Z

Radicalising the Commercial

  In at least two ways, Constantin Costa-Gavras Z counters the typical approach to traditional narrative expectation. First of all, it doesn’t have a central character; secondly, when one emerges, his agency is finally countered by a structural force greater than the individual. The film proposes not so much that a person makes a difference (an abiding and important element in many a socio-politically oriented works), but that the structures dictating individual lives are always at play and constantly capable of undermining them. In the initial stages, it looks like the Leftist politician and anti-war activist The Deputy (based on Greek politician Grigoris Lambakis, and played by Yves Montand) will be our leading figure, even if it is The General (Pierre Dux) who initially takes to the floor explaining in florid metaphors the dangers of the left. Yet while Dux was a respected veteran stage and screen actor,  he wasn’t Yves Montand - an actor who, on his death, Rone Tempest could say was “renowned for his leftist political activism as well as for his rich baritone voice, Montand was the perfect embodiment of a French ideal-a masterful, suave performer with a social conscience.” (Los Angeles Times) He will surely be our leading man when he turns up twelve minutes into the film, getting off a plane. The film’s shot choices and music also suggest he will be.  We have the first use of Mikis Theodorakis’s music, post-credit sequence, a lush moment in the score that is accompanied by a frontal shot of the plane coming in to land, a vertical camera tilt down showing the plane’s tale after it does so, and The Deputy exiting the plane, friendly and perhaps a little flirty with the air hostess. This is our star, we would be forgiven for thinking, but halfway through the film he will be dead, victim of a hard blow to the skull, and for much of that hour he has been in a coma. We don’t even see him giving his speech.

     Once his death is announced, we search around for another central character and find it in The Examining Magistrate (Jean Louis-Trintignant), someone who is now not only investigating an act of manslaughter but a murder charge. The autopsy leaves no doubt that The Deputy didn’t die when a three-wheel truck ran him over, but from a blow administered by someone while it did so. The magistrate also comes increasingly to realise that this wasn’t an incident with a solitary murderer, but part of a much wider conspiracy against The Deputy. Yet even if he becomes our leading character, others weave in and out of the material as if diluting the centrality as readily as allowing the magistrate to investigate the case. When the film explores secondary characters involved in the attempt on The Deputy’s life, these aren’t just moments that delineate the investigation, they are small vignettes in someone’s existence. When for example, a minor character receives a blow to the head as he is on his way to tell the Magistrate what he knows, the director gives us several minutes with him in a hospital ward. It is one thing that the General pays a visit and another for the Examining Magistrate, but Nick (Georges Geret) also gets one from his mother and sister, and flashbacks to his work as a varnisher as he tells the Magistrate he overheard two of the thugs involved in the murder discussing the crime. Much of this isn’t narratively irrelevant, as one of the thugs is Nick’s delivery driver, but it seems to be there to do more than fill in the plot. It also fills out the atmosphere, giving us a sense of working-class lives caught in conspiracies that probably go to the top of society.    

              It is as if Z sees the importance of structures over individuals, and at the same time, the importance of individuals to these structures as they become victims of forces they are unlikely to understand. That might sound complicated, but so in some ways is Costa-Gavras’s film, and it was one of numerous works from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies that wished to understand the workings of political history over the exploration of individual valour. These would include the radical (Miklos Jancso’s The Red and the White, Red Psalm, and the Straubs’ History Lessons) and the less intellectualised and aloof(Costa-Gavras’s Z and State of Siege, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Burn, Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair and Illustrious Corpses). They were all looking for a form that would escape a heroic dimension to the historical When asked why he didn’t make a film about Lambrakis’s life or at least focus more on Lambrakis around the time of the murder, Costa-Gavras said, "if I had wanted to do justice to the achievements of Gregory Lambrakis, I would have had to make a far different film, a film of his life. I didn't set out to do that. I wanted to study the mechanics.” (Cineaste) It was also why he chose not to reenact the funeral (beyond the difficulty of finding half a million extras), and why he ignored incidents from Lambrakis’s life that would have made the film sentimental or improbable, no matter how true. 

