hall as ‘hoodlums’, ‘wage slaves without wages’, and a ‘ragged subproletariat’, thereby exposing his own quasiMarxist ideology and nationalism.11 Without doubt, Z’s character in both the novel and the film fits the role of political agitator. Z’s speech also indicates how inculcated the Greek government remained with NATO, Pentagon, and CIA plans for the region.12 Because the eastern Mediterranean had seen turmoil with the Suez Crisis of 1956, an Israeli–Egypt conflict that also involved the British and the French military, NATO and US governmental interests in Greece’s strategic geographical locale increased. For the London conference on the Suez Canal, known as the 22 Power Conference, only Egypt, of course, and Greece, still fuming over British involvement on Cyprus, refused to attend.13 Since that time, the United States, through the Pentagon plans for developing bases in Greece and the CIA intrigues in Greek politics, viewed Greece as vital to its interests. Those interests continued during the Colonels’ Coup, which Greek journalist Helen Vlachos described ‘as born of the CIA, reared by NATO, and it is more or less being coddled by doting businessmen’, in both Greece and the United States.14 Such a view held sway with Greek radicals and

43

44

The films of Costa-Gavras socialists throughout the 1960s, who concluded that Greece was undergoing a ‘neo-colonial transformation’ since the Truman Doctrine:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Such a view was backed by the fact that subsequent American ambassadors intervened directly in Greek public affairs, that the CIA trained Greek officers in the art of counterinsurgency and interrogation, and that NATO used ‘stay-behind’ operations in Greece. All this, codenamed as the ‘foreign factor’, was enough ground for reinforcing the Greek left-wingers’ conviction that the country had become a pawn in American hands.15

Economically, Greece also held a strategic market position for American corporations in particular, which saw the country as a ‘bridgehead’ to other markets: ‘American multinational monopolies regard Greece as a base of operations in the sense that through Greece their products may be exported with lower customs duties or free of duty to the EEC-countries and they can more easily penetrate into the countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.’ 16 As evident from Z’s speech, Greece’s prosperity in the 1960s owed considerable economic and political debt to the power wielded by US governmental and business interests. In the novel, Z’s assassination takes place in a brief paragraph that concludes chapter 22, with the effect being shockingly swift: At that precise moment, from the opposite corner, on the hotel side of the square, a pickup van swooped in like a rocket. A man crouched in the rear hit him on the head with an iron bar. He waved, he fell; the wheels of the vehicle passed over him, dragging him a foot or two in the process; a pool of blood began to form on the street.17

Z’s assassin hits him from the back of a ‘kamikaze’, ironically.18 Kamikaze has two significant historical meanings for Japan nationalism. Originally, the Japanese word means ‘divine winds’ or ‘winds sent by the gods’ and refers to the typhoons that repelled Khubilai Khan’s 1274 and 1281 armadas at Hakata Bay on northern Kyushu and denied his attempt to subdue Japan under his imperialistic domination of eastern Asia.19 In the Second World War, kamikaze referred to the suicidal pilots of the fascist Japanese Imperial Navy, who, armed with explosives, would crash their fighters into US ships. Of course, the irony of the use of kamikaze for the three-wheeled truck in the novel Z evokes both meanings, one to repulse foreign imperialistic nationalism and the other to support such native imperialistic nationalism. In Z, the assassination scene serves as the mise en abyme for the entire film. As such, it is neither the climax of the film nor an anti-climatic moment in the film. Instead, this scene encapsulates the entire process of nationalistic rhetoric, political violence, partisan betrayal, and both state interference and judicial incompetence in this crime’s investigation. The assassination scene employs the quick editing for which Z became known.Two scenes of graphic violence bookend

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z and nationalism Z’s assassination. In the square between Z’s hotel and the hall where he will speak, anti-nuclear protesters face off against right-wing hooligans. Shouts of ‘Disarmament’, ‘Disarm’, and ‘No more NATO bases! are countered with ‘Long live the Bomb!’ As Deputy Georges Pirou (Jean Bouise) crosses the square toward the hall, right-wing thugs mistake him for Z. One government hoodlum bashes Pirou’s head, while others surround his fallen body, beating and kicking him, and then carry him to an ambulance, which they chase down the dark street in order to finish the job. When the ambulance stops, Vago (Marcel Bozzuffi) and Yago (Renato Salvatori) arrive in the kamikaze, and Vago joins the thugs, beating Pirou until he realizes it is the wrong man. Vago and Yago return to a side street near the square, awaiting the signal to assassinate the real Z. On his way from the hotel to the small hall, two right-wing members of the mob in the square attack Z (Yves Montand), hitting him on the head before running away in an act of cowardice. Before another mob attack can occur, Z’s entourage rush him away. Z, shaken from the blow and trying to regain his balance, ascends a crowded staircase to the hall. An anonymous man, later identifying himself simply as a ‘mason’ (Maurice Baquet), helps Z up the stairs and to the anteroom of the hall. Z, recovered somewhat from the assault, enters the hall and delivers his speech, which plays out over loudspeakers in the square. Z stands before a series of identical posters with a silhouetted A-bomb cloud with ‘Non’ inside it over three descending words ‘Plus’, ‘Jamais’, ‘Ça’ [never again], and below that language appears a peace symbol. Costa-Gavras chose not to film Z giving the entire speech, but includes it as background sound as leftists and rightists exchange taunts and threats. Z’s speech follows much of the tenor of the one in Vassilikos’s novel: he accuses the counter-protesters of being ‘nationalists used by the government’. Z asserts that the government’s ‘laissez-faire’ attitude toward NATO bases remains the real crisis in the country. After the speech, Z and his entourage, now accompanied by the mason, descend the stairs and exit the hall. Armed, helmeted, baton-wielding uniformed policemen form phalanxes that flank the square. Shouts of ‘Down with the police state!’ can be heard as Z begins to cross the square. Costa-Gavras films the assassination scene at an exhilarating pace of forty-seven edits in just three and a half minutes. Z and his team walk through a phalanx of police guards as he calls out ‘Inspector!’ Cut to the Inspector and Chief of Police exiting through another phalanx of police on the opposite side of the square. Cut to Z shouting ‘Chief of Police!’ as he walks to the center of the square. Cut to two thugs approaching Z. Cut to Z staring them down. Cut to the thugs fleeing. Cut to Z approaching the file of police. Cut to the kamikaze emerging from a line of police. Cut to Z’s assistant Manuel (Charles Denner) who cries out ‘Watch Out’! Cut to Z turning. Cut to low angle of kamikaze with Vago rising, an iron pipe in his hand. Cut to the club coming down as Z immediately grabs his head. Cut to Manuel running over. Cut to the mason running after the kamikaze. Cut to the assistant holding the crowd back. Cut to Z falling down,

45

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

46

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 3.1  Z (Yves Montand) pushes through armed police into the square

Figure 3.2  Mason (Maurice Baquet) fights with Vago (Marcel Bozzuffi) in the bed of the kamikaze

holding his head. Cut to the mason still chasing the kamikaze, boarding the tailgate, and fighting with Vago. The remaining thirty shots occupy the intense back-and-forth struggle between the mason and Vago, with a few cuts of Yago looking back from the tiny cab, before the shift to the mason fighting with Yago. Eventually, the mason gets the upper hand and tosses Vago into the street. Vago then runs off into the night. With the iron pipe that struck Z, the mason pounds on the oval window of the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z and nationalism cab. The kamikaze rounds a corner and Yago abruptly stops, throwing the mason forward out of the van’s bed and onto the cobbled street. Yago exits the small van, pulls out a wooden cudgel and strikes the mason savagely. Two bystanders approach, Yago returns the cudgel to his jacket, and lies: ‘It’s my cousin. He fell off.’ Bystanders help Yago place the mason in the bed of the van. Another set of bystanders arrive and one member contradicts Yago, ‘I saw you hit him.’ In the longest shot of the sequence a policeman arrives as Yago keeps lying, the policeman asks for his papers, but Yago cannot retrieve his papers without the policeman seeing the weapon;Yago moves to the kamikaze’s cab, initially out of sight of the policeman, and pulls out his papers; the policeman, however, begins to pull the weapon from Yago’s jacket, as the bystander continues to protest, ‘He hit him with a club!’ As policeman’s hand retrieves the club, in the same shot the mason recovers as if resurrected, slides out the back of the van, and runs off, with Yago smiling, ‘See? It’s nothing.’ The policeman, however, does not believe Yago and arrests him on the spot. Costa-Gavras redirects the film’s focus away from what would seem to be its central moment – Z’s assassination – to this scene of the mason against the two murderers. It is not the assassination, but the subsequent investigation that dominates Z. This scene, then, serves as a mise en abyme for the film’s plot. Like this scene, Z’s narrative follows a similar structure: the assassination, the pursuit of the culprits, confronting criminals’ lies, attempts to silence witnesses, and the eventual arrest of the real criminals. Even the resurrection of Z (from zei ‘he lives’) through the proliferation of the letter painted on walls and streets occurs with the recovery of the mason. The examining magistrate’s (Jean-Louis Trintignant) investigation eventually leads to a series of arrests of police, military, and right-wing thugs, and Costa-Gavras presented as a montage sequence. The photojournalist’s (Jacques Perrin) camera’s automatic shutter mimics the fast-paced, multiple-shot editing of the tension scenes in Z, in particular the iconic one-minute car chase of Manuel through the streets and sidewalk arcade.The photojournalist also concludes Z in a televised news report of the investigation and the murders of witnesses who have coincidentally died from heart attacks, one while driving, car accidents, gas explosion, suicide, drowning, work accident, and Manuel supposedly fall from a seventh-story window as he tried to escape from the police. Taking his cue from Vassilikos, who does not identify by name any governmental figure, only by position – the Assistant Minister, the General, the Investigator, the Chief of Police, and, of course, Deputy Z – Costa-Gavras, unlike Vassilikos, leaves unnamed the country in which the film’s narrative takes place. By doing so, Costa-Gavras signals that Z will have nationalism as its theme by subtly indicating in which country the events occur. Beyond the allegorical, this lack of visual political clues – flag, insignia, political poster – to serve as an outright synecdoche, Costa-Gavras cleverly makes national identity the issue. There exist, however, a few cultural clues, scattered throughout the film, that point to Greece, such as some photos of the Greek royal family, an Olympic

47

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

The films of Costa-Gavras Airways name on the steps of jet airstairs, an Olympic Airways poster, and a few Greek beer bottles, but most audience members would have had to rely upon knowledge of Greek nationalism and the Colonels’ takeover to place Z as Greek. No mention in dialogue of ‘Greece’ or ‘Greek’ or ‘Athens’ or ‘Salonika’ occur whatsoever. Although the opening credits proclaim that Z’s content is absolutely ‘intentional’ in its references to political figures and events; even advanced publicity and reviews were necessary to inform non-European audiences of the obvious parallels to Greece. As a political parable, then, Z serves as more than a film à clef for Costa-Gavras, but as a representation of the general political extremism during the Cold War. Violent nationalist splits between Left and Right polarities could occur almost anywhere, not just in totalitarian regimes such as in South America, but in liberal nations as well. After all, 1968 had already seen conflicts between nationalist extremists in Czechoslovakia with the Prague Spring and its demise by invading Warsaw Pact troops, in Oakland, California with shoot-outs between militant Black Panthers and the police, in Paris with the May riots between anti-American, anti-capitalist students and the Compagnies Républicaines de Securité, in Chicago with clashes between anti-war protesters and Yippies against the police, and in Derry, Northern Ireland with the beginning of The Troubles between Catholic ethno-nationalists and the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. Of course, Z also alludes to the May assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr by white supremacist, escaped convict James Earl Ray in Memphis, and the June assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by anti-Israel Palestinian religious fanatic Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles. John J. Michalczyk relates that Costa-Gavras and his screenwriter Jorge Semprún intended ‘to make a courageous plea for liberty and human dignity on the international scale’.20 Z’s plot also alludes to Costa-Gavras’s list of political martyrs by assassinations: the Kennedys by political zealots Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan; Malcolm X by a Nation of Islam fanatic; Ben Barka most likely by Moroccan Interior Minister Mohammed Oufkir; Humberto Delgado by the Portuguese Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE);21 Patrice Lumumba by Katangan soldiers under Congolese authority Joseph Mobutu; and Enrico Mattei in a plane crash explosion by Italian or French Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE; or British Secret Service) agents. In Malcolm X’s case, he had become a pariah to the Nation of Islam for his outspoken defiance against Elijah Muhammad’s hypocritical black nationalist ideology. In an interview with the Young Socialist, Malcolm X denounced black nationalism after speaking with an Algerian ambassador, most likely Ben Barka, who questioned Malcolm X’s reasoning: When I told him that my political, social and economic philosophy was black nationalism, he asked me very frankly, well, where did that leave him? Because he was white. He was an African, but he was Algerian, and to all appearances he was a white man. And he said if I define my objective as the victory of black nationalism, where does

Z and nationalism

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

that leave him? Where does that leave revolutionaries in Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Mauritania? So he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries, dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary. So, I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as black nationalism? And if you notice, I haven’t been using the expression for several months.22

This shift in the concept of nationalism as complete separation from white society and hostility toward all whites evolved for Malcolm X into what today might be considered an almost neo-conservative reaction to Democratic liberalism and to his own community: the black man should control the politics of his own community. The economic philosophy only means that we should control, own and operate the businesses of our community, and thereby be in a position to create job opportunities for our own people so that they won’t have to boycott and picket and beg others to give them a job. And the social philosophy of black nationalism only means that we should do what is necessary to eliminate the vices of alcoholism, drug addiction, bastard children and things of that sort that are destroying the moral fiber of our community and elevate the social standards of the community to the point where we would be more happy in our own social circles and won’t be trying to force ourselves into the social circles where we’re not wanted.23

Here, Malcolm X points to the problems within the black community as coming from within, although he clearly saw those ills as coming from without as well. His black nationalism, then, did not sit well with the Messianic, whites-as-evil, polygamist Elijah Muhammad, whose rancor toward Malcolm X certainly led to that religio-political assassination. Understanding the mortal consequences of competing nationalisms remains at the center of Z, especially as Costa-Gavras saw the brutal effects and political intolerance in his beloved Greece throughout the 1960s. Ben Barka’s ‘disappearance’ and subsequent death in Paris occurred because of his third-world Communist revolutionary movement, particularly against established colonialism and monarchies. His death, Le Monde, using the intrigue of Dreyfus, called ‘L’affair’, and Moroccan students in Paris appealed internationally for the truth to come out.24 When discussing Z in an interview with Yvonne Baby in Le Monde, Costa-Gavras mentioned his shock over the people’s lack of interest in Ben Barka and the equally shocking inability to know clearly the facts of that case. With Z, however, he had a chance to achieve a better sense of the Lambrakis case and the results of the tribunal: Avec Z notre chance a été d’avoir toutes les données jusqu’à l’aboutissement au tribunal, de comprendre clairement le mécanisme d’un assassinat politique, à différents

49

50

The films of Costa-Gavras niveaux. L’histoire que nous racontons a d’autant plus de valeur que nous n’avons pas eu à inventer quoi que ce soit.25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

[With Z our luck had been to have all the facts up to the conclusion of the tribunal, to comprehend clearly the mechanism of a political assassination, at different levels. The story that we recount has accordingly more value since we have not had to invent anything at all.]

Moreover, Costa-Gavras saw the Ben Barka affair, which he admitted was on his mind during the filming of Z, as a parallel to the Lambrakis murder: I had also been troubled by the murder of Ben Barka in Paris during the fall of 1965. There were many parallels with Greek events, but the Lambrakis murder had all the classic elements of political conspiracy posed most clearly. It had police complicity, the disappearance of key witnesses, corruption in government – all those kinds of things. There was the additional question of the way some men make culprits of others. Most important for me was that the Lambrakis affair had a conclusion. There was a trial which produced concrete testimony and evidence.26

Algeria as the shooting locale for Z certainly fit Costa-Gavras’s political interests not only against French colonialism, but also as a hotbed for new radical organizations to combat tyrannical European governments. Former general Humberto Delgado’s founding of the Patriotic Front for National Liberation Front in Algiers and his trial in absentia in Lisbon for ‘inspiring the insurrection’ against premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s 32-year-old regime most certainly contributed to his demise.27 In the 1960s, Africa became the site of numerous revolutionary movements, often quelled by oppressive regimes – tales akin to the Lambrakis affair in Z. As the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba’s avowed Pan-African anti-colonialism led to his political opponent Mobutu Sese Seko deposing and later executing him, while Mobutu received US and Belgian backing. In his final speech to his nation, Lumumba explained the two nationalisms competing for control of the Congo: Those powers that are fighting us or fighting my government, under the false pretense that they are fighting communism, are in fact concealing their real intentions. These European powers favor only those Africans who are tied to their apron strings and deceive their people. Certain of these powers conceive of their presence in the Congo or in Africa only as a chance to exploit their rich resources to the maximum by conniving with certain corrupted leaders. … The imperialists’ strategy is to maintain the colonial system in the Congo and simply change the cast, as in a play, that is to say, replace the Belgian colonists with neocolonialists who can be easily manipulated.28

Lumumba in this same speech warned against tribalism and also spoke against any stance counter to nationalism: ‘a man without any nationalist tendencies is a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z and nationalism man without a soul’.29 Lumumba, not unlike Z in Costa-Gavras’s film, saw the division within his own country along two distinct types of nationalism, one supported by internal corruption and tribalism, the other by external non-native forces and neo-colonialism. While Greece of the 1960s hardly seemed afflicted with tribalism, it did suffer from fierce, sometimes violent, regionalism, as evidenced by the police and military intrusion in rural elections. Greece’s economic success in the 1960s paralleled Mediterranean financial nationalism in Z, which also resulted in American governmental and corporate interference, those ‘monopolies’ in Z’s speech. In the Cold War period of the 1950s and 1960s, the United States threw considerable aid monies at Greece and Italy, particularly with the Economic Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan), which greatly helped raise the gross domestic product per capita, but aid was not altruistic: ‘The United States would not have spent so many resources, nor would it have committed itself to supplying international aid to Greece and Italy, if it were not for the double challenge to “contain” the USSR and avert the rise to power of the popular Communist parties in European countries after the end of the war’.30 The United States diplomatic and intelligence communities, along with NATO, were watchful of any involvement with the Soviet Union. As director of Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI), Italy’s powerful, multinational oil and gas corporation, Enrico Mattei made joint ventures for crude oil production in North Africa, supporting Algiers over the French, and also began importation of Soviet crude, all of which conflicted with US and NATO alliance interests and, to some extent, the Italian mafia: hence, his elimination. In 1957, Mattei had contracts with Iran, Libya, and the Soviet Union, all of which led to the United States Intelligence community submitting a report to the National Security Council about Mattei being a threat to national security. That extreme position did not exactly fit with Mattei and Italy’s financial position, since overexpansion in foreign production and energy markets left the energy company ENI strapped for liquidity. In order to secure a better market position, following rejection by the Italy Central Bank, Mattei met in confidence with John F. Kennedy administrators, such as Averell Harrimann, as well as Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the second-in-command of Exxon, Howard Page, who ‘offered ENI an attractive price’: ‘A few days before Mattei’s airplane exploded in mid-air, a memorandum of understanding between the two companies was ready, and on that basis Exxon would provide ENI with oil at a discounted price for five years.’ 31 Crucial to all of these events remained not just a clash of ideologies, but also fighting between two polar nationalisms. Costa-Gavras’s ambiguity about the actual country in Z deliberately transforms it to an every-nation, one caught between the promotion of two irreconcilable nationalisms. The image of Greece played a role in Z’s success at the box office. Greece had a prominent narrative role in the cinema of the 1960s.Very successful worldwide box-office Grecian hits included: Jules Dassin’s romantic comedy Never on Sunday

51

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

The films of Costa-Gavras (1960) starring Melina Mercouri, who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress, and Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964) with Anthony Quinn, who was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, as well as reinterpretations of ancient Greek tragedies of Sophocles’s Antigone (Yorgos Javellis, 1961) and Euripides’s Electra (Cacoyannis, 1962), which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. These films, including the Greek tragedies, the Greek military government would ban as subversive. Of course, Costa-Gavras’s Z climaxed the decade of the tragedy of Greece for international audiences and won numerous awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Editing Oscars, Best Film Music at BAFTA, the Jury Prize and Best Actor at Cannes, and Best Film for the Golden Globes and New York Film Critics Circle. In Paris, Z won the top grossing spot over 396 other films.32 So successful was Z that Guy Hennebelle in Cinéaste reclassified new and emerging international cinema genres as ‘Z Movies’ or ‘the political thriller’, a new type of ‘America-style detective story’ into which is injected a ‘political theme’, which he finds ‘condemnable because of such hidden vices as the plagiarism of a foreign aesthetic, the illusion that forms can be innocent, the acceptance of an individual mythology based on a classless humanism, and an exaggerated reliance on questionable stylistic technique’.33 Left-leaning critics in America and in Europe questioned ‘the effectiveness of using such “bourgeois” Hollywood genre conventions for a consciously political cinema’.34 Obviously not having read Vassilikos’s novel or having much knowledge of the Lambrakis assassination, Lawrence Loewinger derided Z as ‘an old-fashioned melodrama’ whose ‘dramatic climax – the death of the politician – comes too soon. The rest is anti-climactic’, as well as for not being ‘a revolutionary movie’: ‘in its celebration of parliamentary democracy Z quite consciously takes an optimistic liberal position, one which the film itself shows is betrayed by events’.35 Of course, the reasons for these condemnations remain the cinematic appeal and shrewd auteur concept of Z. Z also presented nationalistic problems in its own awards classification, such as at Cannes, since its producer Jacques Perrin shot it in Algeria with the approval of the Algerian government; logic dictated that it be a French-Algerian film, but the festival denied such a designation on nationalistic grounds. The Algerian set locale had to do with the fact that Costa-Gavras could not find any Western or Eastern European companies to finance this political film. While Costa-Gavras did receive an advance from Centre de Cinéma for his script, he could not convince ‘private local and US majors’ to invest; fortunately, actor Jacques Perrin convinced an Algerian company to co-produce Z, and Italian distributor Hercule Mucchielli of Valoria Films ‘invested and the pic was on its way’.36 Canico, a former French exhibition company for Algeria theatres before the new state takeover, claimed rights to the film’s profits because of previous ‘expropriated French theatres’ and since ‘the Algerian government has promised to pay 25% of the indemnities’ to those French theatres, but they had received nothing.37

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z and nationalism A kind of industry nationalism among distribution companies also occurred within the US marketplace for Z. Cinema V Distribution Company, as speculated in Variety of 1969, obtained $400,000 for the US and Canada rights for the independently French financed Z, while ‘everything else of world-wide distrib potential is financed by a US major (especially United Artists).’ 38 The International Film Importers and Distributors of America presented Costa-Gavras with Best Director, Yves Montand with Best Actor, and Z with the Joseph Burstyn Award for Best Foreign Film.39 Costa-Gavras’s success in the United States certainly came from audience recognition of his American film style. Jean-Louis Trintignant referred to CostaGavras as ‘the most American oriented’ of French directors, by which he later explained that the director ‘had thoroughly studied and absorbed the hard, slick techniques and style of American melodramas and crime movies, and instinctively employed them in Z’.40 Oddly, Costa-Gavras could not find American backing. Prior to Z, Costa-Gavras could not obtain significant US distribution for Sleeping Car Murders by Seven Arts; moreover, Costa-Gavras could not find any funding for Z with 20th Century Fox, United Artists, Warner Brothers, or Columbia Pictures. Eventually, Jacques Perrin used his savings for the film, the actors waived their salaries ‘for a percentage of any then dimly-seen profits’, and independent distributor Hercules Mucchielli ‘put up $200,000 and the strength of the cast roster managed to sell the film in Italy where it has already made more than $1,000,000’.41 Six months after its release in the United States, Z won the Blue Ribbon from the National Screen Council, a rarity for a foreign-language film, but probably due to its having ‘a box office score of 339 percent of normal business in key cities on first run reports’.42 Cinema V, which distributed Z, had gambled $600,000 on showing it in New York, and it succeeded in earning $10 million.43 So successful was Z at the box office and among award shows that ABC won the television rights, for an undisclosed amount, to air a dubbed version in the United States.44 In an interview in Le Monde in 1969, Costa-Gavras explained why he chose Theodorakis to compose the music for Z. He knew that Theodorakis had been the leader of the youth group who defended the ideas of Lambrakis, and now, in exile in a small village, his music served as a form of resistance, murmured by dissenters whenever there was a police presence.45 Even before the 1967 military junta coup, Theodorakis, like many political composers and singers in Greece, had suffered governmental censorship by the national radio and record companies, so much so that some of his original tapes went missing or were destroyed.46 After the military coup by the Colonels, an official decree banned not just playing, but also listening to Theodorakis’s music. Theodorakis’s arrest and subsequent exile made it impossible for him to compose for Z, but he did grant Costa-Gavras permission to use already recorded music. Costa-Gavras concludes this interview by defining Z, particularly the subsequent coup d’état by the Colonels, as not unique, but occurring in Spain, Argentina, and Brazil, anywhere where the powerful attack

53

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

The films of Costa-Gavras a person’s essential liberties. With Z, Costa-Gavras saw a threat to Lambrakis’s kind of peaceful nationalism, which was under siege among totalitarian regimes, thereby setting up for the next film, The Confession, to be in the same political vein. During 1969 in Paris, Z, listed as a Fr.-Alg. (French-Algerian) ‘Origine’, remained the top grosser for thirty-one weeks with 678,453 attendees, averaging weekly audience sizes of over 20,000.47 Z, however, also met with extreme nationalist opposition in Paris, where five theatres were attacked with smoke bombs, incidents for which the extreme right organization Un Comité pour la liberté d’expression du spectacle claimed responsibility as a form of retaliation against leftists and communists disrupting showings of The Green Berets in Marseille, Bordeaux, Nevers, Nice, and Paris.48 Because of its military junta dictatorship, Brazil banned Z from being shown.49 As Franco’s Spain made a bid to enter the European Common Market in May 1970, its new entertainment and information minister Alfredo Sanchez Bella banned Z, with Spanish cineastes likening the move ‘to the mid-50s when their film industry was still isolated from the liberal influences of America and Western Europe’.50 Costa-Gavras foresaw this censorship in his interview with Yvonne Baby, in which he concludes that the Greece of the Colonels also exists elsewhere: ‘par exemple en Espagne, en Argentine, au Brésil, partout, en somme, où le pouvoir s’attaque aux libertés essentielles de l’homme’ [for example, in Spain, in Argentina, in Brazil, everywhere, all in all, where power takes on the essential liberties of man].51 In Cyprus, President Makarios’s government complied with the regime of the Colonels by not screening Z, a censorship that the national guard enforced, being that its leadership was comprised almost exclusively of Athenian officers. This action against Z, concluded journalist Alecos Constantinides, like other penetrations by Greeks on Cyprus would only lead to more nationalist divisions between Greece and Turkey.52 Exclusion of Z from theatres and festivals did not always originate from oppressive regimes. Costa-Gavras initially pulled Z from the Moscow Film Festival, because he ‘refused to participate alongside any film made under the present Junta in Athens’.53 Actress Melina Mercouri, along with directors Cacoyannis and Kondouros, sent a telegram to the Moscow officials of the film festival rejecting their invitation because they also invited ‘représentants du régime des colonels grecs’. Employing nationalistic sentiment, Costa-Gavras made it known that ‘les acteurs et auteurs du film se solidarisent avec leurs camarades grecs signataires de cette protestation’ [the actors and authors of film are in solidarity with their Greek signatory comrades of this protest].54 Seven years after its ban in Athens, Z opened in ten first run theatres in Athens in 1975, where it achieved total admissions of 27,584 the first day and 21,671 the second day.55 Ironically, as history almost always reveals, Z concludes with a list of bans imposed by the military junta that represent Greek and foreign nationalism. In order, the list includes: Euripides; Mark Twain (in part); Sophocles; (Leo) Tolstoy; Long hair and miniskirts; breaking glasses like Russians after a toast;

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z and nationalism (Louis) Aragon; (Leon) Trotsky; to go on strike; free trade unions; (Jean) Lurçat (!!??!!); Aeschylus; Aristophanes; (Eugène) Ionesco; (Jean-Paul) Sartre; The Beatles; (Edward) Albee; (Harold) Pinter; Writing that Socrates was homosexual; Lawyers’ Association; Learning Russian; Learning Bulgarian; Freedom of the Press; International Encyclopedia; Sociology (etc.); (Samuel) Beckett; (Fyodor) Dostoevsky; (Anton) Chekhov; (Maxim) Gorky (and all Russians); Modern music; Popular music (m. Theodorakis); Modern Mathematics; Peace Movements; and the letter Z (zei or ‘Il Est Vivant’ ‘he is living’). Obviously, any movements or organizations that promoted collective views and freedoms would be banned outright by the Colonels: being able to strike, labor unions, and lawyers’ associations. Any emblem or persons association with pop or hippie culture of the 1960s: The Beatles, long hair, miniskirts, as well as modern and popular music, specifically Theodorakis. Of course, classical Greek playwrights (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes) who had a propensity to reveal state corruption would be excluded by this totalitarian regime, as would playwrights who alluded to the failings of fascism (Ionesco’s Rhinocéros), who questioned Christianity (Beckett’s En attendant Godot), who revealed the instability and absurdity of modern life (Pinter), or who were openly homosexual (Albee). Any association with Russia, such as notable authors (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov) or related to the Soviet regime (Gorky), learning the language, learning a Soviet satellite’s language (Bulgarian), or acting Russian (breaking glasses). New types of learning or information, and freedom of the press, would be banned: Who’s Who, the International Encyclopedia, sociology, and the new math. French authors associated with Communism must be eliminated from public consumption: Aragon and Sartre. Two names struck audiences and obviously Costa-Gavras as unusual: Mark Twain and Jean Lurçat (with exclamation and question marks added by the director). Their placement on the list, however, makes sense from a purely nationalistic perspective. The thirty-third chapter of The Innocents Aboard begins with Mark Twain denigrating the entire country of Greece for being arid, bleak, and barren, without any signs of how the impoverished people and the government sustained themselves. As for Lurçat, the prolific French artist who died the year before the junta coup had spent many years in Greece and often adapted Greek classical vase style into works. When he revived medieval French tapestry making, his subject matter certainly did not sit well with the junta, especially when his rediscovery of Apocalypse (1373–83) in Angers inspired his famous Apocalypse (1948). Even more so, Lurçat’s surrealist Hommage aux morts de la Résistance et de la Déportation (1954) would have rankled the far rightists in Greece. Most clearly, Lurçat’s exhibitions in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, his long association with Louis Aragon and with causes sympathetic to the Soviet Union, struck at the greatest fears of the military junta. Costa-Gavras concludes his film with his own nationalism to replace the list of abuses by the new regime in Athens, simply embodied in the letter Z. This

55

56

The films of Costa-Gavras icon for Lambrakis, his peace work, and his martyrdom represents a hope for a new nation to arise in his native country. Curiously, one name not in the list of bans in Z’s epilogue is that of Vassilikos, whose novel attempted through lyrical political fiction to rouse his nation against injustice. Of course, both novel and film were banned.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Costa-Gavras quoted in Gianni Amelio, ‘The Prospects for Political Cinema Today: A Critical Symposium’, Cinéaste 37.1 (Winter 2011): 8. 2 Irma Adelman and Hollis B. Chenery, ‘The Foreign Aid and Economic Development: The Case of Greece’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 48.1 (February 1966): 2. 3 Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs To Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 106. 4 Vassilis Vassilikos, Z, trans. Marilyn Calmann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), p. 3. 5 Vassilikos, Z, p. 6. 6 John S. Koliopoulous and Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History since 1821 (Chichester, Great Britain: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), p. 137. 7 James Edward Miller, The United States and the Making of Modern Greece: History and Power, 1950–1974 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 82. 8 For a good breakdown of exclusionary divisions in nationalism tenets, see Philip Spenser and Howard Wollman, ‘Chapter 4 Good and Bad Nationalisms’, in Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 2002). 9 Vassilikos, Z, p. 102. 10 Vassilikos, Z, p. 102. 11 Vassilikos, Z, p. 104. 12 For a discussion of responsibility for the military junta, see Anonymous, ‘The Past, Or How It All Came About’, Inside the Colonels’ Greece, trans. Richard Clogg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). 13 Cole C. Kingseed, Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), pp. 65–66. 14 Theodore A. Couloumbis, The Greek Junta Phenomenon: A Professor’s Notes (New York, NY: Pella Publishing Company, 2004), p. 31. 15 Kostis Kornetis, ‘“Cuban Europe?”: Greek and Iberian tiersmondisme in the “Long 1960s”’, Journal of Contemporary History 50.3 (July 2015): 490. 16 S. Babanasis, ‘Specific Features of Recent Economic Growth in Greece’, Acta Oeconomica 16.3/4 (1976): 359. 17 Vassilikos, Z, p. 119. 18 Vassilikos, Z, p. 146. 19 H. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture, third edn (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1984), p. 95. 20 John J. Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (Philadelphia, PA: The Art Alliance Press, 1984), p. 82. 21 Mayln Newitt, Portugal in European and World History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2009), p. 204: ‘Sufficient was the reply that he is alleged to have given to a journalist who asked what he would do about Salazar were he elected president. “I will dismiss him” was the laconic reply that summed up the common political platform of all those who backed his campaign. Delgado did not win the election, which was duly

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z and nationalism rigged, and fled into exile, returning to Portugal from time to time in disguise in circumstances that became more and more bizarre. He was eventually assassinated in 1965 by agents of PIDE, the Portuguese secret police.Delgado had failed to win but had shown the depths of the discontent beneath the surface in Portugal and had drawn the attention of the world to the unresolved issue of the future of the African colonies.’ 22 Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (Norwich, Great Britain: Fletcher & Son Ltd, 1966), p. 212. 23 Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, second edn (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 149. 24 P.Viansson-Ponté, ‘“L’Affaire”, le pourvoir et l’opposition’, Le Monde, 29 January 1966. On Moroccan students’ reactions, see ‘L’audition de M. Bernier n’a pas apporté d’éléments nouveaux’, Le Monde, 26 November 1965. 25 Yvonne Baby, ‘Entretien Avec Costa-Gavras: “Z” est l’anatomie d’un assasinat politique’, Le Monde, 27 February 1969. 26 ‘Costa-Gavras Talks about Z’, Cinéaste 3.3 (Winter 1969/70): 12. 27 ‘Lisbon Trail Begins Today in ’62 Revolt’. The New York Times, 28 January 1964. 28 Lumumba Speaks:The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1957–1961, introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Helen R. Lane (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), p. 429. 29 Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick, Death In The Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 127. 30 Dmitri A. Sotiropoulos, ‘International Aid to Southern Europe in the Early Postwar Period: The Cases of Greece and Italy’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 656 (November 2014): 24. 31 Leonardo Maugeri, The Age of Oil:The Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), p. 91. 32 ‘Two World Enterprises – Films Des Deux Modes’, (advertisement) Variety, 29 April 1970, p. 94. 33 Guy Hennebelle, ‘Z Movies or What Hath Costa-Gavras Wrought?’ trans. Renée Delforge, Cinéaste 6.2 (1974): 29, 31. 34 Gary Crowdus, ‘Z’, Cinéaste 27.4 (Fall 2002): 53. 35 Lawrence Loewinger, ‘Z’, Film Quarterly 23.2 (Winter 1969–1970): 64. 36 Gene Moskowitz, ‘One of those Rare French Politico Pix, Z Looms Top Grosser in Paris’, Variety, 19 March 1969, p. 33. 37 ‘? Mark of “Z” as an Algerian Echo’, Variety, 21 May 1969, p. 13. 38 ‘Cinema V Contracts French “Z” Believe Rights Fetched $400,000’, Variety, 11 June 1969, pp. 7, 90. 39 ‘Awards at IFIDA’s N.Y. Feed’, Variety, 4 March 1970, p. 6. 40 ‘Inside Stuff –Pictures’, Variety, 11 March 1970, p. 15. 41 Addison Verrill, ‘Gothan Distribs Couldn’t see “Z” For (Gold) Dust’, Variety, 17 December 1969, pp. 3, 62. 42 Mary Jo Gorman, ‘Cinema V’s Z Is Voted the Blue Ribbon Award for May’, Boxoffice, 8 June 1970, p. 85. 43 Lewis H. Diuguid, ‘Costa-Gavras: Beyond Labels’, The Washington Post, 13 August 1972, L1. 44 ‘ABC-TV Wins “Z” Pic; Post-1971 Airdate’, Variety, 15 April 1970, p. 2. 45 Baby, ‘Entretien avec Costa-Gavras. 46 Thomas Doulis, The Iron Storm: The Impact on Greek Culture of the Military Junta, 1967–1974 (Xlibris, 2011), p. 222. 47 ‘Two World Enterprises – Films Des Deux Mondes’, p. 94.

57

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

The films of Costa-Gavras 48 ‘Grenades Fumigènes pour “Z” Dans Cinq Cinémas Parisiens’, Le Monde, 11 September 1969. 49 ‘Brazil Censoring’, Variety, 30 December 1970, p. 6. 50 ‘Banning of “Z” Intensifies Spanish Filmites’ Burn Over Stiffer Censoring’, Variety, 27 May 1970, p. 24. 51 Baby, ‘Entretien Avec Costa-Gavras’. 52 Alecos Constantinides, ‘L’interdiction de “Z” confirme l’influence grandissante du régime d’Athènes dans l’île’, Le Monde, 5 March 1970. 53 ‘Politics Diminish As Socialist Bloc Threat to Fests’, Variety, 30 July 1969, p. 22. 54 ‘Le réalisateur de “Z”demande le retrait de son film’, Le Monde, 12 July 1969. 55 ‘“Z” Finally Bows in Athens’, Variety, 1 January 1975, p. 20.

4

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The political efficacy of torture in The Confession (1970) Hilary Neroni

The depiction of torture in Costa-Gavras’s The Confession (1970) reveals the brutal methods employed by the government during the 1951 Slánský trial, one of several show trials in Communist Czechoslovakia. The film straightforwardly argues that the government tortured the defendants in order to extract the confessions that they wanted, and it exposes the incredible violence of the interrogation methods. Revisiting this film uncovers a significant historical difference with our contemporary debate about torture, which revolves around whether torture actually works. That is, does hurting someone’s body produce a revelation of what the person otherwise wouldn’t reveal? Can we rely on torture as a method to procure the truth? The Confession does not wrestle with these questions. Instead, it resolutely presents torture as a coercive and humiliating method that the Communists employed to force people into fake confessions. For Costa-Gavras, however, this depiction of torture leads to a revelation about the failings of the Communist Party and then more broadly leads to a larger argument about the moment at which political regimes as such fail. At the heart of most of Costa-Gavras’s films lies this ambition to shed light on where political regimes fail the people they claim to be representing. Through this endeavor, Costa-Gavras attempts to reveal where this failure occurs, specifically in the complicated and hard-to-see web of secret government machinations, as those in charge attempt to force reality into the narratives political regimes tell about themselves. His films point out that at the heart of every political narrative is a structure which ultimately demands that the political regime turn on its own people. In other words, he suggests that politics as such demands a narrative that in some way or another necessarily folds in on itself, and it is the people that suffer this from this flawed structure. For example, Z (1969) looks at a Greek military-dominated right-wing government’s attempt to thwart the investigation of the assassination of a democratic

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

The films of Costa-Gavras activist through hundreds of minute lies and moments of coercion and violence. And State of Siege (1972) considers the web of lies and endless targeted violence that the Uruguayan government engages in (influenced by US involvement in training Uruguay’s military on interrogation and crowd control techniques) when dealing with resistance fighters. These two examples are clearly about rightist authoritarian regimes, but The Confession is about the Communist political structure.1 When we look at the many types of governments (or structures such as the media or the Church) we see that Costa-Gavras is not just criticizing totalitarian regimes but rather political structures as such. Costa-Gavras’s films reveal that where politics fails its people lies at the heart of the narrative that the political regime depends on to define itself. His films are the most critical of those political regimes that define themselves by the friend/enemy distinction. Political regimes that rely on this distinction ultimately fail the people because the friend/enemy distinction eventually engenders violence and torture toward its own people in order to continue its symbolic fiction about itself.2 The political narrative that sees society formed by the friend/enemy distinction is certainly not uncommon, but Costa-Gavras’s films root out the way that this distinction has a detrimental effect even on those regimes with the most egalitarian ideals. Political theorist Carl Schmitt is the leading advocate for the idea that politics revolves around a friend/enemy distinction. Schmitt theorizes that a political community exists only when a people distinguishes itself and defines outsiders by delineating a friend/enemy distinction. According to Schmitt, this creates a shared identity even among people who may have differences internally. He argues that this friend/enemy distinction defines the foundation of any political structure, and it is this distinction that then can produce the political structure as such. In other words, it is not the political structure (whether it be totalitarian, communist, democratic, and so on) that creates the friend/enemy distinction but rather it is the other way around. Every political structure rests instead on this distinction, and it is this distinction that produces a sovereign to govern it. For Schmitt, this means that political structures can also exist in other forms. He argues, ‘Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.’ 3 Schmitt suggests that believing in the friend/ enemy distinction is the most effective way to understand and build any strong group, but especially a strong nation. Schmitt’s belief in the importance of the friend/enemy distinction leads him to disdain liberalism and celebrate a totalitarian approach to governance, because this approach creates the clearest friend/enemy distinction. Costa-Gavras’s films attack this idea over and over as they reveal the endless violence that this friend/ enemy narrative engenders. His films especially address the way that this narrative often leads to governments turning on their own people in order to continually find new enemies. The faulty logic of the friend/enemy distinction can be found especially at the point at which all societies built on this distinction ultimately

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The political efficacy of torture in The Confession turn on their own. When a sense of community or cohesiveness is based on the relation to the enemy, one must always have an enemy. This means both that peace with other countries is temporary since they must necessarily be put back into the position of enemy, and that eventually the same duality will turn inward looking for the enemy. Schmitt himself advocated the act of rooting out the enemy within as another method to activate the friend/enemy distinction and thus strengthen the society. He explains, ‘As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy.’ 4 The search for an internal enemy is predicated on the idea that there is an internal enemy. Regardless of the reality, this search creates the enemy for its own purposes. The hunt for internal enemies and the violence done as a result are often inscrutable to the public at large but especially to those unexpectedly caught in this political machine. The violence that arises (which is often torture) to address the enemy within is, for Costa-Gavras, the chief indicator of a political regime failing its people. Governments obfuscate their failure by creating endless secrets and subterfuge done in the name of routing out the internal enemy. To address this, Costa-Gavras builds his films around very complex narrative webs that are meant to mirror in their form this seemingly inscrutable nature of political regimes that rely on the friend/enemy distinction. These complicated narrative webs, however, all reveal a necessary point of failure within these political structures. His films depict government structures that seem so caught up in shoring up their symbolic authority (even if, as in The Confession, they are supposed to believe in equality for all) that they see people as simply pawns in their strategy and violence toward those people as an acceptable tool. Torture, as the ultimate representative of this violence, figures prominently in his early films. The question of the political and ethical role of torture in the modern world had certainly come to a head in the decades preceding his early work. The torture that the Nazis’ exerted on the Jews and other groups was publicly denounced in the 1945 Nuremburg trials. The outcry against torture continued with the formal adoption of the anti-torture Geneva Conventions in 1949. These conventions were meant to effect a change worldwide to stop the future use of torture for any purposes. Additionally, when Costa-Gavras emerged as a filmmaker, France itself was still reeling from the revelation that torture had been rampant during the Algerian war (1954–62).5 Costa-Gavras’s films, especially early in his career, often deal with the topic of torture as the penultimate gesture of a corrupt political regime. But it is The Confession that delves into this question of torture in the most detail. In order to look so directly at the problem of torture, the film takes on a different style from his first major film, Z, which brought him international notoriety. Costa-Gavras shot Z with the documentary style of street photography that came to define political thrillers of the 1970s. The cinematographer of both

61

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

The films of Costa-Gavras Z and The Confession, Raoul Coutard, well known for his work with Godard and Truffaut, even commented that Z was easier to plan because he didn’t have to worry too much about the lighting. They shot in natural lighting, on the streets, and in a hand-held style that allowed him freedom of movement. The Confession has a very different visual style and is actually more of a melodrama than a political thriller. Coutard had to carefully plan all the lighting for what was a very stagy and dramatic look. About this film, he says, ‘Lighting on The Confession was more elaborate and complex as the lit parts had to be almost overexposed in order to get deep blacks in the shadows.’ 6 The film largely takes place in barren prison-like environments, where the lighting is garish and unrelenting as it focuses our attention on the horrors of extended torture. There is literally nowhere to hide in the frame of The Confession. In this way, the film forces the viewer to confront the details of torture and consider the link between these barbaric details and political ideals. Following The Confession, Costa-Gavras made State of Siege, which returns to the type of style previously seen in Z. Sandwiched in between these hand-held style political thrillers, The Confession stands out. It does, however, employ many of the thematic motifs that run throughout Costa-Gavras’s films as it emphasizes the political failure of the friend/enemy distinction. The themes of the films surrounding The Confession, then, help us to see what Costa-Gavras was investigating. Z, for example, considers the assassination of a radical political leader and the subsequent inquiry into his death by an utterly corrupt government concerned with its own self-preservation more than with finding out the truth. The officials involved are alternately horrifying and comedic in their attempts to block justice. In the end, the film leads the viewer to believe that justice has in some way prevailed in so far as the officials involved in the murder are charged with the crime. However, the film then twists and reveals that society has become even more restrictive and that rightist forces kill those involved in bringing the officials to justice soon thereafter. In this way, Z engages another trope that becomes very common in political thrillers of the following decades: there is simply no hope whatsoever at the end of the film.This ending, however, also works as a provocation for the viewer. It calls for the viewer to engage, and it resists the viewer’s desire for resolution. The Confession has a similar ending. The victim of torture, Gerard (Yves Montand), goes back to Prague to have his memoir of the ordeal published. He says, ‘A new era began in Czechoslovakia. The people found their voice again after years of silence, passivity, indifference or scorn. This was the proof that socialism lies in the liberty of the masses.’ But when he lands in Prague, that very day 6,000 tanks and 600,000 soldiers of the Warsaw Pact powers invade. The film uses a long slow montage that takes its time to display and develop the sense of the sadness and anger of the people when the tanks are rolling in, with documentary footage mixed with shots of Gerard looking on. One shot of graffiti says, ‘Wake up, Lenin! Brezhnev’s gone mad!’ This becomes a pattern in Costa-Gavras’s work

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The political efficacy of torture in The Confession that started with Z: the viewer holds out for some revolutionary possibility, but then discovers worse things happen at the very end that seem totally insurmountable and usually parallel real world occurrences. State of Siege has a similar theme but a vastly different topic. It follows a resistance group as they kidnap an American liaison and several other officials in an effort to disrupt the current undemocratic state of their government in Uruguay. The form of the film is more experimental as the theme is developed through multiple flashbacks that fill in the elaborate multitiered narrative and emphasize all the more the seemingly endless machinations the government is willing to go through to keep the friend/enemy narrative in place. The end of State of Siege does not offer hope either, though it ends on a more resilient note with the opposition in place to continue fighting. Even still, the hopelessness remains in the new installment of foreign officials arriving to continue the work that the resistance attempted to interrupt. The Confession deals with Czechoslovakian Communist show trials.7 CostaGavras based the film on real life events written about in the memoir of Artur London, on whom he bases the character of Gerard. London wrote about his experience as a co-defendant in the Slánský trial. The film largely focuses on the physical torture and endless verbal brainwashing that spiral to such excess that the prisoners capitulate and sign everything their captors put in front of them. Though the torture scenes remain hard to watch, they pale in comparison to the horror of the verbal attacks and elaborate subterfuge that lead the prisoners eventually to agree even to memorize the lies written out for them to deliver during the trials. The performance of the Communist show trials was precisely that, a performance. This performance assured authorities and onlookers that the enemy within – even a completely fabricated one – had been purged to create a stronger bond among the population. We often think of politics as a social endeavor that searches for the greater good, whether that is a good for the greater number of people or for a fascist leader. Either way, political systems are supposed to be logical. The Communist show trials depicted in The Confession give the lie to this belief. These trials ultimately sabotage the very system that they purportedly aim to defend. With their torture and forced confessions (which the film focuses on), they reveal the weakness at the heart of the Communist regime, not its strength. While one might be tempted to dismiss the show trials as simply the result of a perverted understanding of communism or a few corrupt leaders, the film shows that the trials actually give voice to a structural danger of all political action: the tendency of every regime to destroy those whose interest it seeks to advance. The Confession, then, wants to investigate this foundational problem at the heart of politics in an endeavor to provoke change and awareness so that these types of atrocities won’t happen again in the future. In The Confession, the form and its context are oddly dissimilar in that the majority of the film depicts the torture of a single person in isolation – Gerard.

63

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

The films of Costa-Gavras That is to say, the context involves the complex web of political lies that informs the torture. It is a large political structure that completely envelopes Czechoslovakia. The form, however, stays focused on Gerard’s alienating experience of torture, alone in one room with one or more interrogators for most of the film. While it does cut away to his wife or flashbacks from time to time, it sticks primarily to the isolating traumatic experience that Gerard has during his imprisonment and torture. The viewer is aligned with Gerard so that we, like he, do not know why he is being imprisoned which heightens the sense of politics failing its people. The mise-en-scène emphasizes this even further by having the main part of the film take place in his various holding cells and interrogation rooms where we see only Gerard, the guards, and his interrogators. Costa-Gavras relies on the mise-en-scène in these interiors to get across the experience of the torture. He often positions the bodies of the interrogators so that they seem to be crushing Gerard with their oppressive presence. The interrogators are generally dressed in a similar way and often move around him as if they are closing in. In one scene, a handful of interrogators press in close to him and shout accusations at him. Gerard remains trapped, surrounded, and confused, while all the interrogators are passionate and determined. Visually, they press in on him from either side of the frame, trapping him in the middle. Costa-Gavras positions the actors in such a way that the visual frame is filled with bodies: the torturers stand one behind another on either side of Gerard as if they are a repeating presence that threatens to crush Gerard in the visual frame. Many of these shots are highly stylized, even beautiful in their visual acuity. The torturers act as a repeating visual element with Gerard functioning as the disruption in the center that their repetition attempts to contain. In other scenes, the torturers drag Gerard outside to hang him. They put goggles on him so that he cannot see where he is.

