When History Speaks Again

A Review of Episodes Four and Five of The Century of Costa-Gavras:

Can the political history of an entire century be revisited through the films of a single director? Can cinema serve as a form of memory, resisting oblivion, historical distortion, and the silence of power? And can a documentary about cinema become a genuinely cinematic work in its own right, rather than merely repeating what we have already seen?

Le Siècle de Costa-Gavras (The Century of Costa-Gavras) emerges from these very questions. Using Costa-Gavras's films as its starting point, the documentary series revisits the political history of the twentieth century without confining itself to a conventional account of the filmmaker’s life and career.

For me, one of the most rewarding experiences of the 18th Festival Lumière was attending the screening of episodes four and five with Costa-Gavras himself, Edwy Plenel, and members of the filmmaking team. What struck me most was not simply the political significance of the films under discussion, but the way history was articulated through images, without the documentary ever needing to raise its voice to make an impact.

Across these two episodes, archival footage, excerpts from fiction films, historical interviews, and Costa-Gavras’s present-day reflections move in a continuous dialogue. None exists merely to confirm another.

A historical document can alter the meaning of a fictional scene, just as the filmmaker’s words can invite us to reconsider a familiar image from a different perspective. This movement between evidence, memory, and cinematic representation transforms the documentary from an informative retrospective into a cinematic narrative.

When Investigative Journalism Meets Cinema

The creators’ professional backgrounds matter. Edwy Plenel, the French investigative journalist and co-founder of the independent news organization Mediapart, co-writes with Yannick Kergoat, an editor and filmmaker who previously collaborated with Costa-Gavras.

Their backgrounds alone do not guarantee a documentary's success, but their influence shows in the film’s storytelling. The investigative journalist’s sensitivity to documentary evidence, testimony, and the gap between official accounts and lived experience combines with a cinematic understanding of time, rhythm, and the relationship between images.

What matters is how the research material is treated. A political speech, an archival interview, or the testimony of a historical witness is not included merely to provide additional information. Its position in the sequence of images determines how viewers receive and understand that information.

In many historical documentaries, archival footage primarily illustrates the narration. Here, the reverse also occurs: images sometimes raise questions that the subsequent spoken commentary begins to address. This shift encourages the viewer to move beyond passively receiving information.

Costa-Gavras: Two Moments in Time Within a Single Frame

One notable visual choice is how Costa-Gavras positions himself within the frame.

He appears largely in a single setting, occasionally with images from his earlier films playing in the background. In those moments, the filmmaker of the present and the films of the past coexist in the same composition. A time-marked face appears alongside images created decades earlier.

This simultaneity is more than an aesthetic decision. It makes the historical distance between artist and artwork visible, as though the past were still unfolding behind him while he reflects upon it from the present.

The structure of Costa-Gavras’s speech adds further depth to this visual relationship. Rather than simply retelling his films' plots or explaining events already visible on screen, he turns to the reasons behind his artistic choices, the historical circumstances that shaped them, and the ideas that guided his cinematic decisions.

This approach distinguishes between knowing a film's story and understanding the filmmaker's perspective.

The interviewer’s voice is absent from the principal conversations, and this absence is equally significant. The narrative appears to unfold directly through Costa-Gavras’s own words, yet this immediacy results from a deliberate formal choice. Although the questions remain unheard, their underlying structure still emerges in the sequence of responses and the narrative's progression.

In other words, the less visible the interviewer becomes, the more apparent editing's role in organizing the spoken material.

Alongside Costa-Gavras’s reflections, a separate narrator also shapes the documentary. These two voices serve different functions: the narrator establishes the historical context and traces real individuals' experiences, while Costa-Gavras reflects on his own creative decisions, motivations, and experiences.

Editing brings these two narrative strands together. Transitions between voice-over narration, the filmmaker’s commentary, archival footage, and scenes from the original fiction films create a coherent structure without letting one element repeat another.

History is thus narrated from the outside while the filmmaker simultaneously reconsiders it from within their own experience.

Episode Four: From Structures of Power to Human Experience

Episode four, Les Démocraties meurent aussi (Democracies Die Too), examines State of Siege (1972) and Missing (1982), two films that approach American interventionist policies in Latin America and their human consequences from different perspectives.

In returning to these works, the documentary does more than revisit their historical contexts. It also allows us to compare two distinct modes of political storytelling.

In State of Siege, structures of power, security institutions, and mechanisms of political intervention take a more prominent position. In Missing, similar political dynamics emerge through a family's personal experience and a father’s search for his missing son.

This difference reminds us that Costa-Gavras's political cinema, despite its clearly defined historical positions, is not restricted to a single narrative model. He can move from examining the machinery of power to an intimate family drama without losing the connection between political systems and individual lives.

In the section devoted to Missing, the movement between scenes from the film and historical accounts turns the distance between an event and its cinematic representation into a subject of reflection.

The fictional image does not replace the historical document, nor does the document diminish the scene's dramatic force. Together, they make a different reading of the events possible.

Jack Lemmon: The Awareness of the Actor and the Awareness of the Character

One of the most interesting aspects of episode four is its use of archival interviews with Jack Lemmon, who played Edmund Horman in Missing.

