October 20, 2015 (XXXI:8) Costa-Gavras, MISSING (1982, 122 min)

(The version of this handout on the website has color images and hot urls.) Missing (1982, 122 minutes) Oscar—1983—Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Costa-Gavras & Donald Stewart) Directed by Costa-Gavras Written by Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart (screenplay) and John Nichols (uncredited), based on the book Missing by Thomas Hauser. Produced by Edward Lewis, Mildred Lewis, Peter Guber, Jon Peters (uncredited) Music by Vangelis Cinematography by Ricardo Aronovich Film Editing by Françoise Bonnot Jack Lemmon…Ed Horman Sissy Spacek…Beth Horman Melanie Mayron…Terry Simon John Shea…Charles Horman Charles Cioffi…Captain Ray Tower David Clennon…Consul Phil Putnam Richard Venture…U.S. Ambassador Jerry Hardin…Colonel Sean Patrick Richard Bradford…Andrew Babcock Joe Regalbuto…Frank Teruggi Keith Szarabajka…David Holloway John Doolittle…Dave McGeary Janice Rule…Kate Newman Ward Costello…Congressman Hansford Rowe…Senator Tina Romero…Maria Richard Whiting…Statesman Martin LaSalle…Paris Terence Nelson…Colonel Clay Robert Hitt…Peter Chernin Félix González…Rojas M.E. Rios…Mrs. Duran Jorge Russek…Espinoza Edna Necoechea…Pia Alan Penrith…Samuel Cross

Costa-Gavras (director, writer) (b. on February 12, 1933 in Loutra-Iraias, Greece as Konstantinos Gavras) won an Academy Award in 1983 for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Missing (1982), which he shared with Donald Stewart. Costa-Gavras was not present at the awards ceremony. He was nominated twice in 1970 for Best Director for his film Z (1969), as well as Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium Z (1969) which he shared with: Jorge Semprún. He was also nominated for a 1983 Golden Globe for both Best Director and Best Screenplay (shared with Donald Steward) for Missing (1982). He has both directed and written for several films and TV series including Capital (2012), Eden Is West (2009), The Ax (2005), Amen. (2002), The Little Apocalypse (1993), Family Council (1986), Hanna K. (1983), Missing (1982), Womanlight (1979), Special Section (1975), State of Siege (1972), Z (1969), Shock Troops (1967), Compartiment tueurs (1965), Les rates (1958, Short). He directed Mad City (1997), Lumière and Company (1995, Documentary), À propos de Nice, la suite (1995, segment "Les Kankobals"), Lest We Forget (1991, segment "Pour Kim Song-man, Corée"), Music Box (1989), Betrayed (1988), Yves Montand (1970, TV Movie documentary), The Confession (1970) and wrote 1976 Mr. Klein (uncredited).

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Vangelis (music) (b. Evangelos Odysseus Papathanassiou March 29, 1943 in Volos, Greece) won the 1982 Oscar for Best Music, Original Score for Chariots of Fire (1981). Vangelis was not present at the awards ceremony. Co-presenter William Hurt accepted the award on his behalf. He was also nominated for two Golden Globes for Best Original Score in 1993 for 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) and in 1983 for Blade Runner (1982). He has composed for over 56 films and television shows, some of which include, Twilight of Shadows (2014), Trashed (2012, Documentary),El Greco (2007, music composed and performed by), Alexander (2004), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), Bitter Moon (1992), De Nuremberg à Nuremberg (1989, Documentary), The Bounty (1984), Antarctica (1984), Blade Runner (1982), Missing (1982),Pablo Picasso Painter (1981, Documentary), Chariots of Fire (1981), Death of a Princess (1980, TV Movie), Crime and Passion (1976), Le cantique des créatures: Georges Braque ou Le temps différent (1975, Documentary), Love (1974), Sex-Power (1970), To prosopo tis Medousas (1967), Five Thousand Lies (1966), My Brother, the Traffic Policeman (1963). Ricardo Aronovich (cinematographer) (b. January 4, 1930 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) won the Career Award at the 2001 Argentinean Film Critics Association Awards. He also won the

1965 Candango Trophy for Best Cinematography for Vereda de Salvação (1965) at the Brazilia Festival of Brazilian Cinema. He has been nominated for two César Awards for Best Cinematography in 1984 for Le bal (1983) and in 1978 for Providence (1977). He has been the cinematographer in 90 films and television shows including, Blind Revenge (2009), Moscow Zero (2006), Klimt (2006), Stranded (2001), Marcel Proust's Time Regained (1999), The Raft of the Medusa (1998), The Impostor (1997), The Family (1987), Le Bal (1983), Hanna K. (1983), Missing (1982), Chanel Solitaire (1981), The Outsider (1980), Lumiere (1976), The Assassination (1972), Murmur of the Heart (1971), São Paulo, Sociedade, Anônima (1965), Psique y sexo (1965), The Guns (1964), The Venerable Ones (1963), The Old Young People (1962), The Big Business (1959). Jack Lemmon…Ed Horman (b. February 8, 1925 in Newton, Massachusetts—d. June 27, 2001, age 76, in Los Angeles, California) was nominated for six Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role including in 1983 for Missing (1982), in 1981 for Tribute (1980), in 1980 for The China Syndrome (1979) in 1963 for Days of Wine and Roses (1962), in 1961 for The Apartment (1960) and in 1960 for Some Like It Hot (1959). He won two

