Art vs. Propaganda
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen ART VS. PROPAGANDA BY JOHN SIMON The big brouhaha of the month was George Stevens Jr.'s dropping of State of Siege from the gala opening roster at the American Film Institute's new...
...I am afraid, tenden-tiousness...
...The Confession went too far in the opposite direction...
...when the government, despite a crisis, does not fall and refuses any deals, the revolutionaries must reluctantly execute Santore...
...Little is accomplished by this...
...And unless politics means more to you than people— which, even to the dedicated young revolutionaries of this film, it is not supposed to—the movie will leave you emotionally unfulfilled...
...The film deals loosely with the Mitrione case, though Mitrione becomes Santore, and Uruguay an unspecified Latin American country...
...they release two other, less guilty prisoners...
...Love, manifold yet one, is a felt presence in this film that quietly but devastat-ingly condemns political injustice...
...The film is patently anti-American and does, up to a point, sanction political assassination...
...And while the latter must humor her, she loses, as an undesirable's wife, her job, her friends, and the best part of her apartment, requisitioned and assigned to others...
...there were nasty Stalinist torturers and killers, but if only the anti-Stalinist victims were to come into power someday, as they might, the Iron Curtain would rise on a rosy spectacle...
...His return as a broken starveling, his hardly daring to aspire to his wife's renewed love, are almost unbearably moving because they are stripped to a minimum of words and to awkward, tentative gestures completely bereft of histrionics...
...This broad outline is filled in with lively, pungent, convincing enough details...
...It is...
...Costa-Gavras, the young Greco-French director, has learned quickly and well...
...And as propaganda, it preaches to the converted, but can it sway the unbelievers...
...Ivan Darvas (no relation) fills the screen with the fearful emptiness of his eyes that gradually fill up with humble happiness...
...to spare him would make the revolutionaries look ridiculous and impotent...
...about what is supposed to have happened in Uruguay...
...his wife, to keep the old lady going, tells her her son is in America directing a movie, and actually fakes letters and costly gifts from him to his proud, happy mother...
...police academies is nothing short of prodigious...
...The film is buoyantly witty in the midst of its earnestness...
...PROPAGANDA BY JOHN SIMON The big brouhaha of the month was George Stevens Jr.'s dropping of State of Siege from the gala opening roster at the American Film Institute's new theater in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts...
...This was vehemently denied by the filmmaker, Costa-Gavras, his associates, and Don Rugoff, the American distributor...
...and if the dialogue by Solinas (of Battle of Algiers fame) sounds epigrammatic, it still rings sufficiently true...
...The two women share memories of a copious past, imagine a beautifully fictitious present, and hope for something of a future...
...The rest, however, range from smugly exploitative to dangerously vicious...
...The film, the AFI's director explained, "rationalizes political assassination...
...Nevertheless, it will not do to show all the figures in the country's government and almost all Americans as villains...
...The acting is superlative...
...In the earlier film, the Communists were not presented as monolithically bad...
...a new American policeman in AID clothing arrives...
...This has been called tasteful-ness but is...
...Montand does portray San-tore most skillfully as a not unintelligent and not really evil man, so eager to uphold conservative middle-class values that he becomes a tool of evil...
...we do not see the execution of Santore...
...State of Siege is taut, effective, easefully assured filmmaking...
...But underground eyes are alert and watchful...
...conveys much more vividly the agonies of life under a totalitarian regime...
...imperialism— and appkud the film's intention of showing how, under the cloak of economic aid, we support repressive local governments and pooch on all kinds of natural resources...
...And there is a well-meaning American agronomist who is shown as a befuddled, innocent supernumerary...
...The cast, headed by Yves Montand, is right in aspect and performance...
...As art, it is much too impersonal...
...its remarkable screenplay is, even after heavy losses in the subtitles, recognizably the work of a major novelist, Tibor Dery...
...His captors demand amnesty for all political prisoners in exchange for his freedom...
...And how fair do you think they are to us...
...The problem, though, is more than the politics: It is the propaganda...
...interference in the political, social and economic structures of foreign countries—in short, U.S...
...Even as propaganda, art is more effective...
...And it won't do to say that in The Confession Costa-Gavras showed us the evils of Communism exactly as he now shows us the evils of American imperialism and its puppets...
...They form one big family and their own elderly parents support them to the death...
...The film has every right to be anti-American, only let no one pretend that it isn't...
