Word: costa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Part of the film's importance is due to the people who made it. Costa-Gavras (Z and The Confession) directed. Yves Montand, star of Costa's last three films, stars here as well, but this time with a twist. Instead of portraying a positive character, Montand here has the role of the chief negative character. And possibly most important, Franco Solinas wrote the script. I say possibly the most important because Solinas also scripted Salvatore Guiliano and Battle of Algiers, two of the most politically sophisticated films extant...
STATE OF SIEGE Directed by COSTA-GAVRAS Screenplay by FRANCO SOLINAS and COSTA-GAVRAS...
State of Siege, like Costa-Gavras' other work (Z, The Confession), is angry all right, and with cause, but it is also unnecessarily emphatic, too easy and simplistic, and stylistically jazzy past the point of stridency. His movies are like glossy international versions of Dragnet, with a rather different political bias. Like the dauntless Jack Webb, Costa-Gavras employs a sort of arhythmic, staccato editing and prominent, even aggressive music (by Mikis Theodorakis) to punch the movie along, giving it a kind of spurious suspense. His characters are mouthpieces, not people, repositories of conflicting political attitudes. In State...
...revolution, and the meaning of his films derives entirely from their participation in the class struggle. But here the Dziga-Vertov group sees a problem where conventional filmmakers see none, and that problem is in the very nature of political art. The method of conventional political films--Costa-Gavras' Z and The Confession, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers -- is to assume that the way to political commitment is through faithful depiction of political reality. So they select an important event and recreate it on screen, aiming to provoke a specific chain of emotions and to construct a specific moral...
...theater in Washington's Kennedy Center. Instead, it was only an ironic footnote. Stevens himself yanked out the very first new movie the theater had been scheduled to show, State of Siege. His reason: he thought that the film seemed to rationalize assassination. Directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras, the movie is a fictionalized account of the real-life killing of an American official in Uruguay. Calling Stevens' action bald censorship, directors of as many as a third of the films to be shown in the opening festivities withdrew, leaving Stevens with a blank screen to fill...