In these interviews, Lemmon explains that the film's strong screenplay and the human relationship between its characters initially attracted him. At first, the political dimension was secondary. What particularly interested him was the relationship between a father and his daughter-in-law, who move from mutual distance and disagreement towards understanding through a shared search.

More revealing, however, is the transformation in the actor’s perspective as he encounters the story's historical reality.

Lemmon speaks of developing a greater awareness of the United States’ involvement in political developments across Latin America, an awareness that made him more sensitive to the gap between what citizens know about their government’s actions and what remains outside their knowledge.

In Missing, Edmund Horman undergoes a comparable progression, moving from an initial trust in official institutions towards doubt and questioning.

Placing the actor’s experience alongside the character’s dramatic journey creates two distinct levels of awareness: one within the fictional world and the other emerging from the real experience of making the film.

The documentary establishes this connection without explaining it explicitly.

Elsewhere, Lemmon recalls the American government’s negative official response to the film and, somewhat unexpectedly, expresses satisfaction with it. He regarded the reaction as evidence that the film had attracted attention and made an impact.

These archival conversations matter beyond their historical value. By placing excerpts from them alongside scenes from Missing and historical documents, the documentary suggests that the experience of cinema is not confined to its audience.

Sometimes, by inhabiting a character, an actor also arrives at a different understanding of the world beyond the film.

Here, archival material is not simply a relic of the past. It becomes an element that can change how we read the film today.

Episode Five: Two Women, Two Encounters with the Past

Episode five, Ce passé qui ne passe pas (The Past That Will Not Pass), brings together Hanna K. (1983) and Music Box (1989), two films concerned respectively with the Palestinian question and the legacy of Nazi crimes.

Their connection goes beyond historical memory. Both narratives centre on a female lawyer whose pursuit of justice forces her to confront deeply personal and ethical questions.

In Hanna K., Jill Clayburgh stars as a lawyer whose defence of a Palestinian man becomes intertwined with questions of home, belonging, and the right of return. In Music Box, Jessica Lange stars as a woman whose defence of a father accused of war crimes becomes a difficult confrontation between family loyalty and historical truth.

In one film, the lawyer encounters political and legal structures while defending another person’s rights. In the other, the truth she must confront concerns one of the closest emotional relationships in her life.

Without equating these two distinct historical situations, this narrative parallel raises a shared question: what does justice mean when truth conflicts with personal identity and belonging?

By placing scenes from the two films alongside Costa-Gavras’s reflections and archival interviews, the documentary lets the narratives themselves raise this question rather than imposing a predetermined conclusion.

History Told Without Raising Its Voice

What ultimately gives these two episodes coherence is their restrained approach.

The material itself carries considerable emotional weight: military coups, torture, disappearances, displacement, and war crimes. Yet the filmmakers do not rely on repeated emphasis or lengthy explanatory commentary to underline the gravity of these events.

Meaning emerges instead from the relationships between the elements: the movement between archival footage, scenes from the fiction films, and Costa-Gavras’s own reflections.

Editing here becomes a way of thinking through images. At times, a cut between two historical moments reveals a connection that might otherwise require several sentences of explanation. At others, the interval between two passages of speech allows the meaning of the preceding image to continue unfolding in the viewer’s mind.

This restraint should not be mistaken for political neutrality. Costa-Gavras’s films do not conceal their positions, and the documentary is not indifferent to the historical issues it addresses.

The difference lies in the method of expression. Rather than continually insisting upon the importance or violence of events, the images and testimonies are arranged in a relationship that invites viewers to reflect for themselves.

This approach nevertheless raises a critical question: when archival images and fictional reconstructions are placed side by side, how can viewers distinguish historical evidence from its cinematic interpretation?

In these two episodes, diverse sources and Costa-Gavras’s own commentary help maintain that distinction. Even so, viewers should never infer a historical document's credibility solely from the emotional force of its visual presentation.

The value of the documentary’s method lies precisely in the possibility of comparing these sources, rather than treating them as interchangeable.

For this reason, the collaboration between an investigative journalist and an experienced editor is more than a professional distinction in the credits. It becomes meaningful within the work itself.

Cinema as Memory

At the conclusion of episodes four and five, the question that remains is not simply how Costa-Gavras’s films were made or how faithfully they represented historical events.

The deeper question concerns what happens to images after they are created.

How do we see a film about a political event decades after it was made? What new meanings can an old interview acquire when placed in a different context? And can historical distance, rather than diminishing a film’s impact, create the possibility of a deeper understanding?

By returning films, interviews, and historical documents to the present, Le Siècle de Costa-Gavras gives these questions a visual form.

What mattered most to me in these two episodes was the documentary’s ability to transform historical research into a cinematic structure in which the filmmaker’s presence, the selection of archival material, and the art of editing each fulfil a distinct function without replacing one another.

The series presents history not as a catalogue of events, but as a relationship between human beings, images, and the passage of time.

Perhaps this is one of cinema’s essential possibilities: to make the past visible again without merely repeating it, and to allow history to speak without raising its voice.