torture, politics, and the movies

With torture so much a part of the national conversation—in the blogosphere, at least—I’m wondering why this film not available on DVD (or even VHS, fer chrissake)?

The Confession [L'Aveu], 1970 (Costa-Gavras)

From Vincent Canby’s review in the New York Times (12/10/70):

“The Confession” is the real-life story of Artur London, a loyal Communist who certified his credentials by serving with the International Brigade in Spain and with the Communist anti-Nazi underground in France, and by a long term in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1949, Mr. London returned to his native Czechoslovakia from France to become Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Communist Government of President Klement Gottwald. Two years later, along with 13 other leading Czech Communists (11 of whom were Jewish), Mr. London was arrested for treason and espionage and found guilty in what became known as the “Slansky trial.”

The Slansky trial, named for the secretary general of the Czech Communist party, who was also a defendant, was one of the last major gasps of the Stalinist purges that began with the Moscow trials in the 1930’s. All of the Slansky defendants were found guilty and all but three, including Mr. London, were executed.

Mr. London lived not only to see the defendants rehabilitated and to write his book but also to return to Czechoslovakia on the day in August, 1968, when Soviet troops invaded his country to end the short Czech spring.

“The Confession,” with Yves Montand playing Mr. London and Simone Signoret his wife Lise, is the story of a believer’s ultimate betrayal by his belief, of intolerable physical torture and psychological harassment (London is urged to confess to crimes he did not commit to prove his loyalty to the party), and, finally, of survival.

Subtextually, what was notable about this Costa-Gavras film, which came out a year or so after his hard-hitting international sensation Z, was the appearance of Montand and Signoret in the principal roles. Well-known leftists, the French stars broke ranks with their brethren to make what they considered an important political distinction: between anti-Communism and anti-Stalinism. Of course, that was back in the days when celebrities—not to mention public intellectuals—on the barricades informed themselves about the issues and understood the intricacies and nuances of the politics they espoused: the good old days…

In his review, Canby glosses over the gruesomely anti-Semitic character of the Prague show trials and Communist Party purges.

J. Hoberman doesn’t make that mistake in his New York Times review [$$] of A Trial in Prague, a documentary by Zuzana Justman on the same subject:

It was scarcely coincidental that Slansky and all but three of his fellow defendants — many of whom he had imprisoned earlier — were Jews. This had less to do with the prominence of Jews in Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party — which, after World War II, had been the most popular Communist Party in Eastern Europe, with more than 1 million members, as well as the winner of a national election — than with events inside the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world.

Masterminded from Moscow, the Slansky Trial was of a piece with the virulent anti-Semitic campaign that characterized the last five years of Stalin’s reign. In part, the aging dictator’s paranoia was fed by disappointment with the pro-Western stance taken by the new state of Israel, which had been supported by the Soviets and heavily armed by Czechoslovakia during the war of 1948. Hence the convenience of targeting prominent Jewish Communists.

But the so-called Zionists on trial were all dedicated, lifelong Communists — if not loyal Stalinists — who in embracing that secular religion had largely abandoned their Jewish roots. Representatives of a now antediluvian sort of modernism, they had spent their youth obtaining a particular form of mid-20th-century European education: some survived Nazi concentration camps, most fought in the international brigades on the side of the Spanish Republic, a few had been involved in the French Resistance — all of which would be used to establish their guilt during the trial.

This film was a casualty of 9/11. (I haven’t seen it.) It was scheduled for release on 9/14/01. It is available on video, for $300. At that price, it might as well not be available.

Which is too bad, because the morality tale of the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe, which took place only a half-dozen years after the end of World War Two, is one well worth contemplating in this era of feverish partisanship.