Small Truth, Big Lie
Kohák, Erazim V.
Ax'raux LONDON IS a Czechoslovak Communist currently living in France. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the underground resistance, he held a post in the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign...
...Lenin, though condemning terror, insisted on the rule of the Righteous—and was prepared to accept the cost...
...PARABLE is a legitimate art form, and can be used effectively...
...It was a relentlessly logical, necessary outcome of an ideology that made progress into "struggle," difference of opinion a matter of Virtue and Vice, and replaced democracy with the Rule of the Righteous...
...A veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the underground resistance, he held a post in the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs following the Communist seizure of power in 1948...
...Some wives wrote letters, others sought a modus vivendi, some stubbornly refused any compromise and accepted the grossest, malicious persecution even long after the first rehabilitations...
...Not the direction—expert and polished, avoiding the familiar horror of remembrance, of smiling cheap dramatic effects that occasionally crept politely and pretending that the plush, heated into "Z...
...But a parable must follow its own rules...
...But in the past, they could be explained away by ideological or contingent factors— struggle against the "class enemy," pressures of a revolutionary situation, inexperience, personal failure, or simply Russian backwardness...
...Nor is it likely to have much impact on the Leninists...
...These are French actors, in 1970, acting out roles they can neither imagine nor comprehend...
...And one's historical sense is again jarred by expressions of sympathy on a crowded streetcar: sorry, C.-G., one just didn't...
...When those books have been written, I hope Costa-Gavras will come back to make the film he did not make this time, a film to tell the truth...
...They are generic, pendent...
...There were the tyrants and the murderers who exploited the aspirations of the workers callously to gorge themselves on power...
...The dedication which Communism had evoked when it was in opposition was possible only because its power was not total, because a non-Communist regime protected the autonomy of the individual Communist...
...world in which one discusses relative entertain Costa-Gavras has succeeded in evoking the ment values of "Z" and The Confession is real slow horror of an unrelenting, dull persistence...
...It's points and reduces reality to the one-dimen-a lie...
...The petty pedantry of the interroga-archetypal—the perennial shabby reality betors is appropriate in a world in which words hind autocratic power...
...The point is that men who destroy the safeguards of human freedom, even when they do it with the best intentions, that Virtue might triumph over Vice, become defenseless in face of the very power they created...
...For the rulers, it became a pursuit of power...
...He was working with highly personal memoirs of a man seeking a personal rehabilitation of an ideal...
...Or, in vernacular, rather than saying what happened, a parable must tell the reader what it was all about...
...one learns to live with that in time...
...Of the 14 accused, 11 were executed, the rest condemned to life imprisonment...
...By presenting the Slansky trials as a conflict of an anonymous police with an anonymous victim, Costa-Gavras—and Arthur London— sustain the illusion that it was an accident, that terror is a contingent by-product and not a necessary aspect of the Rule of the Righteous...
...The scene is supposed to be Prague, but those are not Prague streets, buildings, sidewalks...
...The Confession is definitely a film to see...
...It is basically an eidetic description in the strict sense of the first chapter of Husserl's Ideen: a delineation of a structural pattern, an "essence," within which a set of contingent facts can be perceived as intelligible...
...Yet it is precisely as a parable that The Confession is most inadequate...
...I have been told that the film is useful in France, where there are still Stalinists...
...After that, The Confession could no longer be filmed as a documentary, but only as historical fiction—as a parable...
...Quite the contrary, it was a climax of a series of murders and trials start ing with the day of the coup: Jan Masaryk, General Pika, the Socialist MP Milada Hora kova, thousands of nameless victims on all levels of the society...
...The purpose of torture About "Z" I had no such feelings...
...ceeded brilliantly...
...In ac tuality, however, there was nothing Kafkaesque about the Slansky trial...
...That film, documentary or parable, is yet to be made...
...Arrested in 1952, he was one of the defendants in the "Sldnsky Conspiracy Trial...
...But other books need to be written, books which neither condemn nor apologize, books which remember...
...Again, the fault is not altogether the director's...