Oscars, one for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1974 for Save the Tiger (1973) and in 1956 for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Mister Roberts (1955). He acted in over 96 films and television series including, Serendipity (2001), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), Tuesdays with Morrie (1999, TV Movie), The Odd Couple II (1998), The Long Way Home (1998, TV Movie), 12 Angry Men (1997, TV Movie), Hamlet (1996), Grumpier Old Men (1995), The Grass Harp (1995), Short Cuts (1993), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), JFK (1991), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1987, TV Movie), Mass Appeal (1984), Missing (1982), Buddy Buddy (1981), Tribute (1980), The China Syndrome (1979), Airport '77 (1977), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), The Front Page (1974), Save the Tiger (1973), Avanti! (1972), Kotch (1971), The Out of Towners (1970), The Odd Couple (1968), Luv (1967), The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Great Race (1965), How to Murder Your Wife (1965), Irma la Douce (1963), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Pepe (1960), The Apartment (1960), Some Like It Hot (1959), Bell Book and Candle (1958), Cowboy (1958), Fire Down Below (1957), My Sister Eileen (1955), Mister Roberts (1955), It Should Happen to You (1954), The Web (1951, TV Series), Pulitzer Prize Playhouse (1951, TV Series), The Ford Theatre Hour (1950, TV Series), Suspense (1949, TV Series), The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse (1949, TV Series). Sissy Spacek…Beth Horman (b. Mary Elizabeth Spacek on December 25, 1949 in Quitman, Texas) has been nominated for six Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role including in 2002 for In the Bedroom (2001), in 1987 for Crimes of the Heart (1986), in 1985 for The River (1984), in 1983 for Missing (1982), and in 1977 for Carrie (1976). She won one Oscar in 1981 for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). She was nominated for three Golden Globes: for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, in 1985 for The River (1984), in 1983 for Missing (1982), and in 1982 for Raggedy Man (1981). She has won three Golden Globes: in 2002 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for In the Bedroom (2001), in 1987 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical for Crimes of the Heart (1986) and in 1981 for Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy for Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). She was also nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards in 2010 for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for Big Love (2006-2010) for playing "Marilyn Densham" in the episode "End of Days”, in 2002 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for Last Call (2002) for her role as "Zelda Fitzgerald", and in 1995 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Special The Good Old Boys (1995) for her role as "Spring Renfro". She has been in 60 films and television shows including, Bloodline (2015-2016, TV Series), Deadfall (2012), The Help (2011), Big Love (2010, TV Series), Gray Matters (2006), North Country (2005), A Home at the End of the World (2004), Tuck Everlasting (2002), In the Bedroom (2001), Affliction (1997), The Grass Harp (1995), JFK (1991), Crimes of the Heart (1986), The River (1984), Missing (1982), Raggedy Man (1981), Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), 3 Women (1977), Welcome to L.A. (1976), Carrie (1976), Badlands (1973), The Waltons (1973, TV Series), The Girls of Huntington House (1973, TV Movie), Love, American Style (1973, TV Series), Prime Cut (1972). Melanie Mayron…Terry Simon (b. October 20, 1952 in Philadelphia, PA) was nominated twice in 1990 and 1991, and won

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once at the 1989 Primetime Emmy awards for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of "Melissa Steadman" on Thirtysomething (1987). She has acted in 48 films and television shows including Breaking the Girls (2012), Lipstick Jungle (2008, TV Series), Clockstoppers (2002), East of A (2000), Mad About You (1997, TV Series), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1994, TV Series), My Blue Heaven (1990), Checking Out (1989), Wallenberg: A Hero's Story (1985, TV Movie), Cagney & Lacey (1985, TV Series), Missing (1982), Heartbeeps (1982), Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold (1978, TV Movie), Girlfriends (1978), The Love Boat (1977, TV Series), Car Wash (1976), Gable and Lombard (1976), Hustling (1975, TV Movie), The Gambler (1974), Harry and Tonto (1974). She has also directed 44 films and television shows, some of which include, Jane the Virgin (2015, TV Series, 1 episode), The Fosters (2013-2015, TV Series, 3 episodes), Switched at Birth (2013-2015, TV Series, 6 episodes) Playdate (2013), Little Women, Big Cars (2012), Lipstick Jungle (2008, TV Series, 1 episode), Zeyda and the Hitman (2004), Arli$$ (1998-2002, TV Series, 7 episodes), Dawson's Creek (1999, TV Series, 2 episodes), The Larry Sanders Show (1998, TV Series, 1 episode), Tribeca (1993, TV Series, 1 episode), Sirens (1993, TV Series), Thirtysomething (1990, TV Series, 2 episodes).

Joyce and Charles Horman

John Shea…Charles Horman (b. April 14, 1949 in North Conway, New Hampshire) won one Primetime Emmy Award in 1988 for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Special for Baby M (1988) for playing "Bill Stern". He has acted in over 80 films and television shows, some of which are Grey Lady (2015, completed), Northern Borders (2013), The Good Wife (2012-2013, TV Series), Julius Caesar (2010), Framed (2008), Heartbreak Hospital (2002), Catalina Trust (1999), Sex and the City (1999, TV Series), The Adventures of Sebastian Cole (1998), Getting Personal (1998), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997, TV Series), A Weekend in the Country (1996, TV Movie), See Jane Run (1995, TV Movie), Tales from the Crypt (1993, TV Series), Honey I Blew Up the Kid (1992), Freejack (1992), Stealing Home (1998), Hitler's S.S.: Portrait in Evil (1985, TV Movie), Kennedy (1983, TV Mini-Series), Missing (1982), Family Reunion (1981, TV Movie), Hussy (1980), Man from

Atlantis (1977, TV Series), Barnaby Jones (1977, TV Series), Eight Is Enough (1977, TV Series). Charles Cioffi…Captain Ray Tower (b. October 31, 1935 in New York City, New York) has acted in over 95 films and television shows, some of which include Detective (2005, TV Movie), 1999-2002 The Practice (1999-2002, TV Series), Frasier (2001), Amy's Orgasm (2001), Columbo (2000, TV Series), Chicago Hope (1995-2000), The Larry Sanders Show (1995-1998), The X-Files (1993-1997), Cybill (1996, TV Series), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1996), Murder, She Wrote (1995), NYPD Blue (1995), L.A. Law (1992), Law & Order (1991), Days of Our Lives (1990), Mancuso, FBI (1990, TV Series), Kojak: Fatal Flaw (1989, TV Movie), Peter Gunn (1989), Matlock (1989), Thirtysomething (1989, TV Series), The Equalizer (1986-1987, TV Series), Simon & Simon (1982-1986, TV Series), St. Elsewhere (1986), All the Right Moves (1983), The A-Team (1983, TV Series), Taxi (1982, TV Series), Lou Grant (1982, TV Series), Missing (1982), McClain's Law (1981, TV Series), Flamingo Road (1981, TV Series), Time After Time (1979), Little House on the Prairie (1979), The Bionic Woman (1978), Gray Lady Down (1978), The Six Million Dollar Man (1978, TV Series), Wonder Woman (1977, TV Series), Kojak (1977, TV Series), Tail Gunner Joe (1977, TV Movie), The Streets of San Francisco (1975, TV Series), Cannon (1971-1975, TV Series), Crazy Joe (1974), The Don Is Dead (1973), Lucky Luciano (1973), Bonanza (1972, TV Series), Shaft (1971), Klute (1971), Another World (1964, TV Series).

Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (26 June 1908 – 11 September 1973) was a Chilean physician and politician, known as the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country through open elections.

Allende's involvement in Chilean political life spanned a period of nearly forty years. As a member of the Socialist Party, he was a senator, deputy and cabinet minister. He unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in the 1952, 1958, and 1964 elections. In 1970, he won the presidency in a close three-way race. He was elected in a run-off by Congress as no candidate had gained a majority.

As president, Allende adopted a policy of nationalisation of industries and collectivisation; due to these and other factors, increasingly strained relations between him and the legislative and judicial branches of the Chilean government – who did not share his enthusiasm for socialisation – culminated in a declaration of a "constitutional breakdown" by the congress. A centre-right majority including the Christian Democrats, whose support had enabled Allende's election, denounced his rule as unconstitutional and called for his overthrow by force. On 11 September 1973 the

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military moved to oust Allende in a coup d'état sponsored by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. As troops surrounded La Moneda Palace, he gave his last speech vowing not to resign. Later that day, Allende shot himself to death with an AK-47 rifle according to an 2011 investigation conducted by a Chilean court with the assistence of international experts.