Figure 4.1  The sadistic mock hanging torture of Artur Ludvik (Yves Montand)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The political efficacy of torture in The Confession Again, Costa-Gavras stages this very carefully so that the torturers operate as a repeating visual element that seems to flow off the frame at the same time as they are pushing in on him. In this scene, his face with the strange goggles and the noose around his neck create an almost modernist visual aesthetic that sticks out from the nondescript but endlessly present torturers who press in from every side. These visuals emphasize how in the dark and confused Gerard is by all these activities. As viewers we know even less than Gerard because we do not understand his past history with the Communist Party until near the end of the film. The film offers the viewer very little of the historical context that surrounds the torture and forced confession until the very end, when it fleshes out some of this intricate political web. This makes a confusing experience for the viewer, but purposefully so, since the film emphasizes the nonsensical nature of the charges against him, the torture, and the forced confession. In this way, The Confession depicts the Party coming after its own member as itself nonsensical. Gerard doesn’t understand why he is there and neither does the viewer. This frustrating lack of knowledge emphasizes the inscrutable space of the political regime as it fails. It also links this failure to the symbolic narrative of the regime itself. By showing the political regime turning inward to create and then attack those that were once loyal party members, the film lays out possible sites where political action as such lets down its population. This is also, however, the very place that disrupts the symbolic narrative of the political regime. That is to say that it is in the very form of the film – in our not knowing why the government tortures Gerard for most of the film – that Costa-Gavras reveals the impossible nature of the friend/ enemy distinction.This impossible kernel at the heart of the friend/enemy distinction is what disrupts the symbolic narrative of the political regime. In the end, the friend/enemy distinction is a false dichotomy because it relies on the logic of exception that assumes someone is on the inside and really can belong. That is to say, it fails to see that belonging occurs via the exception and thus depends on what doesn’t belong. In his essay on the figure of the neighbor, Kenneth Reinhard suggests that when the world is defined by friends and enemies, it is a fragile world. He theorizes that there is a way to think the political without the friend/enemy distinction by realizing that everyone is in fact an exception. He argues that, ‘it is precisely in redemption that we can find the possibility of a political theology other than that of the friend-enemy dyad – a political theology of the neighbor’.8 Reinhard takes this idea of the neighbor as his theoretical foundation to suggest a way out of the friend/enemy distinction. Reinhard’s ideas uncover the radical potential of a community connected by the uncanny nature of the neighbor. The neighbor is a figure that will always represent an obscurity that no regime can master. This obscurity is tied to the subject’s own unease about what they can and cannot know about themselves. The neighbor reflects this obscurity back to the subject itself. The power of the neighbor is the power to reveal the subject’s own self-obscurity back to it. The neighbor reveals to us

65

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

The films of Costa-Gavras that we are all the exception: that we are all subjects who do, and do not, belong to the community. That is to say, there is something about subjectivity that makes completely belonging to any group utterly impossible because subjectivity emerges through an alienation from the social order. If we see ourselves as all unable to belong, we can begin to create a politics from this as a starting point. In this way of thinking, the friend/enemy distinction doesn’t exist. CostaGavras’s films do not go so far as to suggest an alternative in the way that Reinhard does. However, in revealing the great failure of the friend/enemy distinction, he leaves the viewer wondering what can be done. In this way, his films are a provocation to the viewer to grapple not only with the particular injustice being depicted but also with political injustice as such and how this can be stopped. Freud famously grappled with this question as well in his essay ‘Why War?’ Here, he suggests that self-destructiveness leads to political failures, but he has trouble seeing a way around this self-destructiveness. He ultimately posits that something is needed to bond a community together. But he, like Costa-Gavras and Reinhard, sees the traditional friend/enemy distinction as endlessly destructive. While he considers many real-world violent scenarios, he also mentions the allure of communism, but he himself doesn’t seem to think that it would, as it is conceived, be able to overcome the drive toward violence. He says, ‘The Russian Communists, too, hope to be able to cause human aggressiveness to disappear by guaranteeing the satisfaction of all material needs and by establishing equality in other respects among all the members of the community. That, in my opinion, is an illusion. They themselves are armed to-day with the most scrupulous care and not the least important of the methods by which they keep their supporters together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers.’ 9 In other words, for Freud the gesture of equality may seem like the best way to avoid violence and war, but if that equality is formed in part by creating community through hatred of those outside the border of their nation, then it is not going to work. Though Freud doesn’t use the terminology of the friend/enemy distinction, this is clearly what he is alluding to. Freud grapples with a different way of conceiving community, one which is based on an intellectual sublimation of aggressive drives. But even he admits that this may take too long to be useful in addressing current problems. His approach, which emphasizes the internal struggles between our individual sexual and aggressive drives, does point to the possibility of recognizing this endless antagonism within us as an indication of the impossibility of creating an ideologically whole society. If we recognize that such a utopia is impossible because of our psychic structure then we are one step closer to finding a political structure that can allow for a community that is always already not a community rather than covering over this antagonism with narrative fantasies. In other words, we could forge a community made up of people who are constitutively unable to create a whole and thus unable to imagine an enemy. This essay where Freud grapples with the problem of war occurs in a letter responding to Albert Einstein’s letter to him asking him to consider this question. Both of these thinkers

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The political efficacy of torture in The Confession address violence as the most difficult aspect of humanity to both understand and to deal with. For Freud, considering the question ‘why war?’ also inevitably brings up the question of societies that are violent to their own people.This self-destruction is for Freud, as it is for Costa-Gavras, the ultimate failure in creating a successful community. Freud doesn’t bring up torture, but for Costa-Gavras his most dramatic example of political injustice is often torture. Torture in The Confession and in State of Siege functions as a synecdoche for politics itself and the way that truth is employed in politics. Every political regime has a goal that it believes in and that structures its actions. In Costa-Gavras’s films, people are trapped in this process and are often sacrificed without much care or regret to achieve that goal. This is true whether the goal is total equality or total domination. Torture exemplifies the political regime’s thirst for a victim to sacrifice in the name of the friend/enemy distinction. Today, we justify torture because we believe that torture can extract information.10 In The Confession, however, torture is done to implant party lies and create a performance of strength and resoluteness to clear out all traitors. This is a way of performing the friend/enemy distinction. Costa-Gavras continues his investigation into torture in his next film State of Siege, where he makes a similar argument. In this film, one of the charges that the resistance has against the Uruguayan government and the United States aiding the government is the use of torture as a psychological weapon. While questioning the kidnapped American agent, the resistance leader brings up torture as problem created by the American presence in their country. As he is questioning the American, the film cuts away to some of the ways that the Americans trained the Uruguayans in the intracacies of torture. These cutaways work to emphasize the culpability of the American in helping the Uruguayan political regime to manipulate, intimidate, and coerce its people. One of the most gruesome of these scenes in the film – that far outdoes the gruesomeness in The Confession – is a scene of a group of military personal watching as an advisor demonstrates methods of torture on a victim on stage. We see a shot from behind of a man naked on a metal chair with his head strapped in. There are officials on stage with him and a group of military personnel all sitting and watching. They take out a wire with a clip on it and attach it to the naked man’s scrotum. Costa-Gavras emphasizes this by showing it to the viewer in a close-up. He then cuts to a reverse shot of the crowd watching. He follows this with shots of the agents on stage as they shock the victim’s gums, nostrils, scrotum, and nipples. Most of the men in the audience sit and passively watch, except one man who gets up to throw up. In this way, Costa-Gavras continues his investigation into torture in State of Siege. But he also changes the angle of critique slightly. While the representation of torture is more graphic in State of Siege, it is also more of an illustration of the corrupt nature of the state under fascist rule, which more than any other regime has its basis in the friend/enemy distinction. The Confession, on the other hand, concentrates almost exclusively on torture as the main representation of where

67

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

The films of Costa-Gavras the Communist Party failed its people by succumbing to the friend/enemy distinction that should not be part of the universalist communist vision. But both The Confession and State of Siege depict how the violence of torture ends up disrupting the government that employs it. It ends up inspiring the activists who work to take down the government structure. And even if it doesn’t go this far, the torture turns party members into people who no longer have the same loyalty or belief in the political regime. In The Confession, Gerard was always a loyal party member, and yet the violence he experiences leads him to work to publicize his experiences and thereby undermine the regime. The torture makes it impossible for the people to keep blindly believing in their political system and in this way is the very thing that disrupts the political system that employs it. Gerard does not give up his belief in communism, but he does change from being a blind follower to a vocal critic of internal corruption. At the end of The Confession, there is a remarkable scene after Gerard has survived the ordeal and is free. We see him walking across a public square where he bumps into his main torturer, Kohoutek (Gabriele Ferzetti). Strangely, Kohoutek greets him with warmth and smiles as if they were friends. He asks him if he remembers him. This seems like a ludicrous question, and Gerard looks at him incredulously with blank-faced derision. Then Kohoutek asks, ‘What happened to us, sir? Do you understand it at all?’ The question seems almost philosophical in its strange innocence. Kohoutek comments that he was just following orders, and he suspects he was under surveillance the whole time as well. Gerard tries to walk off and Kohoutek keeps walking with him, standing next to him, and talking close to him as if they share a lifelong bond. Kohoutek even goes so far as to offer to buy him a beer. Gerard looks at him as if he’s crazy but with a quiet resolve. With an air of concern and bizarre familiarity, Kohoutek brazenly asks, ‘And your health – are you better? You must take care of yourself.’ Kohoutek ends the interaction saying that he found a very quiet job. As Gerard walks away Kohoutek yells after him, ‘I’m happy for you, sir.’ Kohoutek evinces no awareness of how the torture might have destroyed Gerard’s life or have made it impossible for him to simply take care of himself. Costa-Gavras shoots this scene with a shot/reverse shot sequence in which both men are always held in a tight proximity. They are in a huge public square with old buildings behind them and people crossing far in the distance. A vast space surrounds them. But the tight shots with Kohoutek peering close into London’s face highlights the feeling of claustrophobia in the interrogation room that forever bonds them together in trauma. The camera moves around each man and at times cuts from speaker to listener. The way Costa-Gavras shoots this sequence indicates their shifted power relations. As the scene ends, the camera stays behind Kohoutek, whose hat and back of his head remain in the very close foreground as the shot opens up, while Gerard walks off into the wide-open space of the square.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The political efficacy of torture in The Confession After this intimate and traumatic exchange, the wide-open space feels impregnated with the betrayal by those in power. The empty space also resonates with Kohoutek’s strange question (which London later repeats in a bemused way when reviewing his memoir): ‘What happened to us, sir? Do you understand it at all?’ The question clearly reveals that the torturers themselves were also caught up in the web of political machinations. The minutiae of what they were asked to do was specific and seemed straightforward. They were told to force a confession in the name of protecting the Communist Party. But in the end, the torturers themselves were as expendable as those they tortured. This expendability in the service of the Communist Party may make sense if you are on a battlefield with people shooting at you, but when the threat is the people as such, the nation’s own people, it doesn’t make as much sense. The torturers in London’s case ended up accused as well and later jailed. Once the friend/enemy distinction turns in on itself, no one is safe. This fact is what prompts Kohoutek to ask his naive and poignant question. In this way, the friend/enemy distinction disintegrates as a viable political structure around the subjectivity of the very individuals it is supposed to exist for. This relationship between the torturer and the tortured is one of the main focuses of The Confession. The torturers develop a relationship with Gerard in which they are constantly either punishing him for not obeying or rewarding him for obeying. This starts with simply getting him to say his number or follow the routines of the prison. But eventually evolves to Kohoutek forcing Gerard to constantly sign many different types of confessions. Kohoutek initially compels London to admit to small things and then eventually larger and larger things. Towards the end of the film, we see that all those imprisoned have been subjected to the same process and end up eventually emotionally tied to the interrogators. They come to rely on the interrogators for every aspect of their survival. The film suggests that this is why after twenty months in prison experiencing torture, severe malnutrition, and being constantly forced to sign and re-sign nonsensical confessions, Gerard submits to the seemingly impossible. He, and the other men accused, all memorize the confession that is handed to them and then deliver it at the trial. The confessions not only fabricate their involvement with an American spy but also fabricate aspects of their personal lives and even of their political, religious, and ethnic affiliations. This works to further the friend/enemy distinction by placing them in the position of the self-avowed enemy. At this point, the film also emphasizes the point that many of those accused were Jewish, a detail that the Communist Party uses as incriminating evidence. The charge at the trial was: ‘Trotskyists, Titoists, Zionists, and enemies of the people’. During one scene, Gerard witnesses them change the designation of his comrade from ‘Jew’ to ‘Zionist’. He tries to tell the authorities that ‘Zionist’ is a political designation and that ‘Jew’ is not. Of course, they don’t listen to him because they are purposely changing the descriptor ‘Jew’ into a political

69

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

The films of Costa-Gavras charge. When the prosecution reads out who the accused are, many of them are also designated as of Jewish origin, as if this was a crime. In this way, the film makes a point to show that here the Jews are being persecuted all over again but by the very groups that were supposed to be against the Nazis. The Communist authorities even accuse them of being traitors because they survived the death camps during the Holocaust. Survival itself becomes a crime. These actions further stain the Communist Party. But the film makes clear that the Party takes the path of anti-Semitism in order to again shore up the friend/enemy distinction. At the end of the film, the prosecution reads a three-hour accusation. Then the court takes a break, and Costa-Gavras ingeniously has all the accused wait in a room, each in a makeshift cubicle with guards all around. At this time, the interrogators walk around and prep each of them, telling them that if they retract or say anything off the script then their microphone will be cut off and twenty witnesses will be brought forth to speak against them. The scene is a visual reminder of the coercion and confusion that these men experience. It emphasizes closeness with alienation and community with betrayal. It is about conformity, emotional control, and political performance. When the film cuts back to the courtroom, it shows only the judge reading the sentence that condemns most of the accused to death while giving a few of them (including Gerard) life imprisonment. The film suggests that these sentences are contingent and thus Gerard’s living to tell the tale – as opposed to any other accused – is itself an indication of the nonsensical actions of the political regime. The Confession is clearly a diatribe against the use of torture, a diatribe he continues in many of his other films. In its detailed investigation into the way torture is used on the population, the film highlights what was commonly believed at the time of the film’s release: that torture is a violent method used to humiliate, degrade, and attempt to destroy the emotional stability of the tortured. Costa-Gavras contributes to this understanding a broader investigation into the political valence of torture. That is to say, for Costa-Gavras, the presence of torture acts as a marker that alerts us to a political system folding in on itself as it desperately tries to feed the endless demands of the friend/enemy distinction. The torture chamber is the very site of the failure of politics. The Confession challenges us to look directly at this site rather than look away. It challenges us to resist shoring up the narratives of political regimes that rely on the friend/enemy distinction. In this way, The Confession resonates all the more in our contemporary world where torture has been redeployed in the name of democracy. As with most hard-hitting political films, Costa-Gavras neither lets the viewer off the hook with a resounding resolution nor with an open wound that can never be addressed. Instead, he demands that the viewer see the connections between the individual cases of political corruption and the larger concepts that undergird politics as such. He hopes at the very least to push people to be able to critically approach the question: ‘What happened to us, sir? Do you understand it at all?’

The political efficacy of torture in The Confession

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 One reviewer points out, ‘The Confession did not meet with the same level of success that Z enjoyed. Part of the reason was surely that this take-down of the totalitarian left was less exhilarating for those audiences who were eager to jeer at the right-wing, tin-pot Greek junta exposed in Z’. Jonathan Kirshner, ‘The Confession’, Cineaste (2015): 61. 2 Emphasizing this failure also suggests that the friend/enemy regime creates a fascist politics. Joan Mellen argues that once young intellectuals were free from having to apologize for Stalin’s action, they began to look at this period as a fascist period and analyse what that meant. She says, ‘Thus Costa-Gavras and the others began to trace the origin of fascism and to see a connection in countries like the United States between the tolerance of civil liberties at home and the social exploitation and a fascist repression of dissent in its “colonies”’. Joan Mellen, ‘Fascism in Contemporary Film’, Film Quarterly 24.4 (Summer 1971): 2. Her point highlights that this gesture of stepping back and seeing the larger structural problems of political regimes was productive for many intellectuals and filmmakers at the time. They then worked to open the wounds of fascism in an attempt to shed light on them and provoke the reader or viewer to question the prevailing political structures. 3 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 37. 4 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 46. 5 French filmmakers in the 1960s had to tread carefully when they criticized the Algerian war for fear of their film being banned because France did not see itself as the type of society that would go against the Geneva conventions. Though he was from Greece, Costa-Gavras made many of his films in France, or with the help of French financing, and often they were in French. His films usually directly considered the way that foreign powers attempted to coerce or strong handle countries to do as they want. His films did not, however, directly criticize France since they were often about other countries or incidents. 6 Interview with Raoul Coutard: www.criterion.com/current/posts/3574-raoul-coutardon-the-confession (accessed 21 August 2019). 7 Reviewer Mike Prokosh echoes many of the critics of the film when he complains that the film does not explain the intricacies of the various communist party layers and beliefs. Instead he feels the film creates a spectacle of Stalinists torturing a good man. He argues, ‘Audiences “informed” by the bourgeois press will fit this spectacle into an anticommunist world-view, missing the point that the hero they admire makes the film not anticommunist but anti-Stalinist and, indeed, procommunist.’ Mike Prokosh, ‘The Confession by Costa-Gavras’, Film Quarterly 24.4 (Summer 1971): 56.This reviewer, however, misses the larger point of the film as, like Costa-Gavras’s other films, it goes after the very nature of the political structure as such. 8 Kenneth Reinhard, ‘Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor’, in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, eds, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 21. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Why War?’ trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 211–212. 10 In my book The Subject of Torture, I argue that contemporary ideas of torture are born out of and reinforce an ideology of biopower in which bodily survival is more important than political freedom. See Hilary Neroni, The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

71

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege (1972) Elizabeth Montes Garcés

Introduction Constantin Costa-Gavras’ State of Siege (1972)1 deals with the kidnapping, trial, and assassination of American OPS (Office of Public Safety) agent Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand) by the MLN-Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay in 1970. Based on the true story of the execution of Daniel Anthony Mitrione by the Tupamaros on 10 August 1970, the film is structured as a political thriller. CostaGavras uses what Richard Schechner has called ‘twice-behaved behaviors’ by re-enacting historical events on the screen dealing with the US intervention in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, the Greek-French film director forces the audience to reflect on the use of torture as a means of getting crucial information from members of guerrilla groups to guarantee success in counterinsurgency operations, and to question the effectiveness of violence as a means of advancing a political cause. In order to understand the circumstances that surrounded Daniel Anthony Mitrione’s kidnapping and assassination in 1970, and the recreation of these events in Costa-Gavras’s film, it is useful to provide a short synopsis of the origins and development of the Movement of National Liberation Tupamaros. The MLN-T was founded by Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro and Raúl Sendic in the 1960s, named after the seventeenth-century Inca leader Tupac Amaru, who led a revolt against the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru in 1780. Initially, the movement attracted members of the Socialist Party of Uruguay, and the cane workers’ union known as UTA, but eventually it also began to appeal to professionals such as physicians, journalists, soldiers, professors, engineers, dentists, priests, and many others. Contrary to Mao Zedong’s and Ernesto Che Guevara’s argument that guerrilla warfare must be fought in the countryside to be successful, Pablo Brum maintains that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege the MLN-T defied that principle by concentrating their operations in Uruguay’s capital city, Montevideo, and becoming mainly an urban guerrilla organization. According to Brum, ‘the Tupamaros’s tactic of armed propaganda was the main driver of their success for as long as they practiced it’.2 From 1969 to 1970, the MLN-T used various strategies to obtain the necessary funds to finance their operations, such as raiding an investment bank that kept a secret double accounting system designed to avoid paying taxes, and robbing a popular San Rafael casino in Montevideo. The money obtained through these assaults was in turn distributed to the poor, which, according to the international press, immediately transformed the Tupamaros into the ‘Robin Hoods of the Americas’. Throughout their operations, MLN-T leaders always took a principled approach and made sure to carry out their activities in the least intrusive ways possible. However, from the early 1970s until the group’s demise in 1972, the MLN-T began to engage in more violent tactics like kidnappings and armed attacks. Such was the case of Dan Mitrione’s kidnapping in August 1970.3 In this chapter, I analyze how Costa-Gavras redefines conventions of a thriller regarding the role of the hero and villain, and the way the story is depicted in the film. I also examine how Costa-Gavras’ film becomes political when he uses what Richard Schechner calls ‘twice-behaved behaviors’ 4 to re-enact the historical events surrounding Michael Santore’s kidnapping, trial, press coverage in the Uruguayan media, and ultimately his execution. According to Tzvetan Todorov, the thriller is a genre that was created in the United States after the Second World War. It is known in France as the série noire. It focuses on both the story of the crime and the story of its investigation. However, it is precisely ‘the second story, the one taking place in the present, [that] occupies a central place’.5 The thriller creates suspense by presenting the causes and then the effects of the actions undertaken by the protagonists. So, the viewer becomes interested not only in what has occurred in the past, but also in what will happen in the future. To that end, the interactions between the main characters are fundamental since there is often a confrontation between the hero and the villain, and usually at the end of the film, the villain is destroyed and the social order is restored. According to Ralph Harper, ‘since the thriller has some regard for truth and justice seen from the perspective of a free mind, it can be judged positively subversive in some political climates’.6 Therefore, in spite of dealing with violence and amoral characters, there is a craving for some type of poetic justice. In Performance Studies Richard Schechner argues that performance is intrinsically linked to human behavior. Performances can be found in daily life by way of rituals, play, sports, and obviously in performing arts (theater, dance, music). All the habits and actions that are part of our daily routines are performed, so they are restored behaviors. For Schechner: ‘restored behavior is “me behaving as I am told to do”, or “as I have learned”’.7 Therefore, if we assume that performance

73

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

The films of Costa-Gavras is such an integral part of daily life, most of our actions could be considered restored behaviors. Another concept that is closely related to restored behaviors is twice-behaved behaviors. When individuals behave as if they were somebody else, we are in the presence of twice-behaved behaviors. For Schechner, ‘Performance means: to the second to the nth time. Performance is twice-behaved behavior.’ 8 When dealing with the re-enactment of historical events, Schechner suggests that when past events are acted out for an audience in the present, they refer to events that took place in the past, but when those actions are reproduced as twice-behaved behaviors, they have the potential to motivate changes in attitudes, opinions, or ways of thinking in the future. As such, it becomes apparent that in CostaGavras’s State of Siege, the representation of historical events as twice-behaved behaviors is crucial to guarantee the involvement of the audience in the subject matter. The hero’s performance in a thriller: the story of Santore’s kidnapping In the Typology of Detective Fiction, Tzvetan Todorov explains that the thriller is an American invention, combining both the story of the crime and its investigation. Following common thriller conventions, the film starts with the discovery of Santore’s body in a blue and white Buick in Montevideo, which initiates a police investigation of his murder. Simultaneously, the crime is depicted through the process of his kidnapping. Once he arrives at the MLN-T prison, he is subjected to a lengthy interrogation where his true mission is disclosed: Santore was in charge of training Uruguayan police officers to torture prisoners by using electric shocks. The sequences representing police efforts to capture the MLN-T kidnappers, press conferences, the constant arrival of undercover OPS agents in Montevideo, and Santore’s trial by the MLN-T emphasize Costa-Gavras’s reliance on performance. According to Jerry Palmer, one of the key ingredients of a thriller is the confrontation between the hero and the villain.9 In State of Siege, that encounter takes place at the MLN-T prison where our hero, Philip Michael Santore, is interrogated by the villain, Hugo, a Tupamaro fighter. Hugo is a law student, and the leader of the MLN-T who organized all the logistics behind Santore’s kidnapping. He wears a mask to cover his identity. He is intelligent, articulate, and methodical, and he believes in violence to advance the Tupamaro cause. This character was developed after the MLN-T founder Raúl Sendic. Santore’s trial by the Tupamaro guerillas is used as a cinematic strategy not only to place both the hero and the villain in the same location, but also to allow the audience to judge the values and behaviors of each character. Throughout each of the three sequences that visualize Santore’s interrogation, the director takes advantage of ‘twice-behaved behaviors’.10

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege Two key elements in Schechner’s definition of twice-behaved behaviors are applicable to Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege: first, the idea of behaving as if one were somebody else, and second, the results of these behaviors when following somebody else’s directions. Philip Michael Santore arrives in Montevideo in July 1969. During his interrogation by Hugo, the Tupamaro fighter, it is revealed that he works for the US International Development Agency (USAID). By all accounts, Santore seems to fit the role of the hero. He is a devoted family man who strives to meet USAID’s goals in helping Uruguayans construct a more equitable society that would provide education, health, and welfare for all. However, during the course of his interrogation the audience learns that Santore has two offices: one at the American Embassy, and another at the police headquarters in downtown Montevideo. The series of intelligent questions and evidence brought to the fore by Hugo reveal that Santore is not in Montevideo to help with development programs at the American Embassy. On the contrary, he is there to train Uruguayan police officers in counter-insurgency techniques at the police headquarters. Therefore, Santore is pretending to be a USAID employee when in fact, he is an undercover OPS agent, and he is doing, as Schechner proposes, what he is told to do. This suggests that Santore follows all of his superiors’ directions in order to achieve their real goal, this being that US interests will be protected in Latin America by dismantling and destroying all socialist revolutionary movements. Obviously the US agenda responds to the geopolitical tensions experienced during the Cold War between the communist block and the capitalist Western nations. US intervention in Uruguay has been well documented by Clara Aldrighi, a history professor at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay. In her book La intervención de Estados Unidos en Uruguay (1965–1973): el caso Mitrione, she manages to collect information not only from Uruguayan sources, but also from unclassified documents from the US Department of State. These documents revealed that during the 1950s, USAID had a dual role. The agency provided foreign aid and help by way of various development programs, and, perhaps more importantly, it strove to counteract the effects of communist ideology in social or political movements in several countries around the world. In order to achieve that goal, the Department of State created the Office of Public Safety (OPS), which was in charge of establishing the Program for Public Safety (PSP). The OPS hired agents to train police and military forces from countries all over the world to implement counter-insurgency tactics, as devised by the FBI. Their agents posed as USAID employees and were sent to strategically important locations where leftist movements were either successful or were gaining widespread support from the public. Daniel Mitrione was one of those agents, sent to several Latin American countries where he pretended to be a USAID employee. Costa-Gavras’s film follows the re-enactment of these historical events closely. Michael Santore played the double role of USAID employee and undercover

75

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

The films of Costa-Gavras OPS agent in several places in Latin America, just as Daniel Mitrione once did in real life. The descriptions made by Francisco Solinas in the film script, and the way the cinematic story is organized by Costa-Gavras all rely heavily on performance of ‘twice-behaved behaviors’.11 Thus, the story of Santore’s career and untimely death is recreated through Hugo’s interrogations by using key questions that lead to several flashbacks. Hence Santore’s dealings in Latin America are framed in retrospect as Costa-Gavras depicts the plan of action followed by Santore in the three different Latin American cities where he worked for the OPS: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1962–65), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (1965–69),12 and Montevideo, Uruguay, from 1969 until his death in 1970. In all of these locations, Santore’s missions were exercised in the same fashion as he pretended to be a USAID employee, while he was, in fact, working for the OPS. His work in the aforementioned cities is considered by the Tupamaros as evidence of his guilt in facilitating US intervention in Latin America. Each one of his missions is introduced by a scene that is repeated three times in the film: Santore and his family arrive at a runway at a Latin American airport where they are greeted by USAID personnel. The scene in question is described in very similar terms in Franco Solinas’s script: Airport, Rio de Janeiro. A Pan American airliner runs on the runway. Down the first gangway come PHILIP SANTORE, his wife […] and a number of other children. Two cars with AID emblems are waiting at the exit.13 Airport, Santo Domingo. A plane lands on the runway. PHILIP MICHAEL SANTORE, his wife, and his children come down the first-class gangway. Two AID cars await them in front of the airport.14 Airport, Montevideo. A Pan American airliner runs on the runway. Out of the first-class section come PHILIP MICHAEL SANTORE, his wife with a child in her arms, and six other children. A small group of men is waiting for the new arrivals. It includes CAPTAIN LÓPEZ, CAPTAIN ROMERO – a stout energetic man also in civilian clothes – four Americans from the police department bureau of AID, and ANTHONY LEE.15

As we see by Solinas’s description, the same scene is performed in three different countries to emphasize Santore’s ultimate goal: to ensure that US interests in Latin America are well served by launching the Program of Public Safety disguised as foreign aid. During his first interrogation with Hugo, the audience finds out that Santore was assigned to Rio de Janeiro prior to the coup d’état staged by the Brazilian

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege

Figure 5.1  Airport scene of arrival of Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand)

Armed Forces against democratically elected president João Goulart. ‘I am a traffic and communications technician’,16 declares Santore during his trial, when in fact he is an instructor in torture techniques, not only in Brazil, but also in the Dominican Republic where ‘hundreds of democrats, political leaders, and labor leaders died and disappeared’.17 Once again, Santore’s actions in the film are depicted as twice-behaved behaviors. The counter-insurgency skills taught by Santore not only in Uruguay and Brazil, but also at the International Police Academy (IPA) in Washington DC, include techniques on how to extract information from prisoners. In order to represent Santore’s dealings in State of Siege, and to create a powerful effect on the audience, Costa-Gavras constructs his film by re-enacting verifiable historical events (courses geared towards Latin American police officers at the IPA in Washington DC) as twice-behaved behaviors. Costa-Gavras’s film takes the audience from the MLN-T prison, where Santore’s interrogation is being conducted by Hugo, to the amphitheater at the IPA in Washington DC where Santore demonstrates how to inflict excruciating pain on the victim’s body by using electric shocks. Therefore, the audience not only has an opportunity to listen to the testimony of the accused (Santore) and the prosecutor (Hugo), but also to witness the torture that is carried out at the IPA, and the reaction of disgust, pity, and even sickness of some of the police officers that attend the class demonstration. In this sense, the representation of events as twice-behaved behaviors manages to effectively shock the film’s internal and external audiences. Thus, by representing historical events as twice-behaved behaviors, Costa-Gavras manages to not only involve the audience in Santore’s pseudo-trial, but also to make the audience abundantly aware of the continuous use of torture as a regular

77

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

The films of Costa-Gavras and common practice in police interrogations of presumed revolutionaries all over the world. In fact, getting the audience so involved in witnessing the effects of US counter-insurgence techniques allows us to witness and reflect on the complacency with which Santore and his fellow OPS agents accept and use torture as a valid tactic to extract information from inmates. Usually, in thrillers, ‘The hero’s behavior is justified by the fact that he reacts to prior aggression, in defense of a status quo that can be anything the [viewer] wants it to be.’ 18 Costa-Gavras somewhat modifies the conventions of the thriller by crafting a complex mise-en-scène in State of Siege, where the audience’s opinion could possibly turn against the hero due to Santore’s regular practice of torturing helpless human beings. The struggle depicted throughout the film between good and evil is much more complex than what is usually seen in thrillers, as viewers realize that the defense of the status quo requires the use of torture. Faced with that way of handling subversion and terrorism, spectators have to make a choice between acknowledging and accepting the use of torture as a means of controlling terrorist threats, or taking a stand against the practice so as not to lose their own humanity while attempting to defend and strengthen capitalism as the the current political reality. The villain’s performance in a political thriller To further this analysis, we observe that Costa-Gavras employs historical events as twice-behaved behaviors in order to force the audience to reflect on actions and beliefs pertaining to the way the Tupamaro fighter Hugo conducts himself. Hugo not only organizes Santore’s kidnapping, but also performs various other activities in State of Siege. He is in charge of Santore’s interrogation throughout his pseudo-trial where he tries to act as a sort of self-appointed State prosecutor who, in his mind, works on behalf of the Uruguayan people to present all the necessary evidence to judge Santore’s crimes. In sequences that take place at the MLN-T prison, the director arranges the characters in a particular fashion; Santore is located directly in front of the audience where he recites his testimony, while Hugo, in the role of the prosecutor, is placed either in front of the accused or towards the right of the screen. On those occasions, he also passes judgment on Santore’s actions and beliefs and acts as if he were the judge, the main authority of this trial: SANTORE:  I think a man, a real man always chooses. Don’t you? HUGO: No, we don’t believe in real men. We believe in men, Mr. Santore. That they must and can organize themselves into a juster, happier society. SANTORE:  But I believe in all that too! HUGO: You? No, you don’t.You accept inequality and defend privilege. Deep down what you really believe in is in property. Your morality is based on exploitation.19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege Curiously enough, while both the villain and the hero share a clear preference for a ‘juster, happier society’,20 Hugo behaves as if he were the judge of Santore’s way of thinking. For him, Santore’s words are only rhetoric because he believes that the hero is guided by the capitalist principle of accumulating wealth. The dialogue between Hugo and Santore allows the audience to learn that although both men share similar beliefs, they differ in the ways of achieving that goal. While Santore is a strong believer in capitalism, Hugo defends socialism. Santore’s and Hugo’s belief systems are so tainted by political ideology, leading both men to resort to violence to secure what they believe is their vision or an ideal society. Costa-Gavras’ depiction of Hugo and Santore deviates from the characterization of protagonists in classic thrillers. Hugo sees himself as a Uruguayan hero. He is fighting against the foreign invader who inflicts pain on his people. Santore follows the orders given by his superiors blindingly. In his mind, he is an American hero because he is fighting against communist insurgents. However, none of them are real heroes. At the end of the film Santore is executed by the Tupamaros, and Hugo is arrested by the Uruguayan police21 and charged with Santore’s kidnapping and murder. Ralph Harper argues that thrillers ‘show a fondness for poetic justice’.22 Harper adds that: ‘In a world where so much either does not come out right or threatens not to, it is pleasant to bathe our cynicism in an imaginary world where we know at the beginning of the story that the side we are on will prevail.’ 23 In State of Siege Costa-Gavras challenges that formula. As viewers, we are placed in the position of jurors who have to judge Santore’s actions. We can hardly think that justice is served if he is considered innocent because he has trained police officers in torturing human beings. On the other hand, it would not be fair to consider Hugo an innocent man because he has kidnapped and executed Santore. Both Santore and Hugo, use violence to accomplish their political objectives disregarding the respect they ought to have for human life and civil rights. The story of the police investigation: a surprising turn Ralph Harper argues that it is: ‘[w]hen evil or the threat of evil undermine our confidence in the natural and social order, and the [viewer] is shaken up, that the thriller gets off to a good start’.24 State of Siege opens up with the discovery of Michael Santore’s body in a Buick, which subsequently triggers the story of the police investigation. Santore’s assassination enrages government forces so much that a State of Siege25 is declared in the country, and the army and the police devise an aggressive plan to capture the kidnappers. So, the film depicts the procedure followed by Commissioner Romero, Assistant Commissioner Fontana, Captain López, Inspector Horacio, and agent Bardès to catch the perpetrators. In order to achieve that objective, the five men design a surveillance operation in Montevideo, tracking the movements of those suspects considered to be members of the MLN-T. A police officer pretending to be a street vendor tracks MLN-T

79

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

The films of Costa-Gavras members’ movements who live in a local apartment building, and reports any relevant intelligence to Captain López.Without suspecting anything, several members of the MLN-T, including Hugo, attend a meeting at that particular apartment and fall into a trap. However, during Hugo’s last interrogation prior to his arrest, another piece of information regarding Commissioner Romero, Captain López, Assistant Commissioner Fontana, Inspector Horacio, and agent Bardès is revealed, affecting the characterization of all the police officers who participate in the investigation of the crime. Generally, in thrillers, police officers work to protect the country’s citizens. However, in State of Siege, Romero, Fontana, López, Horacio, and Bardès are characterized as both police officers and heads of paramilitary death squads who kill Uruguayan citizens simply for sympathizing with communist groups. Therefore, in this regard Costa-Gavras’ film deviates somewhat from the classic thriller genre. The five men, as well as many other police officers, were members of Michael Santore’s class at the IPA in Washington DC, and worked closely with him at the American Embassy in Montevideo. López, Romero, Fontana, Horacio, and Bardès’ actions correspond to Schechner’s concept of twice-behaved behaviors. While they are at the police headquarters in Montevideo they conduct themselves as regular police officers. Once the working day is finished, they change into civilian clothes and proceed to a secret hideout on the coast where they open a wooden case containing a machine that produces electric shocks. As such, while they appear to be following and upholding the rule of law, the act of removing their uniforms allows them the freedom to go rogue. In other words, while police clothing obligates them to follow established protocols and procedures, civilian clothing gives them the freedom to exact extrajudicial vigilante justice, including kidnapping, torturing, and killing individuals who are suspected of being MLN-T members. They received specialized training in the United States on how to torture prisoners, which they proceeded to put into practice in Montevideo to keep what they perceived to be communist subversion at bay. At the police headquarters in Montevideo Captain López questions a young girl ‘with a disfiguring bruise-burn above the eye’: CAPTAIN LÓPEZ: All right then … you know him? GIRL:  No, I don’t know him. LÓPEZ:  But you recognize him? GIRL: No! GIRL: (Hysterical with pain and fear, screams like a litany the only word she will say): No … No … No! In each photograph CAPTAIN LÓPEZ is trying to obtain identification of the same person: a young man […] who always manages to be in in the front line of demonstrations.26

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege

Figure 5.2  Innocent young girl with obvious signs of torture by facial burning

Evidently an innocent girl is being tortured in this scene because the camera zooms in on her scar, which was caused when police officers placed a burning cigarette on her face. The girl is a high school student. She is being interrogated at the police headquarters but there is no lawyer present to advocate on her behalf, so her civil rights are not being respected at all. She refuses to identify Herber as an MLN-T member. Nonetheless, he is identified as such by López, and is consequently killed at a busy intersection of Montevideo by police snipers dressed as civilians. In reality Herber is a high school student who passed out flyers in the streets along with ‘thirty high-school students […] to keep the Institute canteen going’.27 One of the most interesting characters in the film is undercover police agent Captain Bardès, who at one point served as assistant to Byron Engle, director of the OPS during his stay in Montevideo (June 1969). His actions are depicted as twice-behaved behaviors, as he was both a police officer and a secret police agent working for the OPS for many years. However, he was accused of robbery and subsequently discharged from the force: HUGO: (Offscreen) […] Ex-Captain Bardès, no longer a member of the police department ‘officially’. Bardès turned photographer, can continue doing what he was doing before, still with police support but no longer in a position to compromise them. It’s the principle of the death squad, Mr. Santore. Physical elimination of adversaries -no Constitutional problems, no laws or courts of justice to get in the way.28

As we see, he appears to leave the Police Department in an official capacity to work as a freelance photographer, which in reality is a cover story since he continues to work for the police in an unofficial role as a member of a death

81

82

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

squad, targeting and eliminating individuals suspected of being communists. Moreover, Bardès’ photography studio is a secret meeting place where select members of the nation’s armed forces – the police, the navy, the army – conspire against the democratically elected government of Uruguay under the auspices of the OPS. Solinas’s script describes the room as follows: Photography studio The typical dreary décor of a photography shop […] A swivel stool and a camera with photographic plates on a tripod. There’s also an old couch, and a few chairs – and six men, in civilian clothes, who sit chatting.29

In the film, the photography studio is recreated with utmost precision, corresponding to Solinas’s vision of the space. The studio also appears in a flashback where Hugo interrogates Santore. Using voice over, he describes the men who have previously attended the meeting at the photography studio: ‘HUGO (offscreen): Captain López for the police, backed by Fontana. Captain Riggi, Marines. Colonel González, Army, Commander Pignatares, Air Force … and Bardès, the right-hand man of your predecessor, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bain’.30 According to Clara Aldrighi, Costa-Gavras’ State of Siege, as well as the series of press articles that followed its film release, brought unwanted attention to OPS’s clandestine operations in Uruguay, triggering an official investigation led by Democratic senator James Abourezk. Senator Abourezk demonstrated that in countries such as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Uruguay, where local police departments and military units received support from USAID/OPS, US taxpayer dollars were used to create clandestine death squads to perpetrate armed attacks, practice torture, and assassinate civilians deemed to be subversive. Based on Abourezk’s findings, the US State Department dissolved the OPS and its training programs in December 1973. Press conferences, performance, and the role of the audience A further element of note is the role played by the press, whose performance also falls within the scope of Schechner’s concept of twice-behaved behavior. The camera angles and focalization emphasize the dominant on-screen presence of one particular journalist, Carlos Ducas. With his key questions, Ducas manages to expose MLN-T’s motives regarding the kidnappings, and the poor handling of the crisis by Uruguayan president Julio Pacheco. In an interview included with the DVD version of Stage of Siege, Costa-Gavras explains that the character of Carlos Ducas was based on Julio Castro, editor-in-chief of Marcha, who played a central role in exposing the complicity between the US and the Uruguayan governments. Castro, who disappeared on 1 August 1977, was a victim of statesponsored kidnapping, torture, and murder. When the three members of the US diplomatic staff residing in Montevideo are kidnapped, a group of journalists including Carlos Ducas attempt to find

Thriller and performance in State of Siege

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

out why. More importantly, they aim to discover the main purpose of Michael Santore’s mission in Montevideo. The sequence pertaining to Santore’s case is staged in the film as a series of press releases and press conferences. Initially, when reporters try to get a comment from the Minister of Interior about the MLN-T kidnappings, he declares: ‘an official communiqué will answer all your questions’, which essentially implies that he does not wish to answer their questions directly. The ministry’s designated spokesman proceeds to read out the following official communiqué: SPOKESMAN: […] morning that ended with the kidnapping of Mr. Fernando Campos, Consul of Brazil, Mr. Anthony Lee, Under-Secretary of the United States Embassy; Mr. Philip Michael Santore, United States citizen and AID official in our own country. Mr. Lee managed to escape.31

The ministry’s communiqué triggers a series of questions from the press corps, which are never clearly answered by the ministry spokesman. However, throughout the exchange it becomes apparent that the government has outlawed the use of the word ‘Tupamaros’ – owing to the fact they are considered terrorists32 – forcing members of the press to adopt the word ‘unnameables’ instead. At the end of the press conference, Ducas poses a key question that goes unanswered: MR. DUCAS: These ‘terrorists’ attempted to kidnap the Under-Secretary of the American Embassy … And that makes sense from their point of view, of course. The kidnapping of the Brazilian Consul also has a certain intrinsic logic. But this Mr. Santore … Philip Michael Santore … Why? He is not an official personage. […] So, who is he really, this Mr. Santore? And what was he doing in our country?33

Ducas’s questions reflect not only his own criticism of the Uruguayan government’s handling of the kidnappings, but also the government’s hidden agenda, which has been carefully kept secret from the public.Thus, he acts as a performer, a spokesman working on behalf of the internal audience within the film: the Uruguayan people that received information about the kidnappings and the government actions through the press. Ducas keeps digging to try to find answers to his questions, so he attends a press conference offered by the Director of USAID at the American Embassy in Montevideo. At first, the director tries to avoid giving precise answers, declaring that: ‘In Latin America we carry on our activities within the Alliance for Progress.’ 34 Ducas asks him directly: ‘Now … this Mr. Santore … what are – what were – his responsibilities with the AID? What sort of activities did he specialize in?’ The director reluctantly replies: ‘He was actually in charge of reorganizing the … traffic and communications inside the capital and around the country.’ 35 The repetition of the same question over and over again, and the director’s reluctance to provide a clear answer, creates an enigma for the viewer. The audience realizes that USAID’s director in Montevideo is evidently hiding information, and that

83

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

The films of Costa-Gavras his answers reflect the official line that Santore gives to Hugo when questioned about his duties while employed by USAID. During the press conference, a French reporter observes a picture on the wall depicting the ceremony held at the police headquarters when the Minister of Internal Security and several other high-ranking officials in the Uruguayan army and police force receive five American radio patrol cars as gifts from Philip Michael Santore. When they look at the picture closely, all the reporters realize that Santore is involved in public safety at the Montevideo Police Headquarters. The dialogue that follows makes it obvious: THIRD REPORTER: That’s when the Alliance for Progress donated three hundred patrol cars to the Police, right? DIRECTOR:  (not pleased with the implication, but concurring all the same): Yes. DUCAS:  So you’re involved with our police … DIRECTOR: There is an official agreement between our two Governments. DUCAS: Yes, of course, yes … And Mr. Santore worked here, in this building? DIRECTOR:  No, the AID has … the use of an office at police headquarters.36

The revelations of the press conference confirm Santore’s presence at the police headquarters but neither Ducas nor the other reporter know what Santore’s duties entail. Therefore, they interview Captain López at the police headquarters, where López confirms that Santore is in fact a ‘communications specialist’ 37 who has also worked in that capacity in other countries, like Brazil and the Dominican Republic. Even though the members of the press do not get all the information regarding Santore’s real mission in Uruguay, they realize that he has a double role: he poses as a USAID employee, all the while working with the Uruguayan police. For the internal audience of the film, that is to say the native Uruguayan spectator, the editorial pieces written by Carlos Ducas, and the press reports done by the other journalists, are crucial pieces of information to find out the real story behind the secret relationship between the Uruguayan government and American organizations such as USAID.Therefore, when a clandestine radio station broadcasts an MLN-T communiqué claiming that their prisoner, Philip Michael Santore, was found guilty because he taught police officers in Brazil, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic how to torture prisoners, the Uruguayan population had every reason to believe them. That information had been confirmed by the superb performances offered by the press and the Uruguayan and American officials. Marvin Carlson is another intellectual who has done extensive research in performance theory. According to Carlson, the role played by the audience throughout the performance is crucial. In fact, he suggests that there is no performance if there is no audience. Carlson concurs with German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer when he affirms that ‘[a]ll arts (not only the so-called

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege performing arts) “perform” in this way, existing only in the moments of their reception in different contexts’.38 For Schechner, performance includes ‘[t]he whole constellation of events, most of them passing unnoticed, that take place in/among both performers and audience’.39 Thus a film such as State of Siege, relies heavily on the participation of both the internal and external audiences to engage in the subject matter being depicted on screen, and to assume a critical view of the performances in this mise en abyme. Regarding the internal audience, Uruguayan citizens had to follow the clues provided by the press to find out the true nature of the dealings between the Uruguayan government and the OPS. In State of Siege, Costa-Gavras provides the external audience with several performances, and a huge amount of information which must be processed to determine whether the use of violence exercised by the two opposing forces is indeed warranted to advance the political agenda of a revolutionary group such as the MLN-T, or if the use of torture is a valid tactic to counteract the influence of an ideology such as communism in order to maintain the status quo. Conclusion Daniel Anthony Mitrione was assassinated by the MLN-Tupamaro when Uruguayan president Jorge Pacheco refused to negotiate his exchange for the release of 150 MLN-T political prisoners. Despite diplomatic requests by US President Richard Nixon and Brazil’s dictator Emilio Garrastazu Médici, President Pacheco refused to negotiate with the Tupamaros so as not to be seen as being manipulated by foreign powers. However, he implemented Article 168 of the Uruguayan Constitution, establishing a State of Siege that granted the military broad powers to take over government control when it was deemed necessary. In fact, in the aftermath of Mitrione’s death there was an increasingly deteriorating political situation in Uruguay, which triggered the declaration of a permanent State of Siege in the country, and a dictatorship that lasted twelve years. Although the OPS was dismantled in 1973, the men it trained carried out one of the worst campaigns of statesponsored terrorism registered in Uruguayan history during Juan María Bordaberry’s dictatorship (1973–85). As a result of the repression, hundreds of Uruguayans died or disappeared, and 380,000 went into exile in Canada and several countries in Europe (14 per cent of the country’s population). As Costa-Gavras explains in an interview offered to the New York Times when the American Film Institute refused to screen State of Siege, ‘We show how the Tupamaros rationalize execution and how the police rationalize torture.’ 40 It is quite obvious that the French-Greek director’s goal was not to go against the American public, but to make audiences aware of what US foreign policies and aid policies entailed. The analysis of Constantin Costa-Gavras’ Stage of Siege (1970) reveals the director’s unique ability to take full advantage of the thriller as a genre, and to accurately depict the historical events that led to the assassination of Daniel Anthony Mitrione by the MLN-T. By re-enacting Philip Michael Santore’s trial

85

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

The films of Costa-Gavras by MLN-T leader Hugo, Costa-Gavras manages to utilize the thriller formula to elicit a confrontation between the hero and the villain. However, Costa-Gavras skillfully depicts the shocking revelations regarding Santore’s involvement in training Uruguayan police in torture as restored behaviors, which have a powerful effect on the audience. As spectators, we must decide if we support the hero’s use of violent tactics as a means to secure the status quo, or to condemn Santore’s actions by defending the lives and integrity of unarmed civilians. Marina Eleftheriadou argues that Costa-Gavras’ ‘political thrillers’ were accused of employing all ‘the dramatic recipes (plot revelations, palpitating suspense, traditional heroes) of the American-style detective story to build an ostensibly political film’.41 However, a closer analysis of State of Siege in light of the performance theory by Richard Schechner, and Costa-Gavras’ innovations regarding the thriller as a genre, places the audience in a privileged position to weigh in on the implications of exercising violence to either advance the objectives of a political organization such as the MLN-T or to secure the status quo. Notes 1 State of Siege [État de siège], directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras. France: Janus Films, 1972, DVD. 2 Pablo Brum, ‘Revisiting Urban Guerrillas: Armed Propaganda and the Insurgency of Uruguay’s MLN-Tupamaro 1969–70’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 37.5 (2014): 388. 3 In the winter of 1970, the MLN-T launched an operation that included the kidnapping of Daniel Mitrione and two other members of the foreign Diplomatic Corps residing in Montevideo: the Brazilian Consul in Uruguay, Aloysio Dias Gomide, and the American agriculture technician, Claude Fay. The Tupamaros wanted to negotiate an exchange of prisoners to free 150 MLN-T members who had been detained at the Punta Carretas prison. In Costa-Gavras’ film those kidnappings are also represented as restored behavior. 4 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 34. 5 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 48. 6 Ralph Harper, The World of the Thriller (Cleveland: The Press of the Case Western Reserve University, 1969), p. 8. 7 Schechner, Performance Studies, p. 34. 8 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 36. 9 Jerry Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 71. 10 Schechner, Performance Studies, p. 34. 11 Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, p. 36. 12 According to Clara Aldrighi’s investigation into the Daniel Mitrione’s case, he was falsely accused of engaging in the repressive campaign that followed the US Marines’ invasion to the Dominican Republic in 1965. Neither the US Embassy in Santo Domingo nor the US State Department have records about Mitrione’s presence in the Dominican Republic between 1965 and 1967. Therefore, Santore’s activities in the Dominican Republic were part of the fictional tale created by Costa-Gavras and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thriller and performance in State of Siege Franco Solinas in Stage of Siege. Curiously, the difference between fiction and reality seemed to be blurred when US diplomats in Santo Domingo requested clarification on Mitrione’s presence in the Dominican Republic based on reports released by the Brazilian press in 1970. For further information please refer to Clara Aldrighi, La intervención de Estados Unidos en Uruguay (1965–1973): El caso Mitrione (Montevideo, Uruguay: Trilce, 2007), pp. 9–16. 13 Franco Solinas, State of Siege. Screenplay. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Dir. Constantin Costa-Gavras (New York: Ballantine, 1973), p. 43. 14 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 61. 15 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 67. 16 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 67. 17 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 67. 18 Palmer, Thrillers, p. 24. 19 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 74. 20 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 74. 21 In real life, Raúl Sendic was captured by the police and sent to the Punta Carretas prison. He spent 13 years in prison and was released in 1985. 22 Harper, The World of the Thriller, p. 8. 23 Harper, The World of the Thriller, p. 8. 24 Harper, The World of the Thriller, p. 9. 25 When a government declares a State of Siege, there are restrictions on movement of people in or out of the country. All civil rights are suspended, and the police could arrest suspects without charges or warrants. Unfortunately, it is a common practice in many Latin American countries including Uruguay. 26 Solinas, State of Siege, pp. 97–98. 27 Solinas, State of Siege, pp. 97–98. 28 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 95. 29 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 95. 30 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 95. 31 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 37. 32 In his study of the MLN-T, Peter Waldman explains that although both guerrilla groups and terrorists use violence to destabilize society, there is a crucial difference in their goals. For Waldman: ‘Generally, urban guerrillas are interested in the mobilizing effects of their violent attacks. They want to wake people up and push them to action. By contrast, the typical terrorist strategy is to spread fear and panic, that is, to paralyze the public’ (717). Therefore, the use of ‘terrorists’ to characterize the Tupamaros is mistaken because their objective was to convince the population to revolt against the Uruguayan government. For further information please refer to Peter Waldman, ‘How Terrorism Ceases: The Tupamaros in Uruguay’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 34 (2011): 717–731. 33 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 38. 34 The Alliance for Progress was a development project initiated by US President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Its objective was to establish economic cooperation between the United States and Latin America. While the initial objective was to provide technical assistance to developing countries in Latin America, Clara Aldrighi reveals in her book that a significant amount of the funding was diverted to the OPS to be invested in training and equipment for police and armed forces. For further information please refer to Clara Aldrighi, La intervención de Estados Unidos en Uruguay (1965–1973): el caso Mitrione (Montevideo, Uruguay: Trilce, 2007), pp. 18–36. 35 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 41. 36 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 41.

87

88

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

37 Solinas, State of Siege, p. 42. 38 Hans Georg Gadamer quoted by Marvin Carlson in Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 153. 39 Schechner, Performance Theory, p. 71. 40 Constantin Costa-Gavras, interview by Judy Klemesrud, ‘I’m Not Anti American’, New York Times, 22 April 1973. 41 Marina Eleftheriadou, ‘Z and Other Cinematic Tales from the 30-year Greek Civil War’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 26.4 (2015): 637.

6

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing (1982) Thomas Leitch

Some films focus on telling stories, others on creating worlds. Many of CostaGavras’s films share a third focus broadly implied by their status as agitprop: to foster in their target audience a critical skepticism about institutions of political power – the Greek government in Z (1969), the Czech Communist Party in The Confession (1970), the leaders of the United States Aid for International Development (USAID) in Uruguay in State of Siege (1972). Missing (1982), Costa-Gavras’s first American film, carries a more specific charge borrowed from its source, Thomas Hauser’s 1978 volume The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice: that the US government concealed information about the death of Charles Horman, an American activist in Chile, and may even have conspired with the leaders of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in his death. Missing occupies a pivotal place in Costa-Gavras’s career, and not just because it is his first film for a Hollywood studio. Although it follows the trajectory of all his films since his groundbreaking international success Z in marrying the conventions of docu-drama to those of the political thriller, it is his quintessential film, not because of what it includes, but because of what it does not. Long before Missing, Costa-Gavras had established his preeminence as a director of topical political thrillers. Once he had invented his own genre, as Alfred Hitchcock had largely invented the movie thriller a generation earlier, he went even further to legitimize it for the box office. The international success of Z, which won an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film and was the first foreignlanguage film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, went so far to change Hollywood’s attitude toward political thrillers that Costa-Gavras said in 1973: During the period I was trying to find money for Z – more than a year and a half I spent talking to people, showing the list of actors, the ‘package’ – nobody bought the film because they said, ‘This is a political movie, and people don’t like to see

90

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

political situations’. Those same people, when they later saw the big money that had been made with Z, immediately tried to do the same thing and they accepted every political subject. Today in France it is enough to go to a producer and say, ‘Sir, I have a political subject’, and he receives you immediately.1

Within the genre of the political thriller, Costa-Gavras developed several specialties he made his own. Many of his subjects were volatile conflicts ripped from newspaper headlines. When his subjects were historical, as in Shock Troops (1967) and The Confession, they had unsettling contemporary resonance. Just as his abrupt cutting between present-tense events and the earlier events that had led up to them, often making it difficult to distinguish past from present events, his films typically worked from binary oppositions between good guys and bad guys toward an increasing moral complexity through their critique of the apparently good guys. Most significantly, Z identified his core audience by appealing to the political paranoia of anti-establishment young audiences already half-convinced that their governments were out to get them. Costa-Gavras’s films nearly always present themselves with an air of cinema vérité. In the celebrated words included in the opening credits of Z, the director and his screenwriter Jorge Semprún inverted the customary disclaimer of the roman à clef: ‘Any resemblance to actual events, to any persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is deliberate’. Despite this sweeping claim, most of Costa-Gavras’s films either adapt earlier novels – The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), Shock Troops, Z, Womanlight (1979), and, looking ahead, Conseil de famille (1986), La petite apocalypse (1993), The Ax (2005), and Capital (2012) – or plays – Amen. (2002), based on Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy – or are based on original stories or screenplays: Stage of Siege, Special Section (1975), Hanna K. (1983), Betrayed (1988), Music Box (1989), Mad City (1997), Eden Is West (2009). The claims of all these films to tell the truth about contemporary politics are complicated by the fictional status of many of their sources. Along with The Confession, Missing is the only film to date that Costa-Gavras has based on a nonfiction book, one that claims in equally categorical terms to be telling the truth in directly journalistic terms instead of revealing the truth through invented characters, scenes, and stories. Z works by confirming audiences’ worst fears about the recent unrest in Greece in particular and the corruption of establishment politics around the world. The film targets an audience that already suspects that the political game is rigged against them and deepens their paranoia by establishing a close and well-nigh irresistible identification with threatened dissidents like the supporters of the murdered senator (Yves Montand) or investigators like the juge d’instruction charged with investigating his case (Jean-Louis Trintingant). Costa-Gavras did not invent the rules of the paranoid thriller that depends on reaching an audience whose political sympathies it takes for granted. The genre’s tangled roots go back to The Parallax View (1974), La guerre est finie (1966), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Red Menace (1949), Saboteur (1942), Man Hunt (1941), and even The

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing Birth of a Nation (1915), which presents the beleaguered Cameron family and the Ku Klux Klan as victims fighting to recapture their country from the radical, anti-Southern Reconstructionist establishment that has hijacked it. In The 39 Steps (1935), Alfred Hitchcock, by setting his hero’s innocence against the power of the police, had established the conventions of the man-on-the-run film whose ideological baggage could be concealed beneath a series of official threats that his hero had to surmount in the most stylish and witty terms possible in order to establish his innocence. By emphasizing the specifics of the real-world contemporary political conflicts Hitchcock had sketched in only the broadest, most readily disavowed terms, like the invention of the country Bandrika as the setting of The Lady Vanishes (1938), Costa-Gavras joined Alain Resnais and Gillo Pontecorvo in reintroducing an explicitly ideological dimension to this story. The director significantly complicates this pattern in State of Siege. Instead of introducing a central character whose political sympathies make him sympathetic from the beginning and then deepening the audience’s sympathy by placing him in increasing danger from the institutional authorities, as he had done in The Confession, he assumes that the audience will be sympathetic to Philip Michael Santore, an American administrator for USAID, as soon as he is kidnapped by the Tupamaros, or perhaps even before then, since we can see from the first shots in which Santore is presented that he is played by Yves Montand, who also played the sacrificial heroes of Z and The Confession. As Costa-Gavras said of Santore, who is based on the figure of Dan Mitrione, an American police chief who went first to Brazil and then to Uruguay in order to help train the police in their fight against militants: ‘it was very important to have Yves Montand specifically because he’s a very sympathetic person – at the beginning of the film the audience is for Yves Montand, they are not against him, they are for him. And it was extremely important for the character to be sympathetic from the beginning so that the audience would not subsequently refuse what’s told in the film.’ 2 Instead of gradually intensifying the audience’s sympathy for Santore, the film gradually undermines that sympathy by showing the gravity, dignity, and seriousness of his captors, who never harm him physically or psychologically, and his failure to defend himself against his hooded interrogator’s increasingly sharp accusations, even though these accusations invariably take the form of rhetorical questions to which the interrogator already knows the answers. The success of the film requires audiences to change their mind about Santore so completely, at least in my own case, that they are unable to watch the American television news coverage of Dan Mitrione’s abduction, interrogation, execution, and funeral appended to the Criterion DVD in at all the same sympathetic way they would presumably have done if they had not seen the film. Even after Santore implicitly acknowledges his implication in governmentsanctioned police violence by accusing the Tupamaros of being nothing but terrorists, he still remains quiet and dignified. After the balance of power between the government – under intense pressure to negotiate for Santore’s release by

91

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

The films of Costa-Gavras releasing all its political prisoners – and the dissidents changes when the government, on the verge of collapse, arrests nine Tupamaros, including Santore’s interrogator, it becomes clear that that no one will negotiate for Santore’s release. Santore and his new, unhooded captor – who invites him to write his family and informs him that he may be executed the next day – continue to converse dispassionately about the lack of appealing choices for the Tupamaros in what turns out to be Santore’s final scene, apparent equals in their tragic ability to diagnose the ruling regime’s priorities and their equally tragic inability to change them. Missing inverts this trajectory by making its star at first neither enlightened nor sympathetic. It is the business of the film to reverse this initial impression, making Ed Horman gradually more sympathetic precisely to the extent that he weans himself away from his uncritical acceptance of the stories about his son’s disappearance, mostly by American officials. The film departs from Hauser’s Pulitzer-Prize-nominated volume in several important ways. The Execution of Charles Hauser tells the story of a harmless, privileged liberal young who is staying in Chile with his wife Joyce in 1973 when a junta under the aegis of the country’s armed forces mounts a coup against its democratically elected president, Salvatore Allende. Separated from Joyce at the time of the coup, Charles makes his way from Viña del Mar back to Santiago with the help of Lt.-Col. Patrick Ryan and Captain Ray Davis, but on 17 September, shortly after he and Joyce are reunited, he disappears. Unable to find Charles or persuade the American officials she asks to press the new regime for any information about him, Joyce is joined by Charles’s father Ed, who is also stonewalled in his attempts to learn whether his son was arrested, detained in the National Stadium with hundreds of other prisoners, or killed. Eventually, Lovell Jarvis, an economic program advisor at the Ford Foundation, tells him on 17 October that Charles was executed on 20 September, three days after he was last seen by his wife or Terry Simon, the friend with whom he had traveled to Viña, one day after Joyce first inquired about him at the American consulate, and two weeks before Ed Horman arrived in Santiago to join the search for his son. That same day, Ed demands that the consulate staff respond to this report. The following morning, the Consul indicates that Charles’s body has been identified from fingerprints, interred in a wall in the Municipal Stadium, and Ed, examining it, confirms his son’s identity. Furious at the American officials’ professed ignorance about the case, Ed pays $900 to have his son’s body released and shipped home, then continues his investigations into a possible cover-up concerning Charles’s death, focusing on three questions: ‘Was Charles Horman executed by the Chilean military? […] Was there a United States government cover-up? […] Did anyone in the American military, diplomatic, or intelligence community have foreknowledge of or perhaps order the execution of Charles Horman?’ 3 Hauser does not describe the lawsuit he and Ed Horman filed against the American government, as it was still subject to litigation at the time of publication. Instead, his book, its structure and politics clearly influenced by Bob Woodward

