Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film 9781441107084, 9781441196200, 9781501300363, 9781441193155

Citation preview

CINEMATIC TERROR

CINEMATIC TERROR A GLOBAL HISTORY OF TERRORISM ON FILM Tony Shaw

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Tony Shaw, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaw, Tony, 1965Cinematic terror : a global history of terrorism on film / Tony Shaw. pages cm Summary: “The first history of cinema’s treatment of terrorism from the birth of film to today”– Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-4411-0708-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4411-9620-0 (paperback) 1.  Terrorism in motion pictures. 2.  Political violence in motion pictures. 3.  Motion pictures–Political aspects.  I.  Title. PN1995.9.T46S53 2014 791.43'6556–dc23 2014021550

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0708-4 PB: 978-1-4411-9620-0 ePub: 978-1-4411-5809-3 ePDF: 978-1-4411-9315-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

For Shirley and Isaac

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1

Silent Revolutionaries

9

2

Agents of Suspense

24

3

Symbols of Resistance

43

4

Epic Freedom Fighters

62

5

Newsreel Guerrillas

82

6

Docu-death Squads

102

7

Schlock and Awe

123

8

Avant-garde Narcissists

144

9

Serial Killers

163

10 Bollywood’s Communalists

185

11 Biopics for Peace

203

12 Networked Jihadists

224

13 Suicide Victims in Close-up

244

14 YouTube Monsters

265

Conclusion 282 Bibliography 288 Select Filmography 304 Film Index307 General Index310

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank three institutions for helping me put this project together. The Leverhulme Trust gave me thinking time via a Research Fellowship. The British Academy provided financial support, especially for overseas research trips. The Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles – where I was a visiting professor in 2012 – gave me access to fantastic resources and people. The following archivists, scholars and friends deserve particular thanks: Nathan Abrams, Dave Bannerman, John Bell, James Chapman, Nick Cull, Jonny Davies, Nirit Eidelman, Jo Fox, Aaron Gerow, Rebecca Grant, Barbara Hall, Ifan Hughes, Pete Kind, Avishai Kfir, Andre Kozovoi, Helen Monribot, Brigitte Nacos, Holger Nehring, Leon Nikitenko, Bianca Oertel, Steven Peacock, Meir Russo, Ray Ryan, Giles ScottSmith, Owen White, Hugh Wilford and Denise Youngblood. Rob Cavanagh, Fabrizio Fenghi, Kevin Long and Nick Kupensky were wonderful research assistants. Once again, MUFC and MRFC taught me the importance of looking to the future (and the weekend game) rather than to the past. As always, Shirley and Isaac helped me to see that life’s real ‘high points’ are found beyond the back-garden study. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material and film stills in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. Die Hard (1988). Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest. Die Hard 4.0 (2007). Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest. Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995). Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest. Die Harder (1990). Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest. Exodus (1960). United Artists/Photofest. Michael Collins (1996). Warner Bros./Geffen Pictures/Photofest. Operation Thunderbolt (1977). G. S. Films/Photofest. Sabotage (1936). Gaumont British/Photofest. State of Siege (1973). Reggane Films/Unidis/Euro International Films/Dieter Geissler Filmproduktion/Photofest. The Battle of Algiers (1966). Igor Film/Casbah Film/Photofest. The Delta Force (1986). Golan-Globus Productions/Photofest. The Third Generation (1979). Filmverlag der Autoren/Photofest.

INTRODUCTION

Theo van Gogh wasn’t famous just for being the great-grandnephew of painter Vincent. For two decades, the libertarian film-maker and writer revelled in being Holland’s king of provocation and insult. Lüger, van Gogh’s debut film made in 1982, caused a riot by depicting a psychopath shoving a pistol into a woman’s vagina and two kittens spinning in a washing machine. Off-screen, van Gogh was equally inflammatory, offending people with Holocaust-tinged jokes about Jewish celebrities and, after the onset of the West’s ‘war on terror’ in September 2001, incurring the wrath of Dutch Muslims via politically incorrect rants about multiculturalism on his website, the Healthy Smoker. In 2004, van Gogh used his latest film, May 6th, to excoriate the Muslim extremists (or ‘goatfuckers’) that he believed had incited the recent murder of the flamboyant right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn. Van Gogh didn’t live to see May 6th released. In August 2004, van Gogh’s short film Submission triggered uproar in Muslim circles when it was shown on Dutch public television. Submission showed a semi-naked Muslim woman, tattooed with Koranic verses, recounting how she had been forced into an arranged marriage, abused by her husband, raped by her uncle and then brutally punished for adultery. On the morning of 2 November 2004, a Dutch Moroccan Muslim, Mohammed Bouyeri, shot van Gogh off his bicycle on a busy Amsterdam Street, calmly slit the film-maker’s throat with a curved machete and pinned a letter to his chest with a knife. Bouyeri’s letter railed against the ‘infidel fundamentalists’ who were ‘terrorizing Islam’ through films like Submission, called for a holy war against the unbelievers and ended with a warning that Europe and the United States would soon ‘meet with disaster’.1 The death of Theo van Gogh has to be the most shocking illustration of the ways in which film-makers have become embroiled in today’s so-called Global Age of Terror. The Dutchman’s slaughter not only demonstrates the risks that film-makers and journalists run in confronting the subjects of terrorism and religion during a period of extreme political polarization. It also highlights the importance so many societies around the world attach to film as a medium of entertainment, education and persuasion. The international outcry, and deaths, caused by subsequent films