Following Allende's deposition, army General Augusto Pinochet declined to return authority to the civilian government; and Chile became ruled by a military junta that was in power from 1973 to 1990, ending almost 41 years of Chilean democratic rule. The military junta that took over dissolved the Congress of Chile and began a persecution of alleged dissidents, in which thousands of Allende's supporters were murdered.

From World Film Directors, Vol II. Ed. John Wakeman. The H.wW, Wilson Company, NY, 1988. French director and scenarist, was born Konstantinos Gavris in Klivia, in the Greek Pelopenneus (Costa is short for Constantin, the French form of his name, and he subsequently added the hyphen “to create confusion”). He is the third of the three sons of a minor government official, Panayotis Gavris, who emigrated from the soviet Union in 1922. His father was an atheist, but his mother was a deeply pious member of the Greek Orthodox church. Costa-Gavras says that he was “plunged into religion. Completely suffocated by it. The sort of training that made it much easier for me to finally break away from the church.” During the German occupation of Greece, Panayotis Gavas joined the National Liberation Front (FAM), once the war was over,the right-wing government repeatedly imprisoned him and other Resistance fighters as suspected communists, and Costa-Gavras was likewise barred from entering the university, holding an official post, or even obtaining a driver’s license. Opting to leave the country, he first attempted to go to the United States, but in the climate of McCarthyism was denied a visa; as a result he went instead to Paris, where, with the help of family and friends, he enrolled at the Sorbonne in comparative literature. He had been an insatiable moviegoer as a child, though “all we saw in Greece were Westerns and Errol Flynn,” plus a few Russian films shown as anti-Soviet propaganda. The films he discovered at the Cinématèque Française were a revelation to him, “especially American films of the 1930s like The Grapes of Wrath and Capra’s movies.” The Italians Francesco Rosi and Federico Fellinni also

interested him, as did Jean Renoir, Alan Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard among the French After two years at the Sorbonne, Costa-Gavras switched to IDHEC, the French film school, where he studied production and directing. In 1956 he became a French citizen. On completing his studies in 1958 he began to write scripts for American and Canadian television; the following year he entered the French film industry as a second assistant director, working with Yves Allégret, Jacques Nahum, Jean Giono, and René Clair, among others. In 1962 he went to Greenland to shoot footage for a film that was eventually abandoned and on his return he was assigned as first assistant director to Henri Verneuil on Un singe en hiver. In 1963 he met Michèle Ray, a Chanel model who later became a war correspondent and spent a well-publicized three weeks in Viet Cong captivity during the Vietnam War; the two were married in Algeria in 1967.

During the first half of the 1960s Costa-Gavras worked as first assistant to René Clément (Le Jour et l’heure and Les Filèn), Jacques Demy (Le Baie des anges), Marcel Ophuls (L’eau de banane), and Jean Becker (Echappement libre). Of these directors, Clément is thought to have influenced him most, both in his interest in political subjects and in his fondness for self-conscious stylistic effects. There was, however, no sign of the former (though plenty of the latter) in Costa-Gavras’ first film of his own, Compartiments tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders, 1965), described by one critic as “a nerve-tingling, nonpolitical, highly commercial film.” In fact, Costa-Gavras himself felt that he was too inexperienced to undertake a political project and so gathered together a group of friends— Yves Montand and his wife Simone Signoret, her daughter Catherine Allegret, Jean-Louis Tringtinant, Michel Piccoli, and Jacques Perrin—for the adaptation of a novel by Sebastien Jarisot. Montand, who starred in four of Costa-Gavras’ other movies, plays a police detective trying to track down the murderer of a sleeping-car passenger before more victims are claimed, while Signoret gave what was described as a “delicious performance” as an aging actress with a weakness for young men. Penelope Gilliatt found the film “jumpy and gratuitous” in style and sickeningly violent, but most reviewers enjoyed it as a stylish thriller “with a lot of character and wit,” and something of a tribute to American movies. The success of The Sleeping Car Murders brought Costa-Gavras an offer to direct a World War II story, Un Homme de trop (One man Too Many, 1967), in which a band of Resistance fighters break into a Nazi jail to free a dozen political prisoners and find themselves saddled with an unknown thirteenth man (Michel Piccoli) who may endanger them all. The film which Costa-Gavras adapted himself from a novel by Jean-Claude Chabrol was selected to open the Moscow Film Festival in 1967. Two years later it was released as Shock Troops by United Artists, who had re-edited it and supplied a happy ending. The director says that after that experience he never again left the final cut to others. It was while preparing to shoot his next film, Le Fils (The Son) starring Yves Montand, that Costa-Gavras discovered the Vasilis Vassilijos novel Z. Dropping the contract for The Son, he began seeking backers for Z. With the help of his friend Jacques Perrin, he finally set up a coproduction with the Algerian state film company, ONCIC, and then teamed up with the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun to adapt the screenplay. Z (1968) is a thriller centering on the murder of a politician (Yves Montand) in an unspecified Mediterranean country and the subsequent

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investigation by a magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) of unwavering integrity and determination. In fact, though the film was actually shot in Algeria, it is quite obviously a highly fictionalized account of the assassination by fascist thugs of the idolized Greek deputy Grigoris Lambrakis, a hero of the Left. As the film goes on to show, the investigation uncovered such a network of corruption in the police and the government that the right-wing Karamanlis regime fell. It was replaced by the reformist government of George Papandreou, ousted in 1967 in a coup d’état that installed a totalitarian military junta. The score was provided by Mikos Theodorakis, then under house arrest in Greece, and as Guy Flatley wrote, his “seething, swelling, raging music...lends an almost unbearable tension to Z.” The film was shot by Raoul Coutard in Eastmancolor, and it seemed to Pauline Kael that “although the photography is perhaps a little too self-consciously dynamic...the searching, active style doesn’t let you get away.” Kael thought that the film derived “not from the traditions of French film but from American gangster movies and prison pictures and ‘anti-Fascist’ melodramas of the forties...and, like those pictures, it has a basically simple point of view.” For some critics, indeed, the film was altogether too simple: its tidy arrangement of characters into the impeccably heroic and the unrelievedly villainous and its ringing denunciation of tyranny years after the events related seemed designed to send audiences home in “the warm, safe glow of communal outrage.” Less sophisticated viewers were both moved and entertained , and Z enjoyed phenomenal success all over the world (though not in Greece, where it was banned). Among the many honors it received were the New York Film Critics’ awards for best film and best director. “I’m neither a Communist nor a Socialist,” Costa-Gavras has said, “and I find leftist a rather vague expression. Let’s just say I’ve learned to distrust any rigid ideology or party proposal that offers no alternative, that allows no criticism, and that too often tries to make people live according to borrowed ideas or in imitation of others….Therefore since it seems impossible to criticize from within I prefer to stay on the outside, though not with a hostile attitude.” And having lacerated right-wing totalitarianism in Z, he turned his blade against Stalinism in L’Aveu (The Confession, 1970), whose script by Jorge Semprun was based on the autobiography of Artur London, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs in the Czech government. London has been a victim of the 1952 Prague show trials—a faithful party functionary who suddenly found himself ostracized and watched, then arrested and brainwashed into a false confession. Imprisoned, London was released without explanation after Stalin’s death. He went abroad but returned to Czechoslovakia in the hope of rehabilitation in 1968—just in time to see Russian tanks rolling into Prague. L’Aveu follows London’s book very closely, with Montand conveying a weary integrity in the lead, Simone Signoret playing his wife Lise, and Gabriele Ferzetti the genial, merciless

