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PORTSIDE CULTURE

COSTA-GARVAS DIRECTING THE REVOLUTION-‘Z’  
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Kenan Behzat Sharpe
November 8, 2018
Jacobin
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_ Political cinema can sometimes be too highbrow for a mass audience.
But in the 1960s and early '70s, French-Greek director Costa-Garvas
showed that films with a revolutionary message can also be popular. _

Costa Garvas Directing Z, Jacobin

 

_COSTA-GARVAS RELEASED  HIS REVOLUTIONARY  FILM Z' IN 1969.  THIS
JACOBIN ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2018.  TODAY 'Z' CAN BE
STREAMED ON MAX._

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In March 1969 a three-day National Conference for a United Front
Against Fascism
[[link removed]] was
held in Oakland, California. The Black Panther Party (BPP) was in
charge of security. Numerous activists and revolutionaries from around
the world attended. After speeches and other consciousness-raising
activities, a film screening was organized for the participants. The
film? _Z_, by Greek-French director Costa-Gavras
[[link removed]].

Even though the film was not officially released in the US until
December 1969, BPP captain Aaron Dixon and his comrades were able to
procure an advance copy to show at the conference.

_Z_ [[link removed]] tells the
story of a charismatic left-wing politician in an unnamed
Mediterranean country, who is assassinated by shady characters
connected to the deepest layers of the state. As the film progresses
it becomes clear that the murder was organized by malicious figures
from within an entrenched political-military alliance of the Right.
They cannot countenance the prospect of a strong Left, so the young MP
(played by acclaimed French actor Yves Montand
[[link removed]]) must die.

Montand’s character perishes violently in the first fifteen minutes
of the film. There follows a riveting concatenation of events that
reveals both the efforts to bring the assassins to justice and the
array of legal and extra-legal means used to keep the killing under a
cloak of darkness. With car chases, sleuthing, murder, courtroom
scenes, and interrogations, the tale proceeds with knuckle-biting
suspense.

By the end of the film, the viewer is faced with such a thorough
portrait of political, historical, and economic rot in this fictional
society that they understand that nothing short of a revolution could
prevent similar murders from occurring in the future.

The story of _Z_’s screening in Oakland, told in passing by Aaron
Dixon in his memoir
[[link removed]] about
the BPP, is just one example of how the films of Costa-Gavras, often
focusing on historical themes and revolutionary situations, leave the
rarified realm of culture and seem to participate directly in history
and politics. Out of the Oakland conference came the United Front
Against Fascism, which set up radical community centers to counter the
kind of insidious, everyday fascism revealed in _Z_. One continuing
focus of the BPP’s efforts was self-defense against state violence
like that which took down Montand’s character.

Tragically linking fiction and fact, future screenings of _Z_ would
stir the rage and sadness felt in the wake of Fred Hampton’s
all-too-real assassination
[[link removed]] in
Chicago at the end of 1969. As one critic writes
[[link removed]] of
the film’s subsequent US reception, _Z _“sparked a sensation,
not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly
capturing a global mood of apprehension at a moment when America was
at its most vulnerable.”

It would be simplistic to suggest that the screening of the
antifascist and anti-authoritarian film _Z_ directly impacted
political decisions or predicted historical events. But this
all-but-forgotten screening in the Bay Area in 1969 does reveal the
way in which in that decade radical art, and in particular cinema,
breathed the same air as social movements. Art and culture drew on the
same forms of inspiration as these movements, and in turn contributed
to the general atmosphere of those heady years — times when it felt
like everything was about to change.

Radical Cinema

One important manifestation of this 1960s political climate was the
speed with which things (people, ideas, slogans, fashions, arms) could
travel, seemingly unconstrained, across the world and back again.
Central to these international exchanges were objects of revolutionary
culture: a battered paperback carried in a suitcase, a song on a 45
vinyl, a hand-copied script. Or a spool of film reel, sent to Oakland
by a Greek director who made a French film shot in Algeria.

Shared without respect for national or other borders, such a common
1960s repertoire of revolutionary poems, records, plays, films, and
more helped contribute to the feeling that what was kicking off here
was also kicking off there, and that art had a part to play in it all.

Today, most of us would find it difficult to harbor the same optimism
for art’s ability to intervene in the world. There is a sense that
it would be nearly impossible for something like a film to even stir a
genuine controversy anymore, let alone contribute to a revolutionary
situation. Yet this is exactly what Costa-Gavras and other radical
filmmakers of his generation expected from cinema — and so did their
audiences.