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men (1974) and C.D.B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire (1976), concludes with an extended present-tense summary of Ed’s findings and the three leading questions they raise. Missing, which ends with a shot of Charles’s coffin being loaded into a homebound jet plane, omits the third part of Hauser’s book, his analytical summary of the evidence Ed Horman had unearthed about his son’s death, just as it omitted most of the first part of that book, which provides extended background snapshots of Charles’s early years, Allende’s several campaigns for the Chilean presidency, the reaction of the Nixon administration to his election, and Charles’s final visit home to his parents. Instead, the film restricts itself almost entirely to material drawn from chapters 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 of Hauser’s twenty-two chapters. The reasons for this highly selective approach to both Hauser and the draft screenplay that producer Edward Lewis hoped would entice Costa-Gavras to the project are revealing. When Gary Crowdus asked how the project had originated, Costa-Gavras answered, ‘I was sent the book and a script written by someone I prefer not to mention because I didn’t like it. The original script took Charles Horman’s position, leaving the US, travelling throughout Latin America, discovering all those horrors that Charles discovered, and then deciding to stay in Chile’. Instead, the director proposed to start the whole thing from the book.There you have the personal story, the relationship between the father and son, the old generation and a new one, the father disagreeing with his son’s way of life. You also have the father discovering an aspect of his own country and beginning to question his own beliefs.There must be millions of Americans like him – an honest man, but one who doesn’t understand completely what’s going on, and when he finally learns, he protests. It was clear that this was the part of the book to use.4

By omitting most of Hauser’s Part One, the film makes Charles Horman seem more remote and less completely defined than he is in the book. The script dispenses with several passages in which Hauser foreshadows his death,5 omitting Charles’s prophetic comparison of the Chilean situation to the events of Z,6 and avoiding the epithets Hauser used as dog-whistles to stigmatize targets like ‘the Nixon administration’ and ‘General Gustavo Leigh, a right-wing ideologue’, for audiences whose political sensibilities had been decisively shaped by Watergate.7 More important, the director decisively shifted the film’s focus. As Vincent Canby notes in his appreciative review of Missing, ‘The center of the film is the political awakening of Ed Horman. […] Missing documents, in a most moving way, the raising of the political consciousness of Ed Horman, who has, until this devastating experience, always believed in the sanctity of his government and accepted its actions and policies without question.’ 8 Both Costa-Gavras and Canby are correct in observing that Missing shifts the center of gravity implicit in Hauser’s story decisively to Ed Horman. But CostaGavras’s recollection of Hauser’s book is as selective as his adaptation. The film’s

93

94

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

emphasis on ‘the father disagreeing with his son’s way of life’ is based on two brief passages in Hauser. In the first, Ed recalls: ‘Prior to his final visit […] things had not been completely good between us. Charles had become somewhat intolerant of our life style, and I suppose at times I might have been unduly critical of him, too.We exchanged several soul-searching letters which brought us closer together.’ 9 In the second, Ed describes a cross-country drive he and Charles had taken six years earlier: After graduating from Harvard, Charles had grown extremely bitter about the war in Vietnam and hostile toward ‘the establishment’. Ed, as an available representative of the older generation, had become a target for more than occasional abuse. ‘We were cordially noncommunicative on many subjects in those days’, he recalls, ‘and it troubled me greatly. Charles was living in Portland at the time, and, when he decided to move back East, I asked if I could fly out and drive back with him.’ […] The drive cross country to New York took seven days. ‘We talked all the way’, Ed remembers. ‘I didn’t completely satisfy him and he didn’t completely satisfy me, but it helped a lot. We grew closer from that point on. When Charles and Joyce quit their jobs and went to Chile, I didn’t approve completely but at least I understood and was able to accept what they were doing.’ 10

Hauser presents a father and son separated by a generation gap very typical of the Vietnam War era, a gap Ed describes as mostly resolved into an agreement to disagree years before Charles left for Chile.The film shows no interactions between father and son, who has died before Ed (Jack Lemmon) arrives in Chile. The film’s producer, Edward Lewis, recalls that Costa-Gavras had originally sought Paul Newman for the role of Ed, but Newman was not interested. The director’s clear second choice was Jack Lemmon, still associated with comic roles despite his more recent experience in dramatic roles in Save the Tiger (1973) and The China Syndrome (1979), because he radiated common-man decency. He considered his selection of Lemmon ‘counter-casting. I often cast against type.’ 11 Lemmon’s Ed, deferential to a fault to the Washington officials he asks for help, takes every opportunity to run down Charles even before he goes to Chile himself. To a senator who asks, ‘How does your son make a living?’ he replies, ‘Well – I guess he’s a writer.’ To a congressman who asks whether Charles is a liberal or a radical, he replies, ‘Congressman, my son is much too wishy-washy to be a radical.’ His lukewarm characterizations of his missing son blossom into active disapproval when he flies to Santiago and talks to Charles’s wife (Sissy Spacek), now renamed Beth at the request of Joyce Horman. ‘If he had settled down where he belongs’, he tells her in their first extended scene together, ‘this never would have happened in the first place.’ Insisting on making Charles responsible for his own disappearance, he asks her in the following scene, ‘What stupid thing did Charles do to cause his arrest or make him go into hiding?’ and adds irritably, ‘Getting in such a mess that I have to fly sixteen hours in order to – Sometimes, I honestly think that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing boy is incapable of doing anything – except of course give idealistic speeches and write novels that’ll never be published. Unless the entire disappearing act is a stunt to publicize his forthcoming autobiography.’ Unlike his son’s wife and friends, who all call him ‘Charlie’, Ed aligns himself with the embassy officials by always calling him ‘Charles’. Departing even more radically from Hauser, Missing places Ed’s relationship with his daughter-in-law at its heart.That relationship is marked from the beginning by a sharp conflict that has no precedent in The Execution of Charles Horman. Hauser’s determination to restrict the dialogue he presents to ‘the results of verbatim transcripts obtained by me or a reconstruction based on the memory of one or more participants to a given conversation’ 12 limits him to three brief exchanges between Ed and Joyce Horman.13 He does not indicate any words that passed between them when Ed first arrived in Santiago or when he and Joyce returned to New York to meet Ed’s wife Elizabeth.14 But he does include one telephone conversation about Joyce, when Vice-Consul Dale Shaffer in Santiago, speaking to Ed in the United States, says: ‘All I know … is that your son is missing.’ When Ed asks, ‘What about our daughter-in-law?’ Shaffer replies, ‘She’s been giving us a lot of trouble … She’s really pestering us.’ Later, Ed reflects on this exchange: ‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here I was, asking about a missing son with the Embassy unable to tell me where he was, and Shaffer was complaining about Joyce being a pest.’ 15 The film assigns Shaffer’s line to a State Department functionary who brings up Beth himself, but without provoking any such reaction in Ed, who continues to address every Washington official he speaks to with a deferential ‘sir’. Once Ed comes face to face with his daughter-in-law in Missing, these hints of conflict flash into open warfare. As he unpacks in his hotel room, Ed responds to Beth’s question about his trip by sarcastically describing it as ‘a total delight’. When she asks how Elizabeth is doing, he replies witheringly, ‘How do you expect?’ He makes no reply to her question, ‘You blame me?’ and snaps in response to her wearily disillusioned assessment of Phil Putnam, the American consul (David Clennon), ‘I certainly don’t want to hear any of your anti-government paranoia. I already get enough of that from my son.’ As the two of them sit in the office of the unnamed American ambassador (Richard Venture), Beth rocks her leg impatiently as Ed hangs on the ambassador’s anodyne reassurances; when Beth cries, ‘You know he’s not in hiding! The whole neighborhood saw him picked up by a goon squad’, he glances incredulously at her, showing his disapproval of her breach of the decorum he values so highly. He greets Beth’s account of the way Captain Ray Tower (Charles Cioffi) – with whom she and Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron), caught out past curfew, were forced to stay overnight, entered the bathroom while she was in the tub and all but propositioned her – first with silence, then with the question, ‘Why did you have a bath in Tower’s house?’ Immediately afterwards, as they leave Terry’s hotel room the night before her

95

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 6.1  Hostility and distance between Ed (Jack Lemmon) and Beth (Sissy Spacek) upon his arrival

departure for the United States, he pauses in the corridor to ask: ‘Did she have an affair with Charles?’, provoking Beth’s weary retort: ‘Why did you come here?’ Even after he curtly urges the ambassador to work through the military training contacts he is certain the embassy has to get further news of Charles, earning Beth’s instant admiration, her remark about the risks of taking such a line provokes him to call her attitude paranoid, and he winds himself up to a self-righteous peroration: ‘I can no longer abide the young people of our country who live off their parents and the fat of the land, and then they find nothing better to do than whine and complain!’ After Beth stalks out of his hotel room and into her own just across the corridor, the camera holds for a long moment on a symmetrically posed shot of their two closed doors before Beth emerges from her room, knocks tentatively on Ed’s door, and apologizes for her provocation. Ed does not respond. This first movement emphasizing the sharp conflict between Beth and Ed is followed by a second that begins to bridge the gaps between them. In its emphasis on bringing together Ed and Beth, and through her, Ed and Charles, the film echoes a most unlikely predecessor, Costa-Gavras’s romantic fantasy Womanlight, whose subject the director defined as ‘the need to exercise power over someone and the need for form a cell of two’.16 The first signs that a cell of two is forming here is another visit to the embassy immediately after a scene registering their awareness that the telephones in their hotel have been bugged.When the ambassador once again denies the existence of any program of American military training, Ed erupts, not in anger, but in a sadness that disclaims any political agenda and links him for the first time to Beth. ‘I know these are bad times. It’s not fun for you people’, he says. ‘It’s certainly not fun for Beth or me – or Charles … I just

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing

Figure 6.2  Beth assumes a parental role by taking Ed’s arm

want you to reach these people and tell them I will take Charles back in any condition … I will absolve anyone, everyone, of anything. I just want my boy back! He’s the only child I have – sir’, this last as he is framed together with Beth, blurred in the background. When he adds in the silence that follows, ‘Did you hear what I said?’ and the ambassador, looking out the window, murmurs, ‘Yes’, Beth gently takes his arm, tells him, ‘Come on, Ed. The meeting’s over’, and leads him out of the room. As Ed’s most poignant assertion of his parental relation to Charles presents him, not at his most authoritative, but at his most vulnerable, Beth slips for the first time into a protectively nurturing parental role that she assumes once more during their walk down a city street when he asks her ‘what Charles is like’, indicating not only his estrangement from his son but his ignorance about him. When Beth ends her list of Charles’s qualities by saying that he liked to make love on Sunday mornings, Ed briefly flashes out: ‘I really don’t want to hear about your – bedroom antics.’ This time, however, Beth instead takes his arm and continues their walk, establishing herself, not him, as the parental figure. Offered a microphone so that he can talk to the hundreds of prisoners still detained at the stadium in the hope of reaching his son, he instead turns the mike over to Beth, saying, ‘I just can’t. You start it.’ After she speaks, he tries to project his parental authority: ‘Charles Horman? This is your father, Edmund Horman’, but then, when his son fails to respond, asks plaintively, ‘Do you remember that cross-country trip we made from Los Angeles to New York?’ The third movement in the relationship between Ed and Beth confirms them as a team of equals even as it deepens Ed’s identification with the son he has never truly known. Shortly after Ed finally expresses an interest in reading the notes Charles took about what he saw and heard in Viña, he pushes the door of

97

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 6.3  Ed bangs taxi door against soldiers shooting at fleeing protesters

their taxi against a vehicle carrying a group of soldiers shooting at a pair of dissidents who have been painting graffiti on the walls, echoing Charles’s equally foolhardy gesture earlier in the film. When Kate Newman (Janice Rule), a reporter helping them in their inquiries, rebukes him, ‘I saw your son do almost the same damn, dumb thing’, Ed muses wonderingly, ‘He did that?’ A visit to a basement containing scores of unidentified corpses brings Beth face to face with the body of Charles and Beth’s friend Frank Teruggi (Joe Regalbuto), whose body had in fact been identified before Ed came to Chile.17 Beth begins to weep, but Ed overrules Phil Putnam’s directive to ‘get her out of here’. Back upstairs, he takes her hand as he asks, ‘What kind of world is this?’, prompting her to reflect, ‘You sound just like Charlie.’ After an earthquake strikes close to the hotel and the police shoot a guest who has run out into the street, Ed and Beth share a late-night drink, and Ed confesses, ‘I owe you an apology … For a long time now, I’ve sold you short – both of you.’ When he adds, ‘I feel very guilty’, Beth reassures him in a way that installs his son as an authority figure whose authority depends on wisdom and reassurance instead of power and bullying: ‘Charlie always says guilt is like fear: it’s given to us for survival, not destruction.’ Ed’s response – ‘I think you’re one of the most courageous people I’ve ever met’ – indicates that he is finally ready to get the news of his son’s death, as he does, with shocking unexpectedness, during a call to the Ford Foundation to inquire about Charles –a call that seemed so pointless that Beth begged off. After Peter Chernin (Robert Hitt), an economic advisor to the foundation, tells Ed that an unnamed official with whom he plays golf told him the Charles was executed, Ed, unable to lean on the absent Beth for support and saddled with the problem of how to share this news with her, returns to the embassy for the last time with the announcement: ‘I have reason to believe that my son was

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing executed by the military. I do not think they would dare do a thing like that unless an American cosigned a kill order.’ The ambassador, at first denying this charge, then launches into a political and economic justification for America’s support for a coup Ed would surely have ignored and tacitly supported if his interest had not been so urgently personal. ‘You can’t have it both ways’, he concludes. ‘I’m concerned with the preservation of a way of life.’ ‘And a damn good one’, chimes in Ray Tower. Ed, shot from behind as he looks out the window to the embassy’s well-manicured garden, replies, ‘Maybe that’s why there’s nobody out there.’ Unwilling to share his news with Beth until it has been confirmed, he gets that unwelcome confirmation through a phone call telling him that Charles’s fingerprints have been matched with the dead man’s as she is being interrogated yet again by the local police and communicates his news to her by saying simply, ‘We’re going home’, and clasping her close. ‘I love you, Ed’, she replies as she hugs him back. One final indignity awaits Ed at the airport: he is charged $931.14 for returning Charles’s remains to New York. After he pays the bill in disgust, Phil Putnam falters, ‘I wish there was something we could say or do’, and Ed turns on him with all the quiet ferocity of his newly raised consciousness: ‘Well, there’s something I can do, Phil. I’m going to sue you and Tower and the Ambassador and everybody who let that boy die.’ As Ed and Beth walk slowly down the corridor toward their flight, Jack Lemmon continues in voiceover: ‘Ed Horman filed suit charging eleven government officials, including Henry A. Kissinger, with complicity and negligence in the death of his son. The body was not returned home until seven months later, making an accurate autopsy impossible. After years of litigation, the information necessary to prove or disprove complicity remained classified as secrets of state. The suit was dismissed.’ The last shot of the film, showing Charles Horman’s coffin sliding down an airline cargo ramp, finally back home in the United States, eerily echoes a similar shot toward the end of State of Siege that shows Philip Santore’s flag-draped coffin being loaded onto a homebound jet. This obvious and conventional implication of this shot is that Charles’s homecoming marks the end of his story. As Missing has long since made clear, however, Charles’s story is only a prelude to its real story: the raising of Ed’s consciousness. Even though the central mystery in the film concerns the circumstances of Charles’s death at the hands of the Junta, the film’s central conflict is between Ed and Beth. Although they initially battle over their memories of Charles, it is precisely their relation to Charles that brings them together. Much of the commentary on the film takes its cue from contemporaneous reviews, which assumed that ‘Missing is based on a nonfiction book and bills itself not as an interpretation of an actual event but as a literal retelling of it.’ 18 Richard Grenier announced that Missing ‘affirms categorically (on the basis of no evidence that has yet come to light) that the US engineered still another coup, in Chile in 1973 this time, and also (on non-existent evidence) that US

99

100

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

officials had ordered, or at least condoned, the execution of an innocent young American in Chile because he “knew too much” about American complicity in the coup’.19 Robert Brent Toplin has summarized the ensuing debate about the film’s historical accuracy, which responds to the claim advanced in its opening credits: ‘This film is based on a true story. The incidents and facts are documented. Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent and to protect the film.’ 20 Weighing the director’s ‘attempts to balance the conflicting values of drama and ideology’, John J. Michalczyk concludes: In principle, Costa-Gavras follows the truth. It may be only one side of the truth, but it is a significant part of it. The other side would have to be represented by the government officials who appear as very shallow, self-serving individuals in the film. Costa-Gavras has repeated that he in no way attempts to make the film a court case where both sides are meticulously represented. Missing is in fact an aesthetic work, a means of entertainment, and a dramatization of actual events. There is room here for poetic license. The director insists on the difference between a journalist and an artist, claiming only to be the latter. […] Missing remains a creative act and not an historical, accurate testimony to the situation of September–October 1973. As a dramatic work it succeeds, nonetheless, in provoking the public and critic to search further for the truth.21

Michalczyk’s description of the film as ‘a creative act’ raises an issue even more vital than the question of its historical accuracy: the question of what effect it is intended to have, and actually does have, on audiences. That is presumably why Michalczyk’s chapter on the film ends not with this conclusion but with an Epilogue22 summarizing reactions to it. There is no doubt that the film had a profound impact on its first release. It shared the Palme d’Or with Yol at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, won the 1983 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, was named Film of the Year in the London Critics Circle Film Awards, and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for Best Adapted Screenplay. In an interview included in the Criterion DVD of Missing, Thomas Hauser acknowledges that when The Execution of Charles Hauser was published, ‘the response was favorable but muted. And people on the inside, people in the know, read it. Many were outraged by it, but nothing happened. Then Missing, the feature film, was made, and that’s a very different vehicle. The feature film couldn’t be ignored.’ The film clearly made a splash, but it is not entirely clear what the nature of that splash was. Gary Crowdus and Harold Kalisman, interviewing Costa-Gavras about State of Siege, asked him, ‘In political films like your own, where you are trying to make a point about something, where do you think the work of art ends and the piece of propaganda begins?’ The filmmaker replied with unusual emphasis: First, propaganda is a very, very bad word – it was used by Hitler who had a Minister of Propaganda. Propaganda is the victory over the mind. Through the mind you can

What’s missing from Missing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

convince people but in order to vanquish them you must prevent them from thinking. Propaganda is based on false or transformed events, events transformed in the service of an ideology and which are also at the service of this ideology. […] Personally, I’m not trying to promote a political idea of theory. If you want to stick close to the truth, you have to get away from propaganda. […] Propaganda is not the truth – at best it’s only the truth of an ideology for certain people. But my films basically are the truth, they’re based on facts. That is the whole difference between propaganda and my films, but I have no word to substitute for propaganda.23

The vehemence with which Costa-Gavras recoils from the word ‘propaganda’ attests his belief that his proclivity for factual accuracy in the circumstantial details of his films indemnifies them from the charge of propaganda. The lively debate surrounding this belief, best summarized by Stanley Kauffmann’s disdainful dismissal of Costa-Gavras, who ‘cautiously names nothing and no one precisely; he glibly implies deep guilt, making empty heroic gestures of protest without foundation and without risk’,24 has obscured a more important possibility: beyond a certain point, circumstantial specification detracts from the director’s goal rather than fostering it. Costa-Gavras disclaimed the example of the Black Panthers copying the organizational structure of the revolutionaries presented in The Battle of Algiers by saying that ‘in my opinion, that’s a very bad way to see things. You don’t just copy another revolution – in revolution you have to analyze the situation in your own country and try to find solutions to those precise conditions.’ 25 Asked why he never explicitly identified Chile as the setting of Missing, as in fact he had never identified Greece as the setting of Z, he said: ‘Universal would have liked to put at the beginning of the film: “Chile, September 1973”. By saying that, though, it becomes a local problem, and it also becomes a historical thing – far away, ten years ago, who remembers that? But I think these things are still happening. It could be Argentina; it could be El Salvador. People are disappearing all over the world.’ 26 His goal is not to make historical films that say exactly what happened in a particular time and place but to alert audiences to the kinds of things that have happened, are happening, and could happen. Although the director confesses his inability to find a better description than propaganda for his films, there is an obvious label: consciousness-raising. To put the matter in terms the director never uses himself, his films are all invitations to conversion. Its status as a conversion story makes Missing exemplary among the director’s films. What sets it apart from the others is its attempt to convert both an initially unsympathetic character to a fuller humanity and an audience initially unsympathetic to that character to open their hearts to him. Unlike Z and The Confession, which are aimed at an audience whose political consciousness has already been raised, Missing is aimed at an audience much like its hero. As Ed, initially as abrasive and hostile to Beth as he is deferential to American officials in Washington and Santiago, warms to his daughter-in-law, the audience warms to him in turn. His conversion – not toward the ideological beliefs of his son, since Charles is never represented as an ideologue, but to the value of his son’s life – is the cue for the audience’s

101

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

The films of Costa-Gavras conversion toward accepting his own humanity through his new-found vulnerability, humility, and embrace of his son and daughter-in-law. Indeed, although Costa-Gavras never uses the term in his interviews, conversion is his great subject, not because his films all dramatize conversions, but because they are invitations to a conversion that is never shown. Conversion is a subject that is both painstakingly documented in Missing and pointedly omitted from the film’s conclusion because the film depends for its effect on converting the audience in ways that can only be modeled, implied, and invited rather than directly represented. Z is clearly structured as a conversion story in which the slain senator’s mission passes on to the judge called in to investigate the case, a judge whose first important scene is opportunely interrupted by the news of the senator’s death. The judge does not inherit the senator’s political mantle. He does not begin to think like the senator or pledge allegiance to his party. He never expresses solidarity with the senator. All his conversion involves is following the evidence where it leads, taking nothing for granted, without fear of the consequences. Years later, Costa-Gavras would structure Amen. as a conversion story in which the lacerating stories told by SS Lt. Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), about the death chambers he has seen in the concentration camps fails to persuade anyone at the Vatican to act – all except for Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), a young priest who becomes equally passionate in his advocacy, and equally, though separately, doomed in his attempt. Because ‘[t]he director himself finds it “hard to offer solutions” when it comes to political – or cinematic – issues’, Costa-Gavras answers a question about ‘cinema as a tool of social change’ by identifying a more modest goal: ‘Film should serve as a mirror to society, to make people think, to be a reference source – but to change it is a bit too demanding.’ 27 Costa-Gavras has maintained that ‘Z was a political action, like writing on a wall, not a political movie. After April ’67 I felt I had to do something against the Greek regime, so I did Z. And today we call Z “a political movie”.’ 28 The most urgent question to ask about Costa-Gavras’s films as conversion stories is not whether they are accurate, because actions are better described as effective or ineffective than accurate or inaccurate, and calls to action, whether they are judged as accurate or inaccurate, are primarily exhortations, not descriptions. The question rather concerns the status of that action and the ending that completes it as an action. If a film is presented as an action, or as part of an action, when has that action been completed? What possibilities does the film offer for supplying the missing ending in which the audience picks up the torch the characters have offered, and how can we recognize it when we see it? The ending of The Execution of Charles Horman confirms the status of Hauser’s book as an indictment of American policy and American actions in Chile. Its Part Three recounts Ed Horman’s continued search for ‘the truth about Charles’, reviews the evidence for Charles’s discovery of American involvement in the coup as the motive, summarizes the final positions of Ed (‘my family and I have lost trust in the statements, motives, and decency of our government’) and Elizabeth

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing (‘each of us is obligated to fight for what is right and take responsibility for what our government does’), and ‘invite[s] rebuttal by all interested parties’, secure in the belief that ‘only by self-analysis of this kind can we purify our government and make it better’.29 The force of the film’s ending is very different. The response Hauser describes Ed making to a reporter’s question – ’The only reason I’m here in Chile […] is to find my son. I have no interest in challenging what our government has done in the past. I’m interested only in the future’ 30 – would seem to fit the film better than the book, since Missing drops Ed’s continuing story once he gets Charles’s body back. The closest the film comes to an ending like Hauser’s, which dispassionately reviews and summarizes evidence of American wrongdoing independent of the Horman family’s experience, is in the supplementary material included on the second disc of its Criterion DVD release: video interviews with Costa-Gavras,Thomas Hauser, Joyce Horman, Ed Horman, Jack Lemmon, producers Edward and Mildred Lewis and Sean Daniel, and Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project; video excerpts from the 2002 Charles Horman Truth Project event honoring Missing – and in the accompanying booklet; new essays by Terry Simon and film critic Michael Wood; a long excerpt from Gary Crowdus’s 1982 Cinéaste interview with Costa-Gavras, and the State Department’s three-page response to the film, originally issued two days before its first release, condemning as baseless its implication of ‘possible involvement by the United States government and its officials’ in Charles Horman’s death. The film does preserve something of the impetus of Hauser’s Part Three, not in its depiction of events, even in a present-tense summary echoing Hauser’s, but in an implied exhortation picked up from Ed, Elizabeth, and Hauser’s closing words, a tacit call to conversion. But the very different ways its effects are described in the appended video interviews, from Peter Kornbluh’s statement that the film ‘really brings the viewer to the nexus of US intervention in Chile’ to actor Gabriel Byrne’s recollection as emcee of the Charles Horman Truth Project event: ‘Missing is a film that changed my life. […] It was the beginning of my road to awareness’, make it clear that its most enduring power has been as a provocation rather than a definitive statement of the case of Charles Horman. The conversion the film models and solicits but does not supply is not of course the only act that has followed from its release. In 1983, Nathaniel Davis, the American ambassador to Chile; Ray Davis, a naval attaché at the embassy fictionalized as Ray Tower in the film; and Fred Purdy, the US consul in Santiago fictionalized as Phil Putnam, tested the film’s truth claims by filing a libel suit against Costa-Gavras, Universal Pictures, Thomas Hauser, and his publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and the Hearst Corporation, even though Hauser’s book had by now been in print for four years without provoking any such legal action. Interestingly, the film has sought to incorporate this hostile response, along with the State Department’s rebuttal of its implication, into its invitation to conversion. The text of the State Department’s statement is reproduced in the booklet accompanying the Criterion DVD not as an impeachment of the film’s

103

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

104

The films of Costa-Gavras charges but as further context for them. The suit, Davis v. Costa-Gavras, 654 F. Supp. 653 (SDNY 1987), ultimately led the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to make a historic distinction between a documentary film, ‘a non-fictional story or series of historical events portrayed in their actual location; a film of real people and real events as they occur’ in order to ‘maintain[s] strict fidelity to fact’ and docudramas that ‘utilize simulated dialogue, composite characters, and a telescoping of events occurring over a period into a composite scene or scenes’.31 The court’s determination that Missing was a docudrama, not a documentary, doomed Davis’s lawsuit as completely as Ed Horman’s, establishing a legal definition of the docudrama still used in law and the film industry without ultimately resolving the question of how accurate was the film’s representation of the American role in the 1973 Chilean coup. The peculiar status of the film’s remarkably open ending, the ripples of all sorts that have followed its release, resonate far outside Costa-Gavras, to other stories that appeal directly to the audience to change their minds in order to effect a desired outcome and thus require the audience’s conversion for their own completion. This impulse characterizes what might be called performative texts – cookbooks, how-to books like the Idiot’s Guides, self-help books, inspirational books, political propaganda, and religious tracts – even for readers who, as Kenneth Burke points out, ‘make no serious attempt to apply the book’s recipes’ but are content to ‘liv[e] in the aura of success’ during the act of reading.32 Wayne C. Booth begins his study of ‘the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader’ by distinguishing his subject from ‘didactic fiction, fiction used for propaganda or instruction’,33 although his whole project assumes that imposing a fictional world upon the reader is itself a morally consequential act. Commentators following Booth have been less concerned to preserve the sharp distinction he draws between didactic fiction and that other kind of fiction he revealingly declines to label, but most of them continue to regard propaganda with a skepticism that echoes Costa-Gavras’s own. In a conversation appended to the DVD of Z in which Vassilis Vassilikos, the author of the novel Z, recalls that audiences around the world all thought the film was about them, Costa-Gavras identifies ‘the problem’ the film uncovers as ‘the vanishing of democracy’, a problem his films intend not only to identify but to address through conversion, not to the kind of specific political program propaganda would inculcate, but to the kind of critical political literacy that would once again foster democracy in the face of rising military power. This mission could readily be recast as a more progressive version of Joseph Conrad’s ostensibly more conservative program for his writing: ‘to make you hear, to make you feel […] above all, to make you see!’ 34 – with the added proviso Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fox adds to the little prince in a favorite line of Charles Horman’s that Beth quotes to Ed: ‘It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; that which is essential is invisible to the eye.’ 35

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing Speech-act theorists have identified the impulse toward conversion in stories audiences can read as speech acts because their force is primarily perlocutionary (that is, dependent on the extra-textual effects of those stories) rather than illocutionary (enacted by the stories themselves, as the words ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ pronounced under the appropriate circumstances by a justice of the peace enact the marriage they indicate). Charles Dickens ends ‘The Chimes’ with an explicit exhortation to the audience, which reframes his story of Trotty Veck’s prophetic dream as a parable, specifically intended to drive social change through the conversion of individual readers: Had Trotty dreamed? Or are his joys and sorrows, and the actors in them, but a dream; the teller of this tale a dreamer, waking but now? If it be so, oh Listener, dear to him in all his visions, try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere – none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end – endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them.36

This exhortation places ‘The Chimes’ within a long tradition of parables intended to urge personal change (Aesop’s fables), social change (News from Nowhere), and institutional change (dystopian fiction from The Time Machine through Neuromancer). When we read such stories nowadays, we tend to ignore their perlocutionary exhortations or submerge them in cultural history, telling ourselves that this is what Thomas More wanted people to do, or this is how the future looked to Jules Verne and Edward Bellamy. Even when we take their social diagnostics seriously as prophecy, as do many readers of Brave New World and 1984, our main concern, like that of Missing’s reviewers, is to establish or refute their prophetic accuracy instead of focusing on what they are asking us to do. Perhaps the best way to refocus our interest in perlocutionary utterances is to return to the most celebrated of them, the Gospel narratives, which proceed from a scriptural tradition melding direct commandments with allegedly historical narratives more or less explicitly fabular, often combining these impulses in poetic texts like Psalms and Proverbs. The Gospels relates Jesus’s life and death and resurrection, but they are much less obviously intended, and less satisfying to read and reflect on as pure narrative than as a combination of narrative, fable, and explicit prescription. They all end with Jesus’s exhortations to his followers, which are readily translated into exhortations to their readers. Only once is this latter exhortation made explicit, toward the end of John’s Gospel: ‘And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name’ (Jn. 20.30–31, King James Version). Even when the Gospels do not change the audiences’ minds because they are being preached literally to the choir, they are intended to deepen their faith. Costa-Gavras is well aware of both of these functions: ‘State of Siege was intended to help people gain consciousness of this

105

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

The films of Costa-Gavras reality, of this problem. It’s also important for people who are more politicized to have a movie like this. They know what it’s about but it’s important to have a starting point. But the other people, the sort of people who are perhaps very surprised about these things, those whom you call your “silent majority”, are the most important, I think. I hope that when they see this movie they will start to ask questions of themselves and others.’ 37 Because calls to conversion always invite some active response for their completion, either changed beliefs or deepened beliefs and the actions those beliefs in turn inspire, they are never truly complete. Children reading the Gospels in Sunday school commonly take them as perlocutionary, even if they do not know the term, and adults in many faith communities do so as well. Academics, however, are much less likely to do so – not because we resist the particular injunctions to love our neighbor as ourselves or forgive our neighbor seventy times seven, but because we resist perlocutionary utterances and impulses in general as contravening the aesthetic imperative of disinterested beauty. Academics seem to prefer theories that cast narrative and fiction in illocutionary terms, as performative texts completed through the contextualized act of their performance, to perlocutionary theories of narrative and fiction, which recast them as performative texts requiring a specific response from the audience for their completion. More than the courts, the academy remains suspicious that Costa-Gavras’s identification of his films with ‘the truth’, because they are based on historical actualities or documented events, may be unearned. The conversion to which they call us does not simply involve the acquisition of new information or even the ascent to wisdom, but a radical change in our own identities that has the power to make us deeply uncomfortable both with the films and with the selves they ask us to leave behind. After all, when Costa-Gavras says, ‘I don’t know if you can change people politically with a movie, but you can start a political discussion’,38 he is referring to a discussion both between and within members of the audience, an invitation to a debate that is internal as well as external. Approaching Missing as a conversion narrative acknowledges that because truth is historically bound, there is always more truth to learn and live. Conversions may be irreversible, but they are never final. CostaGavras takes a long view of this process: I try – this is, if you like a very moral position – to condemn events by what they represent, in a sense to let events condemn themselves by what they are. The reason for this is that we live in a society which has been colonized by this type of cinema for over seventy years, since the very beginnings of cinema. And we live in that kind of Christian culture in which, when we have an event involving the bad and the good, everyone condemns the bad. […] So the problem in my opinion is not just to change the movies, but also to have any other kind of public which can understand that new kind of film. And if the public is colonized by traditional cinema, we directors are also colonized. So I think the change is going to take a long time.39

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s missing from Missing Hollywood abounds in movies that invite the audience to accept the allegedly new moral beliefs their climaxes dramatize: love conquers all, crime does not pay, actions have consequences, we’re all in this together. It might seem, however, that Costa-Gavras’s agitprop makes him an outlier because few movies encourage conversion in such a pointedly political way as Missing. Its status as an adaptation, however, makes the film representative of an enormous number of films and other texts whose creation and consumption join Costa-Gavras in redefining the nature and mission of art. Even more radically than theories of political art that define it as an act rather than a statement or creation, Missing’s call to conversion is an action that can be completed only by audiences who accept the call. The film challenges Western aesthetics’ assumptions that artworks are achieved, coherent wholes and instead places them within fluxes of competing actions and reactions. This, of course, is exactly what adaptation theory also does, undermining each text’s coherence in the name of a text-making, text-transforming, text-engendering activity that is never complete. Is the conversion to which Costa-Gavras calls his audiences limited to sharing the truth he imparts? His own filmmaking career, defined mostly by his experiences as an adapter, suggests that his encounters with a wide range of texts may be leading him to the same truth over and over. But raising the audience’s consciousness through conversion, like classroom teaching, holds out the possibility of making them wiser than he is – sharper, more judicious, more resourceful, and more active in assessing the political valence and responding to any particular situation. The most appropriate ending for Missing, the one that best expresses its combination of a search definitively concluded and a call to conversion left indefinitely open, is not the film’s final shot, its closing voiceover, the State Department’s response, Nathaniel Davis’s lawsuit, the legal definition of docudrama, or any of the supplementary materials included on the Criterion DVD. Instead, it is the epigraph Thomas Hauser uses to introduce The Execution of Charles Horman, a poem written by Charles that ends: ‘I can’t see the end / from where I am; / but when I get there/I will know.’ 40 Notes 1 Constantin Costa-Gavras, ‘A Film Is Like a Match, You Can Make a Big Fire or Nothing at All’, interview with Costa-Gavras in Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein, The Cineaste Interviews: On the Art and Politics of the Cinema (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1983), p. 74. 2 Costa-Gavras, ‘A Film Is Like a Match’, p. 72. 3 Thomas Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), rpt. as Missing (New York: Avon, 1982), pp. 194, 201, 243. 4 Constantin Costa-Gavras, ‘Missing’, interview with Costa-Gavras in Georgakas and Rubenstein, The Cineaste Interviews, p. 393. 5 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 3, 95. 6 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 68.

107

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

The films of Costa-Gavras 7 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 39, 57. 8 Vincent Canby, ‘Costa-Gavras’s Striking Cinematic Achievement’, New York Times, 12 February 1982, rpt. as ‘Missing’, in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, ed. Peter M. Nichols (New York: Times Books/Random House 1999), p. 561. 9 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 44. 10 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 144. 11 Costa-Gavras and Dan Yakir, ‘“Missing” in Action’, Film Comment 18.2 (March–April 1982): 59. 12 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 254. 13 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 160, 172, 174. 14 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 146, 175. 15 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 110. 16 Costa-Gavras and Yakir, ‘“Missing” in Action’, p. 58. 17 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 140–142. 18 David S. Machlowitz, ‘Lawyer on the Aisle: Missing Drowns in a Sea of Anti-Americanism’, ABA Journal 68 (1982): 627. 19 Richard Grenier, ‘Movies: The Curious Career of Costa-Gavras’, Commentary 73.4 (1 April 1982): 61. 20 Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 111. 21 John J. Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Action Film (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1984), p. 234. 22 Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, pp. 234–235. 23 Costa-Gavras, ‘A Film Is Like a Match’, pp. 70–71. 24 Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Stanley Kauffmann on Films: What’s Missing is Costa-Gavras’, New Republic, 10 March 1982, p. 25. 25 Costa-Gavras, ‘A Film Is Like a Match’, p. 68. 26 Costa-Gavras, ‘Missing’, p. 392. 27 Costa-Gavras and Yakir, ‘“Missing” in Action’, pp. 57, 58. 28 Costa-Gavras, ‘A Film Is Like a Match’, p. 73. 29 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 185, 243, 251, 253, 155. 30 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 155. 31 Davis v. Costa-Gavras, 654 F. Supp. 653 (SDNY 1987), p. 658. 32 Kenneth Burke, ‘Literature as Equipment for Living’, in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 299. 33 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. vii. 34 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: The Works of Joseph Conrad, 20 vols (London: Heinemann, 1921), 3, x. 35 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 70. 36 Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, Vol. 1: A Christmas Carol/The Chimes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 245. 37 Costa-Gavras, ‘A Film Is Like a Match’, p. 65. 38 Costa-Gavras, ‘Missing’, p. 396. 39 Costa-Gavras, ‘A Film Is Like a Match’, pp. 68–69. 40 Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. vii.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

7

Selim Bakri’s quest for a Palestinian identity: Hanna K. (1983) and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ Matthew Abraham

The quintessential Palestinian experience, which illustrates some of the basic issues raised by Palestinian identity, takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and home to them how much they share in common as a people. For it is at these borders and barriers that the six million Palestinians are singled out for ‘special treatment’, and they are forcefully reminded of their identity: of who they are, and of why they are different from others.1

At the very center of Constantin Costa-Gavras’s Hanna K. (1984) are the themes of Palestinian loss, exile, and dispossession. Palestinian attempts to return to a lost homeland and Zionism’s refusal to even entertain those attempted returns because they pose an existential threat to the legitimacy of the Jewish state come into sharp relief. The Palestinian Right of Return refers to the now, perhaps wishful, hope that those Palestinians who were expelled from Israel prior to its creation in 1948 will be able to return to reclaim their lost homes and property. Given the passage of time, the political effort that would be required to enact such a return of nearly 750,000 refugees, many of whom have passed on, is a nearimpossibility some eighty years later. The symbolic significance of such a return, however, continues to infuse much debate about the Israel–Palestine conflict because it captures the magnitude of loss and despair of what is often called the Palestinian Nakba or catastrophe. Selim Bakri’s story of return is at the heart of Hanna K., as Costa-Gavras explores the loss of Palestinian culture and society in the wake of Israel’s triumphant victory in the 1967 War and the beginning of Israel’s settlement project. As a refugee of Palestine who had been exiled in Lebanon, Selim attempts to return to his ancestral home in Kufr Rumaneh, only to find it no longer exists and has been replaced by an Israeli settlement called Kfar Rouman, where Russian immigrants are now living.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

The films of Costa-Gavras Throughout the film, we see the remnants and shadows of that previous society as Selim (Mohammad Bakri) tries to make his way back to what he once knew. Costa-Gavras shows through all the images of policing, walls, checkpoints, and surveillance that Selim’s identity is mediated through Selim’s outsider identity as a threat to Israel’s security as a Jewish state. The fact that he is a Palestinian who is returning to Israel to reclaim his lost heritage immediately makes Bakri’s court appearances of immediate importance to Israel’s international legitimacy. How Bakri’s case is handled and disposed of determines how Israel, as the only democracy in the Middle East, will be perceived as treating non-Jews within its judicial and political process. Bakri’s legitimate claims to his ancestral land are dismissed and his attempts to enter Israel are characterized as ‘clandestine immigration’. That Bakri has to break immigration rules to be intelligible to Israeli authorities takes shape in the scene selections Costa-Gavras makes for the film. When Edward Said speaks of the Palestinian experience being cubistic, he captures the various ways Palestinian experience is refracted through multiple frames of reference, the Holocaust, resistance struggles, and the effects of internal colonialism. In After the Last Sky, a reflection on the Palestinian experience, Said writes, ‘There has been no misfortune worse for us than we are ineluctably viewed as the enemies of the Jews. No moral or political fate worse, none at all, I think: no worse, there is none.’ 2 It is this condition that leads Said to think about how Palestinians can win allies toward winning the struggle for greater understanding and for increasing worldwide empathy toward their cause: How does one rise beyond the limiting circumstances, beyond negativity, into a positive affirmation of what we [as Palestinians] are and want? But that is not just a matter of will, it is also a matter of finding the right modality, the right mixtures of forces to harness, the right rhetoric and concepts by which to mobilize our people and our friends, the right goal to affirm, the right past to drop away from, the right future to fight for.3

This is the perennial Palestinian predicament: obtaining representation within a world that denies the Palestinian recognition, only to relegate him to the role of the threatening terrorist other. That Hanna K. (Jill Clayburgh) must speak for Bakri in the Jerusalem court and in the context of negotiations for his freedom demonstrates that Bakri requires a Jewish voice to make his case intelligible, suggesting that Palestinian silence and incapacity are a prerequisite to a Palestinian grievance being heard and understood. Hanna takes on this role to give Bakri a voice in the Jerusalem court, acting as the concerned advocate who presents Bakri’s appeal to return to Israel in the best possible light, which is what makes him such a threat. That he is in possession of legal documents that show he has valid title to his land brings into question the legitimacy of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in the wake of the 1948 War. The removal of nearly 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from what is present-day Israel comes into focus when Bakri appears before the court to respond to charges

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hanna K. and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ of ‘clandestine immigration’. Prior documentation of land ownership during the British Mandate became void after 1948 as Israel redefined the legal status of Palestinian property as ‘absentee property’, meaning that the previous owners had abandoned their land. The truth, however, is that Zionist forces drove out the Palestinian inhabitants to make way for the creation of the Jewish state. Since the State of Israel presupposes itself as the Jewish state, the status of non-Jews is a problematic one at best. The Palestinians are reminders of the fact that the creation of the Jewish state may have ended the Jewish Problem, but it ushered into existence The Question of Palestine. Bakri reminds Leventhal (Shimon Finkel) and Herzog (Gabriel Byrne) of this Palestinian question through his presence, confirming the Zionist fear that Palestinians do not accept the reality of a Jewish state that nullifies their rights, their claim to the land, and their dignity. To insist on recognition and respect as an excluded Other, as Bakri does in this context, is to challenge the state’s guiding outlook. The reaction to this challenge is telling. Israel is simultaneously an affirmation and denial. The affirmation of a Zionist reality comes at the expense of the rejection of a Palestinian reality. It is a Zionist commonplace that Israel emerged in an area that was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. What this quote from Israel Zangwill overlooks is that the Palestinians were very much part of the land for several generations prior to the signing of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the beginnings of Zionist settlement in historical Palestine at the turn of the nineteenth century. Zionism’s erasure of the Palestinians from the land and from history has proven to be a far more formidable task than its early architects, such as Theodore Herzl, may have anticipated. The Palestinian presence has been continual from the very beginning of Zionism’s surveying of historical Palestine as a future Jewish state. Palestinian resistance through two intifadas, various wars, and the continued press for the enforcement of international law through the United Nations has placed Israel in a trying and difficult position with respect to its long-term legitimacy. In this context, questions about the rights of the Palestinian people are not easily pushed aside, despite the use of various tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian quest for national determination and liberation. Such tactics include asserting that the Palestinians are an invented people who in-migrated around Israel prior to 1948 to benefit from Jewish prosperity. Joan Peters’ famous book From Time Memorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Over Palestine was published to rave reviews in 1984. It alleged that an ‘exchange of populations’ took place between Arab and Jewish populations before Israel’s creation because Arab countries expelled their Jewish inhabitants as sign of solidarity with the Pan-Arab cause, erasing the Palestinian grievance that 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed by Israel in 1948 because at least as many Jews were left stateless. Peters’s book was later proven to be severely flawed in its demographic conclusions. Ultimately, From Time Immemorial represents a Zionist propaganda effort seeking to undercut Palestinian claims of injustice arising from Israel’s creation.

111

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

The films of Costa-Gavras The opening scene of Costas-Gavras’s Hanna K. (1983) provides a clear example of how Zionism denies to the Palestinians what the late Edward Said called ‘the permission to narrate’, the right to tell one’s own story in one’s own way from one’s own perspective. The permission to narrate is a key component of any national liberation movement as it works to free itself of the control of colonialist frameworks and to control its own story and destiny. In this opening scene, which occurs within an Arab village outside of Jerusalem, one sees the Israeli military securing a home as a part of a security operation. Frenetic activity occurs as soldiers look for a supposed terrorist threat, in this context bewildered Palestinians who know what is about to happen to their home. The Palestinian family watches in amazement as the IDF soldiers quickly survey the scene, gathering up everyone around the house in preparation for an explosive demolition. CostaGavras effectively captures the fear and uncertainty surrounding an impending collective punishment. A group of Palestinian men dressed in camouflage, with their hands bound, sits in the back of an IDF vehicle. A family scrambles to collect its belongings as they are pushed outside by the soldiers. A search dog moves through the property looking for hidden people. In this scene, IDF soldiers find Selim Bakri hiding in a deep well after a brief search of the premises.The search dog, a German Shepherd, locates Bakri who is wearing a black suit and white shirt. A soldier states: ‘Hold on, no grenades, it will ruin the well.’ The Palestinians are treated as criminal terrorists in the absence of evidence. The dreary setting, a gray cloudy day on an early morning, reveals the clinical nature of the task at hand – the enforcement of seemingly draconian laws in service to the state. The Israeli Defense Forces are in complete control of the scene. Costa-Gavras effectively captures Palestinian bewilderment and awe at the extreme measures the soldiers implement to ‘secure’ the area. Selim Bakri is already deemed as being connected to the group of Palestinian men wearing camouflage sitting in the truck. One soldier quips to another, upon seeing Bakri in the well, ‘He’s probably pissed in it already.’ ‘They are used to it.’ One soldier commands another, ‘Ask them, “To whom belongs this well”? and “To whom belongs this house?”’ The subordinate proceeds to ask those gathered who the owner of the well and house are. Bakri is then pulled out of the well. The sergeant says to Bakri in Arabic, ‘Where are your weapons? You feel better now. Okay, come on. Tell me who you are and where you came from.’ In reply to the soldier’s question, ‘Who are you?’ Bakri replies, ‘Selim Bakri’. The sergeant then says, ‘Fine, Selim. You see? You’ve introduced yourself. That’s a start. The rest will come little by little. Now, let’s get moving.’ The soldiers assume that Bakri is somehow connected to the other men who are dressed in camouflage and keffiyeh (headdress). As Bakri is led off to join the other men who have already been detained, viewers can see about forty different Palestinians gathered in front of a structure adjacent to the home, waiting to see what will happen next. We see a man, three

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hanna K. and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’

Figure 7.1  Selim (Mohammad Bakri) in truck with other political prisoners after Israeli Army round-up

women, and a couple of children carrying a few remaining items (buckets and pottery urns) out of the house. The camera pans back to Bakri’s forlorn face as he knows what is about to happen next. The other men who have been deemed terrorists also appear dejected, realizing that by being in the vicinity they have cost this family its home. Costa-Gavras reminds us of the pain and humiliation these Palestinian are enduring by panning to the pained look of a Palestinian woman in traditional headdress, as she communicates her sadness and anger at the unfolding scene with a stern resolve. Similarly, the close-up of a young boy with disheveled hair and a look of steely contempt toward Israel’s right to destroy his family’s home in the name of security concerns is extremely powerful. The focus on a young Palestinian mother in white headdress with her two children imparts a sense that the impending home demolition will have a generational effect on this family. The close-up of a solemn-looking and regretful IDF soldier, with his eyes directed toward the ground, reminds viewers that they are about to witness a pivotal event that will inform the rest of the film. The Israeli commander’s statement to his subordinate in control of the demolition (‘What’s the matter? Go ahead’) signifies how routine and unemotional the destruction of Palestinian property and aspirations are when they stand in the way of the enforcement of Israel’s laws and Zionism’s territorial ambitions. The background noise of helicopters circling overhead helps the viewer to understand just how pervasive Israeli surveillance of Palestinian life is. The home goes up in a large plume of smoke and the operation is complete, ending the opening scene. The destruction of the house can be viewed as a destruction of the Palestinian identity and national aspirations. In the very next scene, we see Bakri being transported from an Israeli prison into Jerusalem and led into court with other prisoners. Hanna Kaufman enters

113

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 7.2  Bakri in background, silent, in first court appearance with appointed attorney Hanna K. (Jill Clayburgh)

as Bakri’s court-appointed lawyer. As Kaufman recounts for the judge, ‘He (Bakri) had no weapons. The report [about the incident] is explicit: “No equipment of any kind was found. In the well, all they found was a dirty, old jacket.” Your Honor, that hardly sounds like the uniform of a fanatic or a terrorist.’ District attorney Joshua Herzog, played by Gabriel Byrne, replies, ‘Yes, he was just going around in the dead of night climbing down the well to get a breath of his native air.’ This sarcastic comment from the district attorney prosecuting the case against Bakri reveals a cynicism toward Kaufman’s willingness to believe Bakri’s story. Hanna continues, ‘He was frightened, he was terrified. What would you have done Mr District Attorney?’ Herzog asks, ‘In his shoes?’ Hanna K. states, ‘He wasn’t wearing shoes.’ Herzog asks, ‘So he was wearing only his shorts?’ Hanna K. replies, ‘In any case, he certainly wasn’t wearing camouflage like the other defendants.’The judge asks, ‘Is discussion of the defendant’s clothing absolutely necessary?’ Hanna K. replies, ‘Yes.’ Herzog says, ‘Not as far as I’m concerned. For the defense perhaps since it’s their only argument.’ The judge states, ‘You may continue, Counselor.’ Hanna continues, ‘Selim Bakri is not a terrorist. He was simply trying to come back to what he considers his country. He did this secretly because our laws give him no other possibilities. And since, by our laws, this is also a crime, he should be punished according to the provisions of Article 521.’ Herzog corrects her, stating, ‘721, I believe.’ There is a furtive exchange of glances between Byrne and the judge. Hanna acknowledges the error and says, ‘Right, 721 of the military code. Expel him, then, but do not condemn him for something he didn’t do and had no intention of doing. It is no crime to be present by coincidence where others are preparing or committing illegal acts.’ This early scene provides the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hanna K. and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ essential narrative that will propel the entire story in the film: Bakri’s attempted return to his ancestral home is characterized and understood as a form of trespassing (‘clandestine immigration’) because that is the only way to comprehend an Arab Palestinian within a Zionist framework steeped in Orientalist caricatures. Selim is a trespassing Arab because within Zionism the Palestinian is an Arab refugee. Golda Meir captured this mindset quite precisely when she claimed, ‘There are no Palestinian people. There are Palestinian refugees.’ After this courtroom scene, Bakri is then transported across a border into Jordan, out of Israel proper. An Israeli soldier tells him to keep an IDF-issued jacket just prior to him crossing out of Israel. The soldier says, ‘You can keep it. It is yours.’ ‘Thank you,’ Bakri replies, refusing the jacket given to him, as if accepting it would signal accommodation with the occupier. The soldier states, ‘You’re free. Good luck.’ Upon attempting to re-enter Israel, Bakri is captured again and put in jail. Upon his second arrest, he specifically seeks out Hanna K. as his attorney. Although an interpreter is present during their brief meeting in the prison, Bakri reveals that he is quite fluent in English. Hanna K. discerns that he answers in Arabic before the interpreter translates for him what she says in English. Upon his revealing that he knows English, Hanna states, ‘But you asked for an interpreter.’ Selim replies, ‘No, you did’, suggesting that Hanna had assumed that he could not understand English. When Hanna accepts the task of acting as Bakri’s counsel, she serves as an intermediary between the demands of Israeli (Zionist) justice and the rights of the accused. She sympathizes with Bakri because she views him as simply having been at the wrong place at the wrong time. She clearly believes he has been dealt a grave injustice. Prior to the beginning of the second courtroom appearance for Bakri, a crucial conversation takes places in the judge’s chambers between three of the principal characters. With a picture of Zionism’s founder, Theodore Herzl, in the background, District Attorney Joshua Herzog states, ‘It’s my impression that this trial has become like the skin of a drum. The more one tightens it, the more noise it makes.’ The chief judge asks Hanna who is present in the chambers, ‘And you Council, what do you think?’ Hanna replies, ‘I don’t know. That’s not how it looks to me. The prosecutor is always in a hurry to get to the sentencing. That’s understandable …’ Herzog states, ‘This isn’t a common place trial.’ Hanna responds by saying, ‘It isn’t – I don’t have your experience’. Herzog claims, ‘I was speaking of the political aspect.’ In reply Hanna states, ‘For a poor young man who wants to go home …’ ‘There are two million more behind him’, Herzog exclaims. Hanna presents the factual basis for Selim’s case: ‘Your honor, these are the original deeds of purchase, dated July thirteenth 1876, and blueprints of various chambers in the house, tax receipts, certificates from archaeologists and art historians from all over Europe, scholarly articles.’ Unable to contain himself, Herzog states, ‘Believe me there isn’t any trace of this in the land survey maps and census.’ Hanna replies, ‘The survey maps and census were redone after the owners had been transferred to refugee camps.’ Herzog states, ‘They were rescued from the war.’ Hanna

115

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

The films of Costa-Gavras immediately attempts to rebut him with, ‘Yeah, right. After one rescue after another, they ended up in Lebanon where they were massacred.’ Out of frustration Herzog responds, ‘Bravo. These are the arguments used by our enemies.’ This specific scene closes when the chief judge asks Hanna, ‘Have you read Tacitus?’ Hanna states, ‘Yes, probably in college.’ The judge states, ‘A great historian. Not impartial, but he had the gift of synthesis.’ Hanna K. says to herself: ‘Fuck Tacitus’. The judge’s message seems to be this: Yes, we have engaged in unsavory deeds to create the Jewish state, but so have all states. We are a superior civilization to the Arabs. Therefore, let’s not get hung up on sentiments in seeing the situation as it is before us. The chief judge seems to be referencing Tacitus as a touchstone for seeing history at a distance, in its totality, instead of getting caught up in the details and emotions of any single moment. In this scene, Bakri is framed as a trespasser because he is a Palestinian seeking to return to his land which has been written over by Israel.Various bureaucratic roadblocks are erected to prevent him from reclaiming what he lost as a result of Israel’s creation. This separation of the Palestinians from any claim to historical Palestine constitutes a central Zionist strategy, making the Palestinians strangers in their own land. This commitment to the erasing of any aspect of the Palestinian past that is ideologically threatening to Israel as the Jewish state is central to the operation of Israel’s legal structure. Selim is a reminder that this erasure of the Palestinians is not complete and that the Palestinian right of return must be prevented from gaining traction. At the opening of the second courtroom scene, Joshua Herzog declares that there should be ‘no possible confusion between these proceedings and repeated clandestine immigration and the hypothetical and highly improbable ownership of property’. The judge asks Hanna, ‘Did you hear the DA’s objection?’ Hanna replies, ‘I did, but it’s unacceptable.’ As she explains, ‘The ownership of the house is the cause and motive of the clandestine immigration. It’s not as if I entered an apartment secretly, it’s as if I went in, after having rung the bell, to retrieve my handbag.’ Herzog attempts to interject, ‘Let’s talk about the bell …’ Hanna responds with, ‘Bells plural – the defendant rang any number of them.’ Herzog interjects to say, ‘As he was slipping across the border.’ Hanna K. continues, Before, over a period of five years (emphasis added) … letters sent to multiple requests for entry visas into Israel did not receive a response. Over a period of five years, he sent 5 letters to the ministry of the interior, 5 to the foreign ministry, 3 to the ministry of education and culture to request an entry visa into Israel and recognition of the ownership of the house in Kufr Rumaneh – Kfar Rimon as it is now called. He never received an answer. After the attempts by letter failed, he tried in person. He gets himself included in a charter flight organized by the Jewish community in London.