interrogator. Penelope Houston wrote that the film’s “buttonholing tricks of style and artificially significant camera angles...pile synthetic urgency on real urgency,” but found it all the same a “more disciplined, compelling and complex” picture than Z—we identify with Montand, but do not forget that the man he plays had helped to create the system that crucified him. This complexity and sobriety may have limited the film’s financial success but established it, in the eyes of a number of critics, as its director’s best picture. Costa-Gavras said of L’Aveu that “the Russians did not like the film. Many French Communists hated it. The Maoists were divided, Stalinists enraged and Godard’s friends not at all enthusiastic. Only the Italian party… [came] out unequivocally for the film.” Having thus alienated most of the socialists who had so admired Z, Costa-Gavras went on to raise a great squall of

controversy in the United States with his next movie, État de siège (State of Siege, 1973). Scheduled for screening in the American Film Institute’s festival for the inauguration of the Kennedy Center in Washington, it was abruptly withdrawn on the ground that it “rationalizes an act of political assassination.” State of Siege was written by Costa-Gavras in collaboration with Franco Solinas, scenarist of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. Like Z, it is a somewhat fictionalized version of an actual event—the kidnapping by

Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay in 1970 of Dan Mitrione, an American from the Agency for International Development whose real job was to train the Uruguayan police in counter-insurgency techniques. The ransom demanded by the Tupamaros was the release of all political prisoners, and when this was refused and police death squads made a series of raids showing how much they had learned from Mitrione’s tuition, he was murdered. Mitrione (called Santore in the film) is played by Montand as a brave, serious, well-intentioned man who is simply incapable of recognizing that the capitalist ethic is not universally desired. At the end of the movie, another AID man is flown in to replace him, but the camera singles out one defiant face from the crowd at the airport as a prophetic hint of what is to come. In State of Siege, Costa-Gavras abandoned the subtleties of L’Aveu. Jay Cocks found the new film “stylistically jazzy past the point of stridency,” employment “a sort of arythmic, staccato editing and prminent, even aggressive music (by Mikos Theodorakis) to punch the movie along, giving it a kind of spurious suspense.” It did well at the box office. In q 1974 interview with Pier Nico Solinas, Costa-Gavras explained his conception of political film: “To me it’s a film which brings to the surface a problem that people are ignoring or not thinking about, which makes them reflect upon, discuss, evaluate this problem and makes them aware of it in political terms. It should be a film that shows the political mechanisms with which we live, the mechanisms which cause things to be the way they are. Thus a political film is one which provokes political reactions, political discussions, and political controversies. Starting from this premise I might also add that a political film must be popular, as

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popular as possible so that these reactions, discussions, and controversies will automatically be far-reaching.” Costa-Gavras next turned his attention to his adopted country in Section Spéciale (Special Section,1975), another highly profitable exercise in “righteousness after the event,” condemned for its “loading of the moral dice” but enjoyed all the same for the director’s “special brand of all-star, gold-plated suspense.” In fact, there are no major stars (though many excellent performances) in this reconstruction of a squalid episode in the history of the Vichy government of world War II. An officer of the occupying German forces is killed by the Resistance, and to avert massive reprisals, the Vichy authorities offer up six scapegoats, setting up a special court to “try” and condemn selected “troublemakers” already in custody. Jorge Semprun drew on the researches of the historian Hervé Villeré to who how eminent judges , magistrates, lawyers, and politicians were drawn, more of less reluctantly, into this shameful victory of ends over means. Clair de femme (1979), with Montand and Romy Schneider as middle-aged lovers, was Costa-Gavras‘ first attempt at a conventional romance and is likely to be his last. It was a total failure, excoriated as “a monumentally trivial picturization” of Romain Gary’s novel, “a glassy glossy.” The director returned to more familiar territory in Missing (1982)—literally familiar since he had visited Allende’s Chile in 1971, defending the President against right-wing charges that he had attempted to suppress L’Aveu during that year’s crucial municipal elections. Missing, another political thriller with a basis in fact, proved to be even more controversial than L’Aveu. Charles Horman was a young American freelance writer who went to Chile to observe and support Allende’s socialist government, working thee for a liberal newspaper. In the 1973 coup that brought the right-wing Pinochet regime to illegal power, Charles Horman disappeared. His father, Edmund G. Horman, went to Santiago in search of him and was informed by Charles‘ widow that he had been murdered with American connivance because he knew too much about United States involvement in the coup. Ed Horman, a pro-Nixon Christian Scientist businessman at first ridiculed this theory as “Commie paranoia.” But the American officials in Santiago were strangely unhelpful, Charles did not reappear, and Horman gradually became convinced that his daughter-in-law was right. In 1977, after four years of investigation, Ed Horman sued eleven American government officials for $4 million for negligence and wrongful death, but the case was eventually dismissed on procedural grounds and for lack of evidence. Meanwhile a lawyer named Thomas Hauser had been drawn into the crusade, and it was his book, TheExecution of Charles Horman (1979), that Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart used as the basis for their script. Missing was filmed in Mexico, with Jack Lemmon playing Ed Horman and Sissy Spacek as his daughter-in-law Beth. Vincent Canby thought it Costa-Gavras’ “most striking cinematic

achievement to date,” its script “a carefully interlocking work in which present events and flashbacks are so seamlessly joined that the film’s forward momentum increases progressively, right up to the smashing finale that surprises even though it has never been in doubt.” Philip French similarly applauded “Costa-Gavras’ ability to grab you unawares by the lapels and drag you through the labyrinth of intrigue and paranoia that lies beyond the more acceptable corridors of power,” though he thought that “as honest Ed and his daughter-in-law are reconciled, conflicting generations united against the smug establishment, the picture’s radical thrust is turned into (or concealed behind) domestic drama.” The intense and high-powered debate provoked by Missing centered on its specific claim that it was “based on a true story. The incidents and facts are documented.” In fact, as Flora Lewis pointed out in an article in the New York TImes (February 7, 1982), “the film gives only one point of view,” and Costa-Gavras “made no effort to speak with the government officials he portrays nor to consult the records.” The State Department took the movie seriously enough to issue a long rebuttal of its charges, and

