Search results
identified as an actor of considerable talent with, potentially, a significant screen career ahead of him. Moreover, as he progressed to more prominent roles in films such as Un Héros très discret (Audiard, 1996), Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Jeuent, 2001) and Amen (Costa-Gavras, 2002), Kassovitz’s rising celebrity profile (as both director and actor) and obvious onscreen charisma even
its formal aspects do not correspond. It is exemplified principally by two directors: Constantin Costa-Gavras and Yves Boisset, who adapted the American and Italian political thriller to the French context. The most important single event for French society in the second half of the twentieth century, socially, politically and culturally, is undoubtedly May 1968. As Jill Forbes points out, ‘the Events of May 1968 led to a
British, Scottish? 161 instance Snow’s mainstream account in Capturing Idi Amin) but this remains little discussed. The film achieves this largely by means of the political thriller, a generic dimension that Marx objects to, but her critique of the film overlooks debates about genre and politics that have been found in Film Studies since the 1960s, in the form of the so-called ‘Costa Gavras debates’ which pitted the political thrillers of Costa Gavras against the modernist work of Jean-Luc Godard in a debate over the proper form that political film-making should take
Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), in which the American actor Adrien Brody is unproblematically represented as a Polish Jew, and in which the use of English by all ‘Polish’ and ‘German’ characters (excepting some ambient dialogue and street signs) is both unbroken and unmentioned (2008: 190). Costa-Gavras’s later films, including 2002’s Amen and 2008’s Eden à l’ouest (in which a fake language is concocted from reversed French, so the migrant protagonist can retain an anonymous, almost mythical ‘Eastern’ identity), are much more interested in the power of languages
hommes tomber ). Alongside this core oeuvre of polars , he also wrote the scripts for such varied films as Lautner’s 1985 drag comedy La Cage aux folles III (Lautner, 1985 ); Jean-Jacques Andrien’s ( 1988 ) postwar drama Australia ; and even Jérôme Boivin’s 1989 dark comedy about a murderous talking dog, Baxter (Boivin, 1989 ). He made a brief foray into sound-mixing with Costa-Gavras
) led to a vogue for political thrillers, such as Costa-Gavras’s trilogy – Z (1969), L’Aveu (1970) and État de siège (1973) – starring the left-wing icon Yves Montand. The same period saw Jean-Pierre Melville’s apolitical and heavily stylised trilogy with Alain Delon (see below). The breadth of the genre thus contributed to its popularity in the subsequent decade: a quarter of all French films made in 1981 were polars
against Nicolas Sarkozy is to avoid the danger of a France at war with itself, in conflict and in crisis, divided and torn apart’. Other signatories included the writer Marie NDiaye, the actress Jeanne Moreau, the film director Constantin Costa-Gavras and the singer Georges Moustaki.
a long and distinguished, though variable, career. In retrospect Oliver! seems like an incongruous film for the times. The end of the 1960s, the decade of so-called sexual liberation, was also one of political upheaval. Vietnam and the Paris riots of May 1968 are perhaps the two most dramatic episodes of the period’s turbulence, anticipated or reflected in films like Weekend (Godard, 1967), Z (Costa-Gavras, 1968
Catholic Church. Léon Morin, prêtre (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961) with its priestly central character is a notable exception. However, unlike Costa-Gavras's internationally produced Amen. (2002), France has largely left Catholic priests and nuns to fill secondary roles in ensemble casts of good Samaritans, such as those in Les Misérables , La Rafle and Monsieur Batignole. Perhaps films exploring these diverse identity groups will emerge in contemporary French cinema over the next twenty years as this unrelenting drive to reconcile previously forgotten aspects of
society and its political structures. Films such as Stavisky (Alain Resnais, 1974), Z (Costa Gavras, 1969), Il caso Mattei/The Mattei Affair (Francesco Rosi, 1972), Il conformista/The Conformist or Strategia del ragno/The Spider’s Stratagem (both Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) are examples of just how far these didactic, critical films aimed to go, usurping stereotypical