Herzog asks, ‘And they accepted him? Impossible.’ Hanna responds. ‘Under a false name.’ Herzog quips, ‘Jewish, I hope. Always strictly in order, our friend Selim.’ Hanna replies, ‘Always trying to be … The minute he arrived in Tel Aviv he

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hanna K. and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ reported to the airport police. He declared his real identity and the true purpose of his trip. He is treated like a madman, a fanatic, and is sent back to London on the same BEA plane. From London they send him back once more to the same refugee camp in Beirut.’ Herzog states, ‘The police decision seems reasonable to me.’ Exasperated, Hanna replies, ‘We might as well surround the whole country in barbed wire’. Hertzberg, in response, wryly observes, ‘The barbed wire is already there.’ He asks Hanna, ‘Would you be in favor of abolishing passports?’ Hanna says, ‘No. But they should be granted to those who are entitled to them. Plus, he was born here.’ Herzog claims, ‘The defendant is not a citizen of this country. He is not a citizen of any country. We don’t even know who he is, really.’ Hanna states ironically, ‘Maybe he doesn’t exist at all’ (emphasis added). As Said asks, Do we exist? What proof do we have? The further we get from the Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence. When did we become ‘a people’? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do those big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with others?4

Selim’s very existence and presence before the court raises a host of questions about the status of Palestinians within Israel as the Jewish state and the future of the Palestinian people. The implications of Selim’s trial become more and more immense. After Hanna receives a series of threatening phone calls for her defense of Bakri, a bombing takes place near Jerusalem that immediately makes the trial even more important than it initially was. In the next scene, viewers see a stranger speaking to someone on the telephone at Professor Leventhal’s home: ‘Yes, I understand. How many did you say? Bombs or grenades. Casualties? Any wounded? What about a terrorist?’ The stranger asks, ‘Professor, may I use your phone again?’ Leventhal replies, ‘Help yourself. This whole day has been dedicated to chatter, with a few bombs thrown in for good measure.’ The stranger says to Leventhal, ‘No casualties, luckily.’ ‘There are always casualties, one way or another’, Leventhal responds. Hanna whispers to Herzog, ‘Just the right atmosphere to intimidate me. It’s perfect.’ Leventhal seeking to assess Hanna’s role in the developing drama asks, ‘You feel very important Ms. Kaufman?’ Hanna answers, ‘No, not really. No.’ Leventhal continues, ‘All the same you have become pretty famous. You’ll have many clients and make a lot of money. Isn’t that enough for you?’ Hanna says, ‘I’m waiting for the sentence.’ Leventhal asks the chief judge who is present, ‘Does the defense have any likelihood of success?’ The judge says, ‘None whatsoever, at most, extenuating circumstances.’ Herzog walks over to Hanna and states, ‘Told you so.’ Hanna quickly asks him, ‘Why are you so concerned then?’ To everyone in the room, Hanna proclaims, ‘I don’t understand the problem.’ The stranger who was on the telephone about the bombing states: ‘Too much noise. That could do more harm than the bombs’. He is clearly referencing the fact that Bakri’s trial had the potential to be very damaging to Israel’s public image as a democracy

117

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

The films of Costa-Gavras if Israel denies Bakri legal standing to reclaim his ancestral home, even though he possesses the requisite legal title. Sensing that an unpalatable political situation for Israel might be emerging, the stranger says, ‘There might be a solution.’ Professor Leventhal eagerly responds, ‘A quick one I hope.’ In response, the stranger replies, ‘That all depends on Ms. Kaufman.’ The stranger asks Hanna, ‘What are you hoping to obtain from this trial?’ Hanna quickly answers, ‘The recognition of my client’s rights.’ The stranger replies, ‘Practically speaking, the house and a passport. It could be arranged.’ Hanna says, ‘I was just told the opposite.’ The stranger replies, ‘I’m not talking about a trial, which in any event will have to be concluded.’ The judge says, ‘That’s a matter of hours if the defense agrees.’ Eager to get to a resolution, the stranger continues: ‘Let’s assume then. What about a sentence?’ Herzog replies, ‘The minimum sentence is eight months.’ Seeing a way forward, the stranger states, ‘All right, let’s suppose that. In the meantime, the defendant becomes a citizen of another country, like South Africa. I have an excellent personal contact with the ambassador. The defendant is fairly light-skinned, I believe.’ Hanna says, ‘Fairly light-skinned and his eyes are almost blue.’ This is an important point about Bakri’s physical appearance, as if his light complexion and his blue eyes are assets to his cause. The stranger continues, ‘And if he could become a South African citizen with a proper passport and recognized citizenship, he can regain legal possession of the property if he can prove it belongs to him.’ Hanna quips, ‘That sounds a little complicated to me.’ Leventhal suddenly pipes up, ‘Ms Kaufman prefers tragedy. What is your alternative? Give citizenship to whomever asks for it? Make us a minority in a sea of Arabs? Cram us into a new ghetto?’ Hanna sharply pushes back, ‘No, I never said that.’ Passionately, Leventhal goes on, ‘Listen Hanna, for over two thousand years we have been separated, deported, massacred, but it is not a bad idea to recall it. Your family also had its share in the Holocaust. And now that we have a country, an identity, we must defend it.’ Hanna asks, ‘By refusing the same thing to others, Professor?’ Without hesitation, Leventhal says, ‘Yes, if it’s necessary. Yes.’ Herzog goes on to assert, ‘Hanna’s views of politics are a bit romantic, abstract, impassioned.’ Hanna seems to agree, asking, ‘Naive?’ Herzog, in reply, says, ‘Let’s say idealistic.’ Leventhal asserts, ‘It seems we are all more or less in agreement.’ Hanna asks the stranger, ‘What do I have to do in return?’ The stranger instructs, ‘Conclude the trial at once, tomorrow.’ Hanna asks, ‘What guarantees do I have?’ The stranger replies, ‘Professor Leventhal, district attorney, myself …’ and the scene ends. The court is the site where someone who has been accused of breaking the law appears to assert and prove their innocence. The defendant makes their case by presenting evidence that they have not broken the law, or that there are extenuating circumstances that explain why the law has been broken. Bakri does not make his case by testifying as most defendants do. His testimony appears in the arguments of Hanna K., who tries to present Selim’s humanity to the judge, district attorney, and so on, by insisting that he sought to reclaim what is rightfully

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hanna K. and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ his; although what technically is his no longer exists. Herzog’s skepticism toward Selim and his narrative that he is simply returning ‘home’ is captured in the dialogue with Hanna in the judge’s chambers. Hanna sees Selim as someone who has been wrongly accused of being a terrorist infiltrator, while Herzog characterizes him as a suspicious person with evil motives directed against the Jewish state. For Herzog, there is no conceivable way to understand Selim’s actions and desires in an innocent light. When Hanna seeks to contextualize the plight of Palestinians like Selim by recounting that they have endured hardship and dislocation as refugees in Lebanon, Herzog replies, ‘These are the arguments of our enemies’ – an obvious acknowledgment that Israel’s creation was based on the dispossession of the Palestinians. The realization that the case is a political disaster for Israel leads to the secret agreement between Hanna, Herzog, the stranger, and Professor Leventhal. Again, Selim has no say in determining his fate, leaving it to Hanna to determine what is in his best interest and most feasible. The realization that what is being done to Selim has a historical analog in the treatment Jews endured during the Second World War is that which must be avoided at all costs. Hanna extracts just as much in an admission from Leventhal when he states that Israel must deny rights to the Palestinians in the same way rights have been historically been denied to Jews in their pre-state era. Selim Bakri’s narrative reveals how the ideologies and discourses of Zionism operate. That Palestinian ‘needs’ and living conditions should be sacrificed for the security of Jews is simply a given within the ideological framework of Zionism. Viewers see this framing in every scene in which Bakri appears, as he is continually reminded of the limitations of his identity as a Palestinian Arab in Israel. Bakri is rarely allowed to speak and, when he is, he is frequently misunderstood or misrepresented. He is spoken for by the State of Israel, by the court, by Hanna K., and by the interpreter in the prison. As Edward Said states in his review of the film, ‘In court, Selim’s presence coaxes the observation out of Hanna that since he has no passport, is a citizen of no country, maybe he doesn’t exist at all. For his part, he has lived the itinerant and tenacious life of an exile, and without dressing it up at all, Costa-Gavras – quite literally for the first time in any European or American feature film – allows us to witness the Palestinian quandary as narratable human history.’ Bakri’s expressions of frustration at his existential conditions and seeming powerlessness to change capture the Palestinian predicament. Even when he is going about an ordinary task such as taking Hanna’s baby, David, for a walk in the baby stroller he is under surveillance by those such as Herzog, who states to Hanna, ‘This wouldn’t be the first time they used a baby carriage for bombs.’ Bakri often appears shackled, subdued, and subject to the decisions of Jewish men such as Herzog, contributing to his effeminized positionality. Even Hanna K.’s interactions with Bakri place him in a subordinate position, subjecting him to humiliation and ridicule. Bakri is trapped within the perceptions that others have of him as a Palestinian. Bakri teases and plays with his perspective when he reflects

119

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

120

The films of Costa-Gavras on the ironies of his condition in the scene within the refugee camp. Hanna asks Selim after following him to the camp, ‘What are you doing out here? Why have you come back here?’ Selim states, ‘So that you would follow me. Now you know what the place was like. After all, you never can tell. Where did you put the car?’ Hanna states, ‘I have been following you. For three days. I’ve been spying on you. I’ve been checking up on you. Didn’t you notice?’ Selim replies, ‘Yes, I noticed’ ‘How’? Hanna asks. ‘From your perfume’, says Selim. This scene speaks to Selim’s heightened perceptions that he is being surveilled, followed, and watched in his former family home, and what is now an abandoned refugee camp. This exiled perspective has been described as ‘cubistic’ by Edward Said in After the Last Sky. Selim uses his peripatetic status as a way to leverage key insights about the laws that govern the State of Israel, as well as the central precepts of Zionism. If we can view Bakri’s treatment by certain characters committed to the idea of a Jewish state and the ideology of Zionism not just from the standpoint of what is said about him, but also through certain discursive constructs that work to silence Bakri’s ‘permission to narrate’, one can better understand that Bakri’s agency is limited, if not virtually absent, throughout the film. As Said states, ‘Thus Palestinian life is scattered, discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, by the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed time.’ 5 The predicament before the court about what to do with Bakri – whether to deport him to South Africa and then have him seek reentry into Israel or to banish him completely out of his homeland – provides a reminder of the persistence and continual reemergence of the Question of Palestine. When Hanna visits Bakri’s ancestral home for the first time, she finds pictures of his family on the wall, seeing firsthand that the rooms in the schematic drawings that Bakri had given Hanna when she agreed to take on his case match up with rooms in the actual house. Several scenes earlier in the film come together in symbolic significance once we understand that Selim’s former home is now a settlement for recently arrived Russian immigrants. For example, Hanna’s and Victor’s interaction with an Israeli Defense Forces soldier on the outskirts of Jerusalem about whether a village called ‘Kufr Rumaneh’ actually exists is telling. The soldier claim that there is no Kufr Rumaneh, encouraging Hanna to get a new map. Hanna says the village dates back to the Byzantines in the fifth century. The soldier says, ‘Maybe, but I was not on duty then.’ He admits, however, that ‘Kfar Rimon’ does exist. After looking at Hanna’s map, he says, ‘This must be what is now known as Kfar Rimon.’ When Hanna asks the young Russian woman in Kfar Rimon, ‘What about the old village?’ she replies, ‘Was there an old village?’ Upon Hanna observing, ‘I haven’t seen any Arabs here’, the woman says, ‘We have a few in the countryside, but not here.’ The woman notes how hard it was for her family to build its home here: ‘It took a lot of work, too.’ Shortly after this scene, viewers see a Palestinian shepherd near Kfar Rimon who declares, ‘This is Kufr Rumaneh. This is Kufr Rumaneh.’ This repeated

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hanna K. and the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ pronouncement plays an important symbolic role. Despite the settler colonization of Kufr Rumaneh, this shepherd’s repeated announcement, ‘This is Kufr Rumaneh. This is Kufr Rumaneh’ serves as a reminder that Israeli society is built upon the ruins of Palestinian villages and that it is not so easy to remove all traces of Palestinian life by simply changing the name of a town because the original inhabitants still exist and remember the past. When Hanna locates Selim’s ancestral home at the museum of ruins near the Russian immigrants’ home,Victor asks, ‘Suppose this is the house. So what?’ Hanna exclaims, ‘Then we have one hell of a trial.’ It is at the museum dedicated to the ruins of the Arab village that Victor and Hanna see the following barely legible inscription over an old mosaic: ‘I shall adore. You adore. You will adore. I adore.’ Bakri clarifies in the last scene at dinner what the inscription says: ‘I shall adore not that which you adore. Nor will I adore that which you adore.’ This comes from the Koran and indicates the conditions necessary for mutual respect. This plea for mutual respect is violated in the film’s final scene. When Herzog and Victor Bonè pull up to Hanna’s house in the final scene of the film, we see that Bakri is no longer living in the garage as before because Hanna’s car is parked there. After going on a hunger strike and nearly dying, Selim is paroled and lives with Hanna. At the end of the film, Selim is living in the house with Hanna, with all that implies. Joshua pauses at the garage, noting the change in the garage’s appearance. Bonè asks Herzog, ‘Something wrong?’ ‘No’, Herzog replies. Joshua looks behind him again as if to resurvey the scene. Joshua says, ‘I’ll follow you up’, just as his car phone rings. He is informed by legal authorities of the bombing in Kfar Rimon. He does not say anything to anyone in the apartment, only asking Selim to leave the TV on so he can hear the news when the bombing is officially announced. The following announcement is made on the news: ‘A high explosive bomb went off in a bus at 9:30 this morning at a stop to pick up passengers in Kfar Rimon in the north of the country. Several of the passengers were wounded, with three of them listed in critical condition in Haifa’s Rambam Hospital.’ Herzog immediately turns to Selim and asks, ‘Where were you this morning?’ He asks Hanna, ‘What time did he go out?’ ‘Early, with me’, Hanna replies. ‘Then’? Herzog asks. Hanna replies, ‘I don’t know. I came back here at one and he was here.’ ‘Daphna’? Herzog barks. ‘She’s out. I came back at half past twelve’, states Hanna. Herzog concludes, ‘Kfar Rimon is one hour’, arriving at a decision about Selim’s guilt. Herzog accuses Selim of planning and carrying out the bombing in Kfar Rimon in the absence of any proof whatsoever, other than circumstantial evidence. One is left to wonder whether Selim may have been involved in the bus bombing when we think back about his bus trip to Kfar Rimon. In that scene, he can be seen quickly getting off a bus in the settlement, placing something or picking something up near the bus stop, and re-boarding the bus. He is seen speaking to the driver briefly beforehand, appearing to ask him to delay the bus’s departure for a minute. The scene introduces doubt as to Selim’s innocence, at

121

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

The films of Costa-Gavras least implicating him in the bombing. Costa-Gavras leaves this question about Selim’s role in the bombing open and in doubt. In response to Victor’s question in Hanna’s apartment at the end of the film about whether he played any role in the bombing, ‘Did you have anything do with this?’ Bakri states, ‘The decision has already been made.’ Selim’s fatalistic outlook, subscribing to the belief it did not matter whether or not he was involved in the bombing because Herzog’s rush to judgment pronounced him guilty, reinforces the Orientalist assumption that natives are not capable of accurately reporting on, and being honest about, their own actions and certainly cannot be relied upon to tell the truth. The movie ends with Hanna K. answering the door and seeing a whole battalion there to arrest Bakri, in response to Herzog’s call that he has located a terrorist. Edward Said, in The Village Voice review of Hanna K., claims: ‘Hardly anyone in the film speaks as a mouthpiece for governmental or institutional policy; instead, positions are taken on human, existential grounds, on the basis of lived experience, not on purely ideological or rhetorical principles.’ Said’s nuanced observation is an important one to consider in estimating Hanna K.’s impact as a political film. Characters such as Leventhal and Herzog speak from the power of personal experience, and while these experiences often coincide with a government line, their perspectives are conditioned by the legacy of the Holocaust and the oppression of European Jews.These perspectives, however, blind them to the Palestinian predicament and the tribulations of Selim Bakri. Is such blindness tenable into the future? As Said reminds us at the conclusion of After the Last Sky, ‘We are more than someone’s object. We do more than stand passively in front of whoever, for whatever reason, has wanted to look at us. If you cannot finally see this about us, we will not allow ourselves to believe that the failure has been entirely ours. Not any more.’ 6 Notes 1 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 1. 2 Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 134. 3 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992[1979]), p. 174. 4 Said, After the Last Sky, p. 34. 5 Said, After the Last Sky, p. 20. 6 Said, After the Last Sky, p. 166.

8

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conseil de famille (1986) and La petite apocalypse (1993): comic melodrama Jennifer L. Jenkins

Constantin Costa-Gavras’s cinematic career has been dedicated to stories of political, social, and personal corruption in a body of work that defines the ‘political fiction film’, as John Michalczyk has termed it.1 Across that oeuvre, ranging (non-chronologically) from Amen. to Z, twice Costa-Gavras has veered into comic territory. Conseil de famille (1986) and La petite apocalypse (1993) bookend Betrayed (1988) and Music Box (1989), two films about the invisibility of evil within the family. These two comedies, by contrast, work in counterpoint to the known evils, or at least ills, of modern life. The housebreaking duo in Conseil de famille reluctantly take the next generation into the family business, while the ex-radical bourgeois couple in La petite apocalypse are burdened with a houseguest who won’t leave. In the comic melodramas Conseil de famille and La petite apocalypse, Costa-Gavras uncovers the complex and absurd politics of domesticity. Costa-Gavras was appointed President of the Cinémathèque Française in 1982, and spoke at that time of his tutelage in silent film, specifically the works of René Clair, for whom he worked as assistant director after he left film school. Clair’s silent and early sound films offer formulas for domestic mishaps and comic melodrama. Combined with Costa-Gavras’s social agenda, comedy becomes a means of japing traditional power structures and bourgeois striving. Conseil de famille is based on a 1983 novel of the same name by policier and psychological novelist Francis Ryck. The French title refers to a judicial council that works in the interests of minors; the dual sense of ‘family council’ as a domestic decision-making entity is embedded. The novel and film are both coming-of-age stories centered on the criminal underworld, told from the point of view of young François with the retrospective voiceover that would subsequently be used to effect in Martin Scorsese’s similar tale, Good Fellas (1990, based on the 1985 Henry Hill memoir).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124

The films of Costa-Gavras Costa-Gavras frequently locates his political narratives in family life, and Conseil de famille differs only in the satirical approach: here, all politics are local and familial. In 1986 he told the Montreal Gazette, ‘the film is just an “image of most French families” and … the idea is just the working-through of “an old dream”’. 2 Not overtly comic in the Hollywood sense, Conseil de famille exposes complex relations between the criminal classes and the existing social structure. The title thus fuels Costa-Gavras’s critique of both monolithic French assumptions about famille and the plural meanings of conseil as advice, tips, board of directors, counselor. The family’s existence in counterpoint to traditional French middle-class life calls into question the very purpose of the institutions that define that life: the Church, private property, inherited wealth, education, and professionalism. Conseil de famille is a crime family melodrama, bridging the space between Touchez pas au Grisbi and The Sopranos, with super-cool French icon Johnny Hallyday as the link between the two. The film begins with a shot of a black and white photo of a family of four, then pulls back to an over-the-shoulder shot of a young man looking at the photo on a bulletin board. Costa-Gavras thus signals that memory frames the narrative. François’s journey from innocence to experience is carnivalesque,3 with a series of grotesque sideshows to mark the stages of his development from child to safecracker to cynic. Indeed, Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as expressed in popular culture provides a useful way of thinking about the comic trajectory of this film. Within the world of Louis Burlion, the traditional power structure, religio-ethical codes, and boundaries of private property are mere bagatelles to be inverted or subverted for personal gain. All manner of japery occurs in service of the family of thieves’ survival within and against the status quo. Family relations with the judicial system serve as a backdrop for the entire film. The narrative begins with children playing ‘les flics’ in the Metro, but one is ousted because ‘il ne peut pas être flic. Son père n’est pas Français’ [he can’t be a cop. His dad isn’t French]. François (Laurent Romor) is banned because, as one of the gang reads from the newspaper, ‘Louis Burlion et Max Faucon ont été donnés sept et cinq ans pour le vol avec infraction’ [Lois Burlion and Max Faucon have been given seven and five years for aggravated burglary]. Once home, François confronts his seamstress mother (Fanny Ardant), who has told him and his sister Martine that their father is away in a sanatorium. Faced with the newspaper story, she confesses: ‘Papa fait un métier comme tout le monde. Un peu comme un acrobate sauf que … ni spectateur ni gilet. La prison est un certain accident de travaille’ [Daddy has a trade like everyone. It’s a bit like an acrobat, except there’s no audience and no safety vest. Prison is a kind of hazard of the job]. This whispered conversation is caught by compulsive eavesdropper Martine (Juliette Rennes), and introduces her into the plot. The next scene heralds the return home from prison of Louis (Johnny Hallyday) and Max (Guy Marchand). Mother and children observe the dropoff from the apartment balcony, she clutching the children so hard it hurts. Throughout the scene, small clues suggest a level of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conseil de Famille and La petite apocalypse anxiety in Marie-Anne that must date to the last time Louis was home. She flinches when Louis comments that the champagne is warm, and yet as soon as the children leave the room swings from the sofa arm into his lap for an intimate embrace. The subtext is unclear as the domestic dynamic shifts from single-mother head of household to two burglars in the home. The family unit is restored, but what family unit is it? As Louis and Max settle back into life as parolees, they begin training like athletes for the work to come: running, shadow boxing, taking a variety of homeopathic potions doled out by Marie-Anne. François meanwhile undergoes a severe haircut and a transfer to a Catholic school, both part of Louis’s agenda of upward mobility for the family. Marie-Anne, ‘qui lisait La Nouvelle Observateur’ a liberal-intellectual weekly, objects to parochial education, for fear of molesterpriests – a reasonable concern within a family for whom secrecy is the code of existence. François uses this code to his own advantage, demanding to be taken into the burglary team by blackmailing his father with what he knows about their activities. Meanwhile, Martine’s eavesdropping and tattling have to be dealt with in a dramatic, nearly high-church ritual of secrecy and inclusion rivaling anything the mafia could concoct, certainly for a little girl. All of these activities in one way or another engage with subverting the official discourse, action that Bakhtin traces to carnivalism. More importantly, they relate to the passage of time and the growth of the children within this lifestyle. With each successful job, the family’s trappings of wealth and respectability, their public image, improve over the decade of the children’s growing up: The material bodily lower stratum and the entire system of degradation, turnovers, and travesties presented this essential relation to time and to social and historical transformation. One of the indispensable elements of the folk festival was travesty, that is, the renewal of clothes and of the social image … shifting from top to bottom, casting the high and the old, the finished and completed into the material bodily lower stratum for death and rebirth. These changes were placed into an essential relation with time and with social and historical change.4

As with François’s haircut and Catholic education, and Martine being packed off to boarding school, so the burglars’ clothing and accoutrements improve as time passes. The trappings of material success, however, threaten to expose them to the police. Marie-Anne’s advice to Louis and Max is, in effect, a travesty for each job. ‘Vôtre problème est vôtre style. Et vôtre style est vôtre ennemi … Changez le style à chaque fois’ [Your problem is your style, and your style is your enemy. Change your style every time]. She views Louis as an artist, and an artist can change styles just as the medieval jongleurs and carnival would invert the status quo. Only thus can they elude exposure and capture. After François joins the burglary team, breaking into increasingly haut-bourgeois houses to crack the onsite safes, we find that the carnivalesque dimension of these episodes has more to do with redistribution of wealth than pure travesty.

125

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

The films of Costa-Gavras Grotesqueries do occur, as when guard dogs are subdued by the smell of tiger feces and an enraged householder fires an arrow into the getaway car; only the success of their heists marks the inversion of social order. François, new to this life, pockets a magnifying glass at one house, and is rebuked by his father: ‘Nous sommes des professionels, pas des chapardeurs’ [We’re professionals, not pilferers]. Several comic mishaps occur, yet the madcap comedy of broken water pipes, armed homeowners, and a series of encounters with black cats is tangential to the main narrative. Upending the economic hierarchy is a calling that demands research, finesse, and with Louis being played by Johnny Hallyday, working in an undershirt, is itself a burlesque of manual labor. The film contains several scenes of serious weirdness, understandable only in terms of the carnivalesque. Each of these episodes serves to upend a traditional value, ‘shifting from top to bottom, casting the high and the old, the finished and completed into the material bodily lower stratum for death and rebirth’, as Bakhtin describes.5 When the now upwardly mobile Burlions (plus Max) go to visit Marie-Anne’s estranged family at the hereditary chateau in the countryside, we find that her brother has three sets of eerily identical female twins of different ages and one boy. Catholic symbols appear in every frame of this sequence. Marie-Anne encounters Nicole, clearly a former maid who is still attached to the household, although married with an 8-month-old baby. Her job at the chateau, it turns out, is to breastfeed the family patriarch, Marie-Anne’s grandfather. One of the cousines leads François to peek through the door at this spectacle; until he realizes what is happening, he is more interested in the safe they passed in the hallway. Marie-Anne enters the room and gently questions Nicole, who says that the grandfather hasn’t spoken since Marie-Anne left home. Then MarieAnne gently but firmly recites the final stanza of ‘Je me suis engagé’, a Béarnaise song about a soldier captured by the English.6 The supposedly deaf great-grandfather starts up from the breast at the final line: ‘Jamais je ne reviendrais’ [I’ll never return]. François rushes to tell his father about the second-floor safe as a lead-in to the other curiosity, but instead receives a lecture about ethics and stealing from family. Given brother Octave’s scathing response to Marie-Anne and Louis’s business plan, François’s first instinct may have been correct. The elevation of the maid to wet-nurse and the devolution of the grand-père to suckling suggests an inversion of station in this hereditary, noble context. That the feeding is presented as spectacle by one child to another also reinforces the element of time in the carnivalesque subversion of (the already perverse) droit de seigneur. The robbery from a nouveau riche home with a computerized safe allows François to demonstrate his value to the team, but all domestic concerns fall away when the safe is found to contain only a portfolio of Impressionist works. François’s education finally pays off, as he manages the computer hack as well as recognizing the prints in the portfolio. This bonanza is interrupted by a pair of giggling, chubby, white-pajama-clad, oversized cherubim who stare blankly at François as he greets them in English, Spanish, and German, finally throwing in Latin on a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conseil de Famille and La petite apocalypse whim.The duo burst into friendly giggles and come forward, explaining themselves, as François remembers in voiceover: ‘Nous sommes tombés sur deux latinistes de Bulgare qui ont été passé à l’ouest avec leur papa champion d’échecs et philatéliste’ [We had come upon a pair of Bulgarian Latin scholars who came west with their daddy, a chess champion and stamp-collector]. The surreal pair begin breaking lamps and throwing art about, resembling a Diane Arbus image come to life. Such doubleness Bakhtin cites as the beginning of realism: when the grotesque appears out of time and progress.7 Costa-Gavras enacts this stage of the carnivalesque late in the second act of the film, inserting a final grotesquerie before the film’s dénouement. Following directly from François’s contribution to the safe-cracking, the Latin-speaking Bulgarian manchild twins present a dissociation from understood hierarchies of immigrant, householder, and what one might expect to find in a nouveau riche show-house, not to mention French reality in 1982. Martine’s eavesdropping, kleptomania, and Electral attraction to her uninterested brother present another inversion of customary order. Even within a family of thieves, her behavior distorts the code. Martine bruises herself, runs away from Catholic boarding school, and arrives home a disheveled mess with a story of abuse. She then crawls into bed and asks François to impregnate her so she won’t have to go back to school. Rather than following a House of Usher scenario, Martine settles back into the family, now living a Parisian bourgeois life with a weekend farmhouse. The last act of the narrative presents a final carnivalesque inversion: honest work with one’s hands is seen as scandalous compared with dishonest work with one’s hands cracking safes. Max and Louis, courted by the mafia, are flown to the United States and return with syndicate plans and cheesy American suits and fedoras. It turns out that the draw for the mafia is François’s computer ability, but he has already decided to become an apprentice in a furniture restoration shop. The burglars react to François’s refusal to join the mafia with consternation, claiming that he has joined a sect or been brainwashed and needs deprogramming, all because he refuses to surrender his intention of becoming an artisan. They lock him in his room in the country house until he relents; while the family celebrates their complete alliance with the mafia, François phones the local police to turn in Max and his father. Such a generational inversion is central to Bakhtin’s core sense of the carnivalesque, which is based on the passage of time: ‘time, which is the true hero of every feast, uncrowning the old and crowning the new’.8 La petite apocalypse is based on Tadeusz Konwicki’s 1979 novel, Mala apokalipsa, an Orwellian narrative of a man chosen by external forces to make a grand gesture of self-immolation in front of the Central Party Headquarters in (unnamed) Warsaw at 8 p.m. on the day that Poland is officially erased and swallowed up by the Soviet Union. The actual point of protest remains ambiguous, as does the narrator’s commitment to the cause. Konwicki’s narrator (of the same name as the novelist) was chosen as a worthy public victim for his semi-celebrity: ‘He is

127

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

The films of Costa-Gavras a known writer, one whose death will cause some stir, yet not important enough to be a loss to Polish culture.’ 9 The novel unfolds as the narrative of the protagonist’s final day on earth. Konwicki the novelist has a very good time emplotting his fictional alter ego, Konwicki the character-narrator of Konwicki’s novel, and lampooning his literary reputation. While the novel was read in Poland as a roman á clef,10 even post-Soviet Western readers can find dark humor in the sarcasm and nihilistic comedy of the situation that premises the narrative. Konwicki presents this novel as a first person, last-day-in-the-life narrative à la Ivan Denisovich, although Costa-Gavras’s filmic adaptation opts for a comic metanarrative approach.11 In Jean-Claude Grumberg and Costa-Gavras’s script, the writer figure is again a lesser talent. Konwicki’s La petite apocalypse has already been published, and provides a diegetic model for Costa-Gavras’s hapless Stan Marek (Jiri Menzel). Living in millennial Paris, his value as a suicide candidate is not to the Party, but to an international publisher who wagers that the immolation will raise sales figures of the novel. Parodying not the Eastern bloc bureaucratic apparatus of the novel, but the Parisian fallen ideals of 1968 which, 25 years on, have devolved into bourgeois pseudointellectualism, Costa-Gavras’s film exposes the self-righteous sell-outs whose politics and apartments are both à la droite. The film begins with a daylight 180-degree pan of the rooftops of Paris, apparently from behind the Hôtel de Ville, panning the Left Bank from east to west, past the Panthéon and the double towers of Ste. Clotilde in the middle distance, across the nearer roof of the Theâtre de Ville to the Eiffel Tower, cutting to the mansards of the Louvre, and continuing west to the skyscraper cluster of Front de Seine in rear frame. A reverse pan follows, now in crepuscule, right to left toward the Hôtel de Ville, cutting just before the Louvre to a medium close-up of a rooftop as a black cat crosses a chimney left to right to meet the left-moving camera and exit frame right. Thus, Costa-Gavras introduces his story by moving from the seat of local government, bureaucracy, and public executions at the Hôtel de Ville12 past the secular and sacred monuments of Panthéon and Ste. Clotilde, to the palace of art at the Louvre and on to a monument of integrated residential capitalism at Front de Seine. The history of modern France is displayed as a timeline mapped upon the city in this opening credit sequence. Perhaps a sly nod to René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris (1930) as well as to the sinister bird’s eye pan-left of Manhattan in the title sequence of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), this sequence hints at the themes of the film to follow: a domestic triangle à la Clair and a potentially sinister overplot by cultural forces. Costa-Gavras adds a comic twist: the domestic situation of a man living with his ex-wife and her present husband is absurdly comic, and the pseudo-totalitarian plot is driven by profit-motive rather than political ideology. Following the cat’s exit off the roof the camera moves inside, into a stylish Rive Gauche apartment. A hard cut moves us from the director credit superimposed upon the carousel in the Tuileries to footage of Afghan fighters, more typical

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conseil de Famille and La petite apocalypse Costa-Gavras material. As the shot cuts to a man in a book-filled den holding a television remote control, we realize that the Afghan scene is on television, fully mediated by the screen. As the man clicks through channels, an animated narrative about the Pope appears onscreen. Cutout figures of the Pope flanked first by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, then by George Bush and Boris Yeltsin, move into position in the stiff and amateurish style made popular by South Park four years later. The retrospective news report sets the context for the day’s announcement: the Pope’s declaration of Honorum pauperum, a tribute to the world’s poor (characters continually mispronounce the agenda as ‘honorum poperum’ – an indication of their poor Latin more than their political views). With this social justice cause as a backdrop, the domestic plot of the film begins. Depressive Jacques (André Dussollier) leaves the den to join a cocktail party, tracked through the apartment as he moves from one group of old lefty friends to another. Jacques, now a television producer, is as well-heeled as the others and no more engaged with the cause – or any cause – than anyone else in the room. Indeed, their youthful activism is a standing joke as he moves from group to group. Jacques explains wryly of his job that ‘J’espère de faire moins mal à l’humanite’ [I hope to do less harm to humanity], apparently launching on his favorite theme of television as the opiate of the masses. As soon as they hear the word ‘l’humanité’, hosts Barbara (Anna Romantowska) and Henri (Pierre Arditi) exchange an amused glance and step away. The camera follows them to their vieux Kornfeld, an erstwhile Marxist economist, who is now ‘plus chair qu’en os’ [more flesh than bone]13 and chuckles nostalgically about their student days: ‘Où sont les vingt-ans’ – echoing Villon’s où sont les neiges d’antan. In the background of the shot a man circulates, carrying a tray of champagne glasses in a serpentine lateral movement while raising and lowering the tray over and through the crowd. (The drinks tray, décor, and ambient conversation combine to mark this crowd as le gauche caviar – champagne socialists and salon Marxists.) He enters the scene on a question about Jacques’ current crusade, linking the waiter to Jacques’ faded – and to the group, tedious – idealism. Despite his snakelike undulations, however, Stan (Czech actor-director Jiri Menzel)14 appears to be merely an awkward supernumerary. Jacques watches Stan watching Barbara, and then asks Henri who he is: ‘C’est le mari Polonais de ma femme’ [It’s my wife’s Polish husband]. This remark, the drab-chic mise-en-scène, and the editing on dialogue beats combine to suggest that this film could be a quotidian domestic farce, a staple of late twentieth-century French commercial cinema. Costa-Gavras cleverly deploys these cues as an aesthetic commentary on that very genre and period. The narrative moves further into intimate space, reminding us that all politics are personal. Jacques engages Stan in conversation in a back hallway, claiming to love Poles and asking about the situation in Poland. The two engage in a comic pantomime as Jacques takes the drinks tray so that Stan can deliver a classic Gallic shrug, and then hands it back so he can take another drink. The men play the

129

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

The films of Costa-Gavras rest of the scene, each holding an opposite corner of the wobbly, laden drinks tray. Barbara sails by to the kitchen, remarking archly that they were bound to find each other, as each is still ‘un peu rouge’. Jacques then recites his leftist credentials like an author detailing his publishing credits: ‘Castroiste et Maoïste en 68 … maintenant je suis M.R.G’.15 After this encounter, Stan retreats to his quarters, the maid’s room under the roof, to continue working on his writing project: ‘mon testament, comme toujours’. On his way upstairs he wishes Henri a happy birthday, unable to understand, even when corrected, any other reason for a party. What follows is a sequence that affirms Costa-Gavras’s comic intent: a near-silent pantomime of Stan’s inability to navigate modern life. Combining the expressionlessness of Buster Keaton with the physical foibles of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Stan sets out to change a light bulb. Framed in head-on medium long shot at his table in the sparse attic chamber, with a bottle of vodka and the testament that poses the dual problems of how to begin and what to bequeath, Stan ponders his existence. As he scrawls ‘Voici venir le fin du monde’ [Here comes the end of the world], to the sound of a diegetic opera aria on his radio, the overhead light flickers and dies. Being from Eastern Europe, Stan has a candle ready to hand. In its warm glow, Stan makes shadow figures, including a profile of himself with a serpentine, seeking tongue. He then reaches for a new bulb, places a stool atop the table, and prepares to climb up. Taking a swig from his bottle for courage, he overtips and soaks his shirtfront. Teetering on the stool atop the table, he places the paper lampshade between his feet. Momentarily distracted by his full-length shadow and that of the lamp cord, he wraps the cord around his neck with the bulb at the back and turns for effect, producing a shadow of a hanged man. Mugging various faces of asphyxiation, Stan then catches sight of the black cat from the opening credits, peering in at his skylight. As he attempts to scare off the cat, the lampshade falls onto the table; his gestures tip the stool, which knocks over the liquor bottle and then the candle, igniting the lampshade. Stan swings wildly from the electrical cord as flames leap about his dangling legs. The cord gives way, and Stan falls to the floor. As he attempts to smother the fire with a blanket the electricity cuts out, plunging the party below into darkness. Henri restores power at the fusebox, but Jacques notices the smoke, and the two race upstairs to burst in on Stan, sitting on his bed in the smoky dark with the cord around his neck. He says, by way of explanation, ‘Je voulais, je voulais … et voila’ [I wanted, I wanted, and look (what happened)]. Stan’s actions reveal an absolute innocence of cause and effect – perhaps a sly jab at the effects of Soviet groupthink. Costa-Gavras employs textbook comedy as Henri Bergson described it: ‘un personnage comique est généralement comique dans l’exacte mesure où il s’ignore lui-même. Le comique est inconscient’ [a comical character is generally comical to the exact degree that he is ignorant of himself. The comic is unconscious].16 Henri asks if he should call an ambulance, and Stan wanly suggests an electrician. Jacques sees the room, the cord, and Stan’s condition and jumps to the conclusion of a suicide attempt, projecting his own malaise upon the hapless Pole. Stan

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conseil de Famille and La petite apocalypse overhears Jacques’ whispered hallway conversation with Henri and Barbara and arranges himself as a figure of pathos in true silent film fashion. He succeeds in working the situation: Barbara is all solicitude, and leads Stan downstairs to more comfortable accommodation while the exasperated Henri offers his bourgeois blue blazer to cover Stan’s stained and charred clothing. All the elements of classic commedia dell’arte assemble: the harlequin, the wife, the jealous husband, the knowing friend. This episode predicates the entire ‘apocalyptic’ plot of the film. In its literal meaning an uncovering, apocalypse – secular or sacred – is a form of revelation.17 The little apocalypse in Konwicki’s novel is the death of the author, revealed in a public suicide (or not – the narrative ends before the final act); the little apocalypse in Costa-Gavras’s film is perhaps the revelation of the hypocrisy of the soixantehuitards. The journey from ignominy to fame in both novel and film is a slapstick of mishaps, mistakes, and mischances. This early conflagration that sets the plot in motion prefigures the planned immolation at the end of the film. Indeed, the film is nearly symmetrical, with the animated cutouts from the television mirrored by live-action figures in the final moments of the film. Directly following Stan’s ‘rescue’, Jacques and Henri argue about the course of action, with Jacques rebuking Henri for abandoning his humanitarian ideals, and Henri complaining about the inconvenience of having an Eastern bloc émigré in the attic. This scene is punctuated by regular blackouts, as the light timer in the hallway cuts out every 30 seconds – an apt metaphor for the pair’s inability to be anything but in the dark. Henri adopts the tone of the cuckold, although Stan has the prior claim to Barbara, and throughout the film finds preposterous any aid or comfort given to Stan. His jealous rages are incomprehensible to his friends and exhibit commedia dell’arte extremes. Stan’s near-suicide inspires a surfeit of conscience in Jacques, who determines to get Stan a book deal to cheer him up, even inveigling Arnold (Maurice Bénichou), an ‘ancien Mao’ friend who is now an international publisher, to print the book. Arnold’s one condition is that Stan must emulate the protagonist of La petite apocalypse and immolate himself at the Vatican to protest the Pope’s Honorum pauperum. Only this act will ensure sales and reward Arnold’s gamble on his work; as a media magnate at the millennium, Arnold well understands the value of a public and meaningless countermeasure, and is willing to exploit it. Ever beleaguered, Henri goes along with the plan because it will get Stan out of his house for good. The film’s second act develops the plan to get Stan to the Vatican and to give him the means and opportunity to set himself on fire at the proper moment. Stan, being Stan, cannot follow directions and – again like the silent comedy protagonists – wanders off at key moments to find sacrificial substitutes among more prominent underpublished Polish expatriate writers and to seek political asylum at the Polish consulate in Paris. His every attempt to elude the immolation plan is foiled by external forces of regulation or egoism.

131

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

The films of Costa-Gavras When Jacques, Henri, Arnold, and Stan finally arrive in the Holy City for the solemn immolation, they confront the usual vagaries of modern life: traffic, crowds, and squeegee men, one of whom Stan recognizes as a historian from Warsaw. Even he rejects a chance at fame: he likes washing windows in traffic. The group offer Stan a prostitute and an injectable tranquilizer; Stan resists both. In a good faith gesture, Jacques injects himself and then Stan, and they head out to St Peter’s Square, yellow gas can in hand.18 Costa-Gavras positions the point of view for this sequence inside Arnold’s media van, with multiple monitors depicting various scenes in live video feed around the square. Overseeing it all is an American celebrity director (Andréas Voutsinas) who will make a film of Stan’s immolation. Unable to accompany Stan to his final act despite his wish to be rid of his overripe houseguest, Henri hides out in the van, thereby gaining a front-row seat for events to follow. Costa-Gavras’s insertion of the media crew allows him to play with the 1990s fascination with self-reflexive diegetic shots and onscreen media as metanarrative elements. The bank of monitors relays the synchronic perspectives of the events in St. Peter’s Square, privileging none but creating a pastiche of the plural screens. A camera feed presents Stan’s progress in the square, framed by the monitor bank and commented upon by Arnold, Henri, and American video technicians. This metanarrative commentary creates a distance from the approaching horrific act, and also frames that act within the situational comedy of a media event that needs directing. Through headsets, Arnold directs Jacques and Stan to open the gas can and ready the Polish matches. Stan, predictably, is unable to open the can, and Jacques seizes it, opens it, and sloshes gas down his front – a visual reminder of Stan’s mishap in the garret. Under Arnold’s direction, Jacques hands the open can back to Stan and strikes and drops a match. As the gasoline on the cobblestones ignites, we (and they) hear a scream and Arnold’s cameraman turns away to shoot an immolation already happening just a few feet away. While the crew in the van search the video feeds for an answer, Costa-Gavras cuts away to an unmediated high angle long shot of St Peter’s Square, showing the immolation in progress. As Stan jumps up to see over the crowd, the gasoline sloshes onto the ground and Jacques steps into the small flame already burning from his dropped match. As flames climb up his body, a passer-by throws a coat over him and extinguishes the fire. Meanwhile, the crew in the media van discovers the second, third, and fourth immolations in the crowd, captured on their various video feeds. The one constant image in the monitor bank is the medium long shot of the Pope on the balcony, reading his encyclical and positioned just as the animated figures were in the news report Jacques was watching in the opening sequence. This repetition shows no difference from the original image early in the film, underscoring the point that the Pope is merely an animatronic figure and that the speech-event is nearly Dadaist performance, particularly once the immolations begin.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conseil de Famille and La petite apocalypse A cutaway to another extreme high angle long shot of St Peter’s reveals the, now, four human candles distributed across the square, while the Pope drones on. Back in the van, the American director extols the great footage, but Arnold is outraged: his idea has been stolen and his global media event preempted. In the confusion, Stan slips away into the crowd, dropping the gas can to be trampled. As a fifth column of flame rises, Henri discovers that this immolation is just outside the van. The American director insists that the van drive away from the fire, breaking all the video feeds except the Pope’s as the control room fades into darkness. As Bergson explained about situational comedy, Qu’il y ait interférence de séries, inversion ou répétition, nous voyons que l’objet est toujours le même: obtenir ce que nous avons appelé une mécanisation de la vie. On prendra un système d’actions et de relations, et on le répétera tel quel, ou on le retournera sens dessus dessous, ou on le transportera en bloc dans un autre système avec lequel il coïncide en partie – toutes operations qui consistent à traiter la vie comme un mécanisme à répétition, avec effets réversibles et pièces interchangeables. [Whether there is reciprocal interference of series, inversion, or repetition, we see that the object is always the same – to obtain that which we have called a mechanization of life. One takes a system of actions and relations and repeats it as it is, or turns it upside down, or transfers it wholesale to another system with which it coincides in part – all operations that consist of treating life as a repeating mechanism, with reversible effects and interchangeable pieces.]19

The situations of repetition – fires, misreadings, animations, reports, plans gone awry – in this film are familiar from the very beginnings of silent comedy, in which protagonists contend with the mechanization of life: think of Buster Keaton in the hurricane in Steamboat Bill and Chaplin in the tipping cabin in The Gold Rush, to name just two instances. The hapless protagonists face forces beyond their control and are battered by systems of repetition from which they do not learn and do not change. But they do prevail. From the darkness of the media control van, Costa-Gavras cuts to an offset press conveyor belt with books moving past: Stan Marek’s book, with the banner ‘L’Homme qui s’est brulé en criant “I Protest”’ [The man who burned himself, crying ‘I Protest’] and the full back cover devoted to an author photo. Henri and Arnold, stuck in Roman traffic, bemoan their respective situations: ‘Qu’est ce que je vais dire à Barbara?’ [What am I going to tell Barbara] and ‘Qu’est ce que je vais foutre de ces cent mille bouquins? [What am I going to do with 100,000 books?]. As they bicker and berate their driver, he reaches the breaking point and screams ‘I protest!’, indicating how easily Stan’s title will be adopted into common parlance. Ever the strategist, Arnold imagines a do-over, this time at the G7 meeting in Washington the following week: a flaming leap from a helicopter in front of the White House. Just as he begins to envision recouped investments, the driver

133

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

The films of Costa-Gavras curses at two window-washers: the Polish history professor and Stan. They run off, the conspirators pile out of the car to pursue them, and the music rises along with the rising crane shot over Jacques’ voice: ‘Stan! Stan! Arrêtez! Arnold a un autre idée!’ [Stop! Arnold has another idea!] – invoking a silent comedy motif of non-resolution as the antagonists race into an unseen future. Fade to black. The film was met with much fretting about the state of Costa-Gavras’s social conscience. Few critics could conceive of Costa-Gavras as a humorist, and fewer still were able to see the comic potential of a story about a failed writer being cajoled into suicide as a marketing ploy for his books. Jean A. Gili in Positif worried that Costa-Gavras was misplacing his attention: le résultat n’est qu’è demi convinquant, tant l’humeur ne semble pas la démarche congénitale d’un homme plus apte a dire le drame des individus broyés par des situations historiques qui les dépassent que le grotesque désarroi de privilégiés du monde occidental qui tenent de draper de dignité la soudaine vacuité idéologique qui s’est abbatue sur eux. [the result is only half convincing, such that the mood does not seem the typical approach of a man better suited to tell the story of individuals ground down and bypassed by historical situations than [of] the grotesque disasters of the western privileged classes who drape in dignity the sudden ideological void that befalls them.]20

David Stratton in Variety pronounced that ‘the director’s forte is not comedy’, noting that ‘Pic works better as a philosophical piece on the plight of people from countries like Poland’.21 Hardly a Marxist treatise, the film does invoke philosophy: the philosophy of laughter à la Bergson. John Francis Lane writing from the Berlin Film Festival, while mistaking both the plot and its location, nonetheless credits Costa-Gavras with handling ‘the ambiguities of the post-communist reality with subtle humour’.22 Le film Français quoted a publicity blurb attributed to Costa-Gavras and co-writer Grumberg: ‘C’est un film sur le désespoir, le désespoir tranquille’ [It’s a film about despair, about quiet desperation].23 The august Le Monde was able to concede some humor, but only in a somber context: ‘Un film comme souvent, comme presque toujours chez l’auteur de Z, porteur de malentendus, encensé par ceux qu’il devrait irriter, irritant pour ceux à qui il est destiné … Mais l’image de Costa-Gavras est implacable, les hommes flambent “vraiment”. Et le rire se fige, et le coeur se glace’ [A film as often, almost always from the author of Z, champion of the misunderstood, praised by those he should irritate, irritating to those for whom it is intended … But Costa-Gavras is implacable, men are ‘truly’ burning. And laughter freezes, and the heart is frozen].24 Stiff-necked critics on both sides of the Atlantic were reluctant to see CostaGavras in a comedic light, as though the lens of conscience were somehow tainted by the situational and physical absurdities of the plot. Critics seemed to mourn their own view of Costa-Gavras as auteur of meaningful causes, when instead he

Conseil de Famille and La petite apocalypse skewered their piety in embracing preposterous and hypocritical motifs as socially conscious art. In 1973 Costa-Gavras told Cinéaste, ‘I think a film is like a match or a detonator – you can make a big fire or explosion, or nothing at all. It’s just the beginning of something, not the totality.’ 25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 John J. Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984). 2 Bruce Bailey, ‘Cinema Notebook: Costa-Gavras’ Latest Keeps his Fans Guessing; Interpretation of Film up to Audience, Director Says’, Montreal Gazette, 26 April 1986, p. 32. The phrase ‘an old dream’ may be a reference to Freud, or to the popular song ‘Le vieux rêve’ by François Béranger of the 1970s. 3 ‘But even in its narrow sense carnival is far from being a simple phenomenon with only one meaning. This word combined in a single concept a number of local feasts of different origin and scheduled at different dates but bearing the common traits of popular merriment. This process of unification in a single concept corresponded to the development of life itself; the forms of folk merriment that were dying or degenerating transmitted some of their traits to the carnival celebrations: rituals, paraphernalia, images, masques. These celebrations became a reservoir into which obsolete genres were emptied.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 218. 4 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, pp. 81–82, emphasis mine. 5 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p. 82. 6 ‘Soldats de mon pays, / Ne dites rien à ma mère, / Mais dites-lui plutôt / Que je suis à Bordeaux / Prisonnier des Anglais / Jamais je ne reviendrai’. Béarn is in the French Pyrenees, known, like all the Sud-Ouest, for mountains and isolated communities that maintain their own language and customs. 7 ‘The literature known as “realism of manners” was already presenting, together with authentic carnival themes, the images of a static grotesque entirely removed from the main flux of time and from the flux of becoming. This is a form either frozen in its duality or split in two … these are but the lifeless and at times meaningless fragments of the mighty and deep stream of grotesque realism.’ Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p. 53. 8 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p. 219. 9 Jaroslaw Anders, ‘Tadeusz Konwicki: Polish Endgame’, in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 152. 10 ‘A Minor Apocalypse is a roman à clef, portraying in a thinly veiled way several wellknown figures from official as well as underground culture and politics. Many people took personal offense.’ Anders, ‘Tadeusz Konwicki’, p. 152. 11 ‘Konwicki’s novel is filled with local allusions that would have been largely inaccessible to a Western European audience. These include jibes at other Polish film makers, who Konwicki could criticize as an insider in 1979, but Costa-Gavras could not as an outsider’. David A. Goldfarb, ‘The Comic Struggle for Ideology after Communism: La Petite Apocalypse – Costa-Gavras and The Convert – Kazimierz Kutz’, Slavic and Eastern European Performance 15.3 (1995): 58–59. 12 Fronting the Hôtel de Ville, the Place de Grève dates back to the Middle Ages as a place of public executions, and was the locus of the guillotine during the Revolution and the Terror. Notably, for our purposes, it was also one focus of the Communard incendies in 1971. See François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia

135

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

The films of Costa-Gavras Nevill, Hachette (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 500, and Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 70, 120. 13 ‘En chair et en os’ is a common expression in French, meaning real people, flesh-andblood (bone) human beings. Henri is punning a bit here by teasing Kornfeld about his middle-aged paunch – the sign of all aging revolutionaries. 14 Menzel shares that dual métier with Konwicki and Costa-Gavras. 15 The MRG (Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche) evolved from the Movement of the Radical Socialist Left (Parti républicain, radical et radical-socialiste, MGRS), a longstanding social-liberal party that was a dominant presence in French politics for most of the twentieth century. The history of splintering and re-forming alliances and compulsive re-naming among the traditional Republican Left reads like a Monty Python skit, a condition clearly not lost on Costa-Gavras. See: www.partiradicaldegauche.fr/histoire (accessed 21 August 2019). 16 Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1938), p. 29. La Bibliothèque électronique du Québec, Collection Philosophie,Volume 16: version 1.0. https://beq.ebooksgratuits.com/Philosophie/Bergson-rire.pdf (accessed 21 August 2019). 17 Latin apocalypsis, < Greek ἀποκάλυψις, noun of action < ἀποκαλύπτειν to uncover, disclose, < ἀπό off + καλύπτειν to cover. ‘apocalypse, n’. OED online. March 2019. Oxford University Press. 18 Much is made in Konwicki’s novel of the protagonist’s existential choice of red, blue, or yellow gas can. He chooses blue. 19 Bergson, Le Rire, p. 115. 20 Jean A. Gili, ‘La Petite Apocalypse’, Positif 386 (April 1993): 53. 21 David Stratton, ‘La Petite Apocalypse/The Little Apocalypse’, Variety 350, 8 March 1993, p. 62. 22 John Francis Lane, ‘Berlin Reviews: La Petite Apocalypse’, Screen International 897 (5 March 1993): 22. 23 ‘La petite apocalypse’ [capsule review], Le Film Français 2439 (29 January 1993): 25. 24 ‘Le suicide des illusions: Le nouveau film de Costa-Gavras, distille un désespoir allègre et un malaise persistant/ La Petite Apocalypse de Costa-Gavras’, Le Monde Archive (12 February 1993). 25 ‘“A Film is like a Match: You Can Make a Big Fire or Nothing at All”: An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cinéaste 6.1 (1973): 6.