in January 1983 the former American ambassador to Chile and two of his aides filed a $150 million libel suit against Costa-Gavras, Universal, and others involved in the making of the film. At about the same time it won the Golden Palm at Cannes (shared with Yilmaz Güney’s Yol), subsequently collecting an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Hanna K. (1983) was Gista-Gavras’ first political thriller based on a fictional situation rather than a historical event, and it, like Missing, was released by Universal Studios. An ambitious attempt to explore the

thorny issue of Israel and the Palestinians, Hanna K. was actually the synthesis of several projects the director had been considering for a decade or more—an invitation to make O Jerusalem in the early 1970s, a film on the Paris Commune that he’d begun in 1970 and which raised the issue of the excommunards expelled to Algeria and the evolution of their colonial mentality, and finally a longstanding desire to make a film about a woman’s life. Explaining how he and Franco Solinas wrote the screenplay, he recalled, “Every year, events, a book, a screenplay. or a visitor questioned us with the constancy of bad conscience. In 1978 Franco went to Beirut. He came back shattered. But also pessimistic, discouraged about our being able to write a screenplay. So little by little our desire to write a film about a woman, like those around us, took form….And it was only after we had been with her to Jerusalem in 1979 that we no longer left her.” The film’s central character, Hannah Kaufman (Jill Clayburgh) is a jewish-American woman who, in her professional/political life, emigrates to Israel, becomes a lawyer, and gets involved with the case of a Palestinian man, Selim Bakri (Mohammed Bakri) who is attempting to reclaim his family home in the village of Kurf Rimona, now part of the Russian-Jewish settlement of Kafr Rimon. In her personal life, meanwhile, her

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“search for identity” (Costa-Gavras’ words) take her from a devoted French husband Victor Bonnet (Jean Yanne) to a brief affair with the Israeli chief prosecutor Joshua Herzog (Gabriel Byrne), whose child she bears, and then to a romantic involvement with her Palestinian client. As in his earlier films, it is through the single mediating character of Hanna that Costa-Gavras attempts to engage his viewers in the larger political issues; here, her intimate conversations with Selim provide the rare opportunity for a Palestinian point of view to be sympathetically expressed, while her courtroom confrontations with Joshua allow her changing perspective to emerge. But for lack of a concrete historical situation, the story trails off into melodrama, ending with a highly improbable dinner gathering of Hanna and her three lovers, past and present. A news bulletin announces a bombing in Kafr Rimon; Joshua accuses Selim of the attack and summons the police; Selim flees; Hanna orders the other two men out and then, as she retreats into the shower, finds her house surrounded by the army of police that Joshua had summoned. Hanna K. opened to lukewarm reviews at the Venice Film Festival and more of the same in its commercial runs in Paris and New York. Besides the universal conclusion that Jill Clayburgh was miscast in the role of Hanna (“An Unmarried Woman Moves to Jerusalem” is how one critic retitled the film), reviewers were fairly consistent in suggesting that Costa-Gavras’ departure from a good-guys/bad-guys situation had left him with a muddled story—in the words of Raphael Bassin, “an undigested proposition that tries to make us understand a complex situation but doesn’t succeed.” The New York critics, perhaps less disposed toward Costa-Gavras, much less the Palestinians, to begin with, were even harsher about what Stanley Kauffmann called “patent cheapness” and “marketplace ambiguity.” Cost-Gavras himself told interviewers after the New York premiere, “This film is my most important political statement (to date) and is perhaps the most radical of all my movies. The public perception is something else again, and perhaps the style of the film—the way I approach the subject—will turn out to be the film’s worst enemy. Some (people), however, will find any reason to object to a film like this.” While the film’s political thrust was undoubtedly a cause of some unwarranted criticism—in the extreme, David Denby wrote of “unconscious anti-Semitism”—even those who were favorably disposed towards Gosta-Gavras’ intentions questioned the extent to which he was successful, citing the rampant implausibilities of the plot(at one point Selim is offered South African citizenship as a means of resettling in Israel if he will drop the claim to his family home), the stereotypical characters, the inconclusive resort to melodrama at the end. Yet, as the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said pointed out in one of the more charitable reviews, the film’s singular achievement was the presentation of the human dimensions of the Palestinian experience, and for this reason, he argued, the strength of its political message might override its aesthetic problems. In the wake of Hanna K., Costa- Gavras himself seems to have undertaken a reevaluation of his work while pursuing other

projects. Since 1982 he has served as president of the Cinématèque Française; he subsequently became involved in the production of a first film by Mehdi Charef, an Algerian immigrant whose autobiographical novel, Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983) was a best-seller in France. Michèle Ray-Gavras had purchased the film rights, originally as a vehicle for her husband, but Costa-Gavras turned the direction over to Charef—who had been aspiring to fillmmaking during years of factory work—and the resulting Thé au harem d’Archimède (Tea in the Harem, 1985), “presented by Costa-Gavras” (who appears as the stills photographer in the credits), was an immediate success, winning the Jean Vigo Prize, an Apple Foundation award for film distribution, and a second prize at the Chicago film festival.

After this collaboration with Charef (whose next film was to be produced by Michèle Ray-Gavras as well), Costa-Gavras resumed his own filmmaking but with a different orientation. As Variety put it after the release of Conseil de famille (Family Council, 1986), “Humor has never been an element in the socio-political film world of Costa-Gavras, so it’s a surprise to seethe director now taking a stab at this ironic

comedy about a family of burglars done in by its own double standard of morality.” Based on a novel by the well-known author of thrillers Francis Ryck, Family Council shows the transformation of a family crime ring into the local affiliate of an international syndicate based in the United States. When the father (French rock star Johnny Halliday) returns home to his wife (Fanny Ardant) after a long stint in jail, his son, François breathes new life into the operation, and over the years, the family enjoys the same upward mobility aspired to throughout the working classes. Just at the point when the father makes his American connection, though, the grown-up François (Remy Martin, the co-star of Charef’s Tea in the Harem) opts out for another “profession,” cabinetmaking. His outrages father responds by calling a family counsel and locking the son away until he consents to come back to the fold. Following the rules of the game in which he has been raised, François turns his father and their partner over to the police so that the rest of the family can pursue their dream of a “normal” life. Departing from Costa-Gavras’ established style in form as well as subject, Family Council is structured as a kind of film within a film, with the family history presented through the first-person recollections of François. “It’s a lot of fun to change, to do something else,” Costa-Gavras told Monique Martineau during the shooting; “In making a comedy I’m discovering the traps I didn’t know about. You have to find another tone, another way of telling the story.” While Variety reviewer Len Borger found the result “stolidly lacking in visual imagination and narrative brio,” others were more impressed. French critics Yves Alion and Jacqueline Lajeunesse, for example, wrote appreciatively of Costa-Gavras’ ironic inversion of French family values; for them, this seemingly light entertainment took on “unexpected substance” through its social implications: “more than a comedy, Conseil de famille seems like a bittersweet chronicle, a sentimental saga in halftones…” In any case, as Monique Marineau wrote at the end of a 1985 anthology devoted to “The Cinema of Costa-Gavras,” with