       Just before he was killed, Lambrakis was due to meet a sick son after an old lady asked him to do so, and, after his death, Lambrakis’s widow received a telegram from John F. Kennedy — only months before the US president's own assassination. From a particular perspective, these would be incidents hard to avoid: one that defines the quality of a man’s character; the other about the status he held internationally. Yet there we are instead with a varnisher lying in hospital as his sister lambasts him and admits she and her husband joined the far-right to get on, and there he is speaking to the press and ruining their reputations as they try and make something of their lives. Like Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (and unlike works by Jancso and the Straubs), Costa-Gavras is interested in the structure of people’s existence without becoming abstract in his examination of it. Instead of the sweep of history that Jancso explores as he offers very long takes showing characters often small and all but interchangeable in the frame, Costa-Gavras insists here on the personal story, but not quite as expected, with minor characters playing almost as important a role as what might seem the major players. It allows the filmmaker to resist the heroising history many a biopic based on a famous personage adopts, while also resisting the insistent rigour of Jancso and the Straubs that make affective access difficult for many.  

      However, it isn’t only in offering minor characters with major reasons, but also in casting well-known actors in many of the roles that makes Z in some ways a populist work. Montand and Irene Papas, as his wife, were huge in France and Greece, respectively, while Jacques Perrin, the photographer, was a modest star in French and Italian films throughout the decade. Others like Charles Denner and Bernard Fresson as members of The Deputy’s party, were again common faces to be seen throughout films of the sixties, while Marcel Bozuffi was a supporting actor who could flamboyantly make his presence felt — as he would do a couple of years later as a hitman in The French Connection. Costa Gavras might be resisting the heroic but he accepts the commercial necessity of the star system, even if he then plays against it by making his biggest star (Montand) occupy a brief role. 

       This ambivalent relationship with the star system is there too, with Trintignant as the Examining Magistrate. More than most Trintignant passes for a self-effacing star, a contradiction in terms perhaps but the actor contains that discrepancy in numerous roles (Les Biches, The Conformist, My Night at Maud’s, Blow to the Heart) and it is present in Zas he always gives the impression contained by the law he practices rather than the virtuous need to uncover a crime. Speaking about the person Trintignant’s character is based on, Costa Gavras reckoned: “The investigating judge was truly an incredible character. At any point he was free to halt his investigation. He was quite crucial to the exposé of the police. He was a man of the Right, a man of the Establishment, but he was an honest man.” (Cineaste) Trintignant plays him as a man who is a cog in the machine who discovers that the machine is broken and is no more a presence (and perhaps less of one) than the figures played by Geret and Bozuffi. When Robert Phillip Kolker claims “the race against time and evil pursuers constitutes a genre into which subjects can be molded. Even European filmmakers are not immune to it” he givesZ as an example of it: " a powerful political thriller about murder and repression in Greece in which, as in many recent American films, a reporter runs down the dismal facts.” (The Altering Eye). This seems unfair to Costa-Gavras’ film as the journalist is the photographer with an important role but not quite a paramount one, while the magistrate, who is no less important, isn’t one for doing anything in a hurry. An actor like Jean-Paul Belmondo would have been far better casting for the sort of role Kolker describes. 

           It appears more that the director wants to make a film that is tense but isn’t quite suspenseful, a film putting characters at risk but not quite in the way that creates the punctuated excitement expected of a thriller. Others would half-disagree, with Pauline Kael claiming the film is “almost intolerably exciting — a political thriller that builds up so much tension that you’ll probably feel all knotted up by the time it’s over” as she links it to “American gangster movies and prison pictures and anti-Fascist melodramas of the forties…” (Deeper into Movies)  She does, however, acknowledge that Costa-Gavras combines the melodramatic with a “modern movie style” and it is this modern style that we believe counters its melodrama. It might be better described as crude in its characterisation and sophisticated in its formal exploration, partly why we talk of tension as opposed to suspense. It is a film that is politically adrenalised without falling into the generic, while Kael would probably see suspense and tension as conflated. When the film first shows The Deputy attacked by someone in the crowd, he receives a blow to the head, and the perpetrator disappears into the mass of activists gathering to hear The Deputy speak. The protestors are a mixture of mainly anti-nuclear people and a few agitators, and on both occasions when we see him walk into the crowd, the Deputy looks wary. He is hardly a man milking the masses; more aware of how easily large groups can curdle, especially given the political mix. 

