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passer somehow procured from the International Red Cross. In 1960 he was captured by the Israeli Mossad (foreign intelligence service) in Buenos Aires, and brought back secretly to Israel in an ElAl plane. A year later he stood trial before an Israeli court in Jerusalem, accused of fifteen war crimes and crimes against humanity. After being found guilty he was sentenced to death, the only death sentence ever imposed in Israel. I got involved with Eichmann’s story twice, in two totally different ways, once as a broadcaster and once as a filmmaker, and this chapter
subsequent months, twenty-five of Japan’s military leaders were tried for war crimes by the Military Tribunal of the Far East – seven were hanged while local military commissions condemned a further 920 war criminals to death and over 3,000 to prison.2 But further trauma to Japanese self-image was to follow as, until 1952, Japan’s entire cultural tradition was subject to radical and enforced transformation at the hands of the American Occupation. Introducing a new constitution, the Americans revised the education system ‘with the aim of eliminating propaganda and the
form of indirect self-justification, since both deal with issues of guilt and retribution for war crimes and collaboration. And though the fourth film in this cycle, Miquette et sa mère, is a rather plodding adaptation of a Belle Epoque boulevard comedy, it does at least show how within five years of the war’s end Clouzot was firmly re-established as a mainstream director. Two of Clouzot’s post-war films have achieved popular and critical success: Quai des Orfèvres (1947) attracted over five million French spectators and was awarded a prize for best director at the Venice
characterisation of its central character. Chev Chelios is a British paid assassin working in Los Angeles. In the opening section of the film, he finds himself caught in counterplots between two warring crime syndicates, as well as being targeted by a new aspiring gunman, Ricky Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo), who wants to usurp him. Verona injects Chelios with a synthetic drug which will
of fractured flashbacks Joey’s past is revealed: he is a deserter who has committed war crimes in Helmand Province. Sleeping rough in London’s Soho and suffering from PTSD, he lives under constant threat from a pair of thugs who terrorise the homeless. After one particular attack Joey retaliates and is chased until he literally falls on his feet as he tumbles into a deserted, but decidedly
previously occluded questions of French society during the Occupation. Another semi-autobiographical work but one which challenges both its narrator and audiences is Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants. Released in 1987, it focuses on childhood and solidarity between the Jewish and French populations during the Second World War. Rousso has described it as a work embroiled in the context of Barbie's 1986 trial for war crimes and the kidnapping of forty-four Jewish children housed at an orphanage at Izieu, although Malle's motivations as director did
story of heroic self-sacrifice in a just war. When the King’s Road shop owned by McLaren and Westwood was renamed ‘Seditionaries’ at the end of 1976, it was decorated with large photographs of the bombing of Dresden, which was beginning to be seen as a British war crime that eroded any previous sense of moral superiority over the Nazis. In complete contrast to this iconoclasm, Jarman, the son of a bomber
to give aid to Haiti, but not OK to criticise efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan, where we are destroying countries. This is an issue of political correctness. Movies critical of Iraq have not done well. In Platoon, I had a mix of dead stone killers and heroes which allowed me to attempt a reassessment of Vietnam. The film did show Vietnamese being killed and it did become a subject of discussion, yes. I was called a ‘baby killer’ and so forth, and people said that I should be tried for ‘baby killing’ and for ‘war crimes’. It was mentioned, but it was not the prominent
his tour of duty in Algeria, he walked by a door and glimpsed fellow recruits torturing an Algerian. Boeuf admits he was curious, but he turned away to avoid voyeurism, and he regretted having looked at all. His story is not unique: other interviewees describe the same feeling of powerlessness, the impulse to avoid knowing, and then to forget. His voice breaking, Etienne Boulanger, who spent two years in prison for draft resistance, believes that his government made him complicit in war crimes. Like the Freudian primal scene, this
over the history of the Second World War. This was a period of retribution as, thanks to the work of historians and authorities alike, nations saw a rise in the number of official apologies and trials charging individuals (including Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, Maurice Papon and others) with war crimes. The enduring trauma and legacy of the period was still being felt nearly half a century later. In the post-war period, two films in particular, Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956) and Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), both described as artistic missions against