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Family Council, the director seems to have broken out of the “Z formula,” but one can only ask, with Martineau, “Will it last?” It is no doubt true that, as Vincent Canby writes, “all of Mr. Costa-Gavras’ politically inspired movies are, at heart, chase thrillers.” There are many who maintain that his use of “rapid-fire cross-cutting” and other techniques for building suspense are “manipulative” and inappropriate to the intensely serious issues that provide his themes. His defenders point out that his methods are far more effective in promoting widespread awareness and discussion of these issues than, say, the more austere procedures of Jean-Luc Godard. “Pale, broad-shouldered and handsome,” Costa-Gavras is married to Michele Ray, a “red-headed beauty” whose much-publicized adventures as a freelance journalist include a period of captivity at the hands of the Vietcong in 1967. They have a son, and Michele Ray another by an earlier marriage. Costa-Gavras became president of the Cinémathèque Française in 1982.

Michael Wood: “Missing: ‘’Who Would Care About Us If We Disappeared?’” (Criterion Notes)

The films of Constantin Costa-Gavras are often described as political thrillers, and the phrase is helpful as long as we pause over it a little. There is always a strongly personal element to his stories, a human factor, and the thrills are in the politics rather than set against a political background. The corpses and the cover-ups, whether in Europe or in Latin America, are intimate features of actual historical situations—an assassination in Greece, an execution in Chile, genocide in Germany—rather than fictional elements woven into a political context, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), say, or Salvador (1986) or In the Line of Fire (1993).

Of course, the films of Costa-Gavras are fictionalized, too, and he insists that he is not a maker of documentaries. But the very act of fictionalization, in his case, is discreetly political. Z (1969), a film about the murder of a Greek politician and the ensuing inquiry, doesn’t mention Greece and is not, Costa-Gavras says, “a movie about Greece only.” But a title card at the beginning says, “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. It is intended.” Similarly, the director says of Missing (1982) that “the country where the story takes place is not identified in the film,” and yet the film opens with the statement, readable on the screen and pronounced on the soundtrack by the voice of Jack Lemmon, that “some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and also to protect the film.” In

the version I saw long ago at a preview, the sentence ended at “protect the innocent,” and was followed by another: “The guilty are already protected.”

The point of the thinly disguised allusions is to avoid not the identification of the countries but too easy a limitation of the stories’ reach. These things happened in Greece or in Chile, and things like them have happened and will happen elsewhere. Don’t get too comfortable. Although, in fact, it is not strictly true that Chile is not identified in Missing. The beach resort of Viña del Mar is named, and scenes are set there; an American diplomat uses the word “Chilean”; and a coffin is delivered to the United States with the words “From Santiago” prominently written on the side. But Costa-Gavras is right about the effect of his strategy. If we have to figure out that this place is Santiago de Chile (or Thessaloniki), we will have necessarily figured out that it could be someplace else.

Costa-Gavras’s international background clearly has a lot to do with his themes and preoccupations, and the interplay between what’s actual and what’s possible in politics characterizes much of his work, from Z all the way through to his recent film Amen (2002), where what might have been done for the Jews in Nazi Germany is constantly contrasted with what was. He was born in Greece in 1933, finished his education in France, and went straight into film production, working as an assistant to René Clément, Yves Allégret, and Jacques Demy. His first full-length movie as a director was a straightforward but very sharp thriller, The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), about which he is now mildly (and wrongly) apologetic: “I didn’t like to start in this way but sometimes you have to make a thriller . . .” This work starred Yves Montand, who also appeared in several of the director’s other films (Z; The Confession, 1970; State of Siege, 1972; Clair de femme, 1979). Missing was his first American film and created, as it was meant to, a great deal of resistance and argument—even, although this was no doubt unintended, a lawsuit (for libel, ultimately dismissed, from State Department officials depicted in the film). It was and remains, however, a very popular movie, in the United States and elsewhere. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for best picture at the Oscars. Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek were also nominated, and the film’s screenplay (by Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart, and an uncredited John Nichols) won the Oscar for best adaptation, from Thomas Hauser’s book The Execution of Charles Horman (1978).

Missing pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role. Of course, at least since the revolution in Cuba in 1959, if not the Spanish-American War a half century earlier, there could be little doubt that the government of the United States intended to look very carefully after its interests in Latin America. But, the film asks, what are the constraints on how this is done, and what do American citizens have a right to know about these activities? More dramatically—and this is where the story kicks in—what if they get in the way?

As soon as the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, in spite of many avowed American attempts to have the election go another way, the question of a military coup was on the table. But there is some distance between doing what you can to influence an election in another country (and accepting the result) and supporting a violent uprising; and indeed some distance again between supporting a homegrown rebellion and being the architect and engineer of the whole show. This is where the strong questions arise, and where doubts become

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possible, even among those who support some forms of intervention.

The coup occurred on September 11, 1973, and was led by General Augusto Pinochet, head of the armed forces, and later seen as the savior of the country or one of the century’s major war criminals, depending on your point of view. Allende was killed or committed suicide, and some forty to fifty thousand people were rounded up and imprisoned, many in the National Stadium in the capital city. More than seven hundred and fifty of these detainees were executed without judgment. The general and his cohorts ruled the country as a military junta until 1974, when Pinochet declared himself head of state. Chile returned to democracy in 1990, and Pinochet went into exile.

Costa-Gavras approaches the violent events of 1973 from the point of view of the baffled or frightened individuals caught up in them, opening his film on an intricate shot that places ordinary people in close visual relation to one another and to the larger, dangerous world about them. A young man sits in the backseat of a car looking over a half-open window. Reflected in the window is a group of small children playing soccer in a dusty open space. Then, still in the reflection, the children start to scatter, and a truck full of soldiers comes into view, bristling with helmets and guns. We are on the outskirts of the city, and the coup has already begun. The young man is Charlie Horman (John Shea), an American soon to disappear in a raid, and the sense of invasion, of a peaceful, civilian place turned into a war zone, dominates the first ten minutes of the movie. At one point Sissy Spacek, as Beth, Charlie’s wife, is caught out by the curfew and has to shelter in a doorway all night, sporadic gunshots echoing around her and corpses visible on the street.

Charlie has been in Viña del Mar with a friend, Terry Simon, and has had some disturbing conversations with Americans. One man speaks boastfully of a job being done and of moving on to Bolivia now; more generally, the sheer number of military or pseudomilitary Americans present is disconcerting to Charlie. What are they doing here? Charlie makes it home but is arrested a day or so later, taken to the National Stadium, as we later learn, and singled out and executed. This is possibly a random killing, as the death of one of Charlie’s friends, Frank Teruggi, seems to have been. And possibly it is something else. It is important to recognize that the little Charlie knows poses no threat to the Chilean military. What Charlie has learned is only that Americans have been involved in some way in the coup, but not how or how much. The U.S. embassy in Chile maintains until close to the end of the movie that there has been no involvement of any kind by the United States, that the position of the country is one of strict neutrality. Charlie may have been killed because at least he knew that this was wrong.

