INTRODUCTION
Thank you very much, Alicia (Kozma), for that kind introduction.
Let me begin by congratulating you and your staff on the IU Cinema’s 15th anniversary season. Since its opening in January of 2011, the cinema has become one of the jewels of the Bloomington campus, welcoming hundreds of thousands of guests to thousands of programs, hosting hundreds of visiting filmmakers and scholars, and building a far-reaching reputation as one of the nation’s finest university cinemas.
I would also like to thank the faculty and staff whose gifts in 2017 generously endowed a fund to establish the McRobbie’s Choice Film Series, which I greatly enjoy curating. And I am pleased to be here tonight to say a few words about this semester’s series, "Politics and Propaganda: The Cinema of Costa-Gavras," which includes three powerful and acclaimed films by this great director.
THE CINEMA OF COSTA-GAVRAS
Born Konstantinos Gavras in Greece in 1933, the filmmaker’s life was shaped by post-war political turmoil. His father, a government official, was accused of being a communist during the Greek Civil War, a label that resulted in his family being blacklisted and that blocked the young Costa-Gavras from attending university. He left for Paris, where he studied film and began to forge a cinematic language uniquely his own—a language of dissent, urgency, and profound moral conviction.
Costa-Gavras's films are political dramas, many based on real events and characters. He masterfully uses the tools of popular cinema—suspense, charismatic stars, and propulsive editing—to expose injustice and the nature of the power on which it relies. His films demand the audience’s attention and his work forces viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about governments, ideologies, and themselves.
His influence can be seen in the work of numerous directors, including Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, William Friedkin’s The French Connection, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, and Oliver Stone’s JFK.
The themes of his films are more relevant today than ever. Costa-Gavras is still working at the age of 92. His most recent film, The Last Breath, was released last year, and he is reportedly working on another.
"Z" AND "MISSING"
Last week, as part of this series, the cinema screened his 1969 masterpiece, Z, a film based on the assassination in 1963 of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis by the Greek military junta. In this film, the great French actor Yves Montand plays a politician and doctor who is a thinly disguised version of Lambrakis.
With its breathless pace and righteous fury, Z became an international phenomenon, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and earning a nomination for Best Picture—a rare feat for a non-English-language film. It announced the arrival of a major cinematic voice. I first saw the film on its initial release and found it stunning. What I remember so impressed me was that it showed it was possible to make a gripping and electrifying film based solely on the most serious of political events.
One week from tonight, the cinema will screen Costa-Gavras’ 1982 film, Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. It is a heartbreaking and infuriating look at an American father’s search for his son in the bloody aftermath of the 1973 Chilean coup. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, and Lemmon won Best Actor for his performance. Missing is a powerful story about American involvement in another country’s politics and another example of Costa-Gavras’s unwavering commitment to telling the stories of the silenced.
"THE CONFESSION"
The film we will see tonight, 1970’s The Confession, is perhaps the director’s most courageous.
Where Z was a clear-eyed indictment of right-wing fascism, The Confession turns its lens on ideological totalitarianism on the left.
The unspeakable horrors of Stalin’s Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s had become well-known by the 1960s. But there were few films at that time that truly grappled with and portrayed the depths of moral debasement and depravity of this period.
This film, like Z, is based on true events, though in Czechoslovakia not the Soviet Union. It tells the harrowing true story, lightly fictionalized, of Artur London, a dedicated communist and high-ranking government minister in Czechoslovakia who, in 1951, was arrested, imprisoned, and psychologically tortured by his fellow communists until he agreed to falsely confess to treason at a show trial based on the infamous Slánský trial.
The film is a devastating depiction of how a system, in its relentless pursuit of ideological purity, can devour its own. What makes The Confession so potent is that it was made by people of the left. The star of Z, Yves Montand, and his wife, Simone Signoret, star in this film. At the time, they were two of France's most famous actors and two of its most famous communists. Their participation was an act of incredible bravery, as they faced an extensive and sustained backlash from the French Communist Party, which accused them of betraying the cause and which opposed the making of this film.
As one scholar noted, in the Cold War climate, denouncing the absurdities of the Soviet system, even for Western leftists, could be regarded as treason. The film was a crucial step in their public disillusionment and the disillusionment of many others with Soviet Communism.
The production itself was an act of political defiance. Unable to shoot in Czechoslovakia after the "Prague Spring" was crushed in 1968, Costa-Gavras meticulously recreated Prague on the streets of a French town. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe and remains a landmark of political cinema.
Yves Montand’s dedication was extraordinary. To portray his character's physical and mental disintegration, he lost more than 40 pounds, living on a starvation diet under a doctor's supervision. He isolated himself, trying to inhabit the psychological space of a man being systematically broken.
The Confession is a stark, sobering examination of blind faith and the peril of sacrificing individual conscience to ideology. What gives The Confession its lasting power is its political insight and human depth: the anguish of a man betrayed by his own ideals, the resilience of those who refuse to be silenced, and the bravery of artists who risked everything to tell an inconvenient truth.
Watching it today—more than 50 years after its release—one cannot help but feel its enduring relevance. In an age still shadowed by propaganda, polarization, and moral compromise, Costa-Gavras reminds us that truth and justice demand courage and clarity.
Thank you. I hope you find The Confession as haunting, courageous, and necessary today as it was when it was made.
