The films of Costa-Gavras

New perspectives

Homer B. Pettey

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526146922
• eBook ISBN: 9781526146915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Costa-Gavras is a seminal figure in French and international cinema. A master of the political thriller, he explores historical events through individual human stories, thereby involving his audience in past and contemporary traumas, from the horrors of the Holocaust through mid-century international state terrorism and totalitarianism to the current global financial crisis. With a career spanning half a century, he remains one of cinema's most intriguing and enduring storytellers, theorists and political commentators. This collection of original essays charts and re-examines Costa-Gavras's career from Un homme de trop (1967) to Le capital (2012). Readable and carefully researched, it will appeal to students and scholars of film, as well as fans of the director's work.

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, 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 right-liberal 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 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 tr...

Table of contents

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