With Charlie’s disappearance, the focus of the movie shifts to his father, Ed (magnificently played by Jack Lemmon), a conservative Christian Scientist from New York who has no doubt that the government of his country means to do right in the world, or that, now that he has flown down to the country of the coup, the United States’ representatives will help him find his son, if his son

is anywhere to be found. He loves the boy but is scornful of his vague left-wing sympathies and lack of a steady job, and sees Beth’s distrust of the authorities as the product of knee-jerk radicalism. “I don’t want to hear any of your anti-American paranoia,” he says. Gradually he learns to think differently of her, and his change is all the more affecting and believable because Sissy Spacek plays Beth with such quiet authority, mingling tenderness and distress with an unmistakable courage.

At last Ed Horman learns that the American embassy’s elaborate show of looking for Charlie is a sham because Charlie has been dead for some time—since before Ed came down from the United States, in fact. The scene in which he discovers this—and registers many other things at the same time—is both underplayed and elaborately staged. Lemmon scarcely reacts, but we know just what, and how much, he is thinking. He walks out of the office of the Ford Foundation, where he has heard the news, and finds himself alone in an immense and ornate stairwell, with marble steps running in four directions from a central landing. At first he pays no attention to where he is, walks down a stair, then starts to climb another, although the way out is down. Then he realizes what he is doing, turns, and leaves. It is as if the building is an image of the world that hasn’t been listening to him: still, stylish, overwrought, indifferent.

The hero of Missing, like the hero of Z, like the two heroes of Amen, is a good man who changes his (conformist) politics, or more precisely abandons his old political assumptions, for the sake of justice and what he learns of the truth. In Z, the man is a judge who at first can’t believe that the police and the army have organized a group of thugs to disrupt an antinuclear demonstration and kill a man; in Amen, an SS officer and an Italian priest testify, against their professional class and to their cost, to

what is happening to the Jews in Europe in 1936 and after. Ed Horman doesn’t become less American than he was, and he has no interest in the coup or indeed in the possibility or the extent of the involvement of the United States. But he recognizes when he is being lied to, and he finds out how little he knows about what his government is doing—what it feels it has the right to do in his name.

This is the real question, and a key issue of the Nixon era and after. How secret does secret policy have to be, and how much secrecy is necessary? The American ambassador says to Ed Horman, “Let’s level with each other, sir. If you hadn’t been personally involved in this unfortunate incident, you’d be sitting at home, complacent and more or less oblivious to all of this.” Ed Horman doesn’t argue. And the movie invites us not, alas, to disagree, since great regions of ignorance and complacency constitute the fullest context for the film, but to ask what follows from this obliviousness. The ambassador also makes clear that his job is to protect American interests, not individual Americans, and we can wonder how prevalent and acceptable this priority is, and whether it is not exactly upside down.

In the film’s most memorable scene, Beth and Ed visit a morgue, finding there the body of Charlie’s friend Frank—whom

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American officials had certified as definitely having left the country in safety. Appalled and disheartened, Beth and Ed look around at a scene filled with bloodied and broken corpses. Then they turn their gaze upward in a movement of helplessness. The camera goes with them, and we see that the floor above, semitransparent, is also covered with dead bodies, their silhouettes hovering like huge black moths. Death is above and all around Beth and Ed, and Costa-Gavras has achieved a small miracle: through their sorrow he has individualized every member of this unburied human mass. “I have often thought,” he said in an interview given just before the film was completed, “when I read . . . about twenty thousand people dead or lost, who were those people? Who cared about them? Who would care about us if we disappeared?” These are not political questions, although the violent and unnatural death of so many could scarcely fail to be political in the broadest sense.

Maya Jaggi, “French Resistance: Costa Gavras” (The Guardian, 3 April 2009)

Costa Gavras recalls his shock at arriving at the Gare de Lyon from Greece in 1954, at the "gloomy weather and black façades, 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 50s, 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 Cinémathèque Française, 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. With dark humour, a faux-documentary style and a soundtrack by Mikos Theodorakis - then under house arrest - it made 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 80s, 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 son, the journalist Charles Horman, he is confronted by the depth of his country's collusion in Pinochet's coup. (Gavras and Universal Studios successfully fought a libel suit filed by a former US ambassador to Chile during the coup.) Amen (2003) proved equally controversial, investigating as it did the silence or complicity of the Catholic church and the allied powers in the Holocaust.

Yet 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. He films lone figures dwarfed by opulent buildings, or pacing the indifferent corridors of bureaucracy. For Gavras, "resistance is the most important thing". Ed Rampell, “Costa-Gavras” (The Progressive, August 29, 2013) Costa-Gavras is arguably the world's greatest living political filmmaker.

Born in Arcadia, Greece, in 1933, to the son of a blacklisted father, Costa-Gavras immigrated to France when he was a student. Like others of his generation, including François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras fell in love with film at Paris's renowned Cinémathèque and studied movies at France's national film school, IDHEC. After serving as René Clair's assistant director, Costa-Gavras began directing stylish films known for their dissident sensibility.

His 1969 fact-based film Z, about police repression and the colonels' coup in Greece, won a Cannes Jury Prize and is one of the rare subtitled movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. Zwas also nominated for Best Writing and Best Director Oscars. It scored Oscars for Best Editing and Best Foreign Language Film, in addition to winning a Golden Globe.

Aside fromZ, Costa-Gavras's oeuvre includes: 1973's State of Siege, about urban guerrilla warfare in South America; 1982's Cannes Palme d'Or-winning Missing in which Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek play Americans searching for a loved one in Chile after General Pinochet's bloody coup; 1983's pro-Palestinian Hannah K.; 1988's Betrayed, co-starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger as a member of a rightwing militia; 1989's Music Box, with Jessica Lange scoring an Oscar nomination as a lawyer defending her father charged with committing Nazi war crimes; 1997's Mad City, co-starring John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman in a drama about media sensationalism; and 2002's heartbreaking Amen, wherein a German officer and priest try to save the Jews by informing Pope Pius XII about the Holocaust.

His latest film, Capital, is about the financial crisis and the power of banks.

