Z
Last night we watched Costa-Gavras’s masterpiece Z.
The first time I’ve seen it since its original first release in Paris in February 1969. Yes, it was ‘unleashed’ on the world from that city.
I was a student living in Paris as of the autumn of ‘68. In other words, I missed MAY. I also stayed there for seven years doing various things. That is another story. A long story.
Anyway, I remember clearly the release of Z. The excitement. This film was about Greece. But wasn’t it also about France? About the U.S.?
This seemed to be a moment when change was possible. When corrupt public figures and out of control police forces and, in some countries, out of control army officers, could be reined in. Brought under serious civil control. Z was a great warning flag waved in our faces.
We were all talking about it.
What’s more, Z was the proof that you could make exciting, moral, ethical, tough, political films .
Thinking about it last night, I suddenly realized how much influence it must have had on the way I wrote my first novel – Mort d’un general, 1976, Le seuil/The Birds of Prey, MacMillan, later the same year.
Yes, for those of you who don’t know, I have spent much of my writing life in French. And it began in French in Paris with that first novel, which created a serious political controversy in that country. A strange way for an Anglo Canadian to begin a writing career.
The point here is that Costa-Gavras and Z invented a new way of making films and telling a political story. It was also a film which helped many of us to write our novels differently and to make films differently. He delivered the content of a political thesis, revealed with the pace – the speed – of a thriller.
So fast. So jagged. Sharp edges everywhere. A romantic brutality. A tough view of the world. Complex reality made accessible.
Just a masterpiece.
Nothing more.
And you can’t turn your eyes away.
The film Z was Jury Award Winner at Canes plus Academy Award produced by French and Algerians in Algeria whose war in 1962 raised similar questions about authoritarian violence as the 1963 assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis.
I saw the films debut wth my father and John Harney who gave a talk after with Greek political figures. I was 14 yrs old and it blew me away.
+1