      If anything, Costa-Gavras’s tension counters its potential suspense because he shows us first of all two similar incidents — the first attack and then the later, lethal one when he is hit from the moving vehicle — and then shows the second one from different perspectives. If the initial assumption rests on the truck running him over, then the autopsy proves that it was an object yielded with great force on his head that killed him. Dramatically it would make more sense to show the erroneous claim first and then what actually happened when we see the scene again with this added knowledge the pathologists and surgeons reveal. Instead, the next time we do see it, the scene is offered from the General’s perspective and we don’t witness the blow to the head; only the truck knocking the Deputy over. This isn’t the truth revealed but the lie imposing itself upon what we know. In the type of melodramatic thriller Kael invokes (Crossfire, Brute Force, All The King’s Men), the lie is the story that needs to be uncovered and the suspense often rests on how close the villains are to getting away with it. Here, the tension doesn’t rest on finding out the truth but whether or not it will be covered up: it becomes an inversion of the typical melodramatic thriller. Instead of a murky incident that then becomes clear and justice wins out, a clear incident becomes murky as various authorities are determined to make sure justice isn’t seen to be done. As the film offers flashbacks and more detail than we might expect over minor characters, the film manages to convey the tension evident in the society, rather than the suspense in the plot. 

            The film was written by Jorge Semprun, a political novelist who also wrote the script a couple of years earlier for Alain Resnais’ La Guerre est Fine (starring Montand), and no director was more famous than Resnais for creating the complex through montage, through fragmenting time schemes, but this was usually in the service of memory and subjectivity. Costa-Gavras is as indebted to Rashomon as to Hiroshima mon Amour, to offer perspectives on truth rather than focus on the unreliability of memory. These can be closely associated, but if Resnais often offers the political all the better to comprehend the personal, Costa-Gavras is less interested in the subtlety of the mind than the manipulation of power. Z is, of course, interested in the structure of society, not the structure of a person’s thoughts. It is partly why the film can seem crude, as it uses editing all the better to show the vulgarity of power at work.  When Nick discusses a character called Dumas, from Odessa, whom we’ve earlier seen involved in trying to kill one of The Deputy’s assistants, he says Dumas wanted to get a job in Germany but had no passport. The photographer interviewing Nick manages to arrange one for Dumas and the film shows us this in flashback, and shows a flashback within a flashback as Dumas in return for the passport explains the workings of the right-wing movement he was involved in and why he prefers the right to left as he says you can’t strike in Russia and that the State owns everything. He also says that the person who was driving the truck that drove into the Deputy, Yago was at these meetings as the film moves again into the deeper flashback. The form is much more complex than the characterisation, and all the better to propose that people are acting out of the most base of motives and creating both weak individuals and a weak society. As the Deputy says early in the film in the speech we hear through the loudspeakers as we see instead the thugs’ actions as they get the van ready for its attack. 

         Z may be much more interested in character than Jancso and the Straubs, but not in the complexity of it as we find in Resnais films like Hiroshima, mon amour and La Guerre est fine; more in the crudeness of it as Kael sees similarities with American films from the 40s and 50s. Kael too makes a point similar to our own over the actors and their low-key familiarity when she says “the cast of famous names and faces from the confused, combined past of many other movies forms a familiar, living background” and it allows Costa-Gavras “to tell the story very swiftly.” (Deeper into Movies). The film creates a far greater logistic complexity than the American melodrama, yet still insists on the equivalent dramatic intensity, finding a resolution to the risk of giving us too much information by making sure to cast actors who we will remember as faces all the better to move the story along. When Nick speaks of Dumas, we half-recognise the face from earlier in the film while he was piling into The Deputy’s assistant, and viewers at the time may also have been aware of the numerous small roles he’d taken in other films before that. 

