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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 â accuracy â 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 Ă 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 âqualityâ of ideology in the film, the critic discovers the lack of esthetic qualities. Thus the film is condemned as being not ârealâ enough, or not âsophisticatedâ or âcomplicatedâ 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: âI 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 exposĂ© of the police. He was a man of the Right, a man of the Establishment, but he was an honest man.â4 Even CinĂ©aste took a left-leaning critical reaction to the portrayal of Lambrakis's murderer as being a homosexual, to which Costa-Gavras explained, âHis homosexuality was important because it was the factor that made him a lackey of the police. He was a victim himself.â5
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: âPersonally, I'm very suspicious of these ideologies, or at least the approach to them, how they are translated.â6
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 âelle correspond au problĂšme posĂ© par le filmâ (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. Lâaffiche reprĂ©sente la superposition de la croix gammĂ©e et de la croix chrĂ©tienne. Jamais lâEglise, qui en a entendu beaucoup, nâavait Ă©tĂ© sans doute si violemment insultĂ©e. Doit-elle encore tendre lâautre joue? Les Ă©vĂȘques, qui ont jugĂ© lâimage âinacceptableâ ne porteront pas plainte. Entre la libertĂ© dâexpression et le respect des croyances, la hiĂ©rarchie religieuse veut Ă©viter la confrontation judiciaire. Mais sa prudence peut ĂȘtre 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 âunacceptableâ, 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 (LâAgrif), 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 âodiousâ, a âgratuitous offenseâ, and a âdefamation to the respect of all Christiansâ.9 President of the tribunal Jean-Claude Magendie rejected the injunction to ban the advertisement in his order, stating that LâAgrif had viewed the message within the advertisement with a closed interpretation (âlecture fermĂ©eâ). Instead, Magendie offered an open interpretation (âlecture ouverteâ) that it was not the imposition of the swastika on the cross, but rather the ârehumanizingâ cross and its values placed upon that brutal totalitarian regime. Moreover, the Nazi swastika in the poster remained âincompleteâ.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...