The Confession | |
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Directed by | Costa-Gavras |
Written by | Jorge Semprún Artur London (the book L'aveu) |
Produced by | Robert Dorfmann Bertrand Javal |
Starring | Yves Montand Simone Signoret Gabriele Ferzetti |
Cinematography | Raoul Coutard |
Edited by | Françoise Bonnot |
Music by | Giovanni Fusco |
Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 139 minutes |
Language | French |
The Confession (French : L'aveu) is a 1970 French-Italian film directed by Costa-Gavras starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.
It is based on the true story of the Czechoslovak communist committed leftist Artur London, a defendant in the Slánský trial. [1] Gavras did not intend the film as an anti-communist film but as a plea against totalitarianism and Stalinism. [1] [2]
Artur Ludvik, alias Gerard, is a loyal communist and hero of WWII who serves as the vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia in 1951. He realizes he is being watched and followed, and meets to discuss this with a group of his friends who have also attained top government positions. They realize they are all being watched, even the chief of the StB, the very secret police force that is carrying out the surveillance. One day, Artur is arrested and jailed by an organization that declares itself "above the ruling party", and put in solitary confinement for months without being told the reason why. His wife Lise and their children are kept in the dark by the government and told to cooperate for their own good; Lise is later removed from her job as a prominent radio news announcer and forced to work in a factory by the party. Though she believes in her husband, she is equally certain in the wisdom and ultimate goodness of the party.
Through brainwashing techniques, including sleep deprivation and being forced to walk back and forth all the time, Artur is slowly pressured into confessing imaginary crimes, including treason, and baited with the prospect of leniency at sentencing if he cooperates. He also learns that his friends have been arrested as well and are implicating him in crimes against the state. Upon finally confessing to his alleged crimes, Artur is then groomed for a public "trial", which will be broadcast live on radio and shown in cinemas. While his captors coach him to memorize prepared answers by rote, he is given robust meals, vitamin injections, and a sunlamp to improve his appearance after years of wasting.
At the trial, Artur and his colleagues faithfully play their parts. Lise, to her shame, is forced to make a recorded statement disavowing her husband and praising the party which airs during the trial. The prisoners are variously sentenced to either death or life imprisonment, with Artur given the latter. When their interrogators do not return to them, the prisoners panic and threaten to appeal, but are told by their court-appointed lawyers that the sentences are only for the party's benefit and will not be enforced if they do not appeal. The convicted men appear in court one final time to accept their sentences and waive their right to appeal.
Afterwards, Artur and some of his colleagues are gradually freed and rehabilitated between 1956 and 1963. However, the rest are executed and cremated, with their ashes scattered along a road. At the same time, a number of the officials behind the ordeal end up facing their own persecutions, including Kohoutek, Artur's own interrogator. Artur later encounters the demoted Kohoutek, who tries to downplay his role in Artur's torment by claiming he only followed orders and never understood what the party wanted.
In 1968, Artur completes his memoirs of his experiences in captivity and returns to Czechoslovakia to have them published. By then, amidst the Prague Spring, the Stalinist elements who had orchestrated the entire affair had been pushed out of power by the party, and Artur believed that the party now desired to expose the truth of what happened during those years as much as Artur himself did. Unfortunately, he arrives in Prague just as the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia begins.
Yves Montand lost more than 15 kilograms (33 lb) to play his role. Montand had been shaken by the 1956 events in Hungary and later said of the film: "There was in what I inflicted upon myself [for this role] something of an act of expiation ." [3]
Vincent Canby in The New York Times in December 1970 did not consider The Confession a better film than Z (1969), but because the subject of this film "is much more complex, much more human, I find it vastly more interesting". It is "a harrowing film of intellectual and emotional anguish, dramatized by the breathless devices of melodrama." [1] Roger Ebert wrote in April 1971: "It is not a thriller like Z, and it couldn't be, because there is no justice to emerge at the end and no scoundrels to unmask." The director, he wrote, "has made a point of insisting that the movie is anti-Stalinist, not anti-Communist." [4] London remained a communist at the time the film was made. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker that the film is a "thoughtful, intelligent demonstration of how strong, idealistic men of character are turned into pawns of history". Although the film is "subdued, Costa-Gavras's work has tremendous zing, but it's not until the movie is almost over that it gains resonance." [2]
Ronald Bergan and Robyn Karney in the Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide (1988) wrote: "the screenplay's static and wordy nature is not sufficiently tempered by the direction or the playing. However, some of the interrogation scenes which lead to the false confession of the title cannot fail to have an impact." [5]
The film was nominated for the Golden Globes and BAFTA Awards as Best Foreign Language Film.
In France the movie contributed to the disillusion of French left intellectuals and artists with the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union. [6] In Germany it inspired the singer-songwriter Reinhard Mey to compose his song In Tyrannis (1972) of which he published with a Dutch (De bekentenis) and a French (Tyrannie) version as well. [7]
Ivo Livi, better known as Yves Montand, French:[ivmɔ̃tɑ̃]; 13 October 1921 – 9 November 1991) was an Italian-born French actor and singer. He is said to be one of France's greatest 20th-century artists.
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Konstantinos "Kostas" Gavras, known professionally as Costa-Gavras, is a Greek-French film director, screenwriter, and producer who lives and works in France. He is known for political films, such as the political thriller Z (1969), which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Missing (1982), for which he won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Most of his films have been made in French, but six of them were made in English.
The Slánský trial was a 1952 antisemitic show trial against fourteen members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), including many high-ranking officials. Several charges, including high treason, were announced against the group on the grounds of allegedly conspiring against the Czechoslovak Republic. General Secretary of the KSČ Rudolf Slánský was the alleged leader of the conspirators.
A show trial is a public trial in which the guilt or innocence of the defendant has already been determined. The purpose of holding a show trial is to present both accusation and verdict to the public, serving as an example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors.
Artur London was a Czechoslovak communist politician and co-defendant in the Slánský Trial in 1952. Though he was sentenced to life in prison, he was freed in 1955; he then settled in France with his wife Lise London. In 1968 he published his memoirs in L'Aveu, a book which resonated internationally, adapted by Costa-Gavras as the movie of the same name.
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Rudolf Margolius was a Czech lawyer and economist, Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade, Czechoslovakia (1949–1952), and a co-defendant in the Slánský trial in November 1952.
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Lise London was a French Communist politician and activist. She participated in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II. She was the widow of Artur London, a Czechoslovak communist politician and co-defendant in the Slánský Trial. Following her husband's show trial and imprisonment, she became a strong critic of Stalin and Stalinism.
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