        In the strict sense, the film is probably more confusing now than it was then. Many watching Z at the time would have been aware of the Greek military Junta that was put in place in 1967 after the opposition came to power, when the scandal the film investigates led to the government being overthrown.  And while it is all very well to say the actors would have been familiar to many in the audience in the late sixties, how many would know Jacques Perrin, Charles Denner and  Marcel Bozzuffi now? Yet many a political event becomes retrospectively representative, divorced from its specific context except for historians, and significant as an event more broadly reflecting the times. It suggests a moment when political unrest was common, movements radicalised and political leaders at risk of assassination: Patrice Lumumba, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rafael Trujillo, Che Guevara, Medgar Evers, Mehdi Ben Barka, Hassan Ali Mansur, James L. Gordon and Vjekoslav Luburic, Augusto Vandor, George Lincoln Rockwell. Assassinations are hardly a thing of the past. Yet if any decade is synonymous with them it is probably the sixties and those watching today may see a more general moment in history rather than one specific to Greece - a point the film nevertheless incorporate by keeping the names functional (The Deputy; The Examining Magistrate; The Deputy’s Wife; the General, The Public Prosecutor. Meanwhile, the actors may no longer be known by most, but because the film works in types, it is as if Costa-Gavras could see that he wanted strong faces as readily as strong names: people who could fill out a supporting cast by making their presence pronounced within a few seconds. One might not know they were moderately famous, but they nevertheless carry within the role they are playing a significance that an unknown or non-professional would struggle to convey. A professional who isn’t subtle may overact (as perhaps Bozzuffi and Geret do) but that isn’t the same as weakly conveying the character. If anything, they convey them too strongly and in another film (a Resnais, for example) that would have been a problem. But not here.

                  If Z belonged to a new type of film (halfway between structural demand and melodramatic effect) it rested partly on its ability to acknowledge logistical complexity while still registering dramatic energy. It manages to harness character types and draw on political events that can carry within them a fact greater than even their own magnitude: liberation movements in The Battle of Algiers, slave oppression and emancipation in Burn, the shadow forces of money in Illustrious Corpses, the paradoxes at play in radical movements in State of Siege, and so on. Most of the films were based on specific incidents, but the fidelity to the logistics and the manoeuvring of various forces nevertheless allowed for the dramatic and the general to come through. Some had reservations, with Jean-Luc Godard “dismissing the ‘radicalism’ of Costa-Gavras contemptuously since, he says, the critical ideas in Z and State of Siege are still presented in the Hollywood form.” (Conflict and Control in the Cinema). Jean Narboni at Cahiers du Cinema acknowledged the magazine’s critique of Z was so strong that years later he regretted the “dogmatic” and uselessly “violent attacks”. (Cahiers du Cinema: The Red Years) While Kael saw as positive the incorporation of melodrama into a new political cinema, Godard, Narboni and others viewed it as a destructive infection of the mainstream into the radical. 

     Yet this was partly what made the films new, even if they weren’t quite in keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, or at least the revolutionary spirit of many commentators. Rather than seeing Z and the others as compromised works, better instead to view them as hybrids, all the better to make the political not personal, in the slogan of the era, but simultaneously capable of generating ongoing tension without falling too easily into the punctuated suspense of commercial filmmaking. As Costa-Gavras proposed, “the most important thing is that it have a large audience because of the political possibilities”, yet not so important that he exaggerated the truth for the too easily emotional. “From the beginning, we had decided to do the film as a study of a political crime. We did not want sentimental feeling to interfere with that.” (Cineaste) Godard and Cahiers may have scoffed, but many years later it can seem radical enough next to most films released more than half a century after Z's initial release.

© Tony McKibbin