What set the work of Costa-Gavras slightly apart from fellow left-wing
directors like Jean-Luc Godard
[[link removed]] or Gillo
Pontecorvo [[link removed]],
however, is that he thought cinema could both be
revolutionary_ and_ popular,
consciousness-building _and_ entertaining. Aware that most viewers
don’t care much for avant-garde experiments or newsreel-like
accuracy, Costa-Gavras explained his own approach to filmmaking with
the adage: “You don’t catch flies with vinegar.” The honey of
his films is excitement, action, and suspense. As in _Z_, he
harnessed the excitement of plot and stylish, quick edits to draw in
the viewer.  Aware of the average cinema-goer’s habits and
expectations, he found a way to deliver radical content in a genuinely
popular form.

If a movie utilizing all of Hollywood’s conventions can also be
radical, then perhaps today we are not so far away from the fusing of
politics and pleasure that Costa-Gavras enacted. If films like _Sorry
to Bother You_
[[link removed]] and _The
First Purge_ [[link removed]] (2018) are any
indication, a healthy pop-leftism may be making its way back to the
silver screen. All the more reason, then, to look back at earlier
traditions of political filmmaking to see what lessons can be gleaned.

As a filmmaker, Costa-Gavras represents an enormous range, from his
debut black-and-white murder mystery
[[link removed]] in 1965 to
his forthcoming cinematic adaptation
[[link removed]] of Yanis
Varoufakis’s memoir, _Adults in the Room_
[[link removed]],
or from his denunciation of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship in
1982’s _Missing_
[[link removed]] to his recent
film [[link removed]] on the
Mediterranean refugee crisis. Taking stock of Costa-Gavras’s life
and work, in its high points and low points, allows us to assess what
elements of 1960s cinema can be carried across into a genuinely
popular, radical culture today.

Hyphenated

Costa-Gavras was born in 1933 in Greece’s Peloponnese region. His
given name was Konstantínos Gavrás. (The hyphenated name with which
the director became famous was just a typo from his early filmmaking
days in France that somehow stuck.) His mother was a devout Orthodox
Christian and his father an anti-royalist from Odessa. When the Axis
powers brutally invaded Greece in 1941, Panayotis Gavras joined the
left-wing resistance against the occupiers.

Though Costa-Gavras’s father wasn’t a communist like the main
resistance leaders, he joined forces with other sections of the urban
poor and peasantry who hoped to kick out both the Germans and the
ruling family of Greece. The leftist partisans eventually routed the
Nazis. Widely popular, the EAM/ELAS partisans controlled a large
portion of Greece. However, the king and his British supporters soon
moved to marginalize
[[link removed]] the
antifascists.

Then came a brutal civil war in which former Nazi collaborators were
armed to wipe out the Left. Once heroes for kicking out the invaders,
by the time the 1946–49 Greek Civil War ended the majority of
antifascist partisans were either killed, exiled, or sent to brutal
concentration camps
[[link removed]] on
deserted islands. Hence from the Metaxas dictatorship of the 1930s to
the military regime of 1967–1974, the Greek state always perceived
leftists as “dangerous citizens
[[link removed]]” and punished
them accordingly.

While Costa-Gavras has spent most of his life in France, his Greek
childhood and this history were central to his cinematic imagination
and an understanding of politics shaped by dictatorship, famine,
occupation, civil war, imperialist intervention, and anticommunist
repression.

After the Civil War, the Right was entrenched in power. Former
partisans were blacklisted: to get a job, procure a driver’s
license, or attend university, one needed a “certificate of civic
standing” from the government. These were denied to partisans and
their families: Costa-Gavras recalls
[[link removed]] that
after the war “everyone in the left-wing resistance was considered a
communist. We became very poor.” Unable to get into university,
Costa-Gavras was also denied a visa to go to film school in the US —
this was the period of McCarthyism, after all. “I was a victim of
the Cold War. It was the worst period of Greek history… But it was
fortunate I could come to France and study. Were it not for my
father’s problems, I’d have stayed in Greece.

 In 1953 Costa-Gavras instead tried his luck in Paris. He enrolled at
the Sorbonne and then at the prestigious French national film school,
IDHEC. Spending time in Paris’s Left Bank movie houses; attending
rallies against the atom bomb or in support of the Rosenbergs; and
reading Jean-Paul Sartre, Victor Hugo, John Steinbeck, Marx, and
Lenin; in the mid-1950s Costa-Gavras’s political and cultural
sensibilities began to solidify.

