French resistance on the big screen

Cinema is about seducing an audience to have them go away and think, writer-director Costa-Gavras tells MAYA JAGGI as he celebrates…

Cinema is about seducing an audience to have them go away and think, writer-director Costa-Gavras tells MAYA JAGGIas he celebrates 45 years of film-making

COSTA-GAVRAS recalls his shock at arriving at the Gare de Lyon in Paris from Greece in 1954, at the “gloomy weather and black facades, and the look people give you if you don’t speak the language. My first impulse was to get back on the train and go home”. Now 76, he is one of French cinema’s most internationally feted writer-directors, having made some 20 films over 45 years.

A student at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, he still lives in Paris’s Latin Quarter, in a pink house off a courtyard hidden behind the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where his grandchildren play around him. He is a naturalised citizen, has a French knighthood and in 2007 became president of the Cinematheque Francaise, one of the world’s largest film archives, lavishly rehoused in a Frank Gehry building across the Seine.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of his landmark feature Z (1969), about an incorruptible judge investigating the killing at a peace demo of a reformist politician, played by Yves Montand. With democracy disappearing in a fog of dirty tricks, conspiracy and cover-up, Z was an indictment of the US-backed coup in Greece, and was banned there under the military junta of 1967-74.

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With dark humour, a faux-documentary style and a soundtrack by Mikos Theodorakis – then under house arrest – it made Costa-Gavras’s name as master of a genre that married the pace and suspense of the action thriller with political critique, and it won an Oscar for best foreign language film. Z has recently begun an anniversary tour with a screening in New York in a new 35mm print.

Lured to Hollywood in the 1980s, Costa-Gavras has also made movies in English. Missing(1982), which won an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation, probed another US-backed coup, this time in Chile in 1973. As a conservative American (played by Jack Lemmon) searches for his disappeared journalist son, he is confronted by the depth of his country's collusion in Pinochet's coup . Amen(2002) proved equally controversial, investigating as it did the silence or complicity of the Catholic church and the allied powers in the Holocaust.

Yet Costa-Gavras doesn’t march behind the banner of political cinema. All cinema is political, he says, even action movies showing “heroes saving the Earth only with a gun”. Nor is he bound by the thriller. “Every story has its own style, which I try to find.” His films are often based on fact (“Any similarity to persons or events is deliberate”, Z announced). His interest is in the “pyramid of power”, and in relationships destroyed by global politics, ideologies and beliefs. Yet alongside silent abuses of authority are those who resist – stubborn witnesses, upright judges, dissenting consciences. For Coata-Gavras, “resistance is the most important thing”.

Costa-Gavras's latest feature, Eden Is West, draws on his early experience of exile. The bitter-sweet fable cum road movie about an illegal migrant in Europe, whose dream is to reach Paris, opened London's Human Rights Watch film festival last month. It begins, like a modern Odyssey, in the Aegean, as a boatload of migrants cast their identity documents overboard, leaving their pasts in their wake to join the ranks of the sans-papiers. Elias is the present-day Ulysses, a picaresque ingenu played almost wordlessly by the Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio, who evades police and swims ashore.

HE WAS BORN Konstantinos Gavras in 1933, in a village in the Peloponnese (in professional life he retains the hyphenated “Costa-Gavras” accidentally used in his first film’s credits). During the Nazi occupation his father, an anti-royalist, fought in the left-wing resistance movement. After post- war Greece ended up in the western sphere of influence, and the civil war ended in communist defeat in 1949, his father lost his job as a tax official in Athens and was jailed. “Everyone in the left-wing resistance was considered a communist. We became very poor.” His mother cleaned houses, while he did odd jobs. His father’s political blacklisting not only barred him from Greek university, but, in the McCarthyite 1950s, denied Costa-Gavras a visa for US film school. “I was a victim of the Cold War,” he says. “It was the worst period of Greek history, after the Turkish occupation. 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.”

Working in Athens to save money, “I discovered a part of society I wouldn’t otherwise have known”. He also danced with a Greek ballet company, and has since directed opera and ballet. In France he “discovered what it is to be free – to read and discuss, which was impossible” under Greek censorship.

After Hollywood action movies in Athens, the Cinematheque Francaise, around the corner from the Sorbonne, was a revelation. Erich von Stroheim's Greed(1924) struck him with the force of "ancient Greek tragedy. I discovered cinema was able to do masterpieces – it's not just the good guy winning." In 1956, he enrolled at the national film school in Paris. "It was so exciting to see and analyse movies." He became a trainee director in 1958, as new-wave artists, including Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, were challenging cinema's old guard.