...The new film strikes a good balance: It moves swiftly in time and space, but avoids nervous jumpiness and does not refrain from lingering over some tragic or wryly comic incidents...
...What do they know...
...when many of the underground's leadership are captured...
...it was too arid, monotonous, predictable...
...They make occasional mistakes, but are much smarter than their oppressors...
...Characteristically, while we see the Brazilian and Uruguayan governments torturing the freedom fighters, as well as murdering a few...
...But she keeps her dignity, and out of despair and anger fashions more love for the old lady, who, in turn, teaches her how to cling to life and endure...
...to begin with, so unremittingly political that people in it exist only as political antagonists, with just a suggestion of a private life glimpsed, here and there, in passing...
...their documentation on such elusive data as the training in violence administered to their policemen in U.S...
...As gratuitously as they jailed him, the authorities release the husband...
...Everything looks a bit frazzled, shopworn, overcast — subtly, ineffably unpleasant...
...There is less political terror than petty meanness which, on no specified charges, indefinitely imprisons a loving husband and affectionate son, inflicting the horrors of separation and loneliness...
...As entertainment, it is too meager...
...idealis-tically...
...Santore...
...Conversely, the members of the underground are exemplary in their discipline, scrupulousness, courtesy to prisoners, and absolute fair play...
...In the U.S.-dominated Latin America of State of Siege, the underground is not part of the system, and all parts of the system are bad: The few liberal deputies in Parliament are outshout-ed and overruled...
...Lili Darvas, drolly stiff and stubborn as the mother, Austrian by birth and speaking flawed Hungarian, constructs from petty tyrannies, barely smiling satisfactions and crumbs of grudging praise a great inner luminosity...
...This Hungarian film, directed gracefully by Karoly Makk...
...Both sides rate demerits: Stevens for scheduling a film with whose contents he was evidently unfamiliar...
...The man's widowed old mother is sickly and may die any day...
...When it becomes evident that he is actually a police expert teaching the local police counterrevolutionary tactics...
...There may be a few too many shots of the routine ugly aspects of a state of siege, yet even these retards have their atmospheric value...
...After a film like The Sorrow and the Pity, the unambiguousness of State of Siege simply will not wash...
...the filmmakers and distributor for disingenuousness...
...The director handles his camera with a nice sweep, achieving psychologically satisfying patterns that are not too geometrical or repetitious and manage to pick out significant details without unseemly overemphasis: During an action shot, we casually notice the children of the poor playing on a dumping ground full of rusty junk with ominously sharp edges...
...Best of all is Mari Torocsik as the wife...
...How condescending the old lady is, how grandly she takes her daughter-in-law's sacrifices for granted...
...God knows, I deplore U.S...
...For all the toughness, leanness and bitter wit of the dialogue, it is all about political concepts and activities, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary measures, unjustified governmental violence and allegedly justified insurgent, popular violence on behalf of the exploited people against capitalists, fascists, torturers, abrogators of human rights...
...Z was a good piece of charismatic special pleading, with nice human touches, but a bit too pat and cute...
...The adroit script is by Costa-Gavras and Franco Solinas...
...My own question concerns the efficacy of such filmmaking...
...I hear middle-America sneering, "probably all Commies, make a film in Chile (where else...
...Yet what does the film achieve...
...an ostensible AID man, is kidnapped by an underground organization consisting mostly of young Leftists...
...Their self-control is admirable, and they conduct Santore's questioning and condemnation in the most humane and parliamentary manner...
...only Jean-Luc Bideau looks more like a Parisian lout than a Latin American revolutionary...
...Costa-Gavras is ably assisted by Pierre William Glenn's color cinematography showing a Latin-American winter with a slightly misty and grainy look, just inconsistent enough with the lushness of vegetation and general pigmentation...
...There is such vitality in her despair, humor in her rages, adorable pigheadedness in her generosities, and indomitable-ness in the fidelity she comically threatens to discard, that she embodies the epitome of vulnerable, buffeted, inextirpable love...
...Theirs is a bristling, precarious relationship of shared love for an absent man, each woman jealous of the other yet also admiring and, ultimately, loving of the other...
...And art is what Love is...
...Thus the underground executes Santore only as a last resort, when their government and the United States leave them no alternative...
...A bunch of Greeks, Italians and Frenchmen...
...The Sleeping-Car Murders was mere clever folderol...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 9