Costa-Gavras got his start in the French film industry assisting such
figures as Jean Giono and René Clair. In 1965 he released his first
feature film, _The Sleeping Car Murder_. His future ability to make
films would depend on the box-office success of this directorial
debut. Hence, drawing on his passion for US film noir, Costa-Gavras
created a fast-paced police thriller and murder mystery that was
guaranteed to please.

In Costa-Gavras’s second film, 1966’s _Shock Troops_
[[link removed]], we begin to see traces of the
future political filmmaker. Adapted from a World War II novel and
meticulously researched for accuracy, the film explores anti-Nazi
resistance from the French perspective, following a group of partisans
conducting sabotage operations in France’s south. The plot thickens
when our heroes attack a German prison compound: they expect to
liberate twelve of their comrades but are surprised to find thirteen
prisoners instead.

The action of _Shock Troops_ centers around what exactly the
partisans should do with this ambiguous, final man — neither an
obvious ally nor a certain foe. Like Bertolt Brecht’s
teaching-play _The Measures Taken_
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the film centers on whether it is better to kill a single person,
perhaps wrongly, for the security of the collective, or to save the
individual but put the group at risk. Unlike Brecht’s unsentimental
militants, the French partisans take a risk: they save a life and end
up vindicated.

The swashbuckling action of prison breaks and bank robberies is
punctuated by philosophical disquisitions between the comrades. When a
partisan is killed in battle near the end of the movie, the group
gathers to mourn. Speaking in eulogy one partisan declares, “Some
people can’t understand why others die, why people are willing to
die. We will try to understand. Our nature will not be that of our
enemies.” Like many of Costa-Gavras’s future films, _Shock
Troops_ explores the question of how one can engage in necessary,
revolutionary violence and still remain an ethical person. Screened at
the Moscow Film Festival in 1967, the film generated significant
interest.

The Political Trilogy

With_ Z_ (1969), _The Confession_ (1970), and _State of
Siege_ (1972), Costa-Gavras reached the peak of his career, directing
some of his most memorable work and creating new possibilities for
political cinema. Taking them in order, these three films focus on: an
assassination and its subsequent cover-up; the travails of a prominent
Communist subjected to farcical show-trials in Czechoslovakia; and the
anti-imperialist struggles of Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas. The
foundational theme of these films is the human being and society,
amidst their most extreme moments.

Costa-Gavras treats history as a form of conspiracy. These films are
replete with shady backroom deals, malevolent cabals, violent attacks,
and suspenseful reversals. To explore these themes, Costa-Gavras has
long used characters like journalists, investigators, interrogators,
lawyers, and other such figures privy to the inner workings of power.

Like the black-and-white Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s,
Costa-Gavras’s films include the good guys we root for and the evil
ones we lampoon. Though sometimes leading to cartoonish,
one-dimensional villains pitted against protagonists of epic resolve,
these films never fail to entertain. As Costa-Gavras has always
insisted, the viewer should above all enjoy the experience of the
film. Though thorny, indeed crucial, questions are raised, thinking
and reflection should come after the movie ends and the lights have
come up.

Z

The most influential of all Costa-Garvas’s films, _Z_ deserves
particular attention. It’s clearly about an assassination — but
whose assassination, where, and when? On these questions the film
remains as open-ended and universal as possible. _Z_’s lack of
strong contextualizing details allows the public to fill in the
specific content with whatever assassination was most pressing at the
time (John F. Kennedy, Mehdi Ben Barka, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther
King, Fred Hampton). However, the attentive viewer will notice that
there are certain clues in the film (the soundtrack by Mikis
Theodorakis, a quick glimpse of a bottle of Fix beer, a “No to
NATO” sign) that locate the viewer in a particular time and place.

For as much as this is a film about questions of violence and
resistance in general it is also very much a film about Greece. As the
famous opening title announces, cheekily overturning the typical
disclaimers: “Any similarity to real persons and events is not
coincidental. It is intentional.”

Indirectly, _Z_ tells the true story of Grigoris Lambrakis
[[link removed]],
murdered in Thessaloniki in 1963. Lambrakis was a member of parliament
for the opposition Union of the Democratic Left at a time of
continuous right-wing rule. He was a popular figure — a former
Olympic athlete and an accomplished physician. He was also a peace
activist, organizing against the placement of US missiles in Greece.
After giving a speech at an antiwar meeting on May 22, 1963, he was
hit over the head with a club in the street by two right-wing thugs.
Five days later he died of trauma to the brain.

