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A filmmaker with a pronounced anti-establishment sensibility, Constantin Costa-Gavras 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
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 most frequently noticed effect of the new post-1968 climate on the French cinema was a change in the nature of the thriller. In 1968 itself (and therefore unaffected in its conception by the actual events of that year) Constantin Costa-Gavras’ Z reached the screens and found an eager audience for whom it summed up the new requirements of the time. By the end of 1969, Z had achieved an audience of 700,000 in Paris, which made it one of the biggest successes of the year and indeed of the whole decade. It proved to
; 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 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
occupy in popular imagination the place of remote and perilous borderline on the one hand and convenient vacation hub on the other. This confrontation is central to two of the films covered in the chapter. Eden à l’ouest / Eden is West (Costa-Gavras, France/Greece/Italy, 2009) opens with a ‘clandestine’ boat crossing the Aegean Sea towards Greece, where weary migrants will come
Amenábar has never seriously thought of himself as a political filmmaker, in the manner of a Costa Gavras or a Ken Loach. Indeed, in the 1990s, he tended to avoid the label whenever journalists or academics posed the question (Interview). Among university friends and colleagues he was always regarded as something of a ‘facha’ (right-wing, conservative), largely because he was rather shy, often
) 5 Mathieu Kassovitz (Albert Dehousse) in Un héros très discret (Audiard, 1996) 6 Mathieu Kassovitz (Riccardo Fontana) in Amen (Costa-Gavras, 2002)
film projects, eating cheap food in China Town – he would go on to make Stavisky , a film which again confounded critics but found popular success. Linking La Guerre est finie and Stavisky is the work of screenwriter and novelist Jorge Semprun, who, after working on the first film with Resnais and going on to work with Costa Gavras, returned to Resnais. Semprun has spoken of his pleasure in working with Resnais
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-Gavras 1 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
, including two César nominations for Métisse (Kassovitz, 1993) and Amen (Costa-Gavras, 2002) and one award for his performances in Regarde les hommes tomber (Audiard, 1994) as well as enjoying box-office success as the male-lead in Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Jeunet, 2001). In both France and abroad, Kassovitz has therefore made a considerable impact as director