...Whatever the defects of Arthur London's book, it is a book written in blood, and I appreciate it for that...
...There the experiment in the revolutionary triumph of Virtue was conducted virtually under laboratory conditions— in an industrial society with a mature democratic tradition, socialist neighbors, enough support so that the rulers were not embattled and yet not so much that they would be constrained by the prejudices of their supporters...
...He was condemned to life imprisonment and subsequently permitted to emigrate...
...It was all too real, and far more vicious than the film shows—yet not all the accused were Jews...
...A difThere is little historical scope or psychological ferent horror, the sense of a monstrous lie...
...In early 1952, a number of leading Communists were arrested and charged with conspiring against the State...
...The purpose of the trials was not "justice," not even in some obscure dialectical sense...
...It cannot be used, for good or ill...
...It was simply a lesson in the realities of power, a notice to the Party that autocratic power, once established, becomes autonomous...
...The devil of it is that the film claims rather more...
...To be sure, there had been other trials...
...And among the population at large, some, far too many, believed, some withdrew, others hated...
...Communism in power destroys its own base of support: it can regain it only by a democratization that eliminates all monopoly of power, including its own...
...Most of all, those are not Czech faces...
...Its opening is almost Kafkaesque: an anonymous arrest of an anonymous protagonist by an equally anony mous conspiracy on unspecified charges...
...The task remaining to it was no longer a quest for utopia...
...The film hints vaguely that they were veterans of the Spanish Civil War—some were, though not all...
...Costa-Gavras makes an attempt at such a presentation...
...A documentary can be filmed after the events it documents have lost their historic specificity, or it must be filmed by men and in places that share that specificity...
...As a documentary, The Confession would have to be filmed in Prague, with a cast of Czechs for whom the fifties are an irreducible stratum of imagination...
...But it is not a film to believe...
...All that is left is an analysis, brilliantly acted and directed, of the techniques of brainwashing...
...Since the Soviet occupation, further inquiry has ceased.-E...
...It could happen anyhave taken the place of history, of the world, where and often does...
...Yves Montand is an excep tion: through his powerful performance, he has earned the right to be Arthur London...
...That is not what happened...
...with a superficially similar theme...
...Orwell's Animal Farm may well be the best interpretation of the Russian Revolution, far more helpful than many a scholarly tome...
...It also claims to interpret, including flashes to contemporary France for interviews with Arthur London and his avowal that for all that has happened, he is still a Communist, convinced that it was all an accident, that it would be different next time—and that there must be a next time...
...It did not come as an absurd, irrational non-event, as does the arrest in The Confession...
...The point of the Slansky MOVIES trials was not that an anonymous regime can use force to destroy anonymous victims—nor even that a given Communist regime did so use it...
...It was supposed to be filmed there, but then the tanks rolled again...
...If that were all the film presented, it would be legitimate, instructive, though somewhat narrow...
...Similarly, in the film the accused are not only nameless but fully anonymous: devoid of historical or human characteristics that would make them credible as types...
...Yet it was not: the horror was not an unfortunate accident, after all...
...By contrast, the Slansky MOVIES trial is an intensely historical event, focused and specific: the final trauma of a vision that has captivated Western social aspirations for almost a century...
...Perhaps this is why visual details, harmless in "Z," are so jarring in The Confession...
...Costa-Gavras has used the same cast and world of images about which the viewers can the same cinematographic techniques to deal say, "I liked it, but I liked `Z' better...
...A parable would not have to mention names or recite historical events...
...But that is not the point: the point is that after the trials it was no longer possible to support the regime, not because it was horrible, but because it permitted no support...
...There were the fanatics, convinced that society can be saved only by the strong hand of the Righteous, who saw the Party as their instrument...
...Nor was it "class struggle...
...There is a rather unconvincing scene, mentioning the letter in which London's wife denounced her husband—and the sharply polarized reaction of her fellow workers...
...But other information is gradually becoming available...
...In "Z" it does not...
...Costa-Gavras has set out to exmade a film out of Arthur London's mem-plore not simply the techniques of enslavement, oirs in which the main characters are played but of ultimate dehumanization—and has sucby Yves Montand and Simone Signoret...
