Constantin Costa-Gavras made his reputation as the preeminent director developing the political thriller from the late 1960s through the 80s. Several of his films ("State of Siege" 1973, "Missing" 1982) are archetypes of the genre and "Z" (1969) is a crucial fictional account of political repression in the 20th century.
Born to a Russian father and a Greek mother, Costa-Gavras was mesmerized as a boy by the energy and movement of the many American films he saw. Because of his father's activities in the Greek resistance during WWII, Costa-Gavras's educational and occupational opportunities were stifled when the rightist Greek government blacklisted him. When he failed to obtain a visa to the U S, Costa-Gavras went to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. Like other young cineastes such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he haunted the Cinematheque Francaise and the Left Bank repertory film theaters. In November 1954 he enrolled in IDHEC, the French national film school.
After completing his formal training in 1958 Costa-Gavras started work as a directorial trainee, receiving valuable mentorship from, among others, Rene Clement, Rene Clair and Jacques Demy. His first film, "The Sleeping Car Murder" (1965), a detective thriller starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, was followed by the overtly political "Shock Troops", a tale of the French Maquis starring Michel Piccoli. Shown at the Moscow Film Festival in 1967"", "Shock Troops" was re-edited and given a happy ending by United Artists prior to its American release in 1969.
While preparing another project, Costa-Gavras discovered Vassilis Vassilikos's novel "Z", based on the events surrounding the assassination of Greek reformer Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. His film version, starring Yves Montand, Irene Papas and Jean-Louis Trintignant, was released as a French/Algerian co-production in 1969 and touched the consciousness of young cineastes, critics and political activists around the world. "Z" won the jury and best actor prizes at Cannes as well as the Oscar for best foreign film. It also spawned a host of imitations in France and the US. The film deals with the themes which have remained central to Costa-Gavras's work: the mechanics and repercussions of tyranny and the subtle varieties of guilt. Hugely successful in France and abroad (but banned in Greece), it remains a landmark of recent cinema.
"The Confession" (1970) followed, again based on a true incident in which a spurious confession was tortured out of a Czech Communist Party functionary (Yves Montand) and used in a sham trial. With "State of Siege", Costa-Gavras completed an intensely creative period. Another fictionalized treatment of an actual event, the film tells the story of a clandestine American intelligence agent (Montand) assassinated by Uruguayan political terrorists. "State of Siege" also witnessed the maturation of Costa-Gavras' working method: beginning with a novelistic retelling of a single event and working in close collaboration with his screenwriter, the director meticulously researches the details of the incident, which is then brought to the screen via a highly disciplined but visually eclectic shooting style.
"Special Section" (1975) reunited Costa-Gavras with Jorge Semprun, the screenwriter of "Z", on a project devoted to the activities of the French Vichy government. Roundly criticized by French patriots who had hoped for a melodramatic rewriting of wartime events, "Special Section" is a meditative and even-handed study of one of the most painful periods of French history. "Clair de femme", an emphatically apolitical film starring Montand and Romy Schneider, was released in 1979.
Costa-Gavras was able to weave his fascination with American political culture into the fabric of his first United States-produced film "Missing" (1982), starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. "Missing" told of the kidnapping and death-squad murder of Charles Horman, a leftist American journalist, in Chile in 1973. The film attracted criticism (as have all Costa-Gavras's films since "Z") from doctrinaire Marxists for its use of dramatic devices to invoke sympathy for an individual victim of political repression. Yet "Missing" was well calibrated for its American audience, which responded enthusiastically to the most significant political thriller made in the US since "The Manchurian Candidate".
Although many of Costa-Gavras' French films have not gotten much play in this country, "Hanna K" (1983) generated controversy here for its pro-Palestinian stance but beyond pushing that button, the unsatisfying melodrama was an artistic disappointment. "Betrayed" (1988) marked Costa-Gavras's first collaboration with screenwriter Joe Ezsterhas, and judging from its considerable implausibility and lack of dramatic tension, one wonders why the director trusted Ezsterhas' vision. Starring Tom Berenger and Debra Winger, "Betrayed" explored the underworld of racist politics in rural America, important and unsettling subject matter which deserved better than the pedantic treatment it received from the Costa-Gavras-Ezsterhas team. Their second film together, "The Music Box" (1989), related the trial of an alleged Hungarian war criminal (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and US citizen for 40 years, who is defended in court by his daughter (Jessica Lange). Though decidedly better than "Betrayed", director and screenwriter allowed a potentially crackling political thriller to degenerate into high-gloss melodrama.
In 1982, Costa-Gavras took over the directorship of the Cinematheque Francaise, then badly in disarray. During his tenure, he proved a tireless champion of both film preservation and artistic freedom, furthering the institution's international renown even as he continued to work on his own films. Costa-Gavras demonstrated his continuing social conscience in 1992 by contributing (as one of 30 French filmmakers) his plea on behalf of people suffering human rights violations in the documentary "Lest We Forget". "The Minor Apocalypse" (1993), a French film about a writer who gets an offer to be published only if he commits suicide on TV, served as a dry run for the American release of "Mad City" (1997), a supposedly scathing look at the electronic media's ability to manipulate (and manufacture) breaking news, which elicited yawns and indifference before quickly departing theaters. Fans of Costa-Gavras can only hope for a return of the storytelling prowess that brought them "Z", "State of Siege" and "Missing".