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In person, Costa-Gavras looks much younger than his

eighty years. He is thoughtful and philosophical and speaks in lightly accented English. I interviewed him in a West Hollywood hotel and reminded him that we had met once before, in 1975, when as a Hunter College film student and aspiring journalist, I wrote my first paid article. It was about him. Q: Why did you make your new film, Capital? Costa-Gavras: I decided more than ten years ago now to make a movie about money. I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion. That was the initial idea. Q: Capital touches upon the economic crisis. Under President Obama, the Department of Justice hasn't locked up a single banker. Costa-Gavras: No one anywhere has. This crisis started probably due to the freedom they gave to the banks. First President Reagan and then President Clinton. So, for Obama it is extremely difficult to change now, to find a way to organize this banking system [differently]. In the U.S. more than any other place, the banking system is insane. Millions of Americans lost their houses. Because of what? Because of the banking system. This American banking system is also coming to Europe. We can say today that the banks and high financiers run the world. Q: One point you're making in Capital is that there's a difference between American and European-style capitalism. Costa-Gavras: The difference used to be very strong. It's less and less now. When I was preparing the script, I met with some of the most important bankers in Paris. I was told that the American banks became completely free, without any control or any rules, and that they had to imitate them little by little. If not, they would be swallowed by the American banks. Q: Capital moves very briskly. Costa-Gavras: Thank you. It's a story about a part of our society where everything goes very fast. Every morning you have the economic news from all over the world, from television, radio, the Internet, and an hour later the news changes and the numbers change. People run fast from one place to another, which is very risky because they don't have enough time to think. Aggressive capitalism leads the world, and we can see the results, especially in Europe: more poverty for the vast majority, and more riches for a few. Q: Describe your politics today. Costa-Gavras: It's a tough question because I'm catalogued as leftwing. What does "leftwing" mean? Because the term is very vague. Sometimes there are leftwing governments I'm very critical of. For me, being leftwing is to live in a society where there's permanent change. It also means to respect the freedom of everybody, and to not accept big organizations or rich, powerful people holding power. So, it's to have real democracy and freedom. And, of course, giving everyone a chance at the ballot box. But essentially being leftwing for me means fighting for the dignity of the people.

Q: Your father was in the Greek resistance. Costa-Gavras: My life in Greece influenced what I am. My father was in the left because he was against the king and his family, who had created a war against the Turks at the beginning of the last century to revive the Byzantine Empire. For three years, there was fighting, and all my father's friends died. So he hated the royal family. After the war, the king came back, and all the people like my father lost their jobs. Worse, their kids had to furnish a certificate that the family was pro-king. The kids of these people could not pursue studies, so I had to run away to France to study. I initially studied literature, and then I went to cinema school. I discovered the Cinematheque, and saw not only action movies and westerns, but also lots of serious movies. Q: Who are some of your biggest cinematic influences? Costa-Gavras: The first movie I saw at the Cinematheque was [Erich von Stroheim's] Greed, and I was astonished to see you could do long movies with no happy ending. Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, [Ingmar] Bergman. Q: Do you believe cinema can change the world? Costa-Gavras: Cinema has changed the world. If you go to the beginning of the cinema, you can see that the world started meeting other worlds. It was extraordinary. We saw how other people were living and thinking. How they were sad or happy. We

also saw the body -- naked or half-naked people, which was prohibited everywhere by religions. This was extremely important. Essentially, filmmakers have to be free and not directed by power or politicians. Q: Z is arguably the most successful political film ever made, and it seemed to isolate the Greek junta. Costa-Gavras: The movie in a

certain way helped to show what the colonels were, how stupid they were. Some of the traditional, conservative newspapers spoke very well about the junta at the beginning. When Z came out, they saw they were not such good guys. Q: You've directed a number of movies about Nazis (Special Section, Music Box, and Amen) and neo-Nazis (Betrayed). Do you fear Greece's Golden Dawn party could take over there and that neo-fascist parties can rise to power in other European countries? Costa-Gavras: Every time you have a crisis in a country you have an extreme wing coming up and proposing solutions. In Z, the Golden Dawn is there already, if you remember -- those Christian, rightwing people. The way to fight them is by doing lots of work teaching people that every time these fascist systems gained power they ended up with big tragedies -- lots of blood, lots of police, and lots of misery. Q: On the other extreme, do you think there's a possibility of a socialist revolution in Greece and/or any of the other European countries? Costa-Gavras: It depends what you call "socialist revolution." Q: In the Bolshevik sense?

Costa-Gavras—MISSING-—12

Costa-Gavras: No, we saw what happens with Bolsheviks. It was another catastrophe. I don't have the solution. The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions. Q: You made The Confession in the 1970s. In the end, when the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia, somebody paints graffiti: "Lenin wake up; they've gone mad." Costa-Gavras: Yes, because it was exactly what the students wrote on the walls of Czechoslovakia at that time. Q: Having made such a great movie about Eastern European regimes, how do you feel about the collapse of these Stalinist-type states? Costa-Gavras: It was a normal conclusion. Because they used to make extraordinary promises about the happiness of the people and so forth, but the policies they implemented were completely contrary to that. So those systems collapsed. Q: State of Siege and Missing are harshly critical of U.S. policy toward Latin America. Were you ever banned from the United States for these portrayals? Costa-Gavras: No, never. Missing was entirely financed by the Americans, by Universal. And State of Siege, half the money came from the U.S. People say "the Americans" or "the United States," as if it was a kind of bloc. It's not. There's a lot of people thinking differently from other people in the U.S. This is very interesting to me and very important. Q: What's the difference between working in Hollywood and Europe in terms of making political movies? Costa-Gavras: After the success of Z in the U.S., I was asked to come here and make lots of movies. I refused because I had to make The Confession and other movies in Paris, and I didn't feel comfortable because I didn't know American society enough to make movies about here.

I finally decided to make Missing for several reasons. One is because I knew the Chilean system. The story did not take place in the U.S. but outside. It was a story of a father looking for his son, which I knew also. So I made it. I also asked the American producers to do it with my French crew and to do post-production in France. All the American films I have done under those conditions, and it was a good thing because I also had full freedom. If they hadn't given me full freedom, I would have stayed away. Q: Is it easier making political films in France than in the U.S.? Costa-Gavras: In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe. I was talking with one of the producers of Missing, and he said, "It would be impossible to make Missing today here in the U.S." Q: What do you think of the new left-leaning governments in Latin America? Costa-Gavras: Oh, I think there has been a major change compared to what Latin America used to be thirty-forty years ago. The American influence is not so aggressive anymore. The American big business influence in Latin America is not as strong, so people can vote and they can have a different life than before. They can have more liberal, more interesting, and more democratic governments. Q: What are your reflections upon turning eighty? Costa-Gavras: You know every time you change a decade, it's a problem, because you approach the end little by little. But my decision is to keep going. The problem is always to know when the head doesn't work well. Someone has to tell you. I hope my children will tell me.

COMING UP IN BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS 31

Oct 27 Roland Joffé, The Mission, 1986 Nov 3 Mira Nair, Mississippi Masala, 1991

Nov 10 Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke, 1997 Nov 17 Elia Suleiman, The Time That Remains, 2009

Nov 24 Terry Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, 2009 Dec 1 Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse, 2011

Dec 8 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven, 1946 CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.