...The film similarly notes, much too briefly, the crude anti-Semitism of the trials...
...But there were also idealists, despairing over a complacent mediocrity that droned on, after Hitler, after Oswieczim, after Mauthausen, as if nothing had happened, driven into a desperate coalition with fanatics and murderers in which they inevitably lost...
...Czechoslovakia was different...
...The fault is not the director's...
...The events that have punctuated Communist rule since, the upheavals in Berlin in 1953, in Poland and Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, again in Poland in 1970, bear witness to the change...
...The viewer becomes a part Outside our theaters fashionably avant-garde of the experiment, so that by the end of the audiences render the verdict: "It was good, but film, even the documentary footage from the I enjoyed `Z' more...
...The Sldnsky Trials were a culmination of a series of staged trials, which followed the Communist seizure of power...
...There are men and women who remember, not only in Czechoslovakia, but in the West, where they can speak...
...But it would have to show the logic of those events—and The Confession does nothing of that...
...When the nooses tightened on December 3, Communism lost its innocence...
...Someone must speak out for the dead, not only for the survivors...
...The film might be instructive to young idealists who are convinced that terror can be benign, sanitary...
...the events incapable of action, to make him totally de-are in a sense ahistorical...
...The new regime jailed and executed successive waves of clergy, non-Communist intelligentsia, and representatives of democratic and socialist parties...
...The events of "Z" are perennial—the Slansky trial is history, sharp and specific...
...V. K. Now COSTA-GAVRAS, the director of "Z," has of conscience...
...They were an extremely heterogeneous group, linked only by a common Party membership...
...The charge of careless documentation could be rejected on the grounds that the film is a parable, presenting no facts but offering the viewer a perspective within which to interpret any set of facts falling within its range...
...But that red-haired French actor is not Slansky, that is not Geminder, not LSbl, not young Margolius...
...The trials were reviewed in 1956, 1963 and 1968, the charges quashed, victims rehabilitated, and the trials declared illegal, though the perpetrators were not prosecuted...
...The comparison is hard to Prague of 1968 becomes a part of the shifting avoid...
...It claims to be a documentary, including footage of the Soviet occupation of Prague in 1968...
...The conditions were, for the first time, "ideal," and the Communist leaders were sure that, also for the first time, "here it would be different...
...It is sup posed to be 1952, but the coins "Gerard" pulls out of his pocket did not go into circulation un til several months later...
...for the ruled, a desperate attempt to escape the logic of terror and salvage fragments of a broken dream...
...depth, since the technique, made familiar as The film is authentic, highly so—and yet, walk" brainwashing," is precisely the process of de-ing out of the theater, one experiences a despriving a man of his past, his world, his soul...
...So is the of the past, I felt a sense of horror...
...The accused were a microcosm of the Party...
...This, finally, is the horror and the lie...
...perate urge to shout to the innocent, the unIt is a process that eliminates all firm reference knowing, the complacent, "Don't believe it...
...The report of the Czechoslovak commission charged with investigating the events and practices of the fifties, the socalled Piller Commission, was suppressed in Czechoslovakia—but it did appear in the West (Der unterdruckte Bericht, Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1970...
...There are no emblems on soldiers' caps, no flags in the courtroom...
...I can appreciate why they have not spoken: to revive the horror is an act of courage and agony...
...it can only be served...
...sional level of ideology...
...The basic is no longer to force a man to act in conformity difference is that, in The Confession, what really with the will of his masters, but to render him happened matters...
...Other available documents, such as the memoirs of Slansky's widow, suffer from the same defect...
...The names of the defendants, including Slansky's, are never mentioned...
...In power, the Party, by the very logic of its ideology, could accept only total selfsurrender, blind dedication...
...I rather doubt it: the Stalinists have never had illusions about the realities of autocratic rule...
...Finally, the film obscures the impact of the trials as well...
...The cast still Perhaps this is why, surrounded by the ghosts is good, and Yves Montand superb...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