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Betrayed (1988) and the ruptures of race and religion Ian Scott

On 9 January 2017, 22-year-old Dylann Roof was sentenced to death by a jury in Charleston, South Carolina.1 Roof had entered the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015 and, at the conclusion of a Bible study session, shot dead nine members of the church’s predominantly African American congregation. He left one woman, Polly Sheppard, to, in Roof ’s words, give testimony of his actions to the authorities, the media and at Roof ’s trial. After his arrest Roof asserted that he hoped the atrocity would start a race war and he confessed to being an avowed white supremacist. His actions reached back into what Jelani Cobb described, a week after the murders, as the ‘vintage rationalisations for terrorist violence in American history’. Roof reputedly told one of his victims that: ‘You are raping our women and taking over the country.’ These agitations were precisely the ones expressed in a cultural touchstone for views on violence and miscegenation that Cobb highlighted: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation.2 Griffith’s portrayal of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era has long held a vice-like grip upon the popular imagination for all that cultural form can infer – and misconstrue – about racist terrorism. That Roof ’s murderous assault should occur exactly 100 years on from The Birth of a Nation only reinforced how far the United States had to go to find any social and racial reconciliation for the hatreds of the past constantly re-emerging in the present. It showed too how powerful cinematic imagery remained pertinent when approaching some of America’s most profane injustices; filmic constructions, as this chapter argues of Constantin Costa-Gavras’s 1988 film, Betrayed, that could emerge from the past and talk to the present with cultural distillations even more resonant than when they were first aired. Mass shootings and targeted killings like Roof ’s became a sorrowful legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency between 2009 and 2017. Obama addressed the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

The films of Costa-Gavras nation on fourteen separate occasions in the aftermath of such shootings – six times in his final year in office – and was moved to describe the depressing predictability of it all. ‘Somehow this has become routine. The reporting has become routine. My response here, from this podium, has become routine’, Obama said in October 2015, after a shooting at an Oregon community college cost the lives of eight students and a professor, the deadliest such attack in that state’s history.3 Many of these events were triggered – at least in the eyes of the perpetrators – by hostility towards race and/or religion, those twin pillars of America’s historic shibboleth. Despite the contemporary concerns of the ‘war on terror’ era that sympathies were being internally generated for America’s outside enemies – highlighted by the attack in San Bernardino, California in December 2015 and the Orlando nightclub shootings in June 2016 – many of the events – including Orlando in part – saw their legacy stretch back into the violent domestic history of racism and religious intolerance that really underscored the faultlines at the heart of the American republic. During 2016, amid such terrible acts as Orlando, Roof ’s trial, and in the middle of one of the most contested, and contentious, presidential elections in American history, reports emerged of a renewed interest in the Ku Klux Klan. Roughly falling in line with the 150th anniversary of the Klan’s formation – it was actually formed in December 1865 – newspapers such as the Boston Globe and The Telegraph in the UK reported on an upturn in Klan literature appearing on doorsteps across America. Renewed projections of the organisation’s membership were also recorded, thought to be touching 6,000, though this was nothing compared to the estimated 2–5 million in its heyday, in the 1920s.4 The 2016 election and candidate Donald Trump’s mantras about banning immigrants from certain countries and building a wall to stop Mexicans as well as other nationalities pouring over the border played well with many in that number increasingly attached to what has been described as the alt-right of the American political spectrum. Indeed, Cobb in his New Yorker article in the aftermath of the Charleston shootings saw Roof ’s actions as but a more violent expression of the ‘take back our country’ pleas that swirled around the Obama years. Here was a manifestation of those conservative factions wanting to ‘protect their women’ and unable to reconcile an African American in the White House.5 Obama’s departure paved the unlikely way for Trump to assume the White House. The man whose candidacy had often been dismissed, if not outright laughed at, in the eighteen months leading up to the election, became the 45th president amid a torrent of disbelief. His administration ran into problems straight away, much of these the result of virtually no political experience or working knowledge of how to run the Executive Office and, by extension, the country. But the true moral face of Donald Trump, beyond the petty heckling and clichéd vilification of all manner of groups, was brought out into the light by events in the summer of 2017.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Betrayed and the ruptures of race and religion On the weekend of 11 August 2017 many of the alt-right’s fringe advocates gravitated to Charlottesville,Virginia where the state was in the process of removing a prominent statue – and, by implication, a symbol of slavery – of the Civil War Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. The rally that followed ended in violence and the death of a counter-protestor, Heather Heyer, together with injuries to at least nineteen other participants, mown down by a car charging into crowds during the confrontations.6 In the immediate aftermath of the violence Trump pointedly refused to condemn the outright racism and bigotry of the white supremacist/neo-Nazi activists that had chanted racist slogans and held Nazi swastika flags side-by-side with Confederate ones. A reluctant statement finally denouncing the KKK and Neo-Nazis by name followed, only for the president to not simply countermand his previous statement a few days later but go further than his initial remarks had done about who was to blame for the violence, initiating what the New York Times described as an ‘unprovoked presidential rant’.7 In making a clear moral equivalence between overwhelmingly peaceful protesters, unhappy at the mere presence of white supremacists on the streets of Charlottesville and at the campus of the University of Virginia, let alone what they were protesting for, and uniformed agitators openly carrying weapons, wearing Nazi helmets and with swastikas in abundance, Trump added to the growing – and in the media open – suspicion that here was a president rooted in white authoritarian rule, sympathetic to extremism and racism. Indeed, only a few days before the violence broke out in Charlottesville, an op-ed piece by Paul Waldman made clear the linkage between the ‘Make America Great’ sloganeering and Trump’s patently obvious racist intent: What do you think ‘Make America Great Again’ was supposed to mean? It promised a return to a time when our country was less diverse and no one questioned a hierarchy that placed white men at the top (today, of course, the hierarchy still exists, but people question it all the time). Many of those white men feel like they’ve lost something over the years, particularly if their economic prospects are limited. For them, the idea of turning back the clock so they wouldn’t have to read signs in Spanish or be polite to people they consider their lessers was nothing short of intoxicating.8

Events from 2017 onwards cast a further shadow across cultural projections of race, highlighting the historic as well as contemporary schisms that persisted and which were given ever more immediacy by Trump’s comments and actions. Films like Moonlight (winner of the 2017 Best Picture Oscar), Loving (2016), Detroit (2017), Sorry to Bother You, and especially Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (both 2018) as well as the documentaries 13th and I Am Not Your Negro (both 2016), re-emphasised the country’s contemporary and historical blind spot of race.Television produced prominent roles for Black, Latino, and Asian actors, while The African Americans television documentary series by Henry Louis Gates, the writings of

139

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

The films of Costa-Gavras Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) and novels such as All Involved by Ryan Gattis and especially Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad reminded Americans of how contentious the questions were, and how much remained at stake. As the Trump administration entered a second year in 2018, it became clear that immigrant travel bans and Charlottesville were anything but isolated incidents. In the summer of 2018, the administration was caught in a litany of condemnation for its zero tolerance policy towards illegals – refugees in many cases – crossing the Mexican border into the United States. Over 1,600 children were separated from their parents, held in cages, and/or detained in separate facilities that resulted in stretched agencies then unable to reunite all families when administration officials attempted to backtrack on their previous hard-line policies. More than 38,000 individuals with no criminal records – a 146 per cent increase in less than a year from late 2016 – had also been reportedly deported from the United States during the course of Trump’s first year.9 Race, racism, and the spectre of nationalism hung heavy in the air after nearly two years of the Trump presidency. Novels and books highlighted the ongoing dilemma for African Americans especially as well as many other immigrant and native groups more generally in Trump’s America. But while the White House administration offered a reactionary digest to the critically progressive work of so many contemporary scholars, commentators, and filmmakers, the presentation of marked white nationalist sentiment arose not simply from the pages of modernday America, but from the annals of cultural coverage many decades before. Indeed, it was a film from thirty years past which seemed to resonate most with Trump’s philosophy, and which, prophetically, painted a picture of what was to come in early twenty-first-century US society. This earlier feature film presented a dark and unequivocal portrait of the 1980s heartland at odds with Ronald Reagan’s supposedly inclusive and renewable ‘morning again in America’ vision at the time. Now it can be recast as placing an unmistakeable spotlight upon 2010s American political culture and the immediate future under Donald Trump that the nation was confronting. Opening with the racist murder of a radio talk-show host in Chicago – a scene reminiscent of the real-life killing of DJ Alan Berg in Denver in 1984 – director Constantin Costa-Gavras’s Betrayed (1988) delved into the ruptures of race and religion in 1980s America like no other film. Its allegorical and contemporary equivalent, Alan Parker’s historic tale of the murder of 1960s freedom riders in Mississippi Burning (1988), highlighted segregation and sectionalism, ‘and a kind of racist hatred that no one had gotten near the screen in two decades’, suggests Tom O’Brien.10 But that film’s oft-criticised realisation of racial unrest and southern hostility couched in the buddy-cop motif of two white FBI officers investigating the crime – Parker later claimed the studio would accept nothing less – also diluted the force of its message.11 Nevertheless, for O’Brien the film upheld some of the tendencies of Reagan’s ‘new federalism’: that action at the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Betrayed and the ruptures of race and religion national level to undercut racial injustice was being circumvented by a diminishing ‘big government’ that was handing back responsibilities to the states.12 In Costa-Gavras’s film, a similar critique is at hand as FBI officers battle limited resources and resourceful foes. But white supremacy in all its illogical and stained contradiction is the force that is forever near the surface of the picture’s polemical attribution, and in a more pronounced way than in Mississippi Burning.The opening shooting of the radio host is believed to have been perpetrated by a white supremacist organisation in the vein of The Order, the very group who Berg berated on his programme and who later claimed responsibility for his assassination. In Betrayed’s story, from a script by the legendary if somewhat notorious screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, FBI agent Cathy Weaver (Debra Winger) is first seen already undercover – although the audience is not yet aware – amid the rural mid-western prairies, acting as a driver for grain harvesters. She has been sent to investigate a close-knit rural community thought to be hiding the killers of the DJ and a few other secrets besides. Weaver, masquerading as Katie Phillips, allows herself to be immersed into the family of widower Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger).13 Simmons is a Vietnam veteran bringing up two young children and living with his mother. As we learn from Weaver’s FBI handlers his wife left him but then later died in mysterious circumstances in a road accident in California. Weaver’s early reports to her superiors, including John Heard’s FBI chief Michael Carnes who she has previously been in a relationship with, conclude that ‘there is nothing there’. She’s pushed back into the community anyway and Weaver unwittingly falls for Simmons and gets closer to his two children, especially daughter Rachel (Maria Valdez). But, naively thinking she might be plotting out a new life for herself, Weaver realises her costly mistake when Simmons takes her out ‘hunting’ one night and she is confronted with the horror of his and his friends’ racism. Assisted by the local sheriff, the ‘hunting party’ uses a young African American man as bait, stalking him to his death in the scrubland outside the local town. Weaver is pulled out of the community once more to report on the murder, but Carnes, and his assistant Sanders (Albert Hall), know she must go back in if she is to accumulate any evidence that can be used for a prosecution. Ingratiating herself once more into Gary’s affections, Weaver and the family go to an Oregon retreat that reveals the wider organization’s political and revolutionary intent. Simmons is involved in buying up military hardware smuggled off the government while a political spin doctor and former veteran colleague, Bobby Flynn (Jeffrey DeMunn), brings an aspiring political rebel-rouser, Jack Carpenter (David Clennon), to the camp to drum up support for his forthcoming campaign. The exchange between Simmons and Flynn, which Weaver is privy to, hints at a larger conspiratorial plot. Though she cannot extract any specifics she tips off Carnes and Sanders. Knowing something major is imminent, Weaver ends up involved in a bank robbery in order to prove her commitment to Simmons and his brotherhood’s ever-increasingly extreme politics. Weaver shoots a guard and Sanders is there

141

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

The films of Costa-Gavras to fire at and kill Wes (Ted Devine), an accomplice and Gary’s right-hand man, who suspects Katie’s alias. Trying to insulate herself against further suspicion, Weaver/Katie succumbs to Gary’s pleas to marry her in order to win his trust and gather more information, including a list of high-powered friends and possible assassination targets. It is Simmons’s unlikely conspiratorial connection into the higher echelons of the national political establishment that produces a background check on the unknown Katie, however, which, via Flynn, uncovers her FBI status. Simmons indeed is revealed as no more than a ‘point man’ for a much larger political operation led by Flynn, unfolding in the corridors of power. The net then begins to close on Weaver as The Order’s deadliest and most high-profile murder looms. She is forced to accompany Simmons to Chicago, but is in effect duped into reporting to Carnes that the location is Denver thus isolating her from any limited FBI protection. The plan is to assassinate the populist Carpenter – a political stooge and liability all along – and thus initiate violent retribution across American cities propelling The Order into political power and Flynn into the White House. Complementing both Missing (1982) and the equally wrought Music Box (1989), Betrayed formed an American trilogy of movies for Costa-Gavras during the 1980s that examined love and deceit against the backdrop of increasing state concealment and intransigence. The film was also channelling a similar placement of law enforcement officers into irregular communities, much in the manner of Peter Weir’s Witness (1985). A conventional police procedural of the time starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, Witness was given critical social bite by virtue of its dual, conflictual settings of Philadelphia and the Amish Community of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Like Weir, Costa-Gavras was one of a number of outsiders in Hollywood kicking against the perceived conventionality and overt commercial brashness of 1980s cinema. In an industry churning out what was sometimes referred to as ‘Reaganite entertainment’, the rise of the blockbuster became part of a downgrading of ideological content that led some to feel that Hollywood was simply disengaged from society’s more troubling aspects.14 If however, as Stephen Prince suggests, it is too easy to uni-dimensionally link Hollywood to the Reaganite bravado of the decade, then Costa-Gavras and others were giving pause to that thought in asserting all wasn’t so easily pigeonholed by industry-led commercial performance.15 Along with contemporaries such as Weir, John Sayles, and David Lynch, the Greek born, French-based director found within the dark underbelly of the American dream a much needed antidote to the blockbuster, high-concept movies which were taking the box office by storm during these years, but not always leaving much emotional trace. A decade later in the 1990s, Costa-Gavras explained his method by exposing the hollowness he saw at the heart of American political cinema during the era. ‘Political films above all want to show – but there must be some meaning in what they show’, he explained. ‘You can take all sorts of artistic licence, but there must be facts – and witnesses. That is to say testimony from one who is a witness

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Betrayed and the ruptures of race and religion to what is going on’. Testimony does in fact become the arc upon which Betrayed’s relationships, trust, and moral exposure must operate. But he also saw in retrospect that keeping such feelings and ideas alive, no more so than in America during the post-Cold War Clinton years of the 1990s, was absolutely vital. ‘Memory is crucial (to people and cultures): film must never be allowed to forget. There’s most certainly “political” cinema in the USA today though it’s something very different. Forrest Gump for instance. The most violent films, the banalization of death, guns, evil, all picture the nature of US society. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers sucks in the audience, as does Forrest Gump.They create a political relationship with their audience.’ 16 Seeking a more affecting political commentary then for Hollywood to have to contend with back in the 1980s, events like Berg’s murder preyed upon all sorts of prejudicial hatred that simmered away under the surface of Reagan’s America. In fact, such racial and white nationalist antagonism was also providing cinematic inspiration for arguably Hollywood’s most strident political commentator of the time, Oliver Stone, who Costa-Gavras drew attention to in his quote above. Before the excesses of Natural Born Killers, however, Stone’s Talk Radio was released in the same year as Betrayed, and though the movie is more low-key – with much of its action tethered to the radio studio of main protagonist Barry Champlain (Eric Bogosian, the author of the original stage-play), belying its theatrical origins as a drama – it too displayed many of the hallmarks of people on the fringes of society that Costa-Gavras was highlighting: here given the oxygen of airtime to vent their fears and prejudices. Champlain is the embodiment of the ‘shock-jock’ radio personalities springing up during the decade. Deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission had paved the way for stations to broadcast more daring and provocative material in an increasingly open era of competition. Working in a downtown Houston high-rise that is exposed to every other window on the city’s skyline, Champlain has a perch from which to look down on humanity’s foibles and insecurities. As success proceeds him, his rancour becomes ever more stage-managed and his death equally so. When he receives a package in the mail from a caller claiming it to be a bomb, he defiantly opens the box on air, only to reveal a dead rat and a Nazi flag. Talk Radio continues to prod at such extremism festering away behind Champlain’s late-night ramblings – including similar references to The Order as a white nationalist touchstone – until he succumbs, at the close of the picture, to the madness of attempting to understand the public’s contradictory anxieties and hang-ups. Champlain’s monologue in conclusion begs for reason as the studio rotates around its protagonist in a claustrophobic manner that only Robert Richardson’s cinematography could realise as convincingly as it does. Ultimately, though, Stone’s ambiguous conclusion tilts away from Betrayed’s supremacist leanings by having a so-called ‘fan’ shoot Champlain after his show as he makes for his car, in a manner more akin to John Lennon’s death during this era, than Berg’s.

143

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

The films of Costa-Gavras Talk Radio’s small-scale production on a $4 million budget, was sandwiched between Stone’s high-profile successes, Wall Street (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). It was thus somewhat hidden away from a public who swerved it in theatres – where it failed to recoup its costs – even though it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and captured a string of respectable reviews. Stone leant on Bogosian’s charisma to capture the dramatist’s own original staging, with a cast of character actors of which only Alec Baldwin had any significant name recognition at the time. Costa-Gavras’s film – his second Hollywood outing in effect after Missing (1982) – had by contrast a stellar pair of contemporary Hollywood A-listers as its stars that suggested nothing if not a pitch for commercial viability. Berenger and Winger make an effective enough mismatched couple. At once physically attracted to one another, their morality eventually betrays both of them, undone by their deep-rooted upbringing in two very different Americas, as well as their life experiences and belief in what the country’s past and future might look like. Winger had been on a run of similar roles throughout the decade, from Urban Cowboy (1980) and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), through to Terms of Endearment (1983) and Black Widow (1987). Stephen Prince contemplates her ‘Bette Davis toughness’ in these movies while in Betrayed she pivots between a similar resoluteness and a vulnerability embedded within Cathy’s insecurities.17 Her job, feelings for Simmons and her view of country, despite her best optimistic instincts, cannot detract from the persistent schisms she uncovers about race, place, and position. At first she believes she can cure these mismatches and then, in a telling denouement that is as conspiratorial as it is complicit, doubts that such views will ever evaporate in America. The close of Betrayed finally sees Weaver and Simmons in a Chicago building construction with a vantage point of the street below when Carpenter’s car stops and he emerges. Despite her feelings for Gary and his confession that he truly loved her,Weaver shoots Simmons in order, she believes, to prevent the assassination, only to hear shots ringing out almost immediately from another angle that fells Carpenter anyway. Gary plays upon his attachment to Katie and the bond they have seemingly constructed with each other thinking that this might allow him his shot, despite his knowledge of Katie/Cathy’s FBI training. But Flynn has duped Gary in any case anticipating his failure – and possible death – and nothing has been left to chance in this carefully plotted assassination narrative. Cathy’s assignment was pointless all along; the real conspiracy was much further away, perpetuated by Flynn and others inside a government order that Simmons and his followers believed they were overthrowing. Cathy’s downbeat summary to Carnes and Sanders in the aftermath of these events – ‘you’ll never get them, not all of them’ – is less a rejoinder to the clique plotting inside the establishment that may put Flynn in the White House than it is to this ‘other’ America inhabited by Simmons and his ilk – a view of country

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Betrayed and the ruptures of race and religion

Figure 9.1  Katie shoots Simmons (Tom Berenger)

which materialised more vividly through the 1990s, 2000s and on into the Obama era.The Waco siege of the Branch Davidians in 1993; the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh in 1995; the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002; the Oregon Wildlife Refuge stand-off in 2016, as well as the series of shootings throughout Obama’s presidency and then Charlottesville in 2017; these were all staging-posts in the periodic appearance of militants, separatists, libertarians and outright white supremacists. They have all been vying at the margins of society, just like those in Betrayed, for publicity and action against, variously, fantasist Black, Jewish, and Catholic conspiracies of takeover and the alleged ‘interference’ of government authorities more broadly. In October 2018, the slaying of eleven worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue by Robert Bowers who alleged when arrested that Jews were committing genocide against ‘his people’ only reconfirmed the extremist doctrines and hatred made real and given a face in contemporary America. The perpetrators of these events – including Bowers who was believed to be a trucker – often purported to represent the ordinary, ‘blue-collar’ American. An omnipresent cinematic figure too, Berenger’s 1980s roles had begun to nail down this archetype as a no-nonsense character, apparent in Fear City (1984), Platoon (1986), and especially Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch over Me (1987). In the latter film Berenger rehearses a similar wrong-side-of-the-tracks romance playing Mike Keegan, a New York cop assigned to protect a Manhattan socialite, Claire Gregory (Mimi Rogers) – a witness to her friend’s murder – who Keegan begins to fall for. In Betrayed, Winger and Berenger’s characters are nothing if not the epitome of the United States metastasizing through the 1980s and on into the succeeding decades as a result of the events described. The end-game was realised in the

145

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

The films of Costa-Gavras polarising 2016 election of businessman, reality TV host and celebrity, Donald Trump, and all that happened subsequently. Divided, confused and afraid from opposite ends of the political spectrum as to what their country is and will become, Cathy and Gary are in many ways perfect ciphers for an America uneasy about its future projected into the second decade of the twenty-first century, and allowing schemers like Bobby Flynn into power on the back of populist promises. Back in the late 1980s, though, they also touched a nerve with a country which thought by the end of the Reagan years that it was well on the way to curing the nation’s ills only to belatedly discover that it was merely covering up America’s worst excesses. Supposedly exorcising the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, a term Reagan had borrowed from Richard Nixon, Simmons’s veteran status from the war is held up as a clear motivation for his disenchantment. The film provides alternative succour to other movies – Coming Home, The Deer Hunter – as to what the war’s and homecoming’s real legacy was. An end montage sequence envisages Cathy travelling the length and breadth of America, searching its soul before returning to Simmons’s farm and Rachel, hoping to instil something in the young girl – hope, providence – while still surrounded by rancour and recrimination. An economy propped up by the Wall Street boom that had burst in 1987, jobs being eroded in the American north-east rustbelt and mid-west heartland, and unease in such communities about increasingly progressive and multicultural coastal region cultures, Betrayed examines not so much the causes as the psychological products of such developments. Of course, none of these problems really touched Ronald Reagan’s vision of a newly emboldened America in the decade. Indeed, if the comparison can sustain itself anywhere between the political culture of the 1980s and that of the 2010s, it is in comprehending what Graham Thompson calls the ‘narrative of “Ronald Reagan’s America”’ during these years in precisely the same way that commentators have now cast their eye upon the ‘Donald Trump narrative’.18 As Thompson evinces, critics such as Gary Wills and Michael Rogin identified a president in the 1980s who was less a conveyor of traditional American values than a complete embodiment of them.19 Reagan was ‘synonymous with the 1980s’, as Iwan Morgan says, because, like Wills and Rogin, Morgan too sees continuity with the past and someone able to galvanise a broad consensus of American thought and opinion.20 Moreover, Reagan achieved that degree of consensus within a country that seemed to be heading towards anything but – on the back of Vietnam, Watergate and then Iran-Contra – as the twentieth century approached its final decade.21 At the same time though, Reagan also brought Hollywood and politics ever more into dialogue with each other. Thus the delimiting boundaries between fact and fiction, between the authentic and the insincere, became a watchword of society, and paved the way for those with a claim to be outside of the American dream as somehow missing out owing to some mythical, elitist, conspiratorial hold that dark forces had on the nation.22 In other words, Reagan brought an appearance of harmony to the United States by the very force of his personality.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Betrayed and the ruptures of race and religion Costa-Gavras in Betrayed challenged and undermined that harmony by exposing the hold that the ‘paranoid tradition’ has in America, which Richard Hofstadter had written about over two decades beforehand.The rural, Mid-western supremacists in Betrayed are claiming what Trump supporters three decades on would assert was their ‘beef ’ too, in a similarly Hofstadtian tradition; that they were somehow being ‘left behind’ by economic decisions and social attitudes, by a nation in hock to a liberal-elite that was insensitive to their vision of what the United States really represents. Betrayed is deeply prophetic in that sense then, and not only because it anticipated a series of films in the 1990s and 2000s – from American History X (1998) and Fight Club (1999) to The Believer (2001) and Imperium (2016) – that toyed with and/or explicitly conveyed angry white male/neo-Nazi/supremacist imagery and ideology. These films – patriarchal, bigoted, gnawing away at the roots of American civility and discernment – often drew attention to the political extremes, but did so reassuring us that such characters within them were confined to the margins of the American landscape. In Falling Down (1993), Joel Schumacher’s neurotically angry white male picture of the early 1990s, Michael Douglass’s ‘D-Fens’ is a socially castrated outsider ultimately exposed as playing and losing the social Darwinian game, ‘emotionally numb’ to the core, as David Bordwell terms it.23 Fight Club and American History X muscled in, quite literally, on what American machismo might mean in the dawning twenty-first-century age of anxiety. But Betrayed had already shed the reasoning and excuses for such anger and disenchantment that these 1990s and early 2000s pictures threw up as masquerades. It highlighted conflict in its barest sense; the vision of American society unmoved by fads and fashion, reasoning what for some the ‘purest form’ of the nation should be and once was. As Phil Melling posits of the dressed-up neo-Nazi paramilitaries that Simmons and Weaver come across in the Oregon camp, Simmons views them as ‘little better than make-up artists, despis[ing] their posturing and childish theatricality’.24 Betrayed’s power as a film therefore, like the power of any extremism and hatred brought out into the light, is based on exposing false reasonableness and decency, not focusing on lurid symbols designed to frighten and provoke. Simmons chases off the Nazi stooges not because his philosophy isn’t ultimately similar, but because he wants to couch his crusade in a martyr’s cause to refashion the true American creed, not in some dressed-up reincarnation of an earlier evil. His is an unswerving belief therefore, in what he misguidedly believes is and is not American; and therefore what is and is not a threat. Michael Coyne draws attention to the film’s most provocative scene in this sense, again in the sequence at the camp. The group’s most pliant character, Shorty (John Mahoney) confides in Katie that he lost his farm to the bank and his son to Vietnam; the ‘government’ has taken it all and he has nothing left. He simply wants a piece of what he feels is due him. ‘I got nothing left to take … I got a good heart too Katie, just like you.’

147

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 9.2  White supremacist campfire with Katie (Debra Winger) and Shorty (John Mahoney)

Coyne identifies ‘the essential decency of a man’ ground down by life’s injustices in this confession. But in fact Costa-Gavras is exposing Shorty’s reasonableness precisely for its inverted, contradictory presumptions.25 Women, African Americans, public servants, and people of all races and creeds could all equally make the same claim as Shorty. They have equally been done harm by the system, but equally find themselves the excluded ones set against his assertion that the land, the country, the flag, are all really his to claim, not theirs. Shorty’s appeal is in fact the very definition of fascism. It is after all he who revels in the earlier hunt and encourages Katie to shoot the wounded African American youth once they’ve cornered him, and then gets excited when Simmons talks of blowing up a building in San Francisco; a man whose reasonableness at what he’s lost has actually led him to believe in cold-blooded murder as an answer to his, and the nation’s, problems. Costa-Gavras’s politically oriented films, from Z to State of Siege, The Confession, and the Holocaust-themed Music Box, ‘focus on individuals tangled in the skeins of national, social, familial, and moral obligations’, argues Julia Klein. What she describes as the director’s ‘visual leitmotif ’ are these morals entwined within more aesthetic patterns of patriotism and belonging.26 It’s possible to argue that Betrayed finds its narrative straining at times under the weight of the film’s conspiratorial reasoning. Yet it still fashions illogical adherence like Shorty’s, and locks it into long-term waves of nationalist and racial sentiment that challenge these obligations – those ‘vintage rationalisations’ as Jelani Cobb put it – in often powerful and affecting ways. So much so that the film’s lessons ring out through the years and show the United States of the twenty-first century what remains to be confronted, what society must reconcile, if it envisages any lasting promise of American renewal.

Betrayed and the ruptures of race and religion

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Staff and agencies, ‘Dylann Roof Sentenced to Death for the Murders of Nine Black Church Members’, Guardian, 10 January 2017: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/ jan/10/dylann-roof-sentenced-to-death-charleston-church-shooting (accessed 21 August 2019). 2 Jelani Cobb, ‘Terrorism in Charleston’, The New Yorker, 29 June 2015, p. 17. 3 Gregory Korte, ‘14 Mass Shootings, 14 Speeches: How Obama has Responded’, USA Today, 12 June 2016: www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/06/12/14-mas s-shootings-14-speeches-how-obama-has-responded/85798652 (accessed 21 August 2019). 4 Jay Reeves, ‘Ku Klux Klan Dreams of Rising Again 150 years after Founding’, Boston Globe, 1 July 2016: www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/06/30/klux-klan-dreamsrising-again-years-after-founding/Fk5Zpm1lye1dWongnZPkaN/story.html (accessed 21 August 2019). The Telegraph reported the Southern Poverty Law Center’s findings of a 14 per cent increase in hate groups across the US, not directly linked to, but nevertheless on the back of Roof ’s attack in Charleston. Rachel Ray, ‘US Hate Groups Including Ku Klux Klan Increased Dramatically in Past Year, Report Finds’, The Telegraph, 4 March 2016: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12181747/ US-hate-groups-including-Ku-Klux-Klan-increased-dramatically in-past-year-reportfinds.html (accessed 21 August 2019). 5 Cobb, ‘Terrorism in Charleston’, p. 18. 6 Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Brian M. Rosenthal, ‘Man Charged after White Nationalist Rally in Charlottesville Ends in Deadly Violence’, The New York Times, 12 August 2017: www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/us/charlottesville-protest-white-nationalist.html?actio n=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pg type=article (accessed 21 August 2019). 7 Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, ‘Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames “Both Sides”’, The New York Times, 15 August 2017: www. nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html (accessed 21 August 2019). 8 Paul Waldman, ‘It’s White Nationalism Week in the Trump Administration’, The Week, 3 August 2017: http://theweek.com/articles/715980/white-nationalism-week-trumpadministration (accessed 21 August 2019). 9 Amanda Holpuch, ‘Families Divided at the Border: “The Most Horrific Immigration Policy I’ve Ever Seen”’, The Guardian, 19 June 2018: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ 2018/jun/19/families-border-separations-trump-immigration-policy (accessed 21 August 2019); Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, ‘How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families’, The New York Times, 16 June 2018: www. nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/politics/family separation-trump.html (accessed 21 August 2019). 10 Tom O’Brien, The Screening of America: Movies and Values from Rocky to Rain Man (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 164. 11 O’Brien, The Screening of America, p. 163. 12 O’Brien, The Screening of America, p. 164. 13 Berenger’s character was loosely based on The Order’s leader, Robert Jay Mathews who was killed in a 1984 stand-off with federal law enforcement agents in a remote part of upper Washington State. 14 Graham Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 98–9. See also; Andrew Britton, ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’, Movie 31.2 (1986): 1–42.

149

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

The films of Costa-Gavras 15 Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989 (London: University of California Press, 2000), p. xv. 16 Sally Sampson and Judith Vidal-Hall, ‘Interview with Costa-Gavras: Politics and Propaganda’, Index on Censorship 24.6 (November): 106–107: https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03064229508535997 (accessed 21 August 2019). 17 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. 178. 18 Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s, p. 3. 19 Gary Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 20 Iwan Morgan, Reagan: American Icon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), p. 3. 21 Wills, Reagan’s America; Rogin, Ronald Reagan. 22 Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s, pp. 3–5. 23 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 83–84. 24 Phil Melling. ‘The Adversarial Imagination’, in Philip John Davies and Paul Wells, eds, American Film and Politics from Reagan to Bush Jr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 190. 25 Michael Coyne, Hollywood goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 160. 26 Julia M. Klein. ‘Costa-Gavras’s Moral Journeys, From Z to A’, The Chronicle of Higher Education: Washington 49.23 (February 2003): B.13.

10

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Music Box (1989): melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust R. Barton Palmer

A filmmaker with a pronounced anti-establishment sensibility, Constantin CostaGavras has specialized in turning out well-crafted and emotionally engaging melodramas, based on ‘real’ sources, which resonate politically. In so doing, he somewhat obliquely follows the path blazed early in the history of the commercial cinema by other directors such as Michael Curtiz, whose British Agent (1934) is based on the memoirs of British diplomat, R.H. Lockhart, who was present in Russia during the early stages of the revolution. Those momentous events are illustrated, and even chronicled briefly, in the thrilling action sequences of the film. The real focus in British Agent, however, is the passionate romance that develops between the characters played by charismatic stars Leslie Howard and Kay Francis. Costa-Gavras’s films, especially those released since the early 1980s, reverse this polarity. His films might be quite conventional in dramatizing the discontents of personal, especially romantic, relationships (e.g., Debra Winger and Tom Berenger in Betrayed [1988]). What distinguishes them from the usual commercial product, however, is that, in exploiting the thriller as a generic frame, these films shine a revealing, indeed often, harsh light on the public injustices, collective suffering, and violence that result from oppression in its various forms. Broadly speaking, Costa-Gavras films yield more journalistic truth (at least of a kind) than diverting entertainment. Costa-Gavras, to put this another way, seems to understand himself as a global citizen first and an artist second, working within a variety of national industries and taking up projects from around the contemporary world. Though born in Greece, he has long been resident in France, where as a university student he became fascinated with the cinema and started his career assisting René Clair, with whom, as it turns out, he shares little in common besides a certain affinity for noirish stories and visual effects. His first commercial release (Sleeping Car Murders 1965) was a stylish whodunit in the Agatha Christie tradition. Clair likely

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

The films of Costa-Gavras approved both his choice of subject and style. But this project was a false dawn for Costa-Gavras. In the turbulent political atmosphere of late 1960s France, his cinematic interests soon shifted sharply toward the examination of a very different kind of moral darkness to be found in those institutions and practices whose actual nature is often hidden from public view or has been erased from collective memory. Though his films resonate with those of contemporaries who share a similar cinematic agenda, especially Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg, the Costa-Gavras oeuvre is essentially sui generis, especially with regard to his penchant for an unpredictable choice of subject. This aspect of his engagement in politics, broadly defined, is nicely exemplified by Music Box (1989), which deals with the, then, largely ignored history of the Hungarian Holocaust, the last large-scale operation in the final solution that was directed personally by Adolf Eichmann. Produced at a key moment in the history of Hungary (the fall of communism in 1989), this US-made film, based on a screenplay by Hungarian-American screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, breaks important cinematic ground for world cinema. Music Box is the first film to address how the Nazi final solution was, with great ruthlessness and efficiency, carried out in Hungary during the closing months of the war. As far as Hungarian cinema is concerned, Music Box can be seen as inspiring a trend that has picked up since the beginning of this century, with such critically acclaimed films as Son of Saul (Lázlo Nemes, 2015) and, most notably, Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (2005). In the face of official disapproval from the Orbán regime, which is not eager to examine the country’s regrettable role in the Second World War, Hungarian filmmakers have followed Costa-Gavras in confronting the increasingly welldocumented complicity of Hungarians in the persecution and murder of the majority of the nation’s Jews. In the memorable phrase of Daniel Goldhagen, many Hungarians, particularly members of the Arrow Cross, a long-established fascist party that seized control of the government in November 1944, have turned out to be ‘willing executioners’. Arrow Cross gendarmes, as many survivor accounts attest, were enthusiastic participants in the speeded-up management of the final solution in the waning months of the war, even as the increasing dominance of the Red Army made certain the eventual defeat of the Wehrmacht. It is a testimony to the virulence of the anti-Semitism of many among the Hungarian perpetrators (and perhaps of its tolerance among Gentile fellow citizens) that even when the end of the war was in sight they did not flag in their efforts to assist in the mass killing of their country’s Jews. The historical revisionism that has evidenced itself on the screen in Hungary has been opposed by those ‘intent on re-establishing long-standing national traditions’ who wish to view the Nazi era as merely a ‘blip’ in the country’s narrative, so writes historian Nina Munk. She concludes that Hungarian participation in the murder of most of the country’s Jews ‘continues to lack a clear place in the consciousness of Hungarian citizens’.1 Sadly, a failure to confront the brutal fact

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Music Box: melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust of Hungarian collaboration in the Holocaust has, since 1989, garnered the support of many in the Hungarian-American community (see Lazar for a recent example of Holocaust minimizing by a prominent institution of the émigré community, Hungarian House in New York City).2 In addition, it is important to note the rise of increasingly open anti-Semitism in the body politic presided over by Viktor Orbán since 2010. During the most recent election (2016), Orbán supporters printed leaflets bearing a photograph of Hungarian-American, Jewish financier, George Soros, with copy that identified him as an enemy of the country. These posters, as I saw myself during a visit to Budapest that year, were placed on sidewalks so that pedestrians would step on this image of the man’s face. Even Donald Trump, in a rant targeting Central American asylum seekers, contended that Soros had financed their caravan heading toward the United States.3 The ancient racist trope of an international Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the west constantly resurfaces, and has found a faux intellectual grounding in the so-called ‘replacement theory’ that has received strong support from white supremacist groups, including those that demonstrated at Charlottesville.4 Though Music Box was released thirty years ago, nothing could make the film’s politics more relevant today than the current surge in anti-Semitism, both in the United States and also in Hungary. In fact, it is seen as patriotic in contemporary Hungary to refuse to confront the many troubling questions raised by collaboration with Eichmann’s sonderkommando, which was charged with the deportations and murder, especially after Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross party, came into power in November 1944, following a coup. Declining German military fortunes on the Eastern Front meant that the Arrow Cross government had increasing control over the different programs of the final solution. The evidence clearly establishes that the rounding-up of Hungarian Jews and their transportation to Auschwitz would not have been as efficiently managed without enthusiastic Hungarian participation.5 Only the Russian overrunning of the death camp in late January 1945 prevented further deportations. A significant remnant of the Jewish population were still imprisoned in the Budapest ghetto when the Red Army siege of Budapest succeeded in freeing it from German control on 13 February 1945. Even before the war, the Arrow Cross supported a ‘Hungarist’ approach to reorganising the country’s social, political, and cultural structures, something along the lines of Vichy France’s promotion of patrie, travail, famille (fatherland, work, family). The Arrow Cross intended to implement the forced emigration of the Jews to ‘a place to be determined by international agreement’, from which they would never ‘be allowed to return to Hungarian soil’, according to party’s manifesto, written by its leader, Ferenc Szálasi, proclaimed.6 Offered the opportunity by Eichmann to manage the deportations, the Arrow Cross administration readily adopted the more radical solution of their German allies to what they agreed in seeing as the ‘Jewish problem’.

153

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

The films of Costa-Gavras In the immediate aftermath of the war, with the Russians occupying the country, these collaborators, or at least the leading figures among them, had to face justice.7 Along with members of his inner circle, Szálasi fled the country after the fall of Budapest, only to be taken prisoner by US troops in Germany. Returned to their homeland, the Arrow Cross officials were tried by a people’s tribunal and then publicly hanged. By the end of the 1940s, however, the brutal facts of collaboration started to slip into a memory hole.This political development was encouraged by Soviet refusal – in both the USSR and Eastern Europe – to understand the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish event that is, as a historical fact, quite different from the enemy’s murderousness in general. Nonetheless, Hungarian government attempts to root out forms of extreme nationalism proved perfunctory, even though this so called ‘ideological divergence’ was considered a serious problem for the emergent Marxist-Leninist state. The official party line was that ‘the arrowcross movement was finally annihilated by Hungary’s liberation’, but while the organization was decapitated, the ideas it supported have proved enduring, especially the movement to restore the country to its pre-Trianon territorial reach.8 In these greater Hungary expansionist politics, Jews, powerful international financiers that they are supposed to be, are said to constitute the greatest threat to the country’s fulfilling its long-delayed destiny. During the communist era, the Germans were more or less exclusively blamed for the genocide, and this remains the Orbán administration’s official version of Hungary’s wartime experience. The country, so he and many other Hungarians believe, was ‘more sinned against than sinning’.9 This exculpating narrative runs into the problem of the facts on the ground, well documented by the postwar memoirs of survivors.10 About 75 per cent of the country’s Jewish population of some 800,000 was murdered, most of them gassed at Auschwitz, with many others dying on a death march toward Austria from the Budapest ghetto as the Russians closed in. Hundreds, perhaps thousands were starved or worked to death as ‘laborers’. More relevant to the particular concerns of Music Box, about 15,000 Jews from the Budapest ghetto to which they were confined in late fall 1944 were murdered, often after being tortured or raped, in an unsystematic fashion by Arrow Cross gendarmes and youthful supporters of the regime. Jews caught out on the street were killed out of hand. Numerous others were murdered by gendarmes breaking into houses bearing the yellow star in search of hidden treasure. These informal, spontaneous killings were only incidentally connected to official Hungarian policy under the Arrow Cross regime to de-Judaize the country. In a hierarchy of evils, the casual violence of the Arrow Cross gendarmes, motivated by greed, blood lust, and atavistic cruelty, might be thought worse than the unfeeling violence against designated enemies that was required of those under military orders. Armed Arrow Cross gendarmes and their civilian followers, freed from command and not liable to arrest, were responsible for hurling thousands of victims, alive or dead, into the nearby Danube, most from a spot on the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Music Box: melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust embankment where today stands the city’s famous ‘shoe memorial’ to their slaughter.11 The Arrow Cross gendarmerie drew on recruits who were in many ways similar to the Germans who sought service in the SS. As historian Deborah S. Cornelius recounts, ‘the Arrow Cross mob, which carried out most of the atrocities, was made up of those attracted to the party by the possibility of spoils, the uniform, guns, and Arrow Cross armband’.12 Eszterhas and Costa-Gavras take up this aspect of the Holocaust in Music Box. Key to the narrative, and a mise en abyme for the director’s disclosure of the long-hidden, is the object that provides the film with its title. In the film, CostaGavras poses a simple question. Was a postwar refugee from Hungary, now an American citizen, in his youth a notorious Arrow Cross gendarme who personally murdered women and children and took delight in the torture and rape of adolescent Jewish girls? Or is he what he has seemed to be for the past forty years: a hard-working family man, loyal to the culture and values of both the land of his birth and his adopted country? The final link in the chain of evidence, mostly passed along by the Hungarians to US authorities, surfaces, as it were, by accident. By a strange chance, a music box is retrieved from the Chicago pawnshop shelf upon which it has sat for years. Its tinkling tune completed, the mechanism unexpectedly disgorges a sheath of forty-five year-old photographs. As it turns out, these images constituted the stash of a now-dead man, who had been using them to blackmail his former Arrow Cross gendarme, who is pictured in the photos. At one time, taken with his participation, these had been memorials of murders committed by one-time Arrow Cross gendarme, Mischka Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl). In one, he proudly poses with his pistol beside the corpses of what seem to be recently slaughtered victims; in another, he stands over a kneeling man whom he is preparing to shoot in the head. The photos document brutal, cold-blooded acts, apparently so that they could be later recalled for pleasure. After his emigration to the United States, the copies in the hands of his erstwhile comrade in arms, also now in America, made possible a continuing blackmail that Mischka was able to end only by murdering him. Once turned over to the authorities, the photos would constitute irrefutable proof of his guilt not only for working with the Arrow Cross, but also for participating personally in the informal murder of those confined to the ghetto. Perhaps even more disturbing, since he is self-consciously posing for the camera, the making of the photos and their preservation speaks volumes about his sociopathy. Mischka is not the farmer he said he was on his immigration application. Once the Hungarian investigation begins, he does admit to joining the Arrow Cross, but says that he was merely a fonctionnaire who simply followed the orders of others, doing no killing himself. At his trial, survivors of his attacks recall that he delighted in the assertion of power over his victims, often forcing them to play ‘games’ designed to end in their deaths. In the confusion following the end of the war, when many Hungarians, especially surviving Jews, escaped the Russian occupation and gained entry to the United States, Laszlo made a home for himself

155

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 10.1  Ann (Jessica Lange) with damning photos from the music box

in the American Midwest. For more than four decades he kept his dark secret, living a quiet, indeed useful, life until Hungarian officials decided for their own reasons to send proof to the United States that he had served with the Arrow Cross special unit that was responsible for thousands of murders. As in other countries occupied by the Nazis in which collaboration was extensive (such as France and Norway), the initial zeal for fact-finding vengeance (defendants were routinely and sometimes brutally executed) abated within a few months of the war’s conclusion. During the era of Russian occupation and subsequent communist domination (1945–89), ‘the Holocaust’, according to contemporary historian Ferenc Laczó, became an all-but-forbidden subject, as the Stalinist rulers effectively banned any discussion concerning the persecution and annihilation of the Jews. Remarkably, prohibition of the subject under Stalinism in Eastern Europe by and large corresponded to Western European trends of the 1950s, where the first wave of responses was also followed by significantly diminished levels of engagement.13

Even in the Jewish survivor community in Hungary there was a tendency to blame individual génocidaires while considering them to be ‘unrepresentative of Hungarians in general’, who were thus not to ‘be held responsible for crimes committed against Jews’, even though an increasingly virulent anti-Semitism had

Music Box: melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

become deeply rooted in the country’s culture before the start of the war. The assimilationist Neolog community in Budapest were often seen as foolishly compliant in accepting their fate.14 Writing in the post-1956 Soviet era in English, presumably to engage a world audience, Hungarian historian M. Lackó does his best to minimize the support that the Arrow Cross enjoyed from the population in general, even while only vaguely referring to the murder, torture, rape, robbery, and mayhem that the gendarmerie unleashed on the helpless inmates of the Budapest ghetto: This terrorism had no mass base whatsoever; it relied on a part of the staff of officers, minor fanaticized groups of the petty bourgeoisie and lumpen elements … the masses in the broader sense were passive.15

These conclusions have been forcefully challenged by recent research, especially that sponsored by the faculty of (now-exiled) Central European University.16 Significantly, Mischka is no fanatic, but a young man attracted to service in the gendarmes, so he says, because of the striking uniform. He must be like many others who decided to join the Arrow Cross police. The generally quiet rhythms of most of his postwar adult life make him seem the type who would become ‘fanaticized’. Like others in the exile community, among whom he is a popular figure, after the failure of the 1956 uprising, he adopted an anti-communist politics. This seems a mild form of nationalism, and it leads him only to stage a non-violent disruption of the performance of a visiting Hungarian dance troupe. The man’s essential ordinariness, in other words, is confirmed by his postwar life as a law-abiding steelworker and family man, who is proud that his son served in the Vietnam War. This reformation, if that is what we should call it, makes his wartime ‘career’ as a casual murderer of women and children, as well as his rape of adolescent girls, seem completely impossible. Which it is – only if we accept the conventional notion that ‘character’ is a complex set of traits and energies that make coherent moral sense. However fully intentional and individual, the worst evil, or so the film reveals, can instead lack metaphysical and ideological depth. Such actions are simply a matter of maleficent chance, resulting from the regrettable collision of a usually repressed lustful brutality with circumstances that not only allow, but also legitimate, its horrific expression. Mischka is a fit subject for a profile in depth (perhaps along the lines of The Boston Strangler [Richard Fleischer, 1968]) or, a more relevant historical example, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that Eszterhas reports consulting as part of his research before writing the screenplay.17 Yet a character study is not exactly the film that the screenwriter and director had in mind. For Eszterhas, the story dramatized in Music Box has biographical resonance since in part it retells what happened when he discovered that his father has served with the Arrow Cross during the German occupation, though he was not in the strictest sense one of the perpetrators. That discovery led to a rupture that

157

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

The films of Costa-Gavras never healed before the father died. At the center of Music Box is a slant version of these events, suitably accommodated to the audience-pleasing conventions of melodrama (i.e., the son becomes a mother eager to protect her son from the grandfather whom she discovers was in his youth a conscienceless killer). For the director, however, this plot structure had no personal resonance. What seems instead to have appealed to Costa-Gavras in the script was that it permitted him, albeit with a changed historical framework, to recycle the emotional/political themes that had proven such good box office in Missing (1982), while avoiding the miscalculations that led not long afterward to his most egregious failure: Hanna K. (1983). In Music Box, the daughter, Ann Talbot (Jessica Lange), a prominent local lawyer, is the main character, not her father. Born in the United States, she has no connection to what happened to her father during the war.When the Hungarian government suddenly asks for Mischka to be extradited to face trial for murder and rape, he denies that the man they are looking for is him, and Ann decides to defend him at the Immigration and Naturalization Service trial. Mischka insists that it must be someone else whom the Hungarians are looking for, as in the John Demjanjuk case, which the film briefly references.18 A huge amount of evidence, including eyewitness accounts and his Arrow Cross gendarme identification card, indicates that the Hungarians have got the right man. In order for their request to be granted, he must be deprived of his citizenship, which he obtained under false pretenses, if he is indeed the Mischka to which these forty-five-year-old accounts refer. Reading through the thick file of seemingly conclusive documents and testimony, Ann cannot allow herself to believe in her father’s guilt. Though suspicious, she reaches out for another explanation – the Hungarians must be falsifying evidence for their own purposes, whatever they might be. At the trial, the witnesses identify her father as the perpetrator, and so does a former comrade confined to his hospital bed in Budapest where the trial temporarily relocates. He too is sure that Laszlo is the notorious Mischka from the Arrow Cross, but then a further sheath of documents is suddenly supplied to the judge; these suggest that all the witnesses are lying at the instigation of Hungarian authorities. These documents attest that evidence has been forged and witness testimony falsified in order to get rid of an American who has become too vocal an anti-communist. In any event, Mischka is exonerated; he will not be deported. Chance, however, again plays a huge role in the old man’s fate. Not knowing what she will find, Ann redeems a decades-old pawn ticket and is handed the music box.Yet another trove of documents now finds its way into her hands. She can do nothing but accept that her father is indeed guilty of horrendous crimes. It is a shattering moment. Confronted with the fact of the photographs, he does not flinch, showing no consciousness of guilt or remorse. The trial is over, and if anything more is to be done, it is up to Ann. The undeniable proof of his unspeakable villainy throws her into a deep depression, but she does not hesitate to turn over the evidence to the press in hopes that the authorities will

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Music Box: melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust

Figure 10.2  Newspaper revealing Mike Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl) as a war criminal. Like many finales in Costa-Gavras’s films, this one evokes contradictory feelings of triumph (the truth is now known) and deep regret (what I now know is a horrible burden to bear)

re-open the case. At film’s end, Mischka’s deportation to Hungary is still in doubt, but she has severed all connection with him. Ann is concerned to protect her young son Mikey (Lukas Haas) from the grandfather he loves. In the film’s final scene, yet another microcosm of the film’s agenda to unearth unpleasant facts, as she hands the newspaper in which the revealing photographs of his grandfather have been published. Not the whole truth, but its emotional center Music Box – a commercial success, especially in the American market – serves as a useful illustration of the advantages and problems of using melodrama to make engaging explorations of political issues that in themselves might not hold enough interest for viewers, especially those in the United States, few of whom would have any more than a vague idea of the Holocaust. In any case, that Hungarians were complicit in the slaughter of their country’s Jews is not a revelation with any particular political relevance for the American public. The most important facts of the Hungarian Holocaust, which I have here outlined, as well as the issues both political and moral that they raised at the time, are only briefly referenced in Music Box, often somewhat confusingly. The film gives the misimpression that

159

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

The films of Costa-Gavras the Arrow Cross was simply a police unit rather than a political movement that espoused, if in an extreme fashion, the views of a substantial element within Hungarian society. History is in the film reduced to background, and Costa-Gavras does not supply an account of that history as cogent as Steven Spielberg offered in Schindler’s List (1993). As suggested, it is most important that this history is in fact represented, even if it is in only a limited and sketchy fashion. Costa-Gavras arguably dramatizes what is most important to remember about the Hungarian Holocaust by raising two connected and enduringly difficult issues: the psychological/moral nature of those ‘ordinary’ génocidaires whose descent into incredible depravity proved transitory; and the felt need for society to disavow these actions and seek justice, whatever the collateral damage, for those victims who no longer have the voice to accuse them. Perhaps too seamlessly, Music Box integrates a strong and universalizing focus on family relations in extremis with a far from simple engagement with the then largely unknown facts of the Hungarian final solution. This formula, as we will see, has emerged from the commercial experience of the director as the most appropriate. It is true enough, as Michael Wilmington, reviewing the film in the LA Times, observes, that the film is ‘at bottom, a conventional trial melodrama with revelations that come too easily and too glibly’.19 He finds Music Box ‘too measured, too careful’, in need of more ‘imbalance and recklessness’, that is, embodying more of the energized art cinema approach of his first three films Z (1969). Confession (1970), and State of Siege (1972). Wilmington, I suppose, means that the film gestures allusively at a number of compelling moral issues, but refuses to explore them in depth, which is true enough. If we attend to what the director has to say about his methods, this was a deliberate choice, imposed on the material from the outset by his interest in researching the historical context. Costa-Gavras has written: To be sure, it is not my collaborators who do the research. In regard to everything that I find interesting, I do it myself … very thoroughgoing research is needed, especially when historical situations or figures are concerned … You cannot bring off cinematic dramatizations without taking into account, not the reality, but the ethical valance of events, given that the historical moment and the characters themselves must be reduced to a minimum. And so what matters are the ethical issues involved in each moment, in each scene. Ethical issues as emerging from the reality that shaped them.20

Early in his career, Costa-Gavras committed himself to addressing an international audience of high information viewers, those who take an interest in what might be called world affairs. At the same time, as Bruno Ramirez remarks, ‘he emphasizes the importance of well-constructed plots and a carefully calculated mise-en-scène for a form of art that is concerned above all else with providing entertainment’.21 Even when they are ‘historical’ in some sense, Costa-Gavras’s films deal with subjects and events that are very much dans le vent (when Music

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Music Box: melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust Box was in the planning stages, the general subject of the Holocaust was only then achieving the prominence that Schindler’s List would lend it six years later). Costa-Gavras sets himself the task of learning as much as he can about the relevant events, personages, and issues, because even when he is working from fictional/ dramatic sources or original screenplays, he already has to hand material rich in character and context. What he looks for is a particular kind of moral truth, the ‘ethical valence’ of what happens. As his films demonstrate, ethical valence can be best revealed from the collision of opposing points of view, generated by the social and cultural energies at play as these give force to motivation, action, and reaction. Characteristically, Costa-Gavras expresses this truth in person-to-person confrontations reminiscent of the Aristotelian model of the agon. This truth will emerge in what is said, and how. If, as Ramirez emphasizes, Costa-Gavras does not neglect the entertainment aspect of filmmaking (which means that his stories must engage viewers emotionally), he intends as well to provoke discussion by raising issues about which there might be considerable cultural sensitivity and controversy. An artful and carefully calculated deployment of melodramatic conventions helps Costa-Gavras reconcile his appeals to high-information viewers (for whom political content is perhaps most crucial) and the ordinary filmgoer, who is interested in the kind of emotional experience, including, crucially, the happy ending, that cinema has been provided for more than a hundred years. As in the ambiguous gestures that end many Hollywood films, the finale in Music Box reaffirms that conventional values (here the family) remain unshaken, even as the presence of something darker must be acknowledged and contained within the larger social system (i.e. the court and laws). Containment offers no satisfying explanation, but it satisfies the deep human need for justice. Appeals, then, to consensus values, and the deep-seated feelings with which they are charged, constitute an effective way of framing material that otherwise would prove too disturbing. The truth of Mischka, after all, is that the notion of ‘character’ as we usually conceive it is just an illusion. Even those we love might make no sense, and ‘who they are’ might be revealed to be something quite foreign to our understanding of them. The film makes the point that the evil he represents cannot be allowed to persist within the family, yet cannot be explained by what the family represents. We can call Mischka evil. We can, figuratively, join Ann in pounding on the man’s chest with the accusation ‘you shot that woman, and then you shot her little boy in the head when he jumped on her body’. But just as he has no response for his daughter, to whom he is bound by years of mutually loving relations, so the film has no answer for us. The man was a destroyer of families, and then he was the maker of a family, was loved deeply for that making, and saw his legacy in children and a grandson. How can this be? Who can say? How can matching this man to those acts be turned into the emotionally satisfying ending that cinema requires? Note that Spielberg finds life in the midst of death, rescue where there is only otherwise certain annihilation, a future when incredible force and energy is deployed to end a history. Costa-Gavras too deploys

161

162

The films of Costa-Gavras melodrama in his treatment of the Holocaust to fashion a proper sense of an ending, at least for the commercial cinema. This was an approach quite different from the one he adopted at the beginning of his political filmmaking career.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Discovering a method The success, both critical and financial, that Costa-Gavras initially achieved was with films that were easily sold and evaluated as art cinema: Z (1969), Confession (1970), and State of Siege (1972). In this trio of exciting, fast-paced, and often disturbing narratives, the ‘well-constructed plots’ mentioned by Ramirez do not much figure; there is little melodrama. State of Siege, produced by Polygram in France, takes as its subject that long-standing pattern of US military intervention in support of Latin American dictators.The main character, played by Yves Montand, is an unsympathetic functionary of a US counter-insurgency agency, who is taken captive by the guerrillas and, unrepentant, eventually executed. This is presented as well deserved, though the viewer derives no emotional pleasure from it. The film ends with the arrival of his replacement, who is met with hatred from a public sympathetic to the Tupamaro insurgents. State of Siege enjoyed an immensely successful run in France and in Europe more generally, but its release in the United States after a calculated one-year delay was met with outraged protest from various government officials, who disputed its ‘Yankee Go Home’ message. As Theodore Sorensen, writing in the NY Times, observed, many worried about its representation of ‘bitter feelings against this country, its foreign policy, its foreign economic policy, and its leadership’.22 Acknowledged to be one of the most significant films of the year, State of Siege was to be honored by being the first work screened by the American Film Institute in the recently completed Kennedy Center, but the event was canceled as protests from the American right intensified. It seems likely that the controversy harmed the film’s US box office, but receipts were still quite good. The controversy seems not to have hurt Costa-Gavras’s career. Quite the contrary, State of Siege’s success with critics and viewers enabled him to make a connection with Hollywood for his next project, when Universal decided, with Polygram, to co-produce Missing (1982). This turned out to be a quite profitable investment for all concerned, with a box office take of some $16m against costs of only $9.5m. And this film provided the template for the Hollywoodesque productions that followed in its wake. Missing explored roughly the same political territory as State of Siege, but, interestingly, from a radically different perspective that seems calculated to be more appealing to American viewers. Once again, the subject is covert CIA and US military intervention that served the needs of a dictatorship in a Latin American country, Chile, when the Marxist Allende regime was ended by a military coup that installed Augustin Pinochet. Establishing a pattern that Costa-Gavras would repeat in the decades that followed, Missing featured two big-name US performers

