Jean-Louis Trintignant is dead, Costa Gavras thankfully is still alive

Jun 25, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – One day in 1971, a friend, Balwant Persaud, who I met when he was in high school (Guyana Oriental College on Thomas Street, North Cummingsburg), and I was a student in the “afternoon-lessons” classes at the school, suggested that I see a movie named “Z.”
Balwant is still in Guyana. He offers Canadian immigration consultation in Alberttown. I haven’t seen him in more than seven years. I wonder if he can remember recommending “Z” to me. I saw the movie at the Plaza cinema on Camp Street and it played a huge part in the transformation of my life.
The film was directed by Greek director, Costa Gavras and starred a famous French actor, Jean-Louis Trintignant. It was about the bloody rule of the right-wing Greek government at the time. The direction was phenomenal, the acting was equally so.
I went on to see many more of Gavras films of the genre of “Z” the best of which was the depiction of the CIA sponsored overthrow of President Allende in Chile in 1973. The film’s title is “Missing.” It was released in 1982 at a time when I was studying in Canada and the cinema was packed. It was a huge box office hit around the world. Since seeing Z, I looked for movies by Trintignant because his portrayal of the magistrate investigating the state-sponsored murder of an opposition figure in the film was superb.
I felt an emotional slide when I read that he died on June 17 this year at the age of 91. Once the name Jean-Louis Trintignant and Costa Gavras come up, I think of the political effect both men had on me. The more I saw of Gavras films, the deeper my political convictions of left-wing thinking grew.
The powerful change music, movies and literature can bring to your life is a human trait. No human in this world can ever escape the memories of the shape music, films and books have had on their lives. I am a product of the late sixties, early seventies and Gavras movies like Z and State of Siege (about the brutal military government of Uruguay in the seventies) had a transforming effect on my ideology.
It is an inexplicable, funny thing about life that two friends can see the same movie but the influence of the story has different results on them. It was Balwant that introduced me to Z yet Balwant never took more than a passing interest in politics ending up as a successful businessman while I headed towards radical politics.
I remember seeing another Trintignant political thriller the next year – The Conformist. It was shown at the Plaza. For some reason, in those days, Plaza was the only cinema that showed political movies. I remember seeing “The Adventurers”, the same year I saw Z and at the Plaza too.
The Conformist is set in the late 1930s when fascism and Nazism had overrun Europe. It is directed by one of films’ greatest directors ever – Italian artist, Bernardo Bertalucci who gave us one of the most flawless existentialist films ever done – Last Tango in Paris. The Adventures is about revolution in Latin America and how power, once attained, loses its revolutionary sheen.
Those films had a tremendous impact on me as a very young man. I think at a deep Freudian level, the penetration of those movies are there in me and always will be. It is for this reason, I don’t think I will ever stray from left wing, radical liberal/socialist directions.
I believe Karl Marx made sterling contributions to philosophy and his studies of class dialectics will never fade. Class analysis is priceless if one is to comprehend post-colonial societies. I believe there is a place for socialist economics in the world; not only for poor Third World countries but all countries.
What many liberal thinkers seldom put into their books is the fact that many capitalist countries have socialist inputs. European countries will never move away from these inputs despite the rise of right-wing populism. The French presidential and parliamentary elections were intriguing.
In the second president run-off, the far right candidate came in second with only a percentage point ahead of the far-left candidate. The far-left and the mainstream left increased their strength in the parliamentary voting. In the US, Bernie Sanders still remains one of America’s most popular politicians.
The world has lost a fine artist in Trintignant. Thankfully, Gavras is still alive. He is 89 and is still working. I hope those of the new generation will see his films and learn a few lessons of how brutal power can become once leaders can rule forever.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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