Lambrakis’s funeral led to massive protests. During the
investigation into the assassination it was discovered that his
attackers had links to the army and local police. Meanwhile, witnesses
began dying off mysteriously. These revelations had an effect on Greek
society analogous to Watergate in the US. Out of this rage the
Lambrakis Youth Movement was formed in 1964; it would be a crucial
player in the resurgence of the Greek left in the early 1960s
[[link removed]].

However, this renaissance was stopped in its tracks when a group of
far-right colonels took control of Greece’s civilian government in
a coup on April 21, 1967
[[link removed]]. The few people who had
been tried for Lambrakis’s death were rehabilitated, while the
prosecutor and others involved in uncovering the plot were targeted.

It is no accident that _Z_ follows these events nearly step by step.
Costa-Gavras got the idea for the movie from Vassilis Vassilikos’s
1966 novel
[[link removed]] of
the same name. The novel, which he found on a visit to Athens, could
not have been more perfect for Costa-Gavras’s needs. He recalls that
“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.”

A further motivation to adapt the novel was the fact that the 
military coup took place less than a week after Costa-Gavras left
Greece. He suspected that the same forces that killed Lambrakis were
behind this junta and thus sought to take a clear stand against the
regime.

The title of the film comes from the graffiti used by protestors after
Lambrakis’s death. In Greek the word _zei_, shortened to its first
letter, means “he lives.” This claim of Lambrakis’s immortality
was a direct affront against the forces that covered up his death.
Similarly, the inclusion in the film of a Greek actor, the
acclaimed Irene Papas [[link removed]] (cast
as the MP’s widow), made the accusation leveled against the junta
unmistakable.

Even for those who knew nothing about Lambrakis, the film was a
sensation. With Jean-Louis Trintignant playing the examining
magistrate painstakingly tracking down the perpetrators, the action
resembles such 1970s conspiracy films
[[link removed]] as _All
the President’s Men_ and _Three Days of the Condor_. The
contributions of director of photography Raoul Coutard, linked to the
French New Wave movement, give the film a stimulating visual aesthetic
with handheld cameras, moving shots, and head-spinning montage
sequences.

_Z_ won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1969,
representing Algeria. When Costa-Gavras and his crew were in Algiers
filming during the previous year, the May events
[[link removed]] were happening
in Paris. The director recalled: “1968 was very present in our minds
— the use of police and justice in French society too. The movie
came out at the right moment.”

Part of the film’s success stems from this timing, as it captured
the tensions and energies of the period. Costa-Gavras quipped that if
he were still in university, he would have been building barricades in
the street. But since he was a mature thirty-six years old, he
made _Z_ instead. In the same vein, Costa-Gavras commented,
“‘Basically _Z_ is less a political film (what is a political
film anyway?) than a political act.”

_Z_ ends with a warning to the viewer. The film lists things banned
during the dictatorship, including long hair, labor unions, Tolstoy,
The Beatles, miniskirts, Sophocles, learning Russian, “and the
letter Z, which means, HE LIVES.” While these prohibitions were
lifted by 1974, the warning maintained, and continues to maintain, its
urgency: unless the people resist, nothing is safe.

The Confession

_The Confession_ was also a kind of warning. “I made this film
because Stalinism is not just a thing of the past; it is forever
present. Every single day it begins anew, and not only in
Czechoslovakia,” Costa-Gavras wrote in 1970 when the film was
released. Also an adaptation, _The Confession_ was based on leading
Czech communist Artur London
[[link removed]]’s 1968 book of
the same name.

The memoir detailed London’s harrowing experiences after being
arrested in 1951 during a period of high-profile show trials against
supposed subversives within the Eastern Bloc bureaucracies. With
London portrayed by Yves Montand, who lost a great deal of weight for
the role, the film shows the irreproachable veteran Communist as he is
tortured, forced to give a false confession, and then paraded in court
as an example — all by his erstwhile comrades.

The film is brutal viewing. With none of the slick action of _Z_, the
viewer squirms as Montand’s character is beaten, dehumanized, and
broken in seemingly unending scenes of pain. The slowness increases
the psychological drama, as the viewer is forced to confront the
horror of this historical event.