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Music Box: melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust (Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon), and a considerable budget for location shooting (in Mexico) that lent the film a great deal of authenticity. In State of Siege, the victim of US malfeasance is the Uruguayan people; in Missing it is an idealistic young American aid worker, who goes missing during the coup and is eventually found to have been killed by the military because of his known leftist sympathies. The death is kept from his wife and father (Spacek and Lemmon), who, searching for answers to his disappearance, are frustrated by what seems to be official US indifference to the young man’s fate. In the end, it becomes clear that those on the scene and in Washington are concerned to cover up CIA involvement in the coup and protect the new military dictatorship from an embarrassing incident. Central to the film is its sympathetic portrayal of the conservative father’s growing disillusionment with his country’s institutions; he finds he can no longer trust his country as he had all his life, and he adopts a critical attitude toward its policies and actions which mirrors that of the son with whom he had once bitterly disagreed about such matters. Missing did not arouse any commercially significant controversy in the US, where distrust of the ‘establishment’ had become a mainstream political position, one that became almost a cliché in the Hollywood thriller, such as Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975). Acknowledging the power of the film to shape public opinion, the US State Department (ordinarily unconcerned about the content of Hollywood movies) took the unusual step of releasing a public statement of ‘correction’, arguing that there was no publicly confirmed evidence of CIA involvement in the coup. In effect, the film’s version of the coup, based on an eyewitness account and considerable research, was labeled as fiction.23 Such charges did nothing to harm the film’s reception; Missing won the Palme d’Or, while being nominated for the Academy Award Best Picture and in several other categories. Costa-Gavras soon learned, however, that there was a price to pay if he went beyond what audiences will tolerate in films that are expected to fit broadly into the category of entertainment. Failure to do so can create problems with exhibition, threatening the commercial viability of these filmmakers, especially if like CostaGavras their preferred practice is to work with established stars and generous, if not extravagant, budgets for production design, as well as principal photography that features location shooting. His Hanna K. (1983) was a large budget production, depending on the screen appeal of established stars (Jill Clayburgh and Gabriel Byrne), both of whom had enjoyed recent critical and box office success. Hanna K. deals with what the director presents as the unjust treatment of Palestinian defendants in the Israel’s justice system. As in Missing, the main character is an American. Hanna Kauffmann (Jill Clayburgh), the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is drawn to Israel, where she agrees to represent a Palestinian man whose property has, in a complex fashion, been expropriated by Jewish settlers. In the process of defending him, Hanna exposes what she thinks is the deep hypocrisy of the Israeli establishment, which is committed to policies reducing the civil rights of Palestinians that remind her of what the Germans (and also the Hungarians) inflicted upon

163

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

The films of Costa-Gavras their Jewish communities before they went on to pursue expulsion, and then genocide. Hanna K. was the first and, arguably, remains the only US production ever to present the Middle East conflict from the Palestinian point of view, invoking the legacy of the Holocaust against Israelis who, to Hanna’s mind, have failed to internalize its moral lesson. After initial runs, however, the film was virtually banned from exhibition, with protests from the Jewish organizations certainly affecting that decision, though, to be sure, the production was flawed artistically.24 Its subsequent virtual disappearance, except for a limited VHS release that had been contracted in expectation of box office success, reflected its too provocative engagement with pro-Israel opinion in the US, providing a different view of this continuing clash of peoples. As Edward Said wrote in the Village Voice, the film’s political importance was that it offered ‘an original depiction of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in terms that compromised neither the conflict’s historical depth and ideological complexity, nor, I think, his audience’s sensibility’.25 Pace Said, matters seem quite otherwise, namely that Costa-Gavras misread the sensibilities of American filmgoers, who simply could not identify with a main character who takes the side of the Palestinians against Israel, despite arguments about moral hypocrisy, buttressed by the invocation of the Holocaust as a remembered text that speaks to ‘crimes against humanity’ and scoffs at the reasons of state advanced by Israeli officials for injustices committed against a population of ‘others’. Some material, Hanna K. proves, is simply not grist to the Costa-Gavras mill, at least if he has designs on the American box office. Consider, by way of contrast, how delicately Music Box deals with a quite similar subject. From the outset, the film centers, more or less sympathetically, on a character who only in the end turns out for certain to be a sociopathic murderer of Jews. Nothing in Mischka’s present speaks to such a past. Acting as a loyal daughter, Ann must cross-examine three of his supposed victims, casting doubts on the stories of Holocaust survivors about her father’s alleged depredations in order to establish his innocence. Without the overarching narrative involving her understandable decision to stand by her father, absent conclusive proof of his guilt, these aspects of the screenplay might have proved troublesome to viewers. The trial, in fact, judges that these survivors have in some way been suborned by the Hungarian government. They have in effect been brought to suffer again because they are Jews, even as they are made to bear the moral indignity of bearing false witness. We endure their suffering without protest because the film has focused our attention on the family drama in which Ann is relentlessly caught up. The surprising reversal that seals Mischka’s fate would not have been emotionally satisfying had her character arc not moved Ann from a seemingly heroic defender of supposed paternal innocence to yet another victim, almost half a century later, of Mischka Lászlo, Arrow Cross gendarme, the bane of the helpless. This time the Arrow Cross gendarme, the cold-blooded executioner and brutalizing rapist, whose blood flows in her and her son, makes Ann face an evil so powerful she

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Music Box: melodramatizing the Hungarian Holocaust can only fight by making sure that both she and Mikey never again find themselves in his polluting presence. The two innocents must pay a terrible price for crimes whose only connection to them is precisely the family bond that they are now forced to abjure in order to go on living among decent people. Music Box delivers a cold hard truth that is nearly impossible for those it destroys to believe.The finale evades more disturbing questions about the possibility for evil that lurks within the most ordinary, in order to focus on that most basic and life-affirming of human connections – the love of a mother for her impressionable son. Though we are not allowed to glimpse this difficult movement of the spirit, the young man must, for his own good, consider his grandfather as dead. even though, as the film’s domestic drama makes clear, the old man loves the boy deeply and would certainly do him no deliberate harm. The scene between mother and son is, of course, a kind of lie, in that it suggests a drawing together in love of those who belong to a family that has just been destroyed from within. Costa-Gavras euphemizes this horrifying, yet necessary, moment by placing his camera outside the room in the house where she shows him the newspaper on which appears his grandfather’s face as the worst of all possible villains. We are allowed to see only the initial moments of their colloquy, and we are spared from hearing any of the painful words that pass between them in this most private of encounters. History, long buried, comes alive again in remembrance, punishment, and undeserved pain as evil demonstrates its apparently inexhaustible power to destroy. And yet the film ends with an image of survival, with the demonstration once again that the kind of evil Lászlo embodies cannot destroy the human spirit. This is the Tree of Life message that the most powerful forms of Holocaust art always deliver. Notes 1 Nina Munk, ed. and trans. Ernő Munkásci: How It Happened, Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry (Montreal: McGill and Queen’s University, 2018), p. 1. 2 Gyorgy Lazar (2018) ‘World War II criminal Albert Wass is celebrated (again) at the NY Hungarian House’, Hungarian Free Press, 19 March, 2018. 3 See Jane Coaston, ‘Trump Repeats George Soros Conspiracy Theory Right Before Kavanaugh Vote’, Vox, 5 October 2018. 4 See Krisztina Than, ‘Hungary’s Anti-Soros Posters Recall Europe’s Darkest Hours: Soros’s Spokesman’, 11 July 2017: www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-soros/ hungarys-anti-soros-posters-recall-europes-darkest-hours-soros-spokesmanidUSKBN19W0XU and see Renaud Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 2017). 5 For the early history of the early history of the party, see M. Lackó, Arrow-Cross Men, National Socialists, 1935–1944 (Budapest: Akademiai Kiadó, 1969); on the Arrow Cross participation in the last stages of the genocide, see Randolph I. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), pp. 191–197. 6 Quoted in Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 182. 7 For full details, see the website, ‘Trials in Hungary’, Axis History Forum.

165

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

The films of Costa-Gavras 8 Lackó, Arrow-Cross Men, p. 112. 9 For a recent update, see Sam Sokol, ‘Holocaust Scholars Warn that Memory is a Victim of Israel’s Warming Ties with Eastern Europe’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 29 January 2019. 10 Munk, Ernő Munkásci, pp. xxviii–xli. 11 See Sheryl Silver Ochayon, ‘The Shoes on the Danube Promenade: Commemoration of the Tragedy’, Yad Vashem website: www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/shoes-onthe-danube-promenade.html (accessed 21 August 2019). 12 Deborah S. Cornelius, Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 337; see also Braham, The Politics of Genocide, pp. 181–198, especially on the similar, spontaneous slaughter of Jews in the countryside. 13 Ferenc Laczó, ‘The Excruciating Dilemmas of Ernő Munkásci’, in Munk, Ernő Munkásci, pp. xlviiii–l. 14 Lackó, Arrow-Cross Men, pp. xlii–xliii; blaming the victims is an issue discussed at great length in the postwar memoir of a leading member of that community published by Munk. 15 Lackó, Arrow-Cross Men, p. 112. 16 See the conference proceedings published in Braham and András Kovács, eds, The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016). 17 Paul Chutkow, ‘From the ‘Music Box’ Emerges the Nazi Demon’, The New York Times, 24 December 1989. 18 For details of this case of identification/misidentification, see Richard Raschke, Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals (New York: Delphinium, 2014). 19 Michael Wilmington, ‘A Crisis of Conscience in Costa-Gavras’s “Music Box”’ The Los Angeles Times, 25 December 1989. 20 Costa-Gavras, ‘Entretien avec Bruno Ramirez’, in Ramirez, L’Histoire à L’Écran (Montréal: Les presses de l’université de Montréal, 2014), p. 267. My phrase ‘ethical valence’ translates Costa-Gavras’s éthique, which cannot be rendered properly in English by ‘ethics’, which generally means a body of precepts or guidelines to action that an individual adopts, for example, ‘the councilman’s ethics were questioned by many, as the discovery of his embezzling soon confirmed’. When the director writes, ‘l’éthique des événements’, literally ‘the ethics of events’, it seems clear that he means the ethical dimension or valence of events. 21 Ramirez, L’Histoire à L’Écran, p. 266. 22 Theodore Sorensen, ‘“State of Siege” Speaks “A Warning to Us All” Movies’, The New York Times, 24 June 1973. 23 ‘US Takes Issue with Costa-Gavras Film on Chile’, The New York Times, 12 February 1982. 24 For a fair evaluation, see Vincent Canby, ‘Hanna K. with Jill Clayburgh’, The New York Times, 30 September 1983. 25 Edward Said, ‘Hanna K.: Palestine with a Human Face’, Village Voice 28.41 (1983): 1 and 45.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11

‘Make humans the center of everything’: a cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City (1997) and The Ax (2005) Allen H. Redmon

In 2015, Dale Partridge publishes a book entitled People over Profit. The title does more than mark a book; it articulates a recurring theme in business and leadership circles. Frustrated by the ‘downward capitalistic spiral’ that sees corporations privilege profit over people, Partridge and others create companies and argue for practices that lead to something more than profitability.1 Fortune 500 companies have begun ‘hiring personnel and forming new departments dedicated to giving back and promoting social responsibility’.2 Partridge, for example, creates Sevenly, a cause-oriented company producing clothing and accessories through ‘fair-trade, slave-free’ practices.3 Just as importantly, Partridge’s company partners with a different charity each week to raise awareness about that group and to direct some of his own company’s profits to their cause. In this way, Sevenly, strives to satisfy the double-bottom line of profitability and social impact that corporations in today’s marketplace regularly seek to satisfy. Louis W. Fry and Melissa Sadler Nisiewicz add an additional concern to the double-bottom-line Partridge and others describe. Fry and Nisiewicz contend that companies today must attend not only to people and profit, but to matters of sustainability. No amount of profit or concern for the social good matters if businesses fail to adopt sustainable practices. Fry and Nisiewicz explain that today’s companies must exist within a ‘sustainability movement [that emerges] in response to excess of CEO and corporate greed’.4 This movement demands that businesses pay at least as much attention to a company’s stakeholders as they do to their stockholders. Fry and Nisiewicz maintain that the ‘only way for organizations to succeed in today’s interdependent world is [… by …] operating a business that earns a profit while recognizing and supporting the economic and noneconomic needs of a wide range of stakeholders on whom the organization depends’.5 Such companies reverse the downward capitalistic spiral Partridge describes by embracing what Fry and Nisiewicz deem conscious capitalism.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

The films of Costa-Gavras One can see Costa-Gavras making some of these same appeals in his films over the last quarter-century. Three films in particular, Mad City (1997), The Ax (2005), and Capital (2012), seem especially intent on advocating for a more conscientious and sustainable form of capitalism than the one often practiced. In an interview with Ed Rampell, Costa-Gavras discusses his concern about what he terms a form of ‘aggressive capitalism that leads the world’.6 Costa-Gavras explains: ‘I decided more than ten years ago to make a movie about money […] It’s one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption.’ 7 These corruptions exist at the broadest level of business, too, a point Costa-Gavras places on full display in Capital. Gary Crowdus describes the film as an effective portrayal of ‘the nest-of-vipers milieu that characterizes international financial elites, where ruthless power plays, backstabbing, criminality, corruption, and arrogance of power are all necessary parts of the “game”’.8 Costa-Gavras worries that the game being played is an ongoing pursuit of profits that will eventually guarantee ‘more poverty for the vast majority, and more riches for the few’.9 Left unchecked, this game promises to erase the middle class. To be fair, Capital does not directly consider the way the greed of the financial elites impacts the middle class. The film largely ignores the middle class. One does find such a consideration in Mad City and The Ax. Mad City’s interest in this issue is admittedly tangential to the more overt attack on the sensationalist qualities of the news media. Still, before Costa-Gavras turns his attention to the shameless tactics of a media willing to manufacture news rather than simply report it, the director crafts a compassionate picture of the practical and psychological effects job loss has on the working class. The director returns to this same theme in The Ax, a less-widely circulated film than Mad City, but with a piercing sympathy for those that suffer the results of corporate downsizing and relocation. The Ax provides an explicit, sustained, and nuanced attack on the shift from aggressive capitalism to predatory capitalism that turns society into either predator or prey. Taken together, one can see Costa-Gavras issuing a clear call through Mad City and The Ax for the very kinds of conscious capitalism found in today’s business circles. The films explicitly ask society to make ‘humans the center of everything’, as one of the characters in The Ax will propose as the solution to the unstable practices that profit-driven capitalism performs to reward stockholders at the expense of stakeholders. By most accounts, Mad City is a disappointing film. The film follows the twists and turns of a hostage situation that arise after an out-of-work security guard, Sam Bailey (John Travolta), fails to convince his former boss, Mrs. Banks (Blythe Danner), to restore him to his post. One of the hostages, Max Brackett (Dustin Hoffman), is a down-on-his-luck news reporter, who sees the situation as an opportunity to advance is career. Brackett works with his producer rather than the police to gain access to some real news. One can represent the early parts of Mad City as something of a tightly drawn chamber play in which Mrs.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City and The Ax Banks assumes the position of the powerful elite, Max accepts the role of the opportunist or trickster, and Sam Bailey plays the marginalized middle class. As so often happens in chamber plays, some outside force, here the media, overwhelms the internal dynamics of the small group. None of these stations hold when confronted by the powerful and manipulative media that reassigns each of the characters to the roles it needs them to play in their drama. Critics routinely relate Mad City to Sidney Lumet’s acclaimed Network (1976) and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), although not in a positive way. The comparison usually means to articulate how Mad City fails to achieve the insight of its predecessors. Emanuel Levy, for example, offers that while Mad City has ‘all of the ingredients of [Costa-Gavras’s] notable movies: a politically explosive situation, a socially relevant issue […] major movie stars […] what unfolds onscreen is a simplistic and obvious expose about the manipulative power of the news media’.10 Roger Ebert takes this line of criticism one step further claiming Mad City gives the public ‘the last thing a movie about journalism needs – last year’s news’.11 Ebert faults Costa-Gavras for making a film with a social message that runs counter to what Ebert deems a well-established social truth: ‘the public enjoys sensational journalism [… they do not need a …] lecture on how bad their habit is’.12 Mad City, it would seem, is simply too heavy-handed to work in the way the best Costa-Gavras films do, or, more generally, the most effective social problem films do.13 Any honest assessment of Mad City would do well to concede the film is what some of its detractors say it is. The movie is decidedly against the media, which leaves it making statements more often than asking questions.The difference between films that make statements and ask questions is important, especially when considering the films of Costa-Gavras. The enduring director’s best films tend to deal in questions rather than answers. The Ax is such a film. For its part, Mad City appears too sure of itself to entertain a question. Costa-Gavras presents a way of seeing the media during the opening credits, even before the film properly begins, that he never abandons. A series of extreme close-ups blur the lines between a television crew and a band of militants arming for an attack. For much of the film, Costa-Gavras refuses to distinguish between these two types of outfits. The media is repeatedly seen attacking those that might have a story to tell. For example, just after Sam releases two of the children in exchange for an opportunity to broadcast his story, a throng of reporters rush the children as they begin to descend the long stairs to the street. Costa-Gavras moves the camera to an extreme position so that the effect of the moment is as discernible as the action. An overhead longshot reveals just how completely the media overwhelm the children. At one point, the swarm of reporters push the former hostages back toward their captor. The children have nowhere else to go as the media quite literally engulf them. Eventually, the police intervene. They pull the children from the mob that surrounds them. Costa-Gavras adds one more element to the unfavorable portrayal of the media when he places on the soundtrack

169

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

The films of Costa-Gavras their protests as the police rescue the children: ‘come on, let them say something’. Costa-Gavras adopts the same strategy later in the film when the remaining hostages are released. The camera moves to another extreme overhead longshot that emphasizes the worst aspects of the predatory media that marks his project. The images present the media as resembling invasive ants that overwhelm whatever ground they cover. For all of its heavy-handedness, Costa-Gavras does leave room for some nice subtleties in Mad City. For instance, the film is particularly good at assigning the movie camera a function that differs from the media camera. It also finds a telling way to sympathize with its jobless protagonist, Sam, so that the problem he faces becomes a social rather than an individual one. The two sensitivities actually inform each other. For example, Costa-Gavras twice shows his camera aping what the news cameras are doing. The director will align his frame with the frame found in the media’s television broadcast. This happens at two critical moments in the film. The first occurrence is when the media learns of the events at the local museum. A row of television sets appears alongside the television vans. Costa-Gavras sets his camera directly in front of one of those sets so that the two screens project the same image. After a few seconds, he moves the camera above the embedded frame. The movie camera finds a different vantage point. It settles on a different story. The same thing happens in the moments before the network begins to broadcast Sam’s interview. Costa-Gavras initially aligns the film’s camera with the screen inside the museum. Once the interview begins, he again moves the movie camera to a different position. The screens belonging to the media even begin to encumber the movie camera’s perspective. In both instances, CostaGavras suggests that the movie camera means to capture something the media lens misses. The two cameras are not the same. They serve different impulses. An examination of how Costa-Gavras’s camera finds a different way to cover Sam allows one to articulate some of these differences. Mad City actually begins with a clear interest in two stories, the story of a predatory media that everyone recognizes, and the lesser observed story of a society caught in a cycle of corporate indifference. The opening stories Brackett covers are about executives that steal their employees’ savings, banks that defraud clients, and private and state-run initiatives that reduce their workforce to stay in the black. This last feature becomes the primary investigative point of the early parts of Mad City. Brackett arrives on the campus of the Natural Museum of History to learn about the job reductions at the state-run institution. The reporter first encounters a security guard, later revealed to be Cliff Williams (Bill Nun), Sam’s friend and one-time colleague, who confirms that the reports are right, the museum is laying off its employees. Cliff even explains the way these reductions impact him: ‘you never know who’s gonna be next’. The remark does more than justify Brackett’s presence at the museum. It suggests that the layoffs affect more than just the people being laid off; they also impact those who worry that they might be the next person to lose their job.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City and The Ax A later detail suggests that society as a whole is experiencing job reductions. The problem is not the museum’s alone, in other words. To maximize profits, multiple sectors of society shrink their workforce. Costa-Gavras brings this suggestion to the surface of his plot when Brackett tries to convince Sam to grant him an on-camera interview. Brackett tells Sam, ‘you must connect with those people out there; you don’t think they know what it’s like to lose their job, or they don’t know someone whose lost their job’? The expected answer is that they do. The public at large is experiencing job losses. Set in this context, Sam’s story assumes a greater weight than it otherwise might. Sam represents the suffering of a society as a whole rather than just one corner. Costa-Gavras has several shots that register this point. The most obvious occurs when the public is seen picketing on the lawn outside the museum to show support for Sam, or at least to act on some of their own pent-up anxiety toward a system that largely ignores them. Costa-Gavras focuses these broader concerns in Sam as an economical way to explore the emotional and practical consequences of job reductions on the laborer. This interest is most especially centralized in Sam’s two different on-screen interviews. The first takes place before the official interview begins. Brackett works with Sam to ensure his story will connect with an audience. Brackett urges Sam to omit details that might confuse the point Brackett wants to make. For example, Brackett suggests to Sam that he not talk about playing softball or drinking beers with his buddies after the game. Such details might only justify the museum’s decision to fire him the next day when Sam shows for work in a less than ideal condition. Brackett makes clear that these details can only work against him when they are registered through the media. The inclusion of these details to Costa-Gavras’s plot does more than just show the manipulative aspects of the media; they also construe Sam as an everyday character with whom they can identify. These details help develop a particular view of the character as he fits the story the film wants to tell. While the details are omitted from the broadcast, they are not set aside in the film; instead, they are amplified to Sam as a kind of everyman. These details will not matter so much to the bottom line of the film, the lasting effect a more exterior understanding of the plot will suggest, but they do matter for those who want to situate Mad City within Costa-Gavras’s larger interests. This subplot is more than a plot device for Costa-Gavras. It forms the heart of a film that otherwise appears relatively lifeless. Set against the behind-the-scene exchange, even the comments in the on-air interview begin to gain a broader purpose than they might otherwise have. Brackett obviously wants the public to connect to Sam’s story. His exclusive report will gain more shares if they do. Costa-Gavras most likely means for an even broader audience – the film’s audience – to connect to Sam’s story and, more importantly, to see it as a kind of call to action. One sees this likelihood take shape through Sam’s broadcast. The airing begins with Sam admitting, ‘I used to complain about my paycheck. And then when I didn’t get it no more, I realized

171

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

172

The films of Costa-Gavras that was the last, that little piece of paper was the only thing holding my life together.’ Sam ends with remarks wondering ‘if people listen to guys like me’. Costa-Gavras shows that people in Sam’s immediate audience are listening. The plot cuts to a series of audiences gathered around television sets to hear Sam’s words. The camera shows a bowling alley, a living room, a bar, the very types of spaces everyday people like Sam occupy. It seems that people are listening to Sam. One has to wonder, though, whether the film audience hears and sees the story Costa-Gavras presents on screen. Do they, in other words, see the social problem his film depicts in its drama? As it relates to the crowds in the film, the answer must be ‘no’. Those crowds prove to be as fickle as the lead anchor, Kevin Hollander (Alan Alda), insists they are. They presumably turn on Sam as soon as the media spin a more sensational story for them. The movie audience can still distinguish itself from these crowds. Costa-Gavras increases his audience’s chance to see the social problem his film begins to explore by relating his Sam Bailey to another Bailey – George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Brackett ends Sam’s interview with a rather curious pronouncement, ‘Your name is Sam Bailey’. Costa-Gavras has Hoffman pronounce each name individually and distinctly. The statement draws specific importance to Sam’s family name, Bailey. The reminder of his name creates an at least fleeting intertextual reference to the now beloved character. Interestingly, reviewers often remark on the way Sam’s name refers to Capra’s protagonist even if they miss the significance of this relationship. Marjorie Baumgarten, for instance, refers to George Bailey as Sam’s ‘spiritual namesake’.14 A careful analysis of Travolta’s performance suggests that Costa-Gavras intends for the similarities between the two characters to be more than nominal. While not a parody of Stewart’s performance by any means, Travolta does capture the spirit of Stewart’s George Bailey. Travolta matches the deeper sensitivities of his predecessor as Leland Poague describes them: ‘The key to George Bailey […] lies in recognizing the underlying childishness that derives his dreams and desires, childishness here understood not as a matter of simple regression [… but …] of thwarted development that can be ultimately traced to the workings of capital[ism]’ (emphasis in original).15 One sees Costa-Gavras directing Sam to be the same sort of character. This is especially clear when Sam tells the children the story of Big John, a native memorialized in a statue in the museum. Sam admits to wondering why Big John stands the way he does. He tells the children that one day he decided he was just ‘waving goodbye’. The whole story turns on the same childlike sensitivities Poague finds in George. Costa-Gavras fills Sam with these same sensitivities. The reference to Capra’s much loved film can have a broader impact on how one describes Costa-Gavras’s discursive aim in Mad City. The reference does more than relate one character to another. It also contrasts two different epochs, the post-Second World War 1940s and the 1990s. The two periods share some surfacelevel similarities, at least as they relate to their respective protagonists. George Bailey suffers from some of the same forms of aggressive capitalism Sam Bailey

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City and The Ax encounters. The two meet different fates, though, in part, because they exist within different publics. George is twice saved, once by the fantastical appearance of an angel, Clarence (Henry Travers), who finds the character just as he is about to jump from a bridge to his death. George is saved again when his friends and family come to his rescue after they learn he is in need. Sam exists in a less magnanimous world. His angel turns out to be Max Brackett, a man who exploits his despondent benefactor for his own professional gain. To his credit, Max does eventually develop genuine concern for Sam, the sort of concern that one would expect from a guardian angel, but he fosters this benevolence much too late. The media, law enforcement, and even the public are against Sam by the time Brackett looks to care for Sam. More importantly, though, the public around Sam is very different. Sam has no friends to rush to his aid. Those who speak on Sam’s behalf are either fabricated entirely or misrepresented. Sam is literally left alone, and, as such, he is able to succeed where George failed when he tried to end his life. Brackett says at the end of Mad City, ‘we killed him’, and one might like the ‘we’ in this statement to refer to the media alone. The explicit reference probably is to the media but the symptomatic meaning extends to anyone who hears Sam’s story and remains indifferent to it. This includes the movie audience just as well as those within the diegesis of the film. Costa-Gavras crafts a plot that implicates both crowds. Nearly a decade later, Costa-Gavras turns to another story of man who must face a societal problem on his own. Costa-Gavras brings to the screen an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s novel, The Ax, a book published the same year of Mad City’s release. The similarities between Mad City and Westlake’s The Ax only emerge retrospectively. Although both Sam and the novel’s hero, Burke, lose their jobs, and devise ridiculous plans to correct this problem, the two stories do not have much in common. It is certainly fair to say that Westlake’s Burke lacks any of the childlike qualities that mark Sam. Westlake cuts Burke from the hard-boiled tradition more often seen in Westlake’s stories. Costa-Gavras distances his protagonist, Bruno, from this tradition to bring him more in line with Sam. Even still, Bruno is no Sam unless he is the grown-up version of the more childish character. The clearer alignment between Mad City and Costa-Gavras’s The Ax is the way the later film works to frame the individual story within a more collective social issue. What Mad City suggests in subtitles, The Ax decries more absolutely. The latter extends the predatory traits reserved for the media to every institution impacted by the aggressive forms of capitalism that Costa-Gavras expressly admits to wanting to denounce. In The Ax, aggressive capitalism turns into predatory capitalism that divides society into predator and prey. Costa-Gavras’s main character understands this division and is determined to be the predator so that he can finally re-enter the workforce that had prematurely excluded him. He resolves to kill not only the person who holds the position he wants, but all of those who are likely to compete with him for that position. The plan is the sort of scheme

173

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

The films of Costa-Gavras only a sociopath would endorse, unless, of course, society is engaged in the same game, which Costa-Gavras very much suggests it is. Burke/Bruno’s plan itself admittedly belongs to Westlake, as Costa-Gavras barely alters the plot points of the novel. The director does, however, give them a different appearance by dressing them in different garments. Costa-Gavras explains to Gary Crowdus that Westlake’s hero seems to enjoy killing people too much for his taste.16 Costa-Gavras confirms that he wanted a different hero, one to which audiences could relate and sympathize rather than villainize. To this end, the director marks his protagonist both in script and on the screen in very particular ways. As it relates to the former, Costa-Gavras assumes a writer’s credit for The Ax, something he has done throughout his career, but something he did not do in Mad City. Costa-Gavras describes to Bruno Ramirez the significance of writing rather than only directing a film: ‘film directors are not concerned merely with the moving image: they are also people who write. We choose our subjects, we develop our screenplays as best we can, and we do research […] one cannot create filmic drama without taking into account the ethics of events, the ethics of characters.’ 17 One can see an unmistakable even if unconscionable ethics at work in every scene of The Ax. Costa-Gavras frames his protagonist as a victim of the world he inhabits rather than merely a perpetrator of unthinkable crimes. To achieve this aim, Costa-Gavras creates two different films. One film tells the seemingly realistic story of a man who loses his job and of a family that suffers because of that loss. The other plays the kind of game moviemakers play with audiences as they imagine ridiculous responses to very real problems. For Costa-Gavras, this meant creating a story that followed the logic of so many Westerns or gangster films of classic Hollywood cinema, stories that afford those who are marginalized by society with some response to their banishment. Audiences that have such stories are free to deem some action a character performs as unethical, but they will often also see how society brings that character to the edge of their recklessness. As it relates to The Ax, one can see several indicators that Costa-Gavras meant his character’s actions to be understood as a response to a capitalism without conscience, a capitalism that actually preys on society rather than a flaw in the character’s own psychosis. The continual pursuit of profit over people marginalizes more and more viable workers. Given enough time, the workforce becomes a game of survival of the fittest, where the fittest become those who become as shrewd as the system that obfuscates them. The trick, of course, is to fashion a character who performs horrific actions while still remaining sympathetic to the audience. Costa-Gavras tries to perform this trick by offering his audience a hero who remains human despite his inhumane actions. Bruno’s humanity emerges in a couple of critical ways. For one thing, Costa-Gavras works with Garcia to ensure that the actor’s performance is always grounded in some human response. The director talks about the work he did to fine tune ‘the performances [in The Ax] – for example, whether Bruno is smiling, how he reacts to using a gun […], and so on. There’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City and The Ax always a detail, a nuance that has to be discussed with the actor so he knows exactly how things are to be done.’ 18 In this way, the performances the director obtains emphasizes Bruno’s human qualities. They also bring into focus the ethical concerns embedded in the script. Costa-Gavras adjusts the narrative sequence of Westlake’s novel so that his film begins with his protagonist’s third murder. The shift allows the film to open with a confession and an extended flashback. This is a sharp break from the narrative progression of Westlake’s novel. Westlake begins his plot with Burke wondering if he could kill another person. By the end of the relatively short chapter, just after he kills his first rival, Burke rather smugly announces, ‘it seems I can do it’.19 This is not the sort of statement that engenders sympathy. Costa-Gavras begins his film with a scene that shows a much less resilient or defiant character. Bruno arrives in his motel room having just run over a man with his car. The murderer is visibly shaken. He strips off his clothes in a panic as if doing so will distance him from the crime. When that does not work, Bruno moves to the shower. He scrubs his hands and fingers with the fervency one would expect to see from Macbeth or Pontius Pilate should their drama be placed on screen. After the shower, Bruno starts to leave the bathroom, only to turn to the toilet to vomit. He gathers himself just enough to wrap himself in a blanket. He sits on the edge of his bed and tries to write a confession. When his fingers fail him, Bruno grabs a Dictaphone from his bag and begins: ‘This is my confession […] My name is Bruno Davert. I can’t bear what I did tonight.’ The entire sequence introduces audiences to a very different perpetrator than Westlake offers his readers. Costa-Gavras’s script begins with a vulnerable rather than defiant character. Bruno is ready to confess and Costa-Gavras keeps him in this state for more than forty minutes, as the earliest parts of the story are reiterated from the motel room through an extended flashback. The use of a flashback has several important advantages. More than anything else, it allows Costa-Gavras to show Bruno to be a reliable narrator. Bruno will confess some detail in one moment, something like how he was a loyal employee, only to have Costa-Gavras show that moment in a small vignette in the next sequence. So, just after Bruno says he was a loyal employee, Costa-Gavras cuts to a scene three years earlier where Bruno’s company, Kramer Papers, commends him for his fifteen years of faithful and productive service.The tell-and-show approach confirms that Bruno is what he says he is. More than that, he is a reliable narrator. Audiences tend to align themselves with characters they can trust, and Costa-Gavras gives his viewers every reason to trust Bruno’s testimony. The confessional strategy also allows Costa-Gavras to bring in events that would have stood at some distance from one another in story-time into quick succession on the screen. This allows the full shock of the turns in the early parts of Bruno’s story to be more immediately felt by the audience. For instance, just after seeing the aforementioned work anniversary, Bruno flatly states, ‘six months later I was fired with 600 others’. Bruno does not need to inject any emotion

175

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

The films of Costa-Gavras into the statement. The proximity of the celebration and the news of his release ensure that the absurdity of the two incongruous events registers.The next vignette shows Bruno’s manager expressing optimism that the talented executive will find work quickly only to have Bruno confess the difficult truth that ‘over two years later, [he] still had no job’. Again, the two statements together implicitly carry an emotion that sets the scene better than any statement could. The use of a flashback allows the full weight of these story details to appear on screen in the way they might reasonably exist in Bruno’s mind. The details, therefore, amass an emotional weight they might not otherwise accumulate. They also make it more likely that audiences align themselves with Bruno rather than against him. Costa-Gavras gives viewers an even more persuasive reason to align themselves with his protagonist through his use of telling billboards that appear at key moments in the early parts of the plot and throughout the film. The first such ad appears just moments before the first murder is placed on screen. A yet-tobe-identified driver, Bruno, follows an also yet-to-be-identified pedestrian, Étienne Barnet (Yvon Back), from a local café. Bruno trails the man in his car, hoping that a clearing will open and he can shoot the man with the Luger he carries with him. The pursuant escapes the pursuer, disappearing behind a brightly lit advertisement that displays a clinched fist bedazzled with three exceptionally large gem-stone rings. A cut carries the viewer behind the digital sign in time to show that the structure not only hides Bruno’s target from him, but it also hides Bruno from the pedestrian. The man walks into the street just as Bruno pulls into it. Bruno accelerates his car and hits the defenseless and unexpecting man. CostaGavras cuts to an extreme high-angle shot that shows the man, the car, and – interestingly – the brightly lit advertisement in the upper-left corner. The prominent placement of the ad is a bit surprising. It attributes a significance to the billboard that it might not otherwise, even though it has just participated in some way in the murder. The shot suggests that something about the sign might explain the murder as well as aid it. Costa-Gavras actually admits a desire for the billboards in his film to be more than ‘an anti-publicity comment’; for Costa-Gavras, the advertisements should signify an unavoidable ‘frustration’ the unemployed must feel as they have no means to satisfy the desires the ads stimulate.20 Betty Kaklamanidou suggests that the ads play an even more important role in the film. For Kaklamanidou, at least the first three advertisements depict some form of violence. The first ad, for instance, ‘hints obliquely at an iron device used as a means to inflict injury’. The second ad, which appears almost immediately after the first, captures a hand holding one end of a watch on a band. The resulting image approximates the likeness of a hand holding a knife.21 A bit later Bruno drives by a third suggestive ad. A cell phone has been holstered in a pair of lace panties in the way a cowboy would holster a pistol. Kaklamanidou contends that the first three images do more than entice characters to buy some product. They implicate those who create and display the ads in a kind of violence they would not explicitly admit. Taken together, the ads convert the otherwise benign artifacts

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City and The Ax of capitalism into a kind of predatory attack. One sees tangible evidence of capitalism in a kind of war with the populace. Kaklamanidou further supports this suggestive reading of advertisements in The Ax by noting the special significance of the name of the restaurant at the very opening of the film, Étape. The term refers to ‘the place where troops in both World Wars would rest for the night’.22 Kaklamanidou reasons that CostaGavras adopts this name to suggest to his audience that he means them to see his characters in a time of total war. Such times follow a different moral order. They excuse actions that would otherwise be intolerable. If one extends Kaklamanidou’s suggestion to its logical end, one could treat the characters in CostaGavras’s The Ax in the way one normally treats soldiers in a war film. Characters in such films perform the actions they must to survive the ordeal they face. Costa-Gavras would seem to ask his viewers to see the characters in The Ax in just this way. The forms of capitalism the director wants to expose begin to emerge when one approaches the film as though the characters are at war with the world they occupy. The words the script gives several characters further suggest that Costa-Gavras means for the audience to see these characters in a war with capitalism. Three conservations carry particular significance. The first such exchange occurs just before the plot catches up with itself within the confessional, which is to say when the plot reaches the events Costa-Gavras moves to the front of the film. Bruno engages in a revealing discussion with his soon-to-victim, Étienne Barnet. Étienne admits to being an out-of-work paper executive. His story very nearly matches Bruno’s story: ‘16 years with one outfit, then dumped’. Costa-Gavras brings the social commentary he intends his film to provide into focus through Étienne’s eventual protest. The paper-executive-turned-waiter frames the world as a kind of zero-sum game where society must choose who to save. Étienne explains, These are criminal times […] society is in an insane and novel phase. In ancient China, to save food, they abandoned babies in the mountains. Eskimos leave old men to die on an iceberg. But we dump people when they’re most productive! That’s what’s novel. It’s self-destruction […] We maintain the elderly at a huge cost. If we let some die from summer heat, from fall despair, from winter cold or spring zest, we’d save the economy. Instead they dump us! […] We’d do anything for a job! But you can’t fight turbo-capitalism.

The monologue accepts the assumption motivating Bruno, that society cannot care for all of its citizens. Some part of the population must be eradicated. For Étienne, it makes most sense to eliminate the elderly; they have, after all, lived beyond their productivity.The view oddly enough fits the rationale he is protesting. Productivity is being placed over people. The protest then lacks some of the impact it might otherwise have if only because it performs the very objectives of ‘turbo-capitalism’ he presumably rejects, the kind of capitalism that preys on

177

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 11.1  Gérard Hutchinson (Ulrich Tukur) and Bruno Davert (José Garcia) commiserate in a department store dressing room in The Ax (2005)

those who can still contribute to the bottom line. Bruno asks his new-found comrade what can be done. Étienne proposes, ‘make human beings the center of everything’. Following the logic of the film, humans can only be the center of everything when there are not too many of them. Until then, one must moderate the population excess. Bruno’s plan becomes as good as any other. Étienne’s story would suggest as much. The second telling conversation in the film reveals that one does not have to do anything to eliminate certain parts of society. Circumstances will begin to parse the employable from the unemployable. This idea emerges during Bruno’s discussion with what would be his final rival, Gérard Hutchinson (Ulrich Tukur), should Hutchinson be the man his resume presents him to be. When Bruno meets Hutchinson, it becomes clear Hutchinson is not that man, though. Hutchinson is completely humiliated. He admits that he has been without a job for five years. He describes himself as a ‘has been’. He verbalizes his worst fear, that after being out of the game so long he will never be able to find a way into a position. Costa-Gavras projects a picture of the man Hutchinson describes himself to be by placing the entire discussion in a dressing room walled with mirrors. The various angles throw a series of different images of both Hutchinson and Bruno across their surface. The men are quite literally visually displaced. Neither man exists in one body. They are broken into a variety of people they pretend to be as they wait to be restored to a position. The effect displays the internal consequences of being without a position. In one of the more radical departures from Westlake’s novel, Bruno recognizes these truths about his would-be rival. He extends compassion to his obviously defeated colleague. He tells Hutchinson that he will ‘be OK’. The decision fits the perspective Costa-Gavras seems to want audiences to have of Bruno: he

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City and The Ax only kills when he has to. He would prefer not to be in a position where he has to eliminate his rivals one by one. That is not the world Bruno is given, though, and this point is again articulated in the third pivotal conversation in The Ax. Bruno reaches the end of his plan where the only person between him and a job is Raymond Machefer (Olivier Gourmet), the executive at Arcadia Papers. Bruno quickly wins the trust of his final target by admitting that he is an unemployed paper executive and that he wants to learn from Machefer. Machefer is suspicious, but he is also drunk and knows enough about the current capitalistic climate to believe Bruno to be telling the truth. Machefer invites his unexpected guest to share a drink with him in the kitchen. He asks Bruno where the CEOs of Kramer Papers relocated their operation. Bruno tells him Romania. Mechefert wonders ‘who’ll they sell to’? once they have ruined the economy. The comment registers the kind of protest those advocating for more sustainable practices make. Bruno asks Machefer what he would do if he were fired. Machefer assumes the position of man holding an automatic weapon and claims he would ‘head for the boardroom and mow them down’. Machefer expresses his disdain for the CEOs who no longer care about paper. To them, Machefer maintains, all that matters is ‘profitability, overhead, cost, price, margins, profits’. Machefer insists that the real problem is ‘waste … on a global scale … we need to grapple with recycling waste … that’s a job for people like us! Save the planet, stop wrecking it for money.’ The words linger like a mantra. The whole of The Ax would seem to push toward this moment. Unfortunately, Bruno cannot celebrate the insight; he must eliminate his rival. Machefer falls into an alcohol coma, which allows Bruno to open the gas on the stove. Bruno watches from a distance through a pair of binoculars. Machefer would seem to wake just in time to keep from dying from the fumes, but he creates an explosion when he lights a match to have a smoke. The resulting image looks like something in a war film. The entire floor explodes. Machefer dies. Bruno has won the battle it would seem. Costa-Gavras closes every narrative loop before reopening one very important one. Bruno receives his offer from Arcadia Papers. The detectives who were investigating Bruno’s murders decide that Hutchinson was the murderer. The suit salesman had literally had enough. He hangs himself and leaves a note that reads, ‘I’m quitting it all. What’s the point’? The detectives take this statement as a confession to the earlier murders. Bruno seems to be free and clear. The film seems to push toward a happy ending of sorts as Bruno’s entire family gathers around him in a single image that contains them all. Bruno stands in the center of the picture. His daughter hangs on his shoulder. His wife and son stand beside him with a look of contentedness. All is well at least for a moment. Costa-Gavras cuts from the idyllic image to show an image of a DVD from Arcadia Papers going into the player on a woman’s laptop.The woman waits for the new executive, Bruno, to appear on screen so that she can grab a screenshot of her target. A jump cut carries the plot to the restaurant where Bruno had earlier scouted

179

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 11.2  Bruno Davert (José Garcia) faces his next rival, Prédatrice (Vanessa Larré), in the final moments of The Ax (2005)

Mechefert. The woman finds Bruno sitting in the seat Mechefert sat. She sits where Bruno had earlier sat. A new cycle has begun. Bruno is, of course, more aware than his predecessor. He senses his rival’s presence. He turns to face her. A wonderful reverse shot frames the woman on the far right of the screen with the Arcadia plant sitting in what would be her eye-line as she looks toward Bruno. The word ‘Arcadia’ literally sits in the space between her and the executive she now targets. Bruno continues to lock eyes with the woman he knows is there to displace him. When she refuses to divert her eyes, Bruno rises from his seat and walks toward her. He asks the bartender for his cigarettes and fixes his eyes on the woman. The two oppose each other. The Arcadia plant literally sits between them. The film stops. The final image quite literally rejects the ideal The Ax dares to dream, namely, a world where humans are the center of everything. At the center of the final image is the company that has too few jobs to support the public it means to serve. Costa-Gavras has said, ‘Art is revolutionary. Cinema should be.’ 23 Mad City and The Ax can be viewed as the kinds of revolutionary cries Costa-Gavras hopes cinema will make. Both films fill the screen with sympathetic stories of characters caught in the kinds of dramas real people encounter in a world governed by the same sinister forces as the diegetic world they witness. Costa-Gavras does not imagine a solution to these forces. He does dramatize them, though. He shows the cost they inflict on those who suffer beneath them. What is most interesting about these two films is that they show a problem without trying to articulate a real-world answer. For his part, Bruno dreams of a world where he becomes a

Cinema for conscious capitalism: Mad City and The Ax

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

paper executive again and can ensure that he makes ‘humans the center of everything’. One executive making humans the center in one place would hardly fix the larger problem, and The Ax admits as much with the introduction of a new cycle of violence at the end of the film. For a change to occur, society must demand a different form of capitalism. Aggressive and predatory forms of capitalism must give way to conscious capitalism, the sort of capitalism that places people over profit and contributes to the social well-being of its stakeholders. Notes 1 Dale Partridge, People Over Profit: Break the System, Live with Purpose, Be More Successful (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2015), p. 5. 2 Partridge, People Over Profit, p. 6. 3 The slogan appears on Sevenly’s website: www.sevenly.org. 4 Louis W. Fry and Melissa Sadler Nisiewicz, Maximizing the Triple Bottom Line through Spiritual Leadership (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 241. 5 Fry and Nisiewicz, Maximizing the Triple Bottom Line, pp. 241–242. 6 Ed Rampell. ‘Costa-Gavras’, The Progressive 77.9 (September 2013): 36. 7 Rampell, ‘Costa-Gavras’, p. 36. 8 Gary Crowdus, ‘Money Changes Everything: an Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cineaste 39.1 (Winter 2013): 40. 9 Rampell, ‘Costa-Gavras’, p. 36. 10 Emanuel Levy, ‘Mad City’, Variety, 1 November 1997. 11 Roger Ebert, ‘Mad City’, Rogerebert.com, 7 November 1997. 12 Ebert, ‘Mad City’. 13 For a discussion of social problem films see Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 112–118. 14 Marjorie Baumgarten. ‘Mad City’, Austin Chronicle, 7 November 1997. 15 Leland Poague, Another Frank Capra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211. 16 Crowdus, ‘Money Changes Everything’, p. 42. 17 Bruno Ramirez, Inside the Historical Film (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). 18 Crowdus, ‘Money Changes Everything’, p. 43. 19 Donald E. Westlake, The Ax (New York: The Mysterious Press, 1997), p. 15. 20 Betty Kaklamanidou, ‘Ideology and Social Commentary in Le Couperet’, Off:Screen 10:4 (April 2006), online. 21 Kaklamanidou notes how this image can also serve as an indirect reference to ‘the celebrated shower scene in Psycho’. 22 Kaklamanidou, ‘Ideology and Social Commentary’. 23 John Hill, ‘The Prospects for Political Cinema Today’, Cineaste 36.1 (Winter 2011): 8.

181

12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest (2009): border-crossing odyssey and comedy Isolina Ballesteros

As in The Odyssey, the Aegean Sea is the setting where our hero, Elias, sets out on his adventures. On the same waters, under the same sun and the same sky as the dawn of civilization. After countless incidents and accidents, a stopover in paradise and a sojourn in hell, the magical conclusion of his journey takes place in Paris. Paris, the shining city in the deepest dreams, in the most uncertain sleep of wanderers. Eden is West attempts to echo the path, the journey of those (once our fathers and mothers) who cross through lands, braving oceans and seas of uniforms, looking for a home. Elias’s story is not that of Ulysses, nor is it Jean-Claude’s or mine. But I see myself in Elias, a foreigner who is not foreign to me. Costa-Gavras1

Political cinema, immigration cinema When asked by the French journal Cinéaste in 2007 (on the occasion of the journal’s 40th anniversary) to express his thoughts on the prospects of political – or ‘politically oppositional’ – cinema, Costa-Gavras responded that ‘cinema, politically oppositional or not, is politics’. A movie is political, he says, when it invites the spectator to have an intellectual and emotional reaction to something; ‘the political is what you bring out of the movie when you leave the theater’.2 Since the late 1960s Costa-Gavras has made films that express his leftist political views on controversial topics and the implacable mechanisms of power through a diversity of film genres. His career as a filmmaker took off with Z (1969), a political thriller about the assassination of a leftist political figure in Greece and the subsequent coup d’état by a military junta. After the success of Z,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy The Confession (1970), about the Stalinist show trials in 1952 in Prague, and State of Siege (1972), about the kidnapping and murder of an American by the Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay, reflect on the effects of political violence both on the right and the left. These three films are considered to form a loose trilogy insofar as they all explore the use of violence to reach and consolidate power under the excuse of preserving ‘order’, that is, the privilege of the ruling class. The films he made in the next four decades continue to address urgent socio-political issues in different countries and historical contexts. They explore the ramifications of ‘silent abuses of authority, and the fates of those who resist it’, through a multiplicity of forms and styles:3 the disappearance of a young American man under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and his father’s efforts to find him in Missing (1982); the conflict between Israel and Palestine in Hanna K. (1983); racism, anti-Semitism and Christian fundamentalism in American society in Betrayed (1988); the Holocaust and the memory of the Nazi era in The Music Box (1989) and Amen (2002); the manipulative power of the media in Mad City (1997); the environment and the excesses caused by globalization in The Ax (2005); and the turbulence of financial markets in Capital (2012). As immigration has become one of the most relevant and challenging issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it had to enter Costa-Gavras’s universe sooner or later. In 2009, he tackled it in Eden à l’Ouest, a combination of road movie, epic fable, and comedy. I have spent over a decade investigating the diverse approaches and styles through which immigration is depicted in cinema. In my book Immigration Cinema in the New Europe (2015), I employ the term ‘immigration cinema’, which refers mainly to subject matter and the filmmakers’ (as well as audiences’) ideological orientation, to refer to films that document or fictionalize the processes and sequences of global migratory movements to the EU and the universal ramifications of racism and xenophobia. Immigration films attempt to give voice to immigrants, personalizing the abstract and impersonal accounts that are too common in the media. They provoke ideological and artistic awareness of the social conditions of immigrants in the EU and attempt to shake audiences out of their silent complicity with some of the patterns and policies affecting immigrants. Their ultimate goal is to change the social and cultural relations between Europeans and the Others in their societies; their hope is that the realist exposition of injustice and the fictional solidarity found in cinema will translate into concrete social transformation. Within the large corpus of immigration cinema produced in recent decades, a considerable number of films focus on the migrants’ journeys and crossing of borders – the passage, rather than the process of settling in the receiving country – and all the factors that enable and hinder them along the way: clandestine and undocumented border-crossing, risky transportation systems and passageways, police controls, detention camps and deportations. These border-crossing immigration films offer variations of the road movie genre: they are structured in terms of

183

184

The films of Costa-Gavras

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

mobility and transience, and are concerned with the dehumanizing consequences of closed borders as well as the borderless nature of globalization. They represent the journey as an odyssey – a search for utopia that often ends in dystopia – and an allegorical contemplation of European attitudes toward the Others. In my previous work, I argued that these border-crossing films, including Eden à l’Ouest, share an ethical perspective that calls for an understanding of human mobility in terms of a universal human right.4 A modern odyssey Eden à l’Ouest is a border-crossing movie inspired by Costa-Gavras’s own experience of exile in France and by The Odyssey, Homer’s canonical model of journey literature. Costa-Gavras has declared that it is ‘his most personal film’, and a tribute to ‘our fathers, our grand-fathers, and to those of their generation who came to France in spite of the pitfalls and the storms’;5 and, overall, to all those ‘who cross through lands, braving oceans and seas of uniforms, looking for a home’.6 The film’s protagonist, Elias, is a modern Odysseus who, fleeing the problems of an unspecified country, endures a twenty-first-century odyssey that begins, like Homer’s original, in the Aegean Sea, and ends with his arrival in Paris. If Odysseus’ journey is a return home to Ithaca, Elias’s journey is unidirectional and prompted by the need to escape and find a new home.7 Like Odysseus, he is faced with numerous obstacles that constantly hinder his progress, presenting a multifaceted perspective not only of the voyage’s process and outcome, but also of Europeans’ attitudes toward postcolonial Others who trespass Europe’s ‘fortress’ and ‘illegally’ traverse its allegedly open-border territory. As Costa-Gavras explains, the choice of the Aegean Sea as the place of departure and border crossing is not only a reference to his original birthplace, Greece, but also to the sea’s mythical, historic, and symbolic significance. An arm of the Mediterranean Sea, the Aegean Sea is located between Greece and Turkey and is remarkable for being the birthplace of Hellenic civilization and the site of original democracies that allowed contact and exchange between the diverse civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. The location also accurately represents the actual, not mythical, space where perilous crossings take place daily. As a borderless space between cultures, in theory, the Mediterranean Sea is currently subjected to intense surveillance and securitization; it has become a site of dangerous traffic, failed journeys, and ultimately a graveyard. Consequently, an increasing number of visual and performing artworks created in the last two decades, and notably since the beginning of the refugee crisis of 2015, symbolically memorialize death in the Mediterranean. Among the variety of art projects attempting to generate public awareness of the tragedy that is happening daily on Aegean and Mediterranean shores, several artists are reproducing the iconic

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy history painting by Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, as a counter-memory reference to the current migratory exodus. Géricault’s Raft portrays the aftermath of the sinking of the frigate Medusa in 1816 after it ran aground in shallow waters near the West African Coast. French government officials attempted to save themselves by departing in the available lifeboats. Over a period of two weeks the rafters were subjected to the violence of the sea, murder and cannibalism before a passing government ship rescued the ten survivors. The painting offers the perspective of the rafters, focusing on their plight.8 In 2015, the British graffiti artist Banksy reproduced a version of Géricault’s painting close to the Calais immigration office (on the occasion of the third dismantling of the refugee camp commonly known as The Jungle). In this rendition of the iconic painting, it is the refugees (instead of European nationals) who are stranded in a raft and who make desperate attempts to call the attention of a yacht on the horizon. Recreation and tourism (yacht) are here both correlated and contraposed to clandestine migration. Banksy’s piece offers the rafters’ perspective, the yacht far away on the horizon signifying the vast material difference between the passengers of the two boats in an increasingly globalized world.9 Jason DeCaires Taylor’s The Raft of Lampedusa – a sculpted boat carrying thirteen refugees – is one of the pieces included in his Museo Atlántico, an undersea sculpture museum off the coast of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The piece reproduces Géricault’s iconic painting and is inspired by the real rafts used by immigrants from Western Sahara, Mauritania and Senegal in their attempts to get to the Canary Islands and, thus, enter Europe. DeCaires Taylor, a British sculptor and photographer, forces us to re-examine activity on the sea, and calls attention, like Banksy, to the ironic juxtaposition of immigration and tourism. Some of the submerged sculptures in his underwater museum are reproductions of tourists taking selfies, wielding iPads and pointing cameras.10 The opening scenes of Eden à l’Ouest depict the same conflicted reality. Filmed, unlike the rest of the movie, in a documentary style, and reminiscent of the classic Lamerica (1994) by Gianni Amelio, they show hundreds of illegal immigrants being crammed into a freighter. After the cargo ship is identified by the Hellenic Coastguard and the smugglers abandon it on a motorboat, Elias and other immigrants jump into the water to avoid capture and deportation. Elias wakes up on the nudist beach of the Eden Club, a luxury holiday resort in Crete. While Elias successfully manages to evade the police inside the resort, two of the refugees who had jumped in the water from the freight cargo with him wash up dead on the resort’s beach. As the police and forensic team arrive to inspect and remove the bodies, clients of the hotel take pictures of the tragedy. These scenes – the most explicitly tragic in the entire film – call attention to the fact that some European citizens remain indifferent to or are jaded by shipwrecks and drowned bodies, which have become a spectacle and incorporated as routine occurrences in their lives.

