Two core Costa-Gavras themes, history and the concept of justice, are confronted in Un homme de trop, which marks the beginning and Section spéciale, which marks the end of the filmmaker’s first cycle of political cinema – ‘made in France’. This chapter examines the layered representation of this troubled period in France’s history in terms of aesthetic style and generic type. The chapter also examines the relationship of the adaptation of the novels to France’s political culture over the thirty-year period that separates the events themselves from their representation on screen. History has different tonalities of ‘truth’: lived experience versus journalistic investigation; documented truth in a period of rebuilding France as a nation, versus documentary truth revealed within a period of a nation’s self-reflexivity.
In this collection of new essays, issues emerge that open up numerous innovative approaches to Costa-Gavras’s career, among them: contemporary theories of adaptation, identity politics, reception, and affect, as well as his assessment of twentieth- and twenty-first-century political disorder. Costa-Gavras recontextualizes political history as individual human dramas and thereby involves his audience in past and contemporary traumas, from the horrors of the Second World War through mid-century international totalitarianism to the current problems of immigration and the global financial crisis. In order to capture the feeling of a political era, Costa-Gavras employs cinematic techniques from La Nouvelle Vague for his early films, documentary-like re-enactments for crucial moments of political tension of his renowned thrillers, and state-of-the-art aesthetics and technology for his latest ventures. The first half of this collection focuses upon the first twenty years of Costa-Gavras’s career, especially his development of the political thriller, the second half of this collection explores the past thirty years of his very productive filmic, thematic, and genre experiments. Costa-Gavras remains one of film’s enduring storytellers, theorists, and political commentators.