He worked with old masters Rene Clair and Rene Clement, as well as new auteurs such as Jacques Demy. Though he borrowed techniques of the nouvelle vague, "coming from a different culture, it was impossible for me to make movies like the French directors – interiorised and intimate". His friends Simone Signoret and Yves Montand starred in his first feature, the detective thriller The Sleeping Car Murders(1965).

Shock Troops(1967), on the French Maquis, was less successful ("too much action"). But it crystallised his view of political commitment. "My mother used to say 'stay away from politics', because my father went to prison. But if you reject politics, you reject a lot of relationships. The worst thing in society is individualism." The film was about "someone who refuses to take part – either by going to the Germans, or helping the French resistance. But we can't not be involved; we're not an island. By not taking a position, you take a position."

He was reading Vassilis Vassilikos's novel Z, about the 1963 killing of Greek MP Gregoris Lambrakis, when the colonels seized power. He wrote a screenplay with the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun, and Z was shot in Algeria, standing in for Thessaloniki. It ended with a list of things banned by the colonels, from beatniks to Beckett. The May events in Paris fuelled its success: "1968 was very present in our minds – in the use of police and justice in French society too. The movie came out at the right moment."

After Soviet tanks crushed the Prague spring in 1968, Costa-Gavras made The Confession(1970) about Artur London, a Czech communist minister forced into a false confession of espionage amid Stalinist purges and show trials in the 1950s. Some who had thought Costa-Gavras a communist were thrown. Yet he has always mistrusted utopianism: "My generation in Greece in the late 1940s probably thought communism was a solution. But, at least in eastern Europe, it was a dictatorial system with no respect for human beings except the party leaders. Societies are in a permanent fight to change things. I don't believe society can be paradise."

State of Siege(1972), about the kidnap and murder of a US aid agency official by Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay, concluded a political trilogy. It was filmed in Salvador Allende's Chile, before the elected Marxist president died in the Pinochet coup. Costa-Gavras recalls Allende as a "naive but deeply honest politician. I knew he couldn't succeed. When you saw people occupying factories and estates, I thought, if they don't stop this, it will be a tragedy. I was hop- ing it wouldn't happen".

Two months after Pinochet seized power on September 11th, 1973, the Greek junta storm-ed Athens polytechnic, occupied by student protesters. In Missing, the shots of marauding tanks, corpses and torture in the stadium resonate across continents. “Seven years of the colonels was a tragedy for Greece,” Costa-Gavras says, “the same crazy ideology and stupid ideas of control by a small group in the military. It all came from the civil war.”

His films have sometimes been criticised on the left for explaining political realities in personal and psychological terms. In response to the question, has he ever softened his films to get people to watch unpalatable truths, he says: “The problem of audience is complex. You can’t forget them, but you don’t know who they are or what they like. I try to be the first audience, to keep my virginity as a spectator.”

Amen, based on Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play The Deputy: A Christian Tragedy, portrayed two whistleblowers ignored by the Pope. Even the poster, by the Benetton ad designer Oliviero Toscani, sparked outrage, with its cross morphing into a swastika, though French Christian groups failed to get it banned. "If the Church has lasted 2,000 years, it's because they're nice to the strongest," Costa-Gavras says.

His focus was on the perpetrators and their consciences, with close-ups of German officers peering through spyholes in the gas chambers. “In old movies we saw these guys as crazy. Little by little, we understood they were like us. They weren’t only Germans. The French did the same.”

TWO OF HIS MOST recent films show individuals snapping under the pressure of lay-offs. In Mad City(1997) John Travolta's kindly but jobless security guard takes children hostage at gunpoint, only to by manipulated by Dustin Hoffman's TV newshound. The Ax,released in 2005, speaks to the current economic crisis. It features an executive, jobless after a takeover, who decides to bump off potential competitors. "Killing for a job is a metaphor," Costa-Gavras says. "But when we lose our job, we lose everything. It's the tragedy of the last few months. They used to say we need a big middle class for a peaceful society. But the system is even going against that."

Though he says Greece has made strides since the colonels and with EU membership, he sees last December’s riots, sparked by the police killing of a teenager, as proof that “the economic, social and educational system hasn’t changed enough. Young people don’t accept that governments – right-wing or socialist – make promises they don’t keep. They don’t accept giving billions to banks and not for education”.

He has not worked in Hollywood for some years. “It’s drastically different.” Those overtly political features that get made are instigated by star actors, he believes, because “no major company refuses George Clooney or Brad Pitt. It’s not coming from the companies or from directors.” Critical of Hollywood’s “sedative” effect, he says: “I never forget that we’re making an entertainment.”

Echoing Ingmar Bergman, he continues: “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.”