185

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

186

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 12.1  Poster of Éden à l’Ouest

Several essays have addressed the epic nature of Costa-Gavras’s film and its contemporary connection to Homer’s Odyssey. Sébastien Fevry (2017) establishes the relevance of using mythological narratives from the Greco-Roman tradition (namely Homer and Ovid) to describe contemporary exilic and migratory experiences in French cinema. He calls Eden à l’Ouest a ‘mythological film’ that ‘facilitates a gesture of solidarity towards the Mediterranean area, which has been negatively impacted by both the economic crisis and the arrival of refugees’, and ‘reconnects spectators with Europe’s Mediterranean roots through mythological allusions and narratives’.11 The film’s epic structure, Fevry argues, helps to connect different layers of the past, from ancient times to more recent events. It tells a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy contemporary story of displacement that is ‘out of time’, creating a travel narrative that goes beyond national borders.12 Through the application of epic codes to the reality of migration today, Elias, the undocumented migrant, can be interpreted as an epic hero, and Europe as simultaneously paradise and hell. Europe, as seen from Elias’s viewpoint, is both ‘Promised Land and den of iniquity, the paradise so sought after and a descent into hell’.13 If the nudist camp where Elias wakes up is an allegory of the Garden of Eden – and also ‘inspired by the Odyssey, when Odysseus meets Nausicaa’ 14 – the entire Eden resort is the perfect allegory for Fortress Europe: a paradisiacal garden with luscious plants, food, drink, entertainment, beautiful company, patronized by a multilingual privileged clientele; a rich playground that needs to be protected from external bodies, such as Elias; a great European prison run like a police state surrounded by hidden barbed wire and guarded by men with dogs. Its prison-like configuration prevents outsiders from entering, but also from exiting, once they are inside. The first part of the film takes place in this resort where Elias struggles to evade the police and hotel administration’s literal ‘hunt-game’ for ‘clandestine’ intruders, while desperately attempting to leave. Following the topoi of the mythological genre, Elias experiences both the delights and downsides of the idyllic garden, and the descent into hell. He survives due to both his good looks and a picaresque and resourceful attitude. For his handsome physical appearance, he is both made the object of desire (and abuse) of both men and women, and allowed to pass as one of the privileged few who vacation at the resort. Camouflaged at first with an employee uniform, he is asked to carry the clients’ baggage and is mistaken for a hotel plumber. Later, passing as one of the clients, he is the victim of a sexual attack by the gay hotel assistant manager, and is roped into a variety act by a magician who tells him to look him up in Paris. Later he is seduced by a lonesome German woman who ultimately protects him and gives him money to escape the resort and continue his journey. Through a close re-reading of Homer’s Odyssey, Juan de Dios de Gea Ruiz (2012) identifies some of the obvious parallels between the journeys of Elias and Odysseus. The Eden Club is Calypso’s island, and Cristina, the German lady, and the hotel’s assistant manager are two versions of Calypso, who both want Elias for themselves. Following the episode where Zeus sends Hermes to command Calypso to release Odysseus, the hotel manager, having guessed that Elias is not one of the resort’s clients, gives Cristina two days to get rid of Elias. Like Odysseus, Elias leaves the island in a small boat. As Elias starts his road trip through Europe, his encounter with a Greek peasant named Sophia, who sells birds at the local market, resembles Odysseus’ episode with Circe. Sofía, like Circe, fulfills Elias’s desires and wants him to stay with her. But Paris, like Ithaca for Odysseus, is the place where Elias longs to arrive. All these encounters function as allegories for the vulnerable situations of immigrants, who are both rejected as outsiders and yet desired as both sexual

187

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

188

The films of Costa-Gavras objects and to do the jobs Europeans reject. Two scenes that take place at the Eden Club make explicit reference to the dirty jobs immigrants perform: in one, Elias, mistaken by the hotel plumber, has to unclog the toilet in one the rooms, literally plunging his hands into feces. In another, he is picked in the magician’s show as a volunteer to disappear into a prop called the ‘toilet of death’. If the first scene is the literal representation of the sort of menial jobs offered to immigrants, the second is the comedic metaphorical aftermath of the first: unskilled and undocumented immigrants are ‘thrown down the toilet’ when they cease to be needed. In the interview with Olivier Ravanello (2009), Costa-Gavras explicitly refers to the humiliation and degradation to which immigrants are subjected and which they have internalized as part of the price they have to pay for being tolerated and accepted. The two seduction scenes, by the hotel assistant manager and the German lady, implicitly refer to the sexual tourism and exploitation that so many Europeans engage in both inside and outside of the EU’s borders. The subplot provided by the sexual encounter between Elias and Cristina may also allude to the potential alliance between Europeans and immigrants based on mutual convenience. However, it stops short of being mutual as she refuses to meet him later in Hamburg where she has a settled life and a family. Elias serves as her toyboy for a vacation, but his function ends when her vacation does. Border-crossing road movie Eden à l’Ouest turns into a road movie in the second part, in which Elias hitchhikes through a theoretically borderless Europe until he reaches Paris. The Schengen Agreement – signed on 14 June 1985 by five European countries and gradually expanded to 26 countries as of 2011 – was created to build a Europe without national borders. Following globalist and transnational perspectives, a borderless Europe encouraged the free flow of people, money, consumer goods and information. However, it has been clear since its inception that European borders are open to goods, capital and services, and citizens of the signatories of Schengen, but severely restricted to non-citizens, ‘suspicious’ visitors and immigrants. Étienne Balibar (2002) reminds us that the ‘socially discriminatory function’ of borders is nothing new. At the inception of European colonial empires, borders served to separate different categories of nationals (‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’), and after they were dismantled, borders were designed to ‘actively differentiate between individuals in terms of social class’.15 John Casey (2010) similarly argues that ‘border controls have deep ideological and racial subtexts’; the world is borderless only ‘for those who have the resources to exploit it’.16 In her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), Wendy Brown also points out the paradoxical and curious intertwining of globalization, border-closing and wall building. The militarization of borders and constructions of walls (metaphors of protection and solidity) are an illusory projection of the power that states have lost to the ungovernable forces unleashed by globalization and modern colonization. They

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy are a ‘form of compensating for the loss of sovereignty’, powerful ‘spectacles of state protection and self-determination’, which ‘have less to do with actual deterrence than with managing the image of the border’.17 The case for open borders is a progressive ideology based not only on moral stances and universalist ideas that defend mobility as an essential human right, but also on arguments that outline the potential economic benefits. Along with proponents of the free movement of immigrants, Harald Bauder (2014) argues that ‘capitalist accumulation has become structurally dependent on the exploitable work force that nation-states create when they selectively constrain human migration at their borders’.18 Borders are mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion; they create identities of belonging and non-belonging, and play a crucial role in the formation of oppressive subject identities.19 Most of the open-border debates start from the premise that existing migration policies no longer fit our current world, where, according to recent UN estimates, 258 million people now live in places other than their country of birth, an increase of nearly 50 per cent since 2000.20 Bauder (and Dora Kostakopoulou, 2008) defend the notion of a ‘domicile-based citizenship’ independent of place of birth, ancestry, status and intention to stay.21 Discussions of the economic and social dimensions of immigration also reveal that restricting people’s freedom to circulate leads to higher rates of permanent settlement.22 Drastic measures to restrict mobility and the construction of walls have not stopped migrants from attempting the crossings, but it has reduced or made impossible the migrants’ likelihood of making a return trip. Designed as a way to keep migrants out, they end up keeping more migrants in. Casey argues that ‘open borders would not only put an end to people smuggling and the perils it currently entails’.23 Open borders present probable economic benefits for both countries of origin and destination, such as the creation of new jobs, improvement of productivity, conversion of ‘the brain drain into a brain flow increasing the potential for return migration’;24 compensation for the ‘demographic deficit’ in all industrialized nations; and saving of resources allocated to detection, detention and deportation, and so on. With fewer restrictions, Casey speculates, ‘immigration flows will tend to circulate between countries of origin and destination, with many immigrants choosing to spend periods in both, creating transnational communities’.25 And he concludes that open borders should be afforded the same status of other narratives that drive political and policy processes, such as free trade, reduction of greenhouse gases, and the elimination of world poverty.26 Costa-Gavras’s film, as I interpret it, endorses this open-border ideology insofar as it exposes and denounces the role borders play in perpetuating practices of oppression, subordination and exclusion. The abolition of borders and migration controls within the EU has shifted the problems of inequality, injustice and oppression to the outer walls of the Fortress, which are heavily reinforced and patrolled to stop the entry of ‘undesirables’. International non-EU migration is controlled not only at the physical borders limiting the territory of the EU, but also at ‘transit points … trucking routes, workplaces, public spaces, and even

189

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

190

The films of Costa-Gavras private places after crossing the border’.27 This subjective and discriminatory effect of the EU’s management of both external and internal borders is what constitutes the core of the film’s second part. Costa-Gavras’s choice of the road movie is apt, illustrating the restrictive and yet ineffectual nature of borders. The ‘road’ for undocumented immigrants signifies mobility, anonymity, and the possibility of freedom, on the one hand, and exposure and vulnerability caused by unforeseen turns, unexpected checkpoints and encounters with unwelcoming and intolerant subjects, on the other. Recent studies on European travel and road movies have established the difference between ‘positive cinematic travel’, driven by free choice, and ‘negative voyages’, driven by necessity and showing the darker side of transit undertaken by undocumented migrants, clandestine refugees or asylum seekers.28 Films that center on positive travel through open roads in a borderless Europe emphasize the travelers’ quest for free mobility. They are conceived as self-exploratory road films, in which the route leads to a discovery of or return to the roots, and provides liberation from spatial boundaries or societal constraints.29 Films that focus on negative voyages ‘are clearly and unapologetically critical of … European policies of policing bodies and borders’. These policies are ultimately responsible for creating another set of internal and invisible barriers within states grounded on the travelers’ language, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, or religious beliefs.30 The policing of bodies traversing real or symbolic borders is often determined by Othering processes resulting from prejudiced reactions to racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences. Elias’s character, Costa-Gavras explains, is intended ‘to be emblematic of those who have to leave in order to survive’ 31 and as such, he does not have an identifiable identity: neither his place of origin, nationality or language are known in the film. Interpreted by Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio, Elias’s physical appearance and dark complexion may be perceived as Southern European, North African or Middle Eastern. His identity’s indistinctness is crafted in the opening scenes of the film when smugglers instruct the immigrants boarding the cargo ship to throw their passports overboard. Elias’s real identity remains buried, along with his documents, in the Mediterranean waters. When he awakes at the Eden Club, he is, and will remain for the entirety of the film, a reborn subject without a defined national and ethnic identity. In the scenes on the cargo ship, Elias communicates with a travel companion in their native language – an invented language that was, Costa-Gavras explains, the result of reversing French words and a device to not betray the character’s national identity.32 Also in these scenes, he is shown studying French, since his dream is to make it to Paris. The only possession he takes on his journey is an old French textbook, which he obviously loses when he jumps in the water. His dialogues in French throughout the film are very restricted due to his lack of mastery of the language; his agency develops gradually as he improves his command of French and once he arrives in Paris.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy Costa-Gavras uses the road as a leveler, where both the positive and negative aspects of the road, as well as the visible and invisible borders encountered on the way, are explored. He creates a variety of situations that oppose a Manichean and univocal view of Europeans’ attitudes toward immigrants. Elias encounters both the abuse and kindness of strangers on his way through borderless Europe, and the film’s editing emphasizes this contrast by alternating episodes of cruelty and generosity.33 His freedom of movement is curtailed by the fact that, not knowing the roads or the inter-European public transportation systems, and not having any money, he has to hitchhike, thus making himself vulnerable to drivers’ good or bad intentions. Unlike the characters of conventional road movies, he lacks control of the wheel, which would allow him the freedom to choose his itinerary and would provide the potential for self-examination. Road movies traditionally emphasize the journey over the destination, which in many cases is not even decided at the start of the journey; on the contrary, border-crossing road movies are marked by the desire and the need to reach a concrete destination. Elias’s random itinerancy is determined by his desperate need to reach the ultimate goal, Paris, and by the way he manages to symbolically cross the invisible barriers he encounters on the road. Full of unpredictable complications, the road is almost an antagonist he needs to defeat in order to get to his destination. His development as a character is nominal, and he is depicted throughout the film as purely a moving entity across various terrains and weather conditions, on the run from countless individual and institutional pursuers. His journey is not romanticized, nor does it lead to liberation, counter-cultural rebellion, or personal awakening, as is often the case in traditional road movies.34 Eden à l’Ouest shares with them the fact that the road (with its stops and encounters) provides the space in which to reflect on social conditions and people’s attitudes and effect a cultural and political critique within a concrete historical moment. In his journey north through the southern European countries, Elias has constant interactions with a broad range of subjects from different sexual identities, nationalities, professions, social classes, and ethnicities. Upon his arrival on the Greek shore after his escape from the Eden Club, a fisherman sees him and alerts the police, while a shoe seller shows him how to flee from the police. While he traverses Greece, three episodes go from the cruel to the compassionate to the opportunistic: a driver promises to take him to Paris, but steals the money Cristina had given him, leaving him stranded on the road. Sophia, the Greek peasant, picks him up and hosts and feeds him in her home, after which she hopes to get his sexual favors, driving him to flee again. A Greek couple welcome him in their car until they start quarreling and leave him stranded in a snow-covered landscape in the middle of the Italian Alps. Costa-Gavras explains: ‘It’s a scene about how fickle we are, how we want to be humane, considerate, and charitable, as long as it doesn’t disturb our comfort or our peace of mind. At that point, our humanism fades, then disappears.’ 35

191

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

192

The films of Costa-Gavras Encounters with characters from two traditionally marginalized collectives (LGBTQ and Roma) are also inserted in the second part of the film. They offer their unconditional support to Elias and counter the consistently opportunistic and disdainful attitudes of bourgeois Europeans. Two gay German truck drivers, who drive him through the French Alps, hide him as they cross the border into France and give him a warm coat, in contrast with the sexual harassment scene with the hotel assistant manager at the Eden Club. A group of Gypsies, eternal immigrants in Europe who are defined by mobility and nomadism, save him from a chase, believing he is one of them, and protect him in their camp from persecutors, who then set their camp on fire when they cannot find Elias. Soon afterward he is recruited to work without documents at a recycling plant in France, where he is exploited through the promise of legal status. He works harder and faster than nationals, fueling the resentment of national blue-collar workers who are afraid of being fired and losing their benefits. This segment reflects the sentiment felt by European blue-collar workers, as neoliberalism has weakened the social programs that redistribute resources and protect workers and citizens, and as populist anti-immigration political parties increasingly make immigrants the object of European citizens’ fears – of invasion, unemployment, delinquency, terrorism, contamination of religious, racial and ethnic purity, among others. In their canonical book Race, Nation, Class – originally written in French in 1988 but extremely relevant today and notably after the 2008 economic crisis – Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) established the correlation between racism and social and economic crisis, and defined popular or working-class racism. Focusing their reflection on the specific case of France, they argue that working-class racism is linked to the ‘hierarchization’ of workers by the state: skilled jobs for the French, unskilled jobs for immigrant workers (exploitation versus super-exploitation).36 The correlation between racism and social and economic crisis generates an ‘immigration complex’ in the population that perceives immigrants and their social conditions as ‘a problem’ that generates or aggravates other social problem, whether that be unemployment, housing, social security, education, public health, morals or criminality. In the popular classes the crisis creates an uncertainty about their collective identity as a class that is intimately related to the weakening of labor movements and workers’ organizations.37 Even though the immigrants working at the factory are paid less than the French and are promised a raise only when they get their ‘papers’, one of the workers at the factory expresses this fear of being replaced by immigrants: ‘Stop working so fast. I have worked here ten years and I want ten more. I have got health insurance and a pension.You will have nothing whether you work fast or slow.’ Elias rebels and starts a riot when he and his fellow workers are denied entrance to the cafeteria facilities, which only nationals are allowed to use. As Costa-Gavras puts it, when Elias rebels he gains the respect of others and his dignity, but he loses his job and is forced to run away.38

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy In the third part of the film, when Elias enters France and soon thereafter arrives in Paris, his human interactions continue in a similar vein, with both helpful and suspicious French citizens, as well as immigrants and outcasts like himself. The episodes present tolerant and intolerant attitudes, regardless of the characters’ social or legal status; they fluctuate between the comedic and the tragi-comic. Another immigrant from his country directs Elias to the same shelter where he spends nights and instructs him to carefully guard his possessions, only to rob him while he is asleep. French homeless and undocumented immigrants, who pick up garbage or sell souvenirs to tourists in the streets of Paris, help him with directions and offer him a space in the tent where they live. But soon enough, competition for the commercial use of the urban space arises among other immigrants, who see him as an intruder. An employee at a bakery, seeing Elias’s face glued to the window of a pastry shop, chases him out with a gesture. He is not even allowed to watch what he cannot have. A few minutes later, though, a waiter allows him to eat the food left over on a plate at the outdoor terrace of an elegant brasserie. A compassionate rich lady offers him an elegant suit that belonged to her late husband. Elias’s change of appearance symbolically tears down a fundamental ‘internal boundary’: the police do not harass him anymore but rather call him ‘sir’ and protect him when he is about to get trapped in the middle of a Rollerblade parade. As long as Elias shows sartorial signs of improved economic status, he alters, at least provisionally, the vulnerable position he has held in European society. He ceases to attract suspicious gazes in the streets once he wears his new outfit, demonstrating to himself as well as to the audience that the acceptance he can have in the European society is inextricably tied to his appearance. When he finally finds the magician he has been looking for since he arrived in Paris, and who promised to help him if he ever made it there, the magician refuses to help him and leaves the scene, but not before giving him his magic wand. Fable and slapstick comedy A magical element is incorporated and transferred to the visual composition in those last scenes of the film. With the Eiffel Tower on the near horizon, Elias cries upon realizing that his long search for the magician has been futile. As he inspects the magician’s wand, he magically and inadvertently lights up the Eiffel Tower with it. Astonished by its magical power, he folds it, puts it in his pocket and starts walking on the long promenade that leads towards the now glittering emblematic monument. It is clear by now that he cannot count on the kindness of Europeans or trust their promises; his fate, like the magic wand, is in his hands now. Elias’s journey continues, but the end of the road trip and arrival at the final destination seem to be shiny and full of promise. Elias’s fictitious and ambiguous identity, as well as the satirical take on the EU citizens’ volatile and inconsistent reactions to his passage through Europe,

193

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

The films of Costa-Gavras contribute to the film’s fable-like, and thus universal and atemporal, quality. The closing magical episode grants the film an optimistic outcome, and, as traditional fables do, it conveys a moral: the chance of success does not depend on the kindness of strangers, but resides with the immigrant’s resilience and determination to improve his fate. A fable made out of the experiences of immigrants is an inventive narrative format to raise awareness, question European citizen’s passivity, and encourage the development of collective responsibility. In addition to being an epic noble hero and a candid fable type, Elias is modeled on the comedic anti-heroes of silent cinema. Costa-Gavras explains that he did not want to contribute to ‘overdramatizing’ the issue of immigration and that comedy’s lighter tone was a way to let the issue ‘breathe’ and to approach the story of its ‘problematic man’ from a different angle.39 As inspiration for deadpan humor, slapstick gags and overall lighter tone, the film borrows many of its comic cues from silent movies. Elias, Costa-Gavras explains, is like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. He is constantly on the run, and ‘he is afraid of all uniforms’, and, like silent actors, he hardly speaks but communicates everything through gestures and facial expressions.40 Scamarcio’s acting replicates the vigorous physical acts, farcical pantomime gestures and visual gags performed by classic silent comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and, later, by sound film comedians such as the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. Elias’s frenzy to become invisible and evade authority forces – whether they be security guards at the Eden resort, immigration and border patrols during his road trip, or police in the city of Paris – the falls, blows, antics and mad chases in which he finds himself reproduce those of the silent films’ protagonists. Misunderstandings and sartorial revelations, resulting from his being forced to steal people’s unattended food and clothes to survive, produce some of the film’s funniest gags and chases. As is the case in classic silent comedies, there is often a fine line between the comedic and the pathetic, which is reinforced by framing and mise-en-scène. In virtually every frame, Elias’s face is shot in close-ups that highlight his emotions: fear, sadness, anger, and bewilderment. The aforementioned episode at the Eden Club, in which Elias is chosen to be the puppet of a magic act for the entertainment of the club’s patrons, is not just a metafictional recreation of classic silent-film comedy; by making Elias the target of ridicule and laughter of both diegetic and non-diegetic audiences, it reflects on the vulnerability of the immigrant. The film’s slapstick devices and comic register also serve to stage the tribulations and instability of the solitary immigrant, bereft of family, friends and social support, while also exteriorizing European nativist hostility to immigration. On the road trip north, in the intervals when he is walking on mountain and rural roads or crowded town and city streets, he is often framed with wide long shots that emphasize his loneliness and sense of loss. As Glenda Carpio (2017) explains, referring to films by the Marx Brothers, slapstick can be useful to ‘explore the alienation that immigration entails as it is

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy experienced internally and physically’.41 Pathos and angst are absent, and yet the comic absurdity of slapstick physicalizes the loneliness, alienation, loss of identity and violence that Elias experiences on his journey. Similarly, Elias’s silence, forced by his limited linguistic competence in French or any of the other languages spoken in the countries he traverses, reinforces his foreignness, reducing him even more to the role of the Other: feared, misunderstood and taken advantage of by Europeans. His troubles in communicating and interacting with the locals replicate those existing between nationals and foreigners in reality, inviting spectators to empathize both with him and his interlocutors. Conclusion In my previous work (2015), I grouped Eden à l’Ouest with several other bordercrossing films made around the same time by European or Latin American filmmakers. Among them are In this World (2002), by Michael Winterbottom, a docudrama that follows the journey of two young Afghan men from the refugee camp of Shanshatoo in northwestern Pakistan to London via Iran, Turkey, Italy, France; 14 Kilómetros (2007), by Gerardo Olivares, which depicts the long journey of three characters following one of the most common routes from sub-Saharan Africa across desert and sea to Europe; and Sin nombre (2009) by Cary Fukunaga and La jaula de oro (2013) by Diego Quemada-Díez, both of which dramatize the journey of Central American children and teenagers following the migrant trail that hundreds of thousands of Central Americans have used to make it to the US border, riding atop La Bestia (The Beast, also called the train of death), the network of freight trains that traverse Mexico from the Guatemalan border to the US border. These films present a pessimistic and dystopian vision of social mobility in a world where the policy of closed borders has increasingly resulted in the creation of criminal enterprises with corporate structures that control the industry of human trafficking, linking it with other criminal activities, such as prostitution, drug distribution, and money laundering. Eden à l’Ouest shares with these films a wide variety of elements in terms of genre, structure, and ideology. The road movie genre serves the narrative and visual emphasis on the journey and open-ended outcome for the traveling protagonist, signifying the circularity and unavoidability of migratory flows. As with these other examples, Costa-Gavras’s protagonist travels across multiple geographical boundaries before he arrives at his destination. For him, borders are not only geographical but also political, social and linguistic, especially when referring to the internal or invisible boundaries (financial, ethnic, linguistic and religious) that undocumented immigrants encounter within the European Fortress’s confines. It provides audiences with both closure (the character makes it to his desired destination, in spite of the obstacles) and an open ending (his fate in Europe is uncertain), with both disenchantment with the journey’s process and false promises and hope in the opportunities that may open up.

195

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

The films of Costa-Gavras The originality of Eden à l’Ouest resides in the combination and blurring of the boundaries between serious drama, epic fable, road movie, and comedy. Comedy and self-deprecating humor is more often found in diasporic films authored by second-generation immigrants to present their characters’ struggle to both maintain their cultural traditions and rebel against them in order to assimilate to the new country. As in those films, Eden à l’Ouest’s light and comedic tone permits audiences to laugh in the face of the character’s adversity, and to be simultaneously entertained and educated. In Costa-Gavras’s own words: ‘Cinema is about seducing an audience to have them go away and think … In Greece we have no word for it except for the ancient Greek expression “to guide the soul”. I think the role of entertainment is to do that.’ 42 The film’s main goal is to raise concrete moral questions and human rights concerns.43 Costa-Gavras concluded his interview with Ravanello (2009) on the occasion of the film’s press release by connecting his film to – and questioning with it – the current state of democracy in Western countries: ‘Where is the democratic process when it comes to the immigrant?… Any self-respecting democracy channels violence, protects its weaker members, and maintains its dignity … Immigrant, homeless, unemployed, outcast … nothing should take away their dignity.’ 44 Notes 1 Olivier Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’, Neos Kosmos (2009). 2 See video interview inside ‘Costa-Gavras on Being a Political Filmmaker’, Criterion: www.criterion.com/current/posts/3584-costa-gavras-on-political-filmmaking (accessed 21 August 2019). 3 Maya Jaggi, ‘French Resistance: Costa-Gavras’, The Guardian, 3 April 2009. 4 See Isolina Ballesteros, Immigration Cinema in the New Europe (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 175–203. 5 Costa-Gavras was born in 1933 in Greece. During the Nazi occupation, his father fought in the left-wing resistance. After the Greek Civil War (1946–49) ended in defeat of the Democratic Army of Greece founded by the Communist Party of Greece, his father lost his job and was jailed for allegedly being a communist, and Costa-Gavras was denied entry to the Greek university and a visa to study film in the United States. He migrated to France in 1952. See Jaggi, ‘French Resistance’. The father and paternal grand-parents of the film’s Jewish screenwriter, Jean-Claude Grumberg, migrated from Romania to France in the 1930s to escape fascism. Born in 1939, Grumberg spent his childhood in hiding after his father and grandfather were deported to AuschwitzBirkenau extermination camp in 1943. Grumberg’s plays and screenplays depict the experiences of Jewish people in Europe during and after the Second World War. His best-known plays are his Holocaust trilogy consisting of Dreyfus (1974), L’Atelier (1979), and Zone Libre (1990). See Jean-Claude Grumberg, Jean-Claude Grumberg: Three Plays, trans. Seth L. Wolitz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). 6 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 7 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 8 Verónica Tello, Counter-Memory Aesthetics: Refugee Histoires and the Politics of Contemporary Art (New York: Bloomsbury Academics, 2016), p. 137.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eden à l’Ouest: border-crossing odyssey and comedy 9 Banksy produced the same contrasting effect when he inserted a raft crammed with immigrants in the dystopian playground titled Dismaland, a temporary art project constructed in the seaside resort town of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, England, between August and September of 2015. In it Banksy subverted the concept and design of Disneyland, the theme-park par excellence, dream of every Western child and already available in numerous destinations around the world (Orlando, París, Tokyo, Shangai, and Hong Kong), and turned it into an apocalyptic nightmare that reproduces the sinister spectacle to which we are constantly exposed on the media. 10 Susan Smillie, ‘Drowned World:Welcome to Europe’s First Undersea Sculpture Museum’, The Guardian, 2 February 2016. 11 Sébastien Fevry, ‘Immigration and “Mythological” Memory in French Cinema: How References to Homer and Ovid Refigure the European Perception of Exile’, Image & Narrative 18.1 (2017): 21. 12 Fevry, ‘Immigration and “Mythological” Memory’, p. 23. 13 Fevry, ‘Immigration and “Mythological” Memory’, p. 25. 14 Jaggi, ‘French Resistance’. 15 Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Johns, James Swenson and Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 82. 16 John Casey, ‘Open Borders: Absurd Cinema or Inevitable Future Policy?’ International Migration 48.5 (2010): 18. 17 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), pp. 67, 92, 91. 18 Harald Bauder, ‘The Possibilities of Open and No Borders’, Social Justice 39.4 (2014): 79. 19 Bauder, ‘The Possibilities of Open and No Borders’, p. 80. 20 L. S. and E. H., ‘Open Borders: The Case for Immigration’, The Economist, 16 April 2018. 21 Bauder, ‘The Possibilities of Open and No Borders’, p. 83. 22 Antoine Pécoud and Paul de Guchteneire, ‘Introduction:The Migration without Borders Scenario’, in Pécoud and de Guchteneire, eds, Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People (New York, Oxford: Unesco Publishing) 2007, p. 16. 23 Casey, ‘Open Borders’, p. 41. 24 Casey, ‘Open Borders’, p. 35. 25 Casey, ‘Open Borders’, p. 28. 26 Casey, ‘Open Borders’, p. 44. 27 Bauder, ‘The Possibilities of Open and No Borders’, 76. 28 Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt, Open Road, Closed Borders: The Contemporary FrenchLanguage Road Movie (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), pp. 3–4. 29 Michael Gott, ‘West/East Crossings: Positive Travel in Post-1989 French-Language Cinema’, in Leen Engelen and Kris Van Heukelom, eds, European Cinema After the Wall: Screening East-West Mobility (Lanham, MD and Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 3. 30 Gott and Schilt, Open Road, Closed Borders, p. 6. 31 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 32 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 33 Recent surveys suggest that proximity to immigrants correlates with a pro-immigrant sentiment, and that ‘despite the efforts of European right-wing parties that portray immigrants as a threat to jobs, domestic security and cultural harmony … in practice Europeans’ views of migrants are still relatively positive’ (L. S. & E. H., ‘Open Borders’). 34 David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 20.

197

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

198

The films of Costa-Gavras 35 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 36 Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 224. 37 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, p. 226. 38 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 39 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 40 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’. 41 Glenda R. Carpio, ‘“Am I Dead?”: Slapstick Antics and Dark Humor in Contemporary Immigration Fiction’, Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017): 342. 42 Jaggi, ‘French Resistance’. 43 The film opened the London’s Human Rights Film Festival in 2009 and was screened on the closing night of the 59th Berlinale. Inexplicably, the film never got wide commercial distribution in the United States although it can be purchased and rented through Amazon Prime. 44 Ravanello, ‘Costa-Gavras Seeks His Eden through Film’.

13

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Representing the economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital (2012) Mark Bould

In the early 1970s, the international success of Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) – reflected at the box office and by multiple award nominations and wins everywhere from Cannes and the Oscars to the Mystery Writers of America and the Kansas City Film Critics Circle – helped launch a cycle of political thrillers in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. It also prompted a debate about political–aesthetic strategy for radical filmmaking.1 In 1974, Guy Hennebelle divided the existing field of broadly leftist filmmaking into three categories. Among these was the militant cinema represented by Chris Marker’s SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles) group, for which Hennebelle considered a single approbatory paragraph sufficient to establish the self-evident superiority of their praxis. He was far less enamoured of the ‘telqueliens’, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub, busy ‘drowning’ themselves ‘in formalism, intellectualism and ultraleftism’,2 and the Z films of Costa-Gavras and his epigones. Jousting at windmills, the telqueliens ‘desperately’ tried ‘to “break” the mechanisms of traditional representation without paying any attention to the content’, all the while forgetting that ‘a film perfectly “deconstructed” could be completely reactionary and in no way disturb the powers that be’.3 Their error, John Hill later noted, was a ‘general tendency to assume that certain aesthetic strategies (primarily Brechtian) would almost necessarily deliver a radical politics’.4 Indeed, the Brechtianism they favoured would soon be utterly subsumed into dominant cinema, its radical charge so dissipated under the postmodern dispensation that Disney’s The Lego Movie (Lord and Miller 2014) could wrap an anti-corporation ‘message’ into its relentlessly fourth-wall-breaking metaleptic frenzy of gags, and no one but Fox News shills would be tempted to take it seriously. In a similar vein, while Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) repeatedly breaks the illusion in order to convey complex, contextualising information – here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain subprime mortgage bonds, and how to short them;

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

The films of Costa-Gavras here’s world famous chef Anthony Bourdain using no-longer fresh fish in a ‘fresh’ seafood stew to explain how mortgage tranches work; here’s a crowd of cocktailswilling onlookers placing side bets on Selena Gomez’s blackjack hand to explain, with the help of Dr Richard Thaler, what synthetic CDOs (Collaterilised Debt Obligations) are and how they work – his frequently crude but sometimes effective didacticism tends to get lost under his ADHD barrage of technique. The Z movies, on the other hand, suffer from an array of ‘vices’: ‘the plagiarism of a foreign aesthetic, the illusion that forms can be innocent, the acceptance of an individualist mythology based on classless humanism, and an exaggerated reliance on questionable stylistic techniques’.5 The conventions borrowed from Hollywood – primarily, the displacement of social realities on to the terrain of individual psychology, the focus on surfaces and interpersonal relations rather than deeper economic and political frameworks – tend to overwhelm whatever political content might be injected into the thriller form. Terrified of embodiment, Hennebelle moralises that the Z movies should ‘be condemned’ not because of their ‘reliance on facile techniques’ but for the determination with which their directors ‘use them only to produce a constant excitation combined with a deliberate refusal of any dialectical distanciation’.6 Intriguingly, although Costa-Gavras has continued to work primarily in the thriller form, his most recent films consciously refuse such excitation. Le couperet (2005), based on veteran crime writer Donald Westlake’s The Ax (1997), follows unemployed executive Bruno Davert (José Garcia) as he identifies and murders potential competitors for his ideal job before killing the incumbent in the role. Despite the complications one might expect, the film’s tone is of inevitability, not suspense. The final scene, in which the newly appointed Davert is himself under surveillance by a woman who has come up with exactly the same plan to replace him, comes as no sort of surprise; it is just the next iteration of the business-as-usual cycle the film depicts. Eden à l’Ouest (2009) is the episodic story of Elias (Roccardo Scamarcio), a sans-papiers who washes ashore at an exclusive Mediterranean resort and gradually makes his way to Paris. It repeatedly hinges on how the individuals he encounters will respond to him, but each incident is so arbitrarily driven by their personal situations – by their hang-ups, desires and obliviousness – as to be evacuated of tension. Le capital (2012), based on Stéphane Osmont’s 2004 novel of the same name, returns to the problem of representing economic structures and determinants, while also repeatedly featuring thriller set-ups. However, it eschews the kinds of nail-biting perils one might expect of a corporate/financial thriller – for example, Syriana (Gaghan 2005) or The International (Tykwer 2009)7 – and its conspiracy turns out to be merely the mundane, everyday machinations of finance capital. At the same time, the film rejects the tendency of ‘crunch lit’ – semi-autobiographical and fully fictional narratives about the 2007–8 global financial crash8 – to humanise financial players. It does so not to demonise them but in order to foreground the subjectivity produced by neoliberalism. Although Le capital’s denial of ‘constant

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital excitation’ hardly constitutes the ‘dialectical distanciation’ Hennebelle demands, it nonetheless plays a part in Costa-Gavras’s oblique solution to the problem of representing the economy.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Le capital and representation When Jack Marmande (Daniel Mesguich), CEO of Phenix Bank, collapses on the golf course because of complications arising from his untreated testicular cancer, he nominates Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh) as his successor, fully intending to keep running the venerable French financial institution himself, albeit from behind the scenes. His rivals on the board, headed by Antoine De Suze (Bernard Le Coq), agree, reasoning that even with treatment Marmande will only live long enough for them to select and train his real successor. Marc, however, does not intend to be ousted. Considerably younger than the other executives, he abandoned his academic career to ghost-write Marmande’s books, thus winning his confidence, becoming his right-hand man and designated stooge; finding himself at the head of the bank, he must chart a path which will keep him there, but as his own man. However, his initial manoeuvring draws him against his wishes into the schemes of the Bull Funds Group, a predatory speculative fund, headed by Dittmar Rigule (Gabriel Byrne), which owns a blocking minority of Phenix stock, bought with a loan Phenix must now repay. Marc’s wife, Diane (Natacha Régnier), repeatedly urges him to resign, return to academia and write his own books, but he finds himself intrigued by Phenix’s London-based East Asian specialist Maud Baron (Céline Sallette) and drawn to – or perhaps lured by – the supermodel Nassim (Liya Kebede). Marc hires a detective, Rameur (Philippe Duclos), to investigate his rivals at the bank and Dittmar’s circle, as well as Nassim and Maud. Marc also turns to Craillon (Éric Naggar), the bank’s resident expert in hiding ill-gotten gain, to help him set up impossible-to-follow routing to a secret bank account. Dittmar insists Phenix must fire large numbers of employees so as to boost its return on equity. The reluctant Marc finds a way to shed 11,000 staff worldwide through a company-wide ‘self-assessment’, engineered so as to make him appear the heroic – and fair – saviour of the bank, while also ridding himself of two unwanted senior executives. Marmande finally dies, leaving behind a hidden bank account containing 30 million.9 Dittmar next commands Marc to purchase Mitzuko bank, of which Bull Funds secretly own a large part. Maude tells Marc that Mitzuko is in deep financial trouble. It has major cashflow and equity problems and 80 per cent of its assets are toxic, so buying it will send Phenix stock into freefall. But this is precisely what Dittmar wants. In fact, Bull Funds will accelerate the collapse by selling a block of their own Phenix stock the moment the Mitzuko purchase is announced. It is anticipated Phenix will lose up to 60 per cent of their value, but just before they reach that floor, Bull Funds will rapidly buy up Phenix stock, gain control

201

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

The films of Costa-Gavras of the French bank at a bargain price, and replace Marc with their own man. Marc reveals the plot to De Suze, whose faction starts buying up stock just before its price drops to the level at which Dittmar intends to act. The Bull Funds conspirators threaten Marc with prosecution for fraud and insider trading unless he files a complaint against De Suze’s faction for insider trading, thus stopping the deal going ahead. Marc, who has studiously recorded all his phone calls with Dittmar, presents them with the evidence of their own conspiracy to commit fraud and insider trading. When asked how much he wants, Marc replies, ‘Just the pleasure of having screwed you, Dittmar’. He returns to Paris but is forced to resign. Maud, who has also resigned, offers to help him write a book about it all, on ‘Banks in the claws of predatory stockholders. The dictatorship of the market, speculation, the rating agencies that run the economy for politicos, that threaten society. On democratic states that can no longer govern or get rid of the banks who stifle them.’ But Marc refuses: ‘We’re playing, Maud. It’s a game. An unfair game that’s a bit cruel. But it’s planetary. No one can quit and say “I won’t play any more.”’ Diane threatens to leave him if he returns to a banking career, but he goes ahead and forces De Suze to name him as the bank’s new CEO. To the cheers of the Board, he reaffirms Phenix’s mission, ‘Robbing the poor to give to the rich’, and in voiceover describes his celebrating executives as just ‘children, grown-up children’ who are ‘having fun’ and will ‘keep on having fun until it all blows up’. On two occasions, Le capital attempts to represent economic activity through computer graphics. In the first scene, set late at night, Diane, effortlessly elegant in nightgown and cardigan, finds her husband in his study, ordering Matthew Malburry (Paul Barrett) to set aside his serious misgivings and to develop a plan to buy Mitzuko. After ending the video-chat, Marc, for once not wearing a suit and tie, explains the scheme in which Bull Funds have embroiled him (fortunately, he seems to have already set up a presentation, on the off-chance someone might ask). His touch-sensitive computer screen has three logos on it: in the top left, Phenix Bank; in the top right, a red pagoda, representing Mitzuko; and in the bottom left, a blue motor yacht, representing Bull Funds. ‘Phenix buys Mitzuko,’ he says, dragging the pagoda into the Phenix logo, and then dragging a gold dollar sign back to where the pagoda had been, ‘which is worthless. So Phenix’s stock collapses.’ Dragging the dollar sign down into the yacht, he continues, ‘The money paid for Mitzuko goes into the coffers of the guys in Miami, who now [using the money from selling Mitzuko to Phenix] buy Phenix.’ He drags the dollar sign to the Phenix logo, and then the Phenix logo down to the bottom left. A swipe of the finger casts an anchor line from the back of the yacht into the Phenix logo, and the yacht begins to reel it in. ‘They buy Phenix with Phenix’s money’, Diane says, turning from the screen to her husband. ‘They have the bank and the money.’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital

Figure 13.1  Marc (Gad Elmaleh) explains the Bull Funds scheme to his wife Diane (Natacha Régnier)

Troubled by the illegality of it all, and by Marc’s role as a puppet, she urges him to denounce them. ‘We don’t do that,’ he replies. ‘We just don’t.’ As the film is drawing towards its low-key climax, such exposition is as necessary as it is clumsy. Carefully avoiding finance’s ‘rather esoteric neolanguage’, which contains ‘many Anglo-Saxon terms that are untranslatable into other languages, and … designate complex processes not always accessible to the uninitiated, which is to say, almost everyone’,10 the cartoonishly simple and utterly static computer graphics also eschew the hyperkinetic display of data-flows across the internet familiar from such movies as Johnny Mnemonic (Longo 1995). But for all the PowerPoint clarity this brings to hitherto deliberately murky financial shenanigans, it is also a profound abstraction of economic activity. The second graphic representation comes a couple of scenes later, as Phenix stock begins to lose value. As Marc drafts a press release, his secretary draws his attention to the large computer screen facing his desk. On it is a simple grey graph depicting in real time the value of Phenix stock; a yellow line starting in the top left begins its diagonal descent to the right. While Marc calms Malburry, tells De Suze to get ready, muses in voiceover about possible outcomes, and discovers that Rameur and Craillon have conspired to empty both Marmande’s secret account and his own, the yellow line continues its descent. Then, moments after it starts to climb back up, an outraged Dittmar is on the phone, ordering Marc to New York to help him stop the deal going through. Although this concatenation of events and revelations is scored with music that, generically at least, signifies tension, the scene remains devoid of suspense. There are no accelerating crosscuts between actions, or other melodramatic flurries. There is not even a ticking clock, just a line on a graph, the axes of which are so opaquely labelled that it is almost impossible to tell at what point De Suze must intervene. There is merely a plot function signifying its own function, nothing more. Just as the film bloodlessly presents a series of familiar thriller conventions

203

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

The films of Costa-Gavras

Figure 13.2  Computer screen showing plummeting Phenix stock

in the most attenuated of forms, so the graph abstracts a series of details from all the market data produced second by second (or quicker) – data which is itself already an abstraction of economic activity – and renders it in a conventional, readable form. That is, as with all attempts to visualise the economy, it represents through a massive act of misrepresentation. This is not merely the intractable problem of representation – a representation is never the thing itself – but one compounded by the evasive hyperobjectal nature of the economy itself. As Nicky Marsh writes of the ‘complicatedly virtual dance’ of the money economy, it ‘is almost inconceivably powerful (it dwarfs the economy of trade many hundreds of times over) yet it is also immaterial and vulnerable (it exists primarily in electronic pulses and is sustained by the reflexive confidence of its “market makers”).’ 11 The economy as hyperobject These diegetic computer graphics are adequate for plot purposes, but utterly inadequate as representations of the economic activity. This is unsurprising: the economy is notoriously difficult to represent. Indeed, this problem is part of the quotidian experience of the finance industry’s operations, since the inevitable lag in the near-instantaneous transmission of digital information means that the actions of financial agents are always based on what the market was in a moment that has already passed, rather than what the market is at the moment in which they act. The differentials produced by the relative distances over which information must travel to different agents creates a knotted temporality of various evanescing past moments treated as if they are a singular present. In relation to artistic representations, Paul Crossthwaite asks, how do you construct a frame capacious enough to contain something as sprawling and diffuse as ‘finance’ or ‘the market’? And how do you ensure that what is most essential to financial activity – the exchange of intangible instruments – is made visibly present within the frame and not left in obscurity beyond it?12

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

At the dawn of the era of neoliberal globalisation, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) projected the rise of information capital, the consolidating hegemony of transnational corporations and financial interests, and the not unrelated atomisation and brutalisation of everyday life, fifty years into the future. In a frequently quoted passage, Gibson describes the East Coast megalopolis known as ‘BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston–Atlanta Metropolitan Axis’ in terms which precisely capture this problem of framing and making visible the intangible elements of the economy: Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the core of Atlanta …13

This simulation – this attempt to represent – is haunted by its own failure. A ‘solid white’ screen undoubtedly represents the ‘frequency of data exchange’, but does not do so in any interpretable way; rather, it threatens the very possibility of representation. By changing the scale, by reframing the image – that is, by increasing its abstraction – the simulation contradictorily becomes a more detailed, but not necessarily a better, representation. Just as Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) is not exactly what its subtitle declares – the visible texture of the paint, the tonal variation between the two white squares, the diagonal and the off-centre positioning of the top square all add complexity to its claim to be merely white on white – so Gibson’s reframed image of virtual traffic begins to reveal (while also masking) the texture of the real and the history of power. That is, of capitalism in general and, in particular, of the neoliberal globalization, informationalization and financialization developed since the 1970s for two main reasons. Intended to recover ‘capital’s profitability after the period of profit margin decreases’ by ‘enhanc[ing] capital’s profitability outside immediately productive processes’,14 primarily by massively expanding ‘the accumulation of drawing rights over values that are yet to be produced’,15 these interdependent phenomena also function to enable the US to maintain global hegemony during and after its transition from ‘the world’s main source of liquidity in the 1950s to … the world’s main debtor and recipient of foreign capital in the 1980s’.16 Compounding the difficulties inherent in representing the economy is finance’s own nature as ‘the most fetishised form of wealth’ 17 – ‘abounding’, as Marx said of the commodity form more generally, ‘in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’,18 and prospering, with serious implications for democracy, ‘under the shelter of … linguistic opacity’.19 As ‘the complexity of financial algorithms, the acceleration of transactions via automated high-frequency trading, and the fragmentation of finance chains’ demonstrably make ‘financial transactions’ not more efficient, as their champions claim, but ‘more opaque’,20 the proliferation of

205

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

The films of Costa-Gavras autoreferential and autonomous financial instruments further abstracts financial processes from our comprehension and our control. Indeed, accounts of the financial collapse are replete with stories of financial agents – from hapless individuals, such as Fabrice Tourre, to banks, such as his employer Goldman Sachs – who simply did not understand the instruments they were fashioning or the products they were selling, let alone their consequences. (About halfway through Le capital, Raphäel Sieg (Hippolyte Girardot) attributes being up 16 per cent in the markets to ‘the new financial products [Marc’s] math geniuses concocted’. Furrowing his brow, Marc asks, ‘What exactly are we selling?’ Sieg replies, ‘What? I thought you’d tell me.’) Paul Crossthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh argue that ‘financial processes are often difficult to see not in spite of, but precisely because, of their vast size. Finance – money, investment, credit, debt – is the air we breathe, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to get an objective view of an atmosphere that envelops us completely’.21 Their choice of imagery recalls Timothy Morton’s discussion of hyperobjects, of ‘things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’.22 They ‘involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to’, but are hard to see because ‘we are inside them, like Jonah in the Whale’.23 These ‘non-local’phenomena are ‘time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind’, and thus we cannot fully apprehend them:24 we can feel a refreshing breeze on a hot day, or watch rain falling against a window, but we cannot see climate, the hyperobject of which these instances of weather are ephiphenomena. Despite the invisibility of hyperobjects, they have agency and are ‘more than a little demonic, in the sense that they appear to straddle worlds and times’.25 Morton imagines the hyperobject as an ‘octopus … emitting a cloud of ink as it withdraws from access.Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of effects and affects.’ 26 Climate withdraws even as it showers us with effects and affects, but ‘as soon as humans know about climate, weather becomes a flimsy, superficial appearance that is a mere local representation of some much larger phenomenon that is strictly invisible’.27 Hyperobjects are so massive, so extended in space–time, that they produces a ‘wake of causality’ that appears ‘to flow backward “into” the present’ and ‘exert downward pressure on shorter-lived entities’.28 They break down conventional notions of determinism, leaving climate science, for example, with correlation, probability and non-linear modelling.29 While Morton’s work has primarily been taken up as a way to talk about climate and climate change, his own examples of hyperobjects include black holes, the solar system, the biosphere, the Everglades, ‘all the nuclear materials on Earth’ and, of more direct interest here, ‘the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador … the very long-lasting products of direct human manufacture, such as Styrofoam or plastic bags, or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism’, that is, the economy.30 The economy is everywhere all the time, shaping our being, our lives and relationships, but hidden from our perceptions. The simplest of transactions – buying a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital pint, leaving a tip – conceal far more than they reveal of the economy, while derivatives and other financial instruments compete to engineer the present into the past of the possible futures upon which they gamble. Morton argues that ‘any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject’:31 a plastic bag is not the economy, but that does not mean that it cannot be treated in such a way as to draw out its embeddedness and role in the economy. Gibson’s model of abstraction – reduce the economy to data exchanges which can be represented by points of light – makes a similar point. While foregrounding the impossibility of representation, it also points to a (partial) solution in its return to the concrete and tangible traces, which are also active elements, of the economy. In Le capital, this primarily takes the form of depicting its characters in terms of the kind of subjectivity produced by neoliberal hegemony. The neoliberal subject Critics of neoliberal subjectivity tend to describe an attenuated, evacuated personhood – little more than ‘a mere calculus of interests’ 32 – that is nonetheless urged to pursue self-realisation. Stripped of particularity and affect, the neoliberal subject must simultaneously express individualism and celebrate difference, engage in ‘social sadism’ and in ‘social sentimentality’, in mindlessness and mindfulness.33 These ubiquitous contradictory – arguably, complementary – demands on the neoliberal subject, are mirrored in the look of Le capital. Locations are united by the palette of the international capitalist class, dominated by blacks, greys, light blues and white, with occasional light tans and the even more occasional dark brown of an older boardroom. The colour is washed out, as if seen through the tinted window of a limousine, and when Marc and his team take the company jet, it is to the greyest of Florida cityscapes and skies. In Paris, older buildings are retro-fitted with ultramodern interiors, and red double-decker buses crawl through traffic in London’s square mile, subsumed particularities regurgitating an exaggerated theatre of difference – just as the French bankers volubly protest that they and French capitalism are more ethical, honourable even, than American capitalists and capitalism. According to Wendy Brown, the neoliberal shift from exchange to competition renders us ‘all little capitals (rather than owners, workers, and consumers), competing with, rather than exchanging with each other’; this reduction of the human to ‘an ensemble of entrepreneurial and investment capital is evident on every college and job application, every package of study strategies, every internship, every new exercise and diet program’.34 This competitiveness is embedded in seemingly every encounter in Le capital, across public and private spheres. Take, for example, this early sequence of scenes. Marc is summoned to De Suze’s mansion, known as ‘the palace of intrigues and backstabbers’, to meet Dittmar, a major shareholder. Preliminary discussions

207

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

208

The films of Costa-Gavras establish the ‘retired’ Marmande’s ongoing remuneration package.While Marmande wishes to retain his office and use of the private jet, for De Suze and the others these requests are intended to test Marc – who, in his first display of independence, makes clear that he must have the office since it ‘symbolizes authority’, but is prepared to provide Marmande with another one and with use of the jet when he has no need of it himself. The framing of this exchange gives a clear view of both Marmande’s surprise and Dittmar’s appraising gaze. De Suze then states the annual salary being offered – €1.8 million – and once again Costa-Gavras cuts to a set-up that allows the viewer to see Dittmar’s wry smile as Marc states it is just three-quarters of what Marmande was paid, and that no one wants ‘a cut-price CEO’. After an enigmatic exchange of glances, the attorney is told to outline the accompanying bonus scheme: if Phenix stocks top the EuroStoxx 50, a bonus of 2 million; placed second, 1 million; third, 500,000; fourth, nothing. This incentive scheme only seems generous, since, as Marc points out, Phenix is usually in fourth place. De Suze responds by suggesting this is an opportunity for Marc to innovate, Dittmar by relaxing and reassuring Marc that he will receive his stock options. After Marc leaves, the visibly discomfited Marmande complains that his protégé ‘thinks he really is the CEO’ and urges the others to dump him immediately; De Suze demurs. When Marc enters the meeting, it is apparently into a room of more powerful and better established figures who wish to bend him to their will. As the meeting proceeds, and he refuses to stand for the calculated insults of his remuneration package, the dynamics around him shift uncertainly, opening up potential cracks in what initially seemed like a united front. The smug Marmande loses control of his puppet; the demeanour of De Suze, who has no love for either Marmande of Marc, is smooth and friendly, but obviously insincere, and he rather relishes the former CEO’s humiliation and ire; Dittmar is something of an enigmatic presence, yet twice he seems to soften and take Marc’s side. Nothing is as it seems; or, more precisely, everything is exactly as it seems, a surface obscuring motives, schemes, relationships, ambitions. (Subsequent board meetings and meetings with major stockholders are likewise organised around Marc probing and navigating shifting loyalties and agendas.) Marc returns to his apartment, having forgotten he was supposed to dine with his in-laws, who are now preparing to leave. Diane’s father (Jean-François Elberg) wants a quick word about a financial deal, while her mother (MarieChristine Adam), giving Marc a gift of local press cuttings about his promotion, bluntly asks about his salary.These exchanges are full of ambiguity: the father-in-law is happy to wait, and only mentions the deal when Marc asks him to, and there is similarly nothing to suggest a mercenary motive behind his mother-in-law’s question. However, there is also no reason to believe that their politeness is anything other than a conventional mask for avarice. Marc pauses, stunned by his mother-in-law’s query.The noise of an accelerating heartbeat fills the soundtrack, signalling his rage as he expels them from the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital apartment. This moment, however, is quickly put sous rature (under erasure), and the film cuts from fleeing in-laws back to reality, as Marc instead replies calmly that they are still negotiating his package. The first of four such outbursts, this eruption of Marc’s ressentiment into the diegetic world, and its subsequent erasure, captures the extent to which unreadable competitive manipulation can be seen everywhere once the neoliberal subject is taught that that is how the world (supposedly) works.35 These elements are reworked in the next scene in which Marc finds his teenage son, Gabriel (Samuel Parisi), immersed in a first-person shooter. Sounds of simulated warfare threaten to drown their conversation as they sit side by side in medium close-up, Gabriel not once looking at his father. ‘You’re winning’, Marc says, jabbing his son on the shoulder, a nudge which, according to Gabriel, ‘made me lose’, as if every exchange were a zero-sum game of barely suppressed violence – and of calculation. Marc then gives Gabriel a credit card, tells him he has a €1000 monthly limit, which Gabriel receives with apparent indifference. Marc reminds him to say ‘thank you’, and then demands he does so again but in English. The next scene begins with Marc in the shower, still angry about his motherin-law. Diane protests that – even in the real version of the scene – he was ‘odious’ to her parents. Beneath, he is seething about having been offered just 75 per cent of Marmande’s salary. Smiling, Diane suggests it should be enough, but the source of Marc’s ressentiment is clear when he says to her: ‘For you, wealth was long ago. For me, it’s the future.’ She can be so unconcerned about money because she comes from money; but for him, or so he claims, it is about respect.Their exchange switches abruptly to one of flirtation: ‘Turned on by the CEO?’ he asks; ‘No,’ she replies, ‘by you.’ Where Diane proposed mutuality, Marc can already only see instrumentalism and the struggle for dominance: as they start to make love, he says the board picked him because, ‘Like you, they want to use me.’ 36 This elision of any distinction between public and private realms is soon reiterated when in rapid succession Marc: insists on the resignation of Isidore Sartre (uncredited), a regional manager infuriated by his staff ’s claims that he is dictatorial; accepts the threatened resignations of a pair of posturing directors, Boris (Yann Sundberg) and Alfred (Christophe Kourotchkine), angered by the disdain Marc’s self-assessment process has unleashed upon them; and then, when Diane subsequently refuses to wear a €22,000 dress loaned by Dior for a public event, he effectively invites her resignation from the role of the CEO’s wife if she is unwilling properly to fulfil her duties. Although one might be tempted to see Diane as providing, perhaps in conjunction with Maud, some kind of moral core to the movie, they are both so remarkably blind to their inherited privilege that it is difficult to do so. Rather, they parallel the French bankers who consider themselves inevitably and essentially more ethical than American hedge funders; their morality is merely relative, constricted by the patriarchal settings in which they find themselves, but also protected and enabled

209

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

210

The films of Costa-Gavras by their class position. Indeed, when Marc is first ordered to lay off large numbers of Phenix staff, it is Diane who – after again suggesting he resign – provides him with the method, adapted, ironically enough, from Mao Zedong’s strategy in the Cultural Revolution: use ‘the rank and file to get rid of the old timers’ (while also ‘par[ing] the rank and file’).37 His ensuing ‘social plan’ is announced at the AGM, to which he has, for the first time, invited representative regular staff to attend virtually via webcam. At the front of an auditorium in which senior executives are seated with monitors bearing live market information, Marc, Claude and Sieg sit behind a desk on a platform, their images projected onto the giant screen behind them; at the key moment, this massive single image breaks into hundreds of smaller webcam images of the 1407 representative employees from 49 countries. Marc’s speech begins with familiar, supposedly ‘inspirational’, management guff about the relationship between employer and employees being personal and familial, rather than asymmetrical and instrumental, and talks about the possibility of ‘break[ing] free from the past together’. He wants them all ‘to start a meaningful conversation in order to make Phenix Bank number one’.The dark-suited executives in the auditorium burst into applause – an instinctive response to the promise of bigger bonuses. Marc announces that he wants all employees to ‘answer a very straightforward and absolutely confidential questionnaire’: I want you to tell us anything that prevents you from flourishing in your job, be it material issues or problems with your bosses or your co-workers or the people you manage … This is a self-assessment, actually this is a family conversation. In order to increase our collective energy, we have to break little clans. Phenix Bank must rise from its internal contradictions to put an end to unworthy executives, to despotism, moral and sexual harassment, debasement of individual, arbitrary promotions, job insecurity, suicide. My friends, it’s time now to open our hearts and our minds.