Though unforgivingly critical of Stalinism, Costa-Gavras and his team
were insistent that _The Confession_ was not an anticommunist film.
Because its implied argument matched the 1960s New Left ethos —
critical of both state capitalism and state communism — some closer
to the orthodox French Communist Party objected to the film. For a
spell Costa-Gavras remained persona non grata in the socialist
republics.

The controversial film not only focused on past excesses but also
winked at the present. _The Confession_ ends with the protagonist
rehabilitated and free. However, wandering the streets during
Czechoslovakia’s 1968 Prague Spring
[[link removed]], he is
shocked to see Eastern Bloc tanks invading to shut down the hopeful
experiment in democratizing communism. Challenging this betrayal of
the revolution by the Soviet leadership, the film shows London
watching as university students write on the walls of the city:
“Lenin, awaken, they have gone mad!”

State of Siege

In 1972’s _State of Siege_, Costa-Gavras turned his attention to US
imperialism’s role in Latin America. The film portrays the fate of a
US official from the Agency for International Development (AID) who
was kidnapped in 1970 by Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas
[[link removed]]. In his third role with
Costa-Gavras, Yves Montand plays Philip Michael Santore, based on
real-life kidnapped AID official Dan A. Mitrione
[[link removed]].

Costa-Gavras and scriptwriter Francesco Rosi spent six weeks in Latin
America researching Mitrione’s activities and death. Their
suspicions were confirmed: though posing as a humanitarian, Mitrione
was really one of a number of “traveling salesmen of imperialist
America,” as Costa-Gavras put it. Such men traveled the rounds
between countries like Greece, Guatemala, Brazil, and Thailand pulling
strings in the government, making connections to right-wing elements,
and leaving a trail of military coups and repressive regimes.

In the film, as in reality, Santore is kidnapped by the guerillas.
They suspect he is involved with training the Montevideo police in
illegal torture and counterinsurgency techniques. As we watch the
masked guerrillas question Santore — using not violence but the
overwhelming weight of facts, dates, and documents to wring their
confession — the action cuts to debates going on in the Uruguayan
parliament over such torturous practices as the application of
electrical shocks to genitalia. The film then flashes back to how
these brutal techniques were learned by Uruguayan police officials
visiting the International Police Academy alongside their counterparts
from the US-allied world.

Faced with this array of telescopically presented evidence, the
suspense lies in the viewer’s own decision whether Santore is
guilty, and then whether the Tupamaros should put him to death once
their ultimatum to the government is left unanswered. While the film
tries to preserve factual objectivity, the structure of the action
ultimately convinces the viewer to concur that they are right to
execute Santore.

The enormity of the challenges the Tupamaros face in ridding their
country of foreign intervention and instituting a more just society is
cleverly presented in the film’s final scene. On the runway
Santore’s coffin is lifted up onto a plane to be sent home. Just at
that moment, there touches down another plane bringing in his
replacement. Meanwhile, the wary eyes of a Tupamaro watch on.

If _State of Siege_ is an argument-film, laying out the destructive
results of US involvement in Latin America, its most fascinating
dimension lies in its representation of the Tupamaros’ everyday
practices. This film was made in the early 1970s, when the New Left
still had a certain romance with the figure of the “heroic
guerrilla.” Costa-Gavras presents them as a model of revolutionary
seriousness: “What fascinated me about the Tupamaros was their
political maturity, their ways of analyzing a situation in terms of
the country’s real conditions, the perfection of their technique,
their effectiveness on both the military and political levels.”

The film’s careful attention to how the Tupamaros conduct their
operations makes it almost a how-to manual for becoming an urban
guerilla. The viewer witnesses at length how the group moves
undetected through police checkpoints, robs banks, and conducts
reconnaissance. The film shows the Tupamaros’s effectiveness and
widespread popularity, as separate cells coordinate to capture Santore
and whisk him away to their People’s Jail. A dizzying range of
vehicles is requisitioned all across Montevideo in order to capture
Santore, set up roadblocks, and evade pursuit. As soon as they
complete their task, guerrillas or guerrilla-sympathizers melt back
into the population.

In another fascinating portrayal of everyday operations, the film’s
climax contains a long scene 
[[link removed]]in which shadowy figures
get on and off a bus at various stops to make discrete signals to a
fellow passenger: without ever physically being in the same location,
the entire leadership of the Tupamaros thus subtly debates and votes
on the issue of Santore’s execution. All these details reveal a
highly effective force of guerrillas who clearly live out the Tupamaro
philosophy: “Words divide us, actions unite us.”