As he speaks, the gathered executives grow restless and uncertain, fall silent and, when he finishes, clap slowly and unenthusiastically, but behind him, the onscreen workers burst into rapturous applause. This move is disturbing to more senior employees, not least because it crudely democratises managerial sadism, effectively giving underlings the power to make arbitrary and unaccountable decisions that determine the fate not only of each other but also of their overlings. It taps simultaneously into several aspects of the neoliberal subject: into identification with your job, or with the espoused project of your employer, or both, however sincerely or cynically such things might be felt; into the drives of ‘the flexible, depth-free, entrepreneurial subject’, who – like Le couperet’s Bruno – sees the removal of those around and above him as an opportunity for advancement; into ‘the rush of jouissance’ experienced by the troll beneath the comments elevating himself by cutting – or imagining he does – the headliner down to size. Marc’s carnivalesque redistribution of sadocratic power briefly makes visible – although does not actually instantiate – the neoliberal fantasy that we are all monadic agents competing for advantage on a level playing field.38

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital Through the complicity it evokes, Marc is able to legitimate the savage – and unnecessary – cuts to his workforce. To the dismay of the overlings, it renders them – or reacquaints them with – the conditions of precarity inhabited daily by underlings in a system in which, increasingly, ‘losers are all disposable’.39

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conclusion Recently, Annie McClanahan has called into question the conventional image – advanced by Brown, Feher, Lazzarato, Henry Giroux, Philip Mirowski and Jason Read, among many others – of the neoliberal subject as being reduced to ‘the moment-by-moment calculation of loss and gain, risk and reward’.40 She begins by historicising neoliberalism as a ‘doctrine’ that was ‘consciously constructed’ from the late 1940s onwards by a cadre of ‘inorganic intellectuals’ 41 terrified of capitalism’s imminent demise in the face of socialism, anti-colonial struggle and the ‘long down-turn’ of late capitalism,42 rather than depicting it as a fully formed counterrevolution that sprang into existence and transformed everything with the 1978–80 ascendances of Deng Xiaoping, Thatcher and Reagan. Then, noting the tendency for writers such as Brown and Giroux to focus on the contemporary university as a key site for the production of the neoliberal subjectivity they decry, McClanahan historicises human capital education theory, which similarly emerged thirty or more years earlier than usually imagined, alongside the postwar GI Bill. Consequently, she suggests, what has changed is not so much the construction of subjectivity in the service of late capitalism as the economic context in which it is happening – centrally, the proliferation of accessible credit and the concomitant production of indebtedness as a means to counter the crisis of capitalist profitability. Therefore, if the higher education premium has been declining since at least the 1980s, even as the cost of education began to spiral, then perhaps the phenomena typically described as neoliberal subjectivity is not ‘the wholesale becomingeconomic of the formerly non-economic but rather the introduction of economic exigencies into the lives of people once shielded from them’.43 Perhaps the ‘neoliberal subject’ of Brown and Giroux actually describes the professionalmanagerial class suddenly discovering quite how disposable they are to capital. Costa-Gavras has already explored this possibility in his depiction of Le couperet’s Bruno, two years into redundancy, his resources running down, his opportunities contracting as he gets older and is unemployed for longer, sensing the oncoming end of the residual middle class comforts to which he and his family have grown accustomed. Le capital rearticulates this concern through Marc’s necessary workplace paranoia, which is echoed in the responses of the Phenix executives made abruptly more precarious by the CEO’s proposed ‘family conversation’. McClanahan goes further, though, and suggests that to find the subject typical of neoliberal capitalism we should look elsewhere: not just those from the professional-managerial class thrown into precarity by corporate restructuring,

211

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

212

The films of Costa-Gavras offshoring, predatory mergers and acquisitions, the instabilities and fluctuations of the financial system, toxic debt, and so on, but the people they come increasingly to resemble: ‘the marginally employed, the working poor, immigrants, and people of color’ and, beyond them, ‘those no longer worth capital’s investment at all’, the ‘absolutely redundant’, the ‘wageless life’ concentrated in but not exclusive to the Global South, the segregated, warehoused ‘surplus population that capital seeks to contain, not to credit; to export, not exploit; to annihilate, not to invest in’.44 That is, people like Eden à l’Ouest’s Elias – people who, with the exception of a pair of London rough sleepers Marc disturbs by accidentally setting off a car alarm, do not appear at all in Le capital. While their exclusion might be considered an ideological failure, by treating Costa-Gavras’s most recent films as a triptych, their different perspectives do produce a quietly effective prismatic view of the current conjuncture. Of course, this view remains incomplete, and the broader economic, political and social determinants remain elusive. However, by systematically rejecting the ‘constant excitation’ intrinsic to the thriller form (and to other Hollywood conventions), and thus promoting dissatisfaction rather than surfeit, these late instances of the Z movie perhaps get a little closer to the dialectical distanciation for which Hennebelle clamoured. At the same time, their relative marginality only proposes this kind of rejection as a local, small-scale tactic for these particular films, not as a grand strategy for some fantasy that a truly revolutionary cinema can be made within the confines of the commodity form – which, like Phenix executives, will keep on having fun until it all blows up. Notes 1 An account of this debate can be found in John J. Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984). 2 Guy Hennebelle, ‘Z Movies, or What Hath Costa-Gavras Wrought?’ trans. Renée Delforge Cinéaste 6.2 (1974): 29. 3 Hennebelle, ‘Z Movies’, p. 31. 4 John Hill, ‘Finding A Form: Politics and Aesthetics in Fatherland, Hidden Agenda, and Riff-Raff ’ in George McKnight, ed., Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (Trowbridge: Flicks, 1997), p. 139. 5 Hennebelle, ‘Z Movies’, p. 31. 6 Hennebelle, ‘Z Movies’, p. 31. 7 On the relative utility of the conspiracy narrative for the critique of contemporary capital in films such as The International, Perder es cuestión de método/The Art of Losing (Cabrera 2004) and Manorama Six Feet Under (Singh 2007), see Mark Bould, ‘Post-Noir: Getting Back to Business’ in Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer, eds, International Noir (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 8 The term ‘crunch lit’ refers to semi-autobiographical and fully fictional narratives about, or in some way reflecting upon, the 2007–8 global financial crash, its causes and aftermath. It was coined by Sathnam Sanghera in a review of several confessional accounts to emerge from workers in the financial sector at that time, but soon expanded to include other kinds of narratives [‘Confessions of the Man who Caused the Credit Crunch’ The Times, 20 April 2009, pp. 8–9]. For an overview, see Kay Shaw, Crunch

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital Lit (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Although no one has yet proposed a ‘crunch cinema’, it would include black comedies, crime movies, true-story dramatisations, thrillers, family melodramas, naturalist dramas and yuppie nostalgia-fests, such as The Boss of it All (von Trier 2006), Headhunters (Tyldum 2012), Human Capital (Virzi 2013), The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese 2013), Two Days, One Night (Dardennes brothers 2014), The Big Short (McKay 2015) and I, Daniel Blake (Loach 2016), as well as the horror movies – Drag Me to Hell (Raimi 2009), Dream Home (Pang 2010), Mother’s Day (Bousman 2010) and Crawlspace (Stolberg 2013) – discussed in Dead Pledges, Annie McClanahan’s incisive account of representations and mediations of the collapse of subprime mortgages, a symptom and trigger, often mistaken for the cause, of the systemic crisis [Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017]. For journalistic accounts of the financial collapse, see Michael Lewis, The Big Short: A True Story (London: Penguin, 2011); Paul Mason, Meltdown:The End of the Age of Greed (London:Verso, 2009); and Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010). More critical accounts are provided by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review, 2009) and by David McNally, Global Slump:The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland: PM, 2011), while Michael Roberts offers a longer, structural view: The Long Depression: How It Happened, Why It Happened, and What Happens Next (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). 9 Intriguingly, for a film about international finance, Le capital rarely specifies which currency is being discussed at any particular moment. While it might be assumed that the functionaries of global capital default to US dollars, the effect is to deracinate money, to further separate it from the realm of human activity and being. 10 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. Kristina Lebedeva and Jason Francis McGimsey (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), p. 123. 11 Nicky Marsh, Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 1. 12 Paul Crossthwaite, ‘Framing Finance’, in Paul Crossthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh, eds., Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 36. 13 William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Grafton, 1986), p. 57. 14 Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, p. 31. 15 Cédric Durand, Fictitious Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future, trans. David Broder (London:Verso, 2017), p. 4. For a critical account of neoliberalism, see Harvey; for a longer view, see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds, The Road from Mont Pèlerin:The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). On financialisation, see Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London: Verso, 2013). 16 Ray Kiely, Empire in the Age of Globalisation: US Hegemony and Neoliberal Disorder (London: Pluto, 2005), p. 111. 17 Durand, Fictitious Capital, p. 155. 18 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume one, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 163. 19 Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, p. 123. 20 Durand, Fictitious Capital, p. 118. 21 Paul Crossthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh, ‘Introduction’, Show Me the Money, p. 1. 22 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 1.

213

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

214

The films of Costa-Gavras 23 Morton, Hyperobjects, pp. 1, 20. 24 Morton, Hyperobjects, pp. 1, 58. 25 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 29. 26 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 39. United Fruit – the model for the contemporary multinational corporation – was known throughout Central America as El Pulpo, the octopus; see Peter Chapman, Jungle Capitalists: A Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007). 27 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 104. 28 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 67. 29 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 39. 30 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 1. See Durand, Fictitious Capital. There is a clear connection between ‘the contemporary accumulation of fictitious capital on the stock markets’ and ‘the addiction to fossil fuels’, with companies in the energy and closely affiliated sectors representing almost ‘one-third of worldwide stock-market capitalisation’ (63). Consequently, ‘the preservation of fictitious capital on the stock market directly impedes the fight against global warming’ (64). 31 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 1. 32 Michel Feher, ‘Self Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital’, trans. Ivan Ascher, Public Culture 21.1 (2009): 23. 33 China Miéville, ‘On Social Sadism’, Salvage 2: Awaiting the Furies (2015): 33–34. 34 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. (Cambridge: Zone, 2015), p. 36. 35 In the subsequent sous rature passages, Marc imagines firing Claude (Olga Grumberg), Marmande’s daughter, because of the callousness with which she glibly talks about making massive lay-offs; fantasises about racing out of a meeting with Dittmar to give money to an unemployed man he used to know, Elias Guigou (Nicolas Wanczycki), but whose approach he snubbed minutes before; and relishes pulling Dittmar’s image through the computer screen and into three-dimensional reality so as to beat it to a bloody pulp on the desktop. Significantly, while each of these moments might seem to betray some trace of decency lingering on in Marc, he acts upon none of them, since each would prove a potentially fatal misstep in his constant renegotiations of relative position and power. Since these passages mostly deny the possibility of decisive, violent action, they are not unrelated to Le capital’s comedy of emasculation: when, in the opening moments, Marmande collapses, he clutches not at his heart but at his groin; the film cuts from Marc and Diane making love to Marc’s new tailor enquiring whether he dresses to the left or right; Stanley Greenball (John Warnaby) describes the mass lay-offs as ‘stock exchange viagra’, but when Marc outlines the 30 million bonus he expects, the outraged Marmande leaps to his feet, his heavy cane clunking against the floor as, once more, he clutches at his groin; and so on.Various journalistic accounts of the global financial crisis were quick to attribute it to the macho culture of Wall Street – evident in Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2007) and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (2011), and their adaptations – and while such reckless, braggartly masculinism undoubtedly exacerbated the situation, this ‘common-sense’ explanation is merely a pretext for ignoring the structural causes. 36 Much later, after an extended and, for Marc, unsatisfactory jet-setting flirtation with Nassim, during which she has continually kept him off balance and which may (or may not) be part of the Bull Funds’ machinations, he rapes her in the back of a limo. It is nasty, brutish and short to the point of perfunctory, driven not by libido but a rage for control, for another victory. Nassim’s response – ‘Is that all you wanted? Just a bang?’ – is world-weary, utterly alienated, as if this has happened to her body before and will undoubtedly happen to it again. She throws a cheque for the million euros

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Economy and neoliberal subjectivity in Le capital she owes him in his face, but he has already outmanoeuvred her in this zero–sum game, too: she is in debt to the bank, not him, so he does not even need to stoop to pick it up. 37 This is one of several moments in which the language, ideas or aspirations of the 1960s Left is wryly evoked. In Marc’s address to the AGM, he unabashedly uses dialectical terminology of ‘inner contradictions’, and in an argument with his disenchanted uncle Bruno (Jean-Marie Frin), claims that neoliberal globalisation fulfils the Left’s desire for internationalism. 38 Miéville, ‘On Social Sadism’, pp. 23; 20. 39 Miéville, ‘On Social Sadism’, pp. 43. 40 McClanahan, ‘Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject’, Boundary 2 46.1 (2019): 112. 41 McClanahan, ‘Serious’, p. 104. 42 See Ernst Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1999) and Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: From Long Boom to Long Downturn (London:Verso, 2006). 43 McClanahan, ‘Serious’, p. 118. 44 McClanahan, ‘Serious’, pp. 121, 122.

215

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Filmography

Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders, 1965) Adapted from Sébastien Japrisot’s 1962 novel by Costa-Gavras Starring Yves Montand, Catherine Allégret, Jacques Perrin, Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli, Jean-Louis Trintignant In French National Board of Review for Best Foreign Language Film.

Un homme de trop (Shock Troops, 1967) Screenplay by Jean-Pierre Chabrol and Costa-Gavras Starring Charles Vanel, Bruno Cremer, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Piccoli, Jacques Perrin In French.

Z (1969) Adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’s 1966 novel Z by Jorge Semprún and Costa-Gavras Starring Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Irene Papas In French Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; for Best Editing to Françoise Bonnot Cannes Jury Prize and Best Actor to Jean-Louis Trintignant BAFTA for Best Film Music Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

L’aveu (The Confession, 1970) Adapted from Artur and Lise London’s 1968 book by Jorge Semprún Starring Yves Montand, Simone Signoret In French.

État de siège (State of Siege, 1972) Starring Yves Montand, O.E. Hasse, Jacques Weber In French.

Filmography Clair de femme (1979) Adapted from Roman Gary’s 1977 novel Clair de femme by Gray and Costa-Gavras Starring Jean Reno and Romy Schneider In French.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Missing (1982) Adapted from Thomas Hauser’s 1978 book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Donald E. Stewart and Costa-Gavras Starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek In English Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay Cannes Palme d’Or and Best Actor BAFTA for Best Screeplay; Best Editing to Françoise Bonnot.

Hanna K. (1983) Screenplay by Franco Solinas and Costa-Gavras Starring Jill Clayburgh, Mohammad Bakri, Gabriel Byrne In English.

Conseil de famille (Family Business, 1986) Adapted from Francis Ryck’s 1983 novel by Costa-Gavras Starring Johnny Hallyday, Fanny Ardant, Guy Marchand In French.

Betrayed (1988) Screenplay by Joe Eszterhas Starring Debra Winger, Tom Berenger, John Heard, John Mahoney In English.

Music Box (1989) Screenplay by Joe Eszterhas Starring Jessica Lange, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Frederic Forrest In English Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival.

La petite apocalypse (The Little Apocalypse, 1993) Adapted from Tadeusz Konwicki’s 1979 novel Mala Apokalipsa by Jean-Claude Grumberg and Costa-Gavras Starring André Dussollier and Jiri Menzel In French.

Lumière et compagnie (Lumière and Company, 1995) Contributed a short less-than-one minute subject using the restored original Lumière camera.

217

218

Filmography Mad City (1997) Screenplay by Tom Matthews Starring Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, Alan Alda In English.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Amen. (2002) Based on Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) by Jean-Claude Grumberg and Costa-Gavras Starring Ulrich Tukur and Mathieu Kassovitz In English.

Parthenon (2003) Animated short by Costa-Gavras first release for ‘All Around is Light’ for the Cultural Olympiad at the New York Metropolitan Opera (20 May 2003).

Le couperet (The Ax, 2005) Adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg and Costa-Gavras Starring José Garcia and Karin Viard In French.

Eden à l’Ouest (Eden Is West, 2009) Screenplay by Jean-Claude Grumberg and Costa-Gavras Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Juliane Köhler, Ulrich Tukur In French.

Le capital (Capital, 2012) Adapted from Stéphane Osmont’s 2004 novel by Karim Boukercha, Jean-Claude Grumberg, and Costa-Gavras Starring Gad Elmaleh, Gabriel Byrne, Natacha Régnier, Bernard Le Coq In French and English.

Adults in the Room (2019) Adapted from Yanis Varoufakis’s 2017 book by Costa-Gavras Starring Christos Loulis, Alexandros Bourdoumis, Dimitris Tarloou, Ulrich Tukur, Josiane Pinson, Valeria Golino

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

‘? Mark of ‘Z’ As an Algerian Echo’ (1969) Variety, Wednesday 21 May, 13. ‘ABC-TV Wins “Z” Pic; Post-1971 Airdate’ (1970) Variety, Wednesday 15 April, 2. Adelman, Irma and Hollis B. Chenery (1966) ‘The Foreign Aid and Economic Development: The Case of Greece’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 48.1 (February): 1–19. Aldrighi, Clara (2007) La intervención de Estados Unidos en Uruguay (1965–1973): El caso Mitrione, Montevideo, Uruguay, Trilce. Anders, Jaroslaw (2009) ‘Tadeusz Konwicki: Polish Endgame’, in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose, New Haven: Yale University Press. Anonymous (1972) ‘The Past, Or How It All Came About’, Inside the Colonels’ Greece, trans. Richard Clogg, New York: W.W. Norton. Arendt, Hannah (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Viking Press. ‘L’audition de M. Bernier n’a pas apporté d’éléments nouveaux’ (1965) Le Monde, 26 November. ‘Awards at IFIDA’s N.Y. Feed’ (1970) Variety, Wednesday, 4 March. Babanasis, S. (1976) ‘Specific Features of Recent Economic Growth in Greece’, Acta Oeconomica 16.3/4: 345–362. Baby, Yvonne (1969) ‘Entretien Avec Costa-Gavras “Z” est l’anatomie d’un assassinat politique’, Le Monde, 27 February. Bailey, Bruce (1986) ‘Cinema Notebook: Costa-Gavras’ Latest Keeps his Fans Guessing; Interpretation of film up to audience, director says’, Montreal Gazette, 26 April, 32. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolski, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Balibar, Étienne and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner, London and New York, Verso. Balibar, Étienne (2002) Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Johns, James Swenson and Chris Turner, London and New York, Verso. Ballesteros, Isolina (2015) Immigration Cinema in the New Europe, Bristol and Chicago, Intellect and University of Chicago Press. ‘Banning of “Z” Intensifies Spanish Filmites’ Burn Over Stiffer Censoring’ (1970) Variety, 27 May, 24. Bauder, Harald (2014) ‘The Possibilities of Open and No Borders’, Social Justice 39.4, 76–96.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

220

Bibliography Baumgarten, Marjorie (1997) ‘Mad City’, Austin Chronicle, 7 November 1997. Belfort, Jordan (2007) The Wolf of Wall Street, New York: Bantam. Bergson, Henri (1938) Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan. La Bibliothèque électronique du Québec. Collection Philosophie, Volume 16: version 1.0. https://beq.ebooksgratuits.com/Philosophie/Bergson-rire.pdf Booth, Wayne C. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, David (2006) The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bould, Mark (2014) ‘Post-Noir: Getting Back to Business’, in Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer, eds, International Noir, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 220–240. Braham, Randolph I. (2000) The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, condensed edn, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ——— and András Kovács, eds (2016) The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later, Budapest: Central European University Press. Brayard, Florent (2008) ‘“Grasping the Spoke of the Wheel of History”: Gerstein, Eichmann, and Genocide of the Jews’, History and Memory 20.1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 48–88. ‘Brazil Censoring’ (1970) Variety, Wednesday, 30 December, 6. Brenner, Robert (2006) The Economics of Global Turbulence: From Long Boom to Long Downturn, London: Verso. Britton, Andrew (1986) ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’, Movie, 31.2: 1–42. Brown, Wendy (2010) Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, New York, Zone Books. ——— (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Cambridge: Zone. Browning, Christopher R. (2001[1992]) Ordinary Men – Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, London: Penguin Books. Brum, Pablo (2014) ‘Revisiting Urban Guerrillas: Armed Propaganda and the Insurgency of Uruguay’s MLN-Tupamaro 1969–70’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 37.5: 387–404. Burke, Kenneth (1973) ‘Literature as Equipment for Living’, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd edn, Berkeley: University of California Press, 293–304. Camus, Renaud (2017) You Will Not Replace Us!, Paris: Chez l’auteur. Canby, Vincent (1999) ‘Costa-Gavras’s Striking Cinematic Achievement’, The New York Times 12 February 1982. Rpt. as ‘Missing’, in Peter M. Nichols, ed., The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, New York: Times Books/Random House, 560–562. Canby, Vincent (1983) ‘Hanna K. with Jill Clayburgh’, The New York Times, 30 September. Carlson, Marvin (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction, New York, Routledge. Carpio, Glenda R. (2017) ‘‘Am I Dead?’: Slapstick Antics and Dark Humor in Contemporary Immigrant Fiction’, Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter): 341–360. Casey, John (2010) ‘Open Borders: Absurd Chimera or Inevitable Future Policy?’, International Migration 48.5: 14–62. Chabrol, Jean-Pierre (1958) Un homme de trop, Paris: Gallimard. Chapman, Peter (2007) Jungle Capitalists: A Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution, Edinburgh: Canongate. Chartier, Roger (1982) ‘Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories’, in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds, Modern and New Perspectives, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 13–46. Chutkow, Paul (1989) ‘From the ‘Music Box’ Emerges the Nazi Demon’, The New York Times, 24 December. Ciment, Michel (1967) Review of Un homme de trop, Positif 86 (July): 64.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography ‘Cinema V Contracts French “Z”; Believe Rights Fetched $400,000’ (1969) Variety, 11 June, 7, 90. Clark, Elizabeth A. (2004) History,Theory,Text – Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coaston, Jane (2018) ‘Trump Repeats George a Soros Conspiracy Theory Right Before Kavanaugh Vote’, Vox, 5 October. Cobb, Jelani (2015) ‘Terrorism in Charleston’, The New Yorker, 29 June, 17–18. Confino, Alon (2014) A World Without Jews – The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Conrad, Joseph (1921) The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus, The Works of Joseph Conrad (London: Heinemann, 3), vii–xiii. Constantinides, Alecos (1970) ‘L’interdiction de ‘Z’ confirme l’influence grandissante du régime d’Athènes dans l’île’, Le Monde, 5 March. Cornelius, Deborah S. (2011) Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron, New York: Fordham University Press. Cornwell, John (2008) Hitler’s Pope – The Secret History of Pius XII, 1999, New York: Penguin. ‘Costa-Gavras Talks about Z’ (1969/70) Cinéaste 3.3 (Winter): 12–16. Costa-Gavras, Constantin (1973) ‘I’m Not Anti-American’, by Judy Klemesrud, The New York Times, 22 April. ——— (1976) quoted in an interview, ‘Costa-Gavras Discusses Special Section’, Bette Jeffries Demby, Filmmakers Newsletter 9.4 (March): 28–32. ——— (1982) ‘“Missing” in Action’, Film Comment 18.2 (March–April): 57–59. ——— (1983) ‘“A Film Is Like a Match, You Can Make a Big Fire or Nothing at All”’, Interview with Costa-Gavras, Georgakas and Rubenstein, 64–76. ——— (1983) ‘Missing’, Interview with Costa-Gavras, Georgakas and Rubenstein, 390–396. ——— (2004) ‘Film and History: Questions to Filmmakers and Historians’, Cinéaste 29.2 (Spring): 55–68. ——— (2014) ‘Entretien avec Bruno Ramirez’, in Ramirez, L’Histoire à L’Écran, Montréal, Canada: Les presses de l’univérsité de Montréal, 265–279. ——— (2018) Va où il est impossible d’aller: Mémoires, Paris, Editions du Seuil. Couloumbis, Theodore A. (2004) The Greek Junta Phenomenon – A Professor’s Notes, New York, NY: Pella Publishing Company, 2004. Coyne, Michael (2008) Hollywood goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen, London: Reaktion. Criterion Collection (2015) ‘Costa-Gavras on Political Filmmaking’, Inside Criterion/Sneak Peeks, 2 June. Crossthwaite, Paul (2014) ‘Framing Finance’, in Paul Crossthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh, eds, Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 35–61. ———, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh (2014) ‘Introduction’, Show Me the Money, 1–5. Crowdus, Gary (2013) ‘Money Changes Everything: an Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cinéaste 39.1: 38–45. ——— (2002) ‘Z’, Cinéaste 27.4 (Fall): 52–53. ——— and Dan Georgakas (2003) ‘Filming the Story of a Spy for God – An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cinéaste 28.2 (Spring): 14–20. ‘Dans La Presse Française’ (2002) Le Monde, 16 February. Davis v. Costa-Gavras, 654 F. Supp. 653 (SDNY 1987): 654–660 (accessed 12 August 2016). Davis, Julie Hirschfeld and Michael D. Shear (2018) ‘How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families’, The New York Times, 16 June.

221

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

222

Bibliography Dickens, Charles (1971) The Christmas Books, Vol. 1: A Christmas Carol/The Chimes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dillon, Christopher (2015) Dachau and the SS – A Schooling in Violence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Diuguid, Lewis H. (1972) ‘Costa-Gavras: Beyond Labels’, The Washington Post, 13 August, L1. Doulis, Thomas (2011) The Iron Storm – The Impact on Greek Culture of the Military Junta, 1967–1974, Xlibris. Durand, Cédric (2017) Fictitious Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future, trans. David Broder, London: Verso. Ebert, Roger (1997) ‘Mad City’, Rogerebert.com, 7 November (accessed 26 December 2018). Eleftheriadou, Marina (2015) ‘Z and Other Cinematic Tales from the 30-year Greek Civil War’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 26.4: 616–639. Feher, Michel (2009) ‘Self Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital’, trans. Ivan Ascher, Public Culture 21.1: 21–41. Fevry, Sébastien (2017) ‘Immigration and ‘Mythological’ Memory in French Cinema: How References to Homer and Ovid Refigure the European Perception of Exile’, Image & Narrative 18.1: 20–32. Field, Amy J. (1988) ‘A Curtain Call for Docudrama-Defamation Actions: A Clear Standard Takes a Bow’, Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 8: 113–126 (accessed 12 August 2016). ‘“A Film is like a Match: You Can Make a Big Fire or Nothing at All”: An Interview with Costa-Gavras’ (1973), Cinéaste 6.1: 2–7. Foster, John Bellamy and Fred Magdoff (2009) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, New York: Monthly Review. Freud, Sigmund (1961) ‘Why War?’, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press. Fry, Louis W. and Sadler Nisiewicz, Melissa (2013) Maximizing the Triple Bottom Line through Spiritual Leadership, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Furet, François (1992) Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Garcia, Alexandre (2002) ‘La justice examine la demande d’interdiction de l’affiche du film “Amen”’, Le Monde, 21 February. Georgakas, Dan (1988) ‘There’s Always a Point-of-View – An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cinéaste 16.4: 18–21. ——— and Rubenstein, Lenny (1983) The Cinéaste Interviews: On the Art and Politics of the Cinema, Chicago: Lake View Press. Gerard, Emmanuel and Bruce Kuklick (2015) Death In The Congo – Murdering Patrice Lumumba, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gibson, William (1986) Neuromancer, London: Grafton. Gili, Jean A. (1993) ‘La Petite Apocalypse’, Positif 386 (April): 52–53. Ginzburg, Carlo (2006) ‘Microhistory – Two or three things that I know about it’, trans. John and Anna C. Tedeschi, in Robert M. Burns, ed., Historiography – Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, Volume IV: Culture, London: Routledge, 183–206. Giroux, Henry (2014) Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket. Godman, Peter (2004) Hitler and the Vatican – Inside the Secret Archives that reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church, New York: Simon & Schuster. Goldfarb, David A. (1995) ‘The Comic Struggle for Ideology after Communism: La Petite Apocalypse – Costa-Gavras and The Convert – Kazimierz Kutz’, Slavic and Eastern European Performance 15.3: 58–62.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography Goldman, Peter (1979) The Death and Life of Malcolm X, second edn, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gonzalez-Vaillant, Gabriela (2015) ‘The Tupamaros: Re-gendering an Ungendered Guerilla Movement’, Norma 10.3: 295–311. Gorman, Mary Jo (1970) ‘Cinema V’s Z Is Voted the Blue Ribbon Award for May’, Boxoffice, 8 June, 85. Gott, Michael (2014) ‘West/East Crossings: Positive Travel in Post-1989 French-Language Cinema’, in Leen Engelen and Kris Van Heukelom, eds, European Cinema After the Wall. Screening East-West Mobility, Lanham, MD and Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 1–17. ——— and Thibaut Schilt (2013) Open Roads, Closed Borders. The Contemporary FrenchLanguage Road Movie, Bristol: Intellect. ‘Grenades Fumigènes pour “Z” Dans Cinq Cinémas Parisiens’ (1969) Le Monde, 11 September. Grenier, Richard (1982) ‘Movies: The Curious Career of Costa-Gavras’, Commentary 73.4: 61. Griech-Polelle, Beth A. (2002) Bishop von Galen – German Catholicism and National Socialism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Grumberg, Jean-Claude (2014) Jean-Claude Grumberg: Three Plays, trans. Seth L. Wolitz, Austin: University of Texas Press. Harper, Ralph (1969) The World of Thriller, Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University. Harvey, David (2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hauser, Thomas (1982[1978]) The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Rpt. as Missing, New York: Avon. Hennebelle, Guy (1974) ‘Z Movies, or What Hath Costa-Gavras Wrought?’, trans. Renée Delforge, Cinéaste 6.2: 28–3. Hill, John (1997) ‘Finding A Form: Politics and Aesthetics’, in George McKnight, ed., Fatherland, Hidden Agenda and Riff-Raff’ Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach, Trowbridge: Flicks, 125–143. Hill, John (2011) ‘The Prospects for Political Cinema Today’, Cinéaste 36.1: 8–17. Hochhuth, Rolf (1964) ‘Sidelight on History’, in Richard and Clara Winston, trans., The Deputy, New York: Grove Press. Holpuch, Amanda (2018) ‘Families Divided at the Border: “The Most Horrific Immigration Policy I’ve ever Seen”’, The Guardian, 19 June. ‘Inside Stuff-Pictures’ (1970) Variety, Wednesday, 11 March, 15. Jaggi, Maya (2009) ‘French Resistance: Costa-Gavras’, The Guardian, 3 April. Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre (1975) ‘Fonction du témoignage (les années 1939–1945) dans le cinéma de l’après-guerre’, Positif, 170: 45–60. Jones, Colin (2004) Paris: Biography of a City, New York: Viking. Kaklamanidou, Betty (2006) ‘Ideology and Social Commentary in Le Couperet’, OffScreen 10:4 (accessed 26 December 2018). Kalyvas, Stathis N. (2015) Modern Greece – What Everyone Needs To Know, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kauffmann, Stanley (1982) ‘Stanley Kauffmann on Films: What’s Missing is Costa-Gavras’, New Republic, 10 March, 24–26. Kershaw, Ian (2008) Hitler, Germans, and the Final Solution, New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2008. Khalidi, Rashidi (1998) Palestinian Identity:The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press. Kirshner, Jonathan (2015) ‘The Confession’, Cinéaste 40.4: 60–61.

223

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

224

Bibliography Kiely, Ray (2005) Empire in the Age of Globalisation: US Hegemony and Neoliberal Disorder, London: Pluto, 2005. Kingseed, Cole C. (1995) Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Klein, Julia M. (2003) ‘Costa-Gavras’s Moral Journeys, From Z to A’, The Chronicle of Higher Education 49.23 (14 February): B.13. Kogon, Eugen, Hermann Langbein and Adalbert Rückerl, eds, Nazi Mass Murder – A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, trans. Mary Scott and Caroline Lloyd-Morris, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Koliopoulous, John S. and Thanos M.Veremis (2010) Modern Greece – A History since 1821, Chichester, Great Britain: John Wiley & Sons. Kornetis, Kostis (2015) ‘“Cuban Europe?” Greek and Iberian Tiersmondisme in the “Long 1960s”’, Journal of Contemporary History 50.3 (July): 486–515. Korte, Gregory (2016) ‘14 Mass Shootings, 14 Speeches: How Obama has Responded’, USA Today, 12 June. Kostakopoulou, Dora (2008) The Future Governance of Citizenship, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried (1995[1969]) History – The Last Things Before the Last, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers. L.S. and E.H. (2018) ‘Open Borders:The Case for Immigration’, Open Borders. The Economist, 16 April. ‘La petite apocalypse’ (1993), Le Film Français no. 2439 (29 January): 25. LaCapra, Dominick (1983) Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lackó, M. (1969) Arrow-Cross Men, National Socialists, 1935–1944, Budapest: Akademiai Kiadó. Lacroix-Riz, Annie (2002) ‘Pie XII, “pape de Hitler”, par Annie Lacroix-Riz – Avec l’appui de Pie XII, l’Eglise s’engagea activement à l’est de l’Europe dans l’extermination’, Le Monde, 25 February. Laczó, Ferenc (2018) ‘The Excruciating Dilemmas of Ernő Munkásci’, in Nina Munk (ed.), How It Happened, Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry, Montreal: McGill and Queen’s University Press. xxiii–lv. Laderman, David (2002) Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, Austin, University of Texas Press. Lane, John Francis (1993) ‘Berlin Reviews: La Petite Apocalypse’, Screen International 897 (5 March): 22. Lapavitsas, Costas (2013) Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All, London: Verso. Lazar, Gyorgy (2018) ‘World War II Criminal Albert Wass is Celebrated (again) at the NY Hungarian House’, Hungarian Free Press, 19 March. Levy, Emanuel (1997) ‘Mad City’, Variety, 1 November (accessed 26 December 2018). Lewis, Michael (2011) The Big Short: A True Story, London: Penguin. Lewy, Guenter (2000) The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 1964; Boston: Da Capo Press, 2000. ‘Lisbon Trail Begins Today in ’62 Revolt’ (1964) The New York Times, 28 January. Loewinger, Lawrence (1969–1970) ‘Z’, Film Quarterly 23.2 (Winter): 64. Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1957–1961 (1972) introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Helen R. Lane, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. McClanahan, Annie (2017) Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis and Twenty-First Century Culture, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography ——— (2019) ‘Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject’, Boundary 2, 46.1: 103–132. Machlowitz, David S. (1982) ‘Lawyer on the Aisle: Missing Drowns in a Sea of AntiAmericanism’, ABA Journal 68: 627. McNally, David (2011) Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance, Oakland: PM Press. Malcolm X Speaks – Selected Speeches and Statements (1966) ed. George Breitman, Norwich, Great Britain: Fletcher & Son Ltd. Mandel, Ernst (1999) Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Marazzi, Christian (2011) The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. Kristina Lebedeva and Jason Francis McGimsey, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marsh, Nicky (2007) Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction, London: Continuum. Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume one, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Mason, Paul (2009) Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, London: Verso. Maugeri, Leonardo (2006) The Age of Oil – The Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource, Westport, CT: Praeger. Meir, Golda (1976) The New York Times Op-Ed, 14 January. Mellen, Joan (1971) ‘Fascism in Contemporary Film’, Film Quarterly 24.4 (Summer): 2–19. Melling, Phil (2002) ‘The Adversarial Imagination’, in Philip John Davies and Paul Wells, eds, American Film and Politics from Reagan to Bush Jr, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Michalczyk, John (1984) Costa-Gavras – The Political Fiction Film, Philadelphia, Art Alliance Press. Miéville, China (2015) ‘On Social Sadism’, Salvage 2: Awaiting the Furies: 17–49. Miller, James Edward (2009) The United States and the Making of Modern Greece – History and Power, 1950–1974, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Mirowski, Philip (2013) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Breakdown, London: Verso. ——— and Dieter Plehwe, eds (2015) The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Monaco, James (1976) ‘The Costa-Gavras Syndrome’ Cinéaste 7.2 (Spring): 18–21. Morgan, Iwan (2016) Reagan: American Icon, London: I.B. Tauris. Morton, Timothy (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moskowitz, Gene (1969) ‘One of those Rare French Politico Pix, “Z” Looms Top Grosser in Paris’, Variety, 19 March, 33. Munk, Nina, ed. and trans. (2018) Ernő Munkásci: How It Happened, Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry, Montreal: McGill and Queen’s University Press. Narboni, Jean (1967) Review of Un homme de trop, Cahiers du cinéma 190 (May): 72. Neale, Steve (2000) Genre and Hollywood, New York: Routledge. Neroni, Hilary (2015) The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film, New York: Columbia University Press. Newitt, Mayln (2009) Portugal in European and World History, London: Reaktion Books Ltd. O’Brien, Tom (1990) The Screening of America: Movies and Values from Rocky to Rain Man, New York: Continuum. Ochayon, Sheryl Silver, ‘The Shoes on the Danube Promenade: Commemoration of the Tragedy’, Yad Vashem website.

225

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

226

Bibliography Palmer, Jerry (1978) Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre, London, Edward Arnold. Partridge, Dale (2015) People Over Profit: Break the System, Live with Purpose, Be More Successful, Nashville, TN: Nelson Books. Pécoud, Antoine and Paul De Guchteneire (2007) ‘Introduction: The Migration without Borders Scenario’, in A. Pécoud and P. de Guchteneire, eds, Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People, New York and Oxford, UNESCO Publishing and Berghahn Books, 1–30. Peters, Joan (2001) From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, JKAP Publications. Poague, Leland (1994) Another Frank Capra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Politics Diminish As Socialist Bloc Threat to Fests’ (1969) Variety, Wednesday, 30 July, 22. Pompidou, Georges cited in ‘Paul Touvier: une grâce accordée en 1971 par le Président Pompidou’, broadcast on France-Inter, in the radio series Histoire et Politique, edited by Claude Askolovich, 1 January 2017 (accessed 16 October 2018). Prince, Stephen (2000) A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989, London: University of California Press. Prokosh, Mike (1971) ‘The Confession by Costa-Gavras’, Film Quarterly 24.4 (Summer): 54–56. ‘The Prospects for Political Cinema Today: A Critical Symposium’ (2011) Cinéaste 37.1 (Winter): 6–17. Ramirez, Bruno (2014) L’Histoire à L’Écran, Montréal: Les presses de l’univérsité de Montréal. ——— (2014) Inside the Historical Film, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rampell, Ed (2013) ‘Costa-Gavras’, The Progressive 77.9: 35–38. Raschke, Richard (2014) Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals, New York: Delphinium. Ravanello, Olivier (2009) ‘Costa-Gavras: Seeks His Eden through Film’, Neos Kosmos, 18 August. Read, Jason (2009) ‘A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity’, Foucault Studies 6: 25–36. ‘Le réalisateur de “Z” demande le retrait de son film’ (1969) Le Monde, 12 July. Reeves, Jay (2016) ‘Ku Klux Klan dreams of rising again 150 years after founding’, Boston Globe, 1 July. Reinhard, Kenneth (2005) ‘Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor’, in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, eds, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Revel, Jacques (1996) ‘Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social’, in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds, Histories: French Constructions of the Past, New York: New Press. Roberts, Michael (2016) The Long Depression: How It Happened,Why It Happened, and What Happens Next, Chicago: Haymarket. Rogin, Michael (1987) Ronald Reagan,The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, Berkeley: University of California Press. Said, Edward (1984) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, New York: Pantheon. ——— (1983) ‘Hanna K.’, The Village Voice (11 October). ——— (1992[1979]) The Question of Palestine, New York: Vintage Books. ——— (1994) The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self Determination 1969–1994, New York: Vintage Books. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine (1943). The Little Prince, trans. Katherine Woods, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography Sampson, Sally and Judith Vidal-Hall (1995) ‘Interview with Costa-Gavras: Politics and Propaganda’, Index on Censorship 24.6 (1 November): 106–107. Sanghera, Sathnam (2009) ‘Confessions of the Man who Caused the Credit Crunch’, The Times, 20 April, 8–9. Shamsie, Kamila (2018) ‘Citizen of Nowhere’, The Guardian Review 44, 17 November, 7–11. Shear, Michael D. and Maggie Haberman (2017) ‘Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames “Both Sides”’, The New York Times, 15 August. Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press. ——— (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction, New York, Routledge. ——— (2003) Performance Theory, London and New York, Routledge. Schmitt, Carl (1996) The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Serceaul, Daniel (2002) film review of Section spéciale, in CinémAction 103. Shaw, Katy (2015) Crunch Lit, London: Bloomsbury. Smillie, Susan (2016) ‘Drowned World: Welcome to Europe’s First Undersea Sculpture Museum’, The Guardian, 2 February. Sokol, Sam (2019) ‘Holocaust Scholars Warn that Memory is a Victim of Israel’s Warming Ties with Eastern Europe’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 29 January. Solinas, Franco (1973). State of Siege, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, New York, Ballantine. Sorensen, Theodore (1973) ‘“State of Siege” Speaks “A Warning to Us All” Movies’, The New York Times, 24 June. Sotiropoulos, Dmitri A. (2014) ‘International Aid to Southern Europe in the Early Postwar Period: The Cases of Greece and Italy’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 656 (November): 22–14. Spenser, Philip and Howard Wollman (2002) ‘Good and Bad Nationalisms’, in Nationalism – A Critical Introduction, London: Sage Publications. Stolberg, Sheryl Gay and Brian M. Rosenthal (2017) ‘Man Charged After White Nationalist Rally in Charlottesville Ends in Deadly Violence’, The New York Times, 12 August. Stratton, David (1993) ‘La Petite Apocalypse/The Little Apocalypse’, Variety 350, 8 March, 62. ‘Le suicide des illusions: Le nouveau film de Costa-Gavras, distille un désespoir allègre et un malaise persistant/La Petite Apocalypse de Costa-Gavras’ (1993), Le Monde Archive (12 February). Taibbi, Matt (2010) Griftopia: Bubbles Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America, New York: Spiegel and Grau. Taubira, Christine in conversation with Costa-Gavras on the DVD of Section spéciale. Tello, Verónica (2016) Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art, New York: Bloomsbury Academics. Than, Krisztina (2017) ‘Hungary’s Anti-Soros Posters “Recall Europe’s Darkest Hours: Soros’s Spokesman”’, 11 July, www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-soros/hungarysanti-soros-posters-recall-europes-darkest-hours-soros-spokesman-idUSKBN19W0XU. Thompson, Graham (2007) American Culture in the 1980s, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tincq, Henri (2002) ‘“Amen”, le prochain film de Costa-Gavras, dont l’affiche scandalise l’Eglise’, Le Monde, 14 February. Todorov, Tzvetan (1977) ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, The Poetics of Prose, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 42–52. Toplin, Robert Brent (1996) History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

227

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

228

Bibliography Toubiana, Serge (1975) ‘Mais qui raisonne (Les Ordres, Section spéciale). Review of Section spéciale, Cahiers du cinéma, 258/9: 43–46. ‘Trials in Hungary’, Axis History Forum website. Trivellato, Francesca (2015) ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’, French Politics, Culture & Society 33.1: 122–134. ‘Two World Enterprises/Films Des Deux Mondes’ (advertisement) (1970) Variety,Wednesday, 29 April, 94. ‘US Takes Issue with Costa-Gavras Film on Chile’ (1981) The New York Times, 12 February. Varley, H. Paul (1984) Japanese Culture, third edn, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Vassilikos, Vassilis (1968) Z, trans. Marilyn Calmann, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Verrill, Addison (1969) ‘Gothan Distribs Couldn’t see “Z” For (Gold) Dust’, Variety,Wednesday, 17 December, 3, 62. Viansson-Ponté, P. (1966) ‘“L’Affaire”, le pourvoir et l’opposition’, Le Monde, 29 January. Villeré, Hervé (1973) L’Affaire de la Section Spéciale, Paris: Arthème Fayard. Waldman, Paul (2017) ‘It’s White Nationalism Week in the Trump Administration’, The Week, 3 August. Waldman, Peter. (2011) ‘How Terrorism Ceases: The Tupamaros in Uruguay’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 34, 717–731. Westlake, Donald E. (1997), The Ax, New York: The Mysterious Press. White, Hayden (1978) Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Wills, Gary (1990) Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, New York: Simon & Schuster. Wilmington, Michael (1989) ‘A Crisis of Conscience in Costa-Gavras’s “Music Box”’, The Los Angeles Times, 25 December. ‘“Z” Finally Bows in Athens’ (1975) Variety, Wednesday, 1 January, 20.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

adaptation xiv–xv, 1, 10, 18, 24, 41, 93, 107, 128, 173, 214 Adults in the Room (2019) xiv, 218 Alda, Alan 172 Algeria 50, 52, 54, 57, 61, 71 Allende, Salvador 89, 92–93, 162 Amen. (2002) 3–6, 8, 10, 12–14, 90, 102, 123, 218 Anti-Semitism 8, 15, 20, 70, 152–153, 156, 183 Ardant, Fanny 124, 217 Arendt, Hannah 157 Arrow Cross xv, 152–158, 160, 164–166 assassination xiv, 1, 22, 41–42, 47–50, 52, 59, 62, 72, 79, 85, 141–142, 144, 183 Auschwitz 4–6, 8, 13–14, 15, 153–154, 166 L’ aveu (The Confession, 1970) xv, 1, 10, 18, 23, 39, 54, 59–65, 67–71, 216 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 124–127, 135 Bakri, Mohammad 109, 110–122, 217 Barka (Mehdi) Ben 48–50 Berenger, Tom 10, 141, 144–145, 151, 217 Bergson, Henri 130, 133–134, 136 Betrayed (1988) xv, 1, 10, 90, 123, 137, 140–148, 151, 183, 217 Big Short, The (2015) 199–200, 213–214 Bordwell, Davd 147, 150 Bozzuffi, Marcel 45–46

British Agent (1934) 151 Byrne, Gabriel 103, 111, 114, 163, 201, 217–218 Cahiers du cinéma 20–22, 37–38 Canby, Vincent 93, 108, 166 Le Capital (Capital, 2012) xiv, xv, 168, 200–202, 206–207, 211–214, 218 capital; capitalism; capitalist xv, 2, 42, 48, 75, 78–79, 83, 128, 167–168, 172–174, 177, 179, 181, 183, 188–189, 200, 205–207, 211–215 Capra, Frank 172, 181 Chabrol, Jean-Pierre 18, 24, 37, 216 Le chagrin et la pitié (1969) 18, 22 Chaplin, Charlie 130, 132, 194 Chile 89, 92–94, 98–104, 162, 166, 183 Claire de femme (Womanlight, 1979) 10, 217 Clayburgh, Jill 10, 110, 114, 163, 217 comedy 51, 123, 126, 128, 130–134, 183, 193–194, 196, 214 communist; communism 1, 7–8, 10, 17, 19, 24, 26, 31–32, 42, 49–51, 54–55, 59–60, 63, 65–66, 68, 69, 71, 75, 79–80, 82, 85, 89, 134–135, 152, 154, 156, 157–158, 196 Compartiment tuers (The Sleeping Car Murders 1965) xvi, 26, 53, 90, 151, 216 Conseil de famille (Family Business, 1986) xv, 10, 90, 123–124, 217

230

Index Le couperet (The Ax, 2005) xv, 90, 168–169, 173–174, 177, 179–181, 183, 200, 218 Curtiz, Michael 151 Czechoslovakia 48, 59, 62–64, 89

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Danner, Blythe 168 Demjanjuk, John 158, 166 Ebert, Roger 169, 181 Eden à la l’Ouest (Eden Is West, 2009) xv, 10, 90, 182, 184–186, 188, 191, 195–196, 200, 212, 218 Eichmann, Adolf 152–153, 157 Elmaleh, Gad 201, 203, 218 Eszterhas, Joe 141, 152, 155, 157, 217 État de siège (State of Siege, 1972) xv, 1, 2, 10, 18, 23, 39, 60, 62, 63, 67, 68, 72, 74–75, 77–80, 82, 85–88, 90, 91, 99, 100, 105, 148, 160, 162, 163, 166, 183, 216 Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, The 89, 95, 102, 107–108, 217 14 Kilómetros (2007) 195 Freud, Sigmund 66–67, 71, 135 Garcia, José 174, 178, 180, 200, 218 Ginzburg, Carlo 11–12, 16 Greece; Greek xiv, xv, 1, 23, 41–44, 48–49, 51–57, 59, 71–72, 85, 88–90, 101–102, 136, 142, 151, 183–184, 187, 191, 196 Griffith, D.W. 12, 132 Guevara, Che 2, 72 Hallyday, Johnny 124, 126, 217 Hanna K. (1983) xv, 1, 10, 90, 109–110, 112, 122, 158, 163–164, 166, 183, 217 Hauser, Thomas 89, 92–95, 102–103, 107–108, 217 Hitchcock, Alfred 89, 91 Hitler 4, 6, 7, 15 Hochhuth, Rolf 3–4, 14, 16, 90, 218 Hoffman, Dustin 168, 172, 218 holocaust 3–5, 8, 11, 14, 70, 110, 118, 122, 148, 152–156, 159–166, 183, 196 Un homme de trop (Shock Troops, 1967) xiv, 17–21, 24, 25–27, 36–39, 90, 134, 216

Hungary; Hungarian 152–160, 163–166 hyperobject 204, 206–207, 213–214 immigration xv, 40, 110–111, 115–116, 149, 155, 158, 182–185, 189, 192, 194, 196–198 In This World (2002) 195 Israel 109–113, 115–121, 163–164, 166, 183 It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) 172 La jaula de oro (2013) 195 Jew; Jews; Jewish xv, 4–9, 13–16, 17, 20, 24, 29, 31–32, 35–36, 61, 69–70, 109–111, 116–117, 119–120, 122, 145, 152–159, 163–166, 196 Junta 41, 53–56, 71, 92, 99, 182 KKK (Ku Klux Klan) 139 Kassovitz, Mathieu 4, 10, 102, 218 Keaton, Buster 130, 133, 194 Konwicki, Taseusz 127–128, 131, 135–136, 217 Kracauer, Siegfried 12, 16 Lacombe Lucien (1974) 18 Lamarre, Hervé 18 Lange, Jessica 10, 156, 158, 217 Lee, Spike 139 Lemmon, Jack xiv, 10, 94, 96, 99, 103, 163, 217 London, Artur 1, 63, 67, 69, 216 Lumumba, Patrice 48, 50–51, 57 Mad City (1997) xv, 10, 90, 168–174, 180, 181, 183, 218 Mahoney, John 147–148, 217 Malcolm X 48–49, 57 Malle, Louis 18 Marx; Marxism; Marxist 2, 21, 37, 43, 129, 134, 154, 162, 205, 213 Meir, Golda 115 melodrama 1–2, 10, 52–53, 62, 123–124, 151, 158–162, 203, 213 Menzel, Jiri 10, 128–129, 136, 217 Michalczyk, John xiv, xvi-xvii, 37, 48, 56, 100, 108, 123, 135, 212 microhistory; microhistoriography 3–4, 10–14, 16

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index Missing (1982) xiv, xv, xvi, 1, 10, 18, 89–95, 97, 99–108, 142, 144, 158, 162–163, 183, 217 Mississippi Burning (1988) 140–141 Mitrione, Daniel 1, 72–73, 75–76, 85–87, 91 MLN-Tupamaro (MLN-T) 72–74, 78–87 Le Monde 14–15, 49, 53, 57–58, 134, 136 Montand, Yves 10, 23, 37–38, 45, 46, 53, 62, 64, 72, 77, 90–91, 162, 216 Mueller-Stahl, Armin 155, 159, 217 Mühe, Ulrich 6 Music Box (1989) xv, 1, 10, 90, 123, 142, 148, 152–155, 157–161, 164–166, 168, 183, 217 nationalism xv, 41–44, 47–51, 53–56, 140, 149, 154, 157 NATO 43–45, 51 Nazi; Nazis 1, 3–8, 13, 15–16, 17, 37, 61, 70, 139, 143, 147, 152, 156, 166, 183, 196 neocolonial; neocolonialism; neocolonialist 2, 50 neoliberal; neoliberalism xv, 192, 200, 205, 207, 209–211, 213–215 neo-Nazi 1, 139, 147 Never On Sunday (1960) 51–52 Nouvel Ordre (New Order) 20, 32–33 Obama, Barack 137–138, 145, 149 Odyssey, The 182, 184, 186–187 Ophuls, Marcel 18, 22 Order, The 1, 79, 141–143, 149 Osmont, Stéphane 200, 218 Palestine; Palestinian xv, 3, 48, 109–113, 115–117, 119–122, 163–164, 166, 183 Perrin, Jacques 47, 52–53, 216 Pétain; Pétainism 19, 22–24, 30–34, 36–37 La petite apocalypse (The Little Apocalypse, 1993) xv, 10, 90, 123, 127, 131, 135–136, 217 Pius XII 4, 8, 9, 15 propaganda xvii, 7, 16, 29, 73, 86, 100–101, 104, 111, 140 racism; racist 7, 137–141, 183, 192 Reagan, Ronald 129, 140, 142–143, 146, 149–150, 211

Régnier, Natacha 201, 203, 218 Roof, Dylann 137–138 Said, Edward 110, 112, 117–120, 122, 164, 166 Salvatori, Renato 45 Scamarcio, Riccardo 10, 190, 194, 200, 218 Schechner, Richard 72–75, 80, 82, 85–86, 88 Schmitt, Carl 60–61, 71 Section spéciale (1975) 17–26, 30–32, 34–39 Signoret, Simone xii, 37, 216 Sin nombre (2009) 195 slapstick 131, 193–195, 198 Spacek, Sissy 94, 96, 163, 217 Stone, Oliver 143, 152 supremacist (white) 10, 48, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147–148, 153 Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) 205 Talk Radio (1988) 143–144 Todorov, Tzvetan 73–74, 86 torture xv, 2, 59–65, 67–70, 71, 72, 74, 77–78, 80–82, 84–86, 154–155, 157 totalitarian; totalitarianism 18, 19, 48, 54–55, 60, 71, 128 Travolta, John 10, 168, 172, 218 Trintignant, Jean-Louis 10, 216 Trump, Donald 138–140, 146–147, 149, 153, 165 Tukur, Ulrich 4, 7, 10, 102, 178, 218 United States Aid for International Development (USAID) 75–76, 82–84, 89, 91 Uruguay; Uruguayan 1, 2, 60, 63, 67, 72–80, 82–87, 89, 91, 163, 183 USSR 51, 154 Variety 53, 57–58, 134, 136, 181 Varoufakis, Yanis xiv, 218 Vassilikos, Vassilis xiv, 1, 42, 45, 47, 52, 56, 104, 217 Vatican 4–5, 8–9, 15, 102, 131 Vichy xv, 17, 20, 24, 29, 31–32, 36, 37–38, 153

231

232

Index Westlake, Donald E. 173–175, 181, 200, 218 Winger, Debra 141, 144–145, 148, 151

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Z (1969) xiv-xv, xvii, 1, 14, 18, 23, 26, 39, 41, 45, 47–58, 59, 61–63, 71, 89–93,

101–102, 104, 123, 134, 148, 150, 160, 162, 182, 199–200, 212, 216 Zionist; Zionism 51, 69, 110–113, 115–116, 119–120 Zorba, the Greek (1964) 52 Zyklon B 4, 6, 7, 13–15