The spirit of resistance that so enchanted viewers is best summed up
in a scene taking place at the main university campus
[[link removed]] in Montevideo. Various
speakers hanging from different parts of the stone courtyard play the
Cuban revolutionary anthem _Hasta Siempre_ as befuddled police
officers try in vain to stop it. As soon as one speaker is silenced,
another one starts. The song continues.

The Uruguayan scenes were mostly filmed in Chile, under the express
approval of president Salvador Allende
[[link removed]].
He tore through the script of _State of Siege_ “like a detective
novel,” supported the project, and even allowed Costa-Gavras’s
crew to film for one day in the Chilean parliament. Not long after,
Allende too was brought down in a US-backed coup.
[[link removed]]

Not surprisingly, the film faced controversy in the US for its
indictment of intervention in Latin America. At one point Santore’s
questioner Hugo asks him: “‘You say you’re defending freedom and
democracy… Your methods are war, fascism, and torture… Surely you
agree with me, Mr. Santore?” Various US agencies took issue with
these claims and released official statements against the film. In
1971 a screening at the American Film Institute Festival in Washington
DC was cancelled, sparking massive controversy.

Costa-Gavras maintained that the film was not propaganda but, like all
real cinema, “a way of showing, exposing the political processes in
our everyday life.” Indeed, more than anything this trilogy of
political films succeeded through its representation of the politics
of the everyday.

A Legacy of Political Filmmaking

Even today Costa-Gavras remains a prolific filmmaker. As with any
creative worker who produces in such quantity, the output is bound to
be uneven. While all of his subsequent films carried on the same
themes of power, corruption, and violence, only a few preserved the
revolutionary excitement and compelling aesthetic of his early work.

1975’s _Special Section_
[[link removed]] returned to territory
explored in _Shock Troops_. This time the French World War II setting
is centered on French collaboration with the Nazis rather than the
heroic exploits of antifascists. In 1979 Costa-Gavras released _Clair
de Femme_ [[link removed]]. A departure within
his oeuvre, this film narrates a love affair. Though it did not
contain overt political content, Costa-Gavras saw the film as focusing
on the “smallest form of political organization: the couple.”

These films were followed by a return to Latin America
in _Missing_ (1982). Adapting the true story of a US journalist
disappeared during the 1973 coup
[[link removed]] against
Allende, the Cannes award–winning film condemns the right-wing
takeover.

Costa-Gavras continued to make films based on historical and political
questions, from the Holocaust to white supremacy, Israel-Palestine,
and economic crisis. Like a lone voice in the wilderness, he exposes
the deeper power structures behind violent events, portrays the moral
conflicts of the individuals attempting to resist, and shows the
obscured fascism always threatening to emerge into the light of day.
Yet no longer fueled by the energy of the social movements of the
1960s, these films contain something of the hoarseness and monotone
quality of a warning repeated ad nauseam.

Indeed, while Costa-Gavras’s films focus on dissecting structural
inequalities and injustices, his strategy is still to zero in on human
integrity and courageous individual acts of resistance against the
conspiracy of the powerful. This clash of the structural and the human
remains an unresolved conflict in his films, in the mismatch between
structural diagnoses and individualized, moral solutions.

The most successful of Costa-Gavras’s recent films, _Eden is
West_ (2009), takes on the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The
film is innovative in leaving the causes off-screen and focusing on
what the director most deftly portrays: the human costs. The film
comically and humanely narrates the saga of a Middle
Eastern _sans-papier_ as he swims ashore at a Greek resort and faces
both the unabashed cruelty and tenderness of strangers while making
his halting way to Paris.

Taken as a whole, Costa-Gavras’s cinematic output provides us with
an example of what it means to be a political artist, in it for the
long haul. His work shows us both the fruits of principled consistency
and the limitations of a once-successful approach
too-little-reinvented. While there remains much to enjoy and learn
from in his films, in the end we can declare, paraphrasing Marx, that
the social revolution of the twenty-first century cannot take its
poetry from the past; it must above all look to the future.

A popular, radical cinema of the future can best honor its
predecessors in creating something altogether unforeseen. The success
of Costa-Gavras’s early films emerged from their intertwining
proximity with the social movements of their day. May a new synthesis
of culture and politics continue to develop in our own present.

We can see Z  now as it streams on MAX.

 

 

 

 

 

* Fim
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* Film Review
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* Costa-Garvas
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