Ronald Rovers, ‘The Silencing of Theo van Gogh’, Salon.com, 24 November 2004, http://www.salon. com/2004/11/24/vangogh_2/ (17 December 2013); Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (London: Penguin, 2006). Submission was 11 minutes long and written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician. May 6th also went by the title 06/05. 1

Cinematic Terror

engaging with terrorism and religion – like Innocence of Muslims, a thirteen-minute low-budget video with obscure origins denigrating the prophet Mohammed posted on YouTube in 2012 – serves to underline this.2 So too does the widespread use of the Internet over the past decade as a vehicle for filmic propaganda by Islamist extremists exhibiting hostage beheadings in countries like Iraq and Chechnya.3 All of this suggests that terrorism has taken on a highly optical character in the early twenty-first century. This development can partly be attributed to the immediacy of 24-hour television and to global access to the Internet and other networked information technology over the past decade. It can also be linked to al-Qaeda’s historic attack on the United States on 11 September 2001. That perfectly timed, early-morning kamikaze assault on New York and Washington DC was a brilliantly choreographed, visually spectacular made-for-media ‘performance’. The attack – and the global, wall-to-wall coverage of it – helped turn terrorism into what international relations specialist James Der Derian calls the ‘political pornography of modernity’: a fetishized, iconic phenomenon that seems to be everywhere yet nowhere, an activity that many people seem obsessed with but the vast majority of whom only experience in an entirely mediated form.4 Der Derian and others are surely right in saying that our age has been defined by terrorism and that this development is bound up with the proliferation of all sorts of images of political violence (war, riots, torture, terrorism, etc.) via new media. Yet it would be wrong to think either that terrorism’s high-profile visibility or that film-makers’ engagement with terrorism began in September 2001. The very fact that so many people who witnessed al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States that month described them as being ‘just like a movie’ points to cinema’s long and intimate association with terrorism and images of mass destruction. Since the 1980s, Hollywood especially had portrayed ‘Arab madmen’ and ‘Islamic fundamentalists’

Peter Bradshaw, ‘Innocence of Muslims: A Dark Demonstration of the Power of Film’, Guardian, 17 September 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/sep/17/innocence-of-muslims-demonstration-film (17 December 2013); Paul Bond, ‘ “Innocence of Muslims” Filmmaker Planning New Film About Islamic Terrorism’, Hollywood Reporter, 1 October 2013, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/innocence-muslimsfilmmaker-planning-new-639479 (17 December 2013). 3 On this subject, see Akil N. Awan, ‘Radicalization on the Internet? The Virtual Propagation of the Jihadist Media and Its Effects’, The RUSI Journal, 152, 3, 2007, 76–81; Pete Lentini and Muhammad Bakashmar, ‘Jihadist Beheading: A Convergence of Technology, Theology, and Teleology’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 30, 4, 2007, 303–325; Makram Khoury-Machool, ‘Kidnap Videos: Setting the Power Relations of New Media’, in Sarah Maltby and Richard Keeble (eds.), Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Bury St. Edmunds: Abramis, 2007), 163–176. 4 James Der Derian, ‘Imaging Terror: Logos, Pathos and Ethos’, Third World Quarterly, 26, 1, 2005, 25–26. On the media’s packaging of 11 September 2001 as ‘9/11’ and as a melodrama, especially in the United States, see Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Elisabeth Anker, ‘Villains, Victims, and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11’, Journal of Communication, 55, 1, 2005, 22–37. On the global meaning of the events of 9/11, see Cara Cilano (ed.), From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). 2

2

Introduction

in dozens of frightening scenarios, including hijacking planes to blow up American cities and laying siege to New York. After ‘9/11’, many people, including Hollywood film-makers like Robert Altman, suggested that these movie scenarios could even have provided Osama bin Laden with the atrocity’s blueprint.5 In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, it is only natural that so many people should have focused on the US film industry’s recent record on terrorism. 9/11 was after all a tragedy that took place on American soil and Hollywood had long been the world’s single most powerful image-maker. However, the truth is that over the years the United States has by no means had a monopoly on cinematic images of terrorism. Indeed, other countries as far apart as Israel, India and Britain have been serious competitors in the field of filmic ‘terrortainment’. Furthermore, nor would it be right to believe – as most analyses of cinematic terrorism suggest – that the history of big screen terrorism began so recently, in the 1980s. In fact, as this book hopes to show, film and terrorism go back a long, long way together, to the very dawn of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century. What exactly are we talking about when we refer to terrorism in this context? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this because the construct ‘terrorism’ is notoriously elastic. Despite numerous attempts to find one over the decades by scholars and bodies like the United Nations, we have no single accepted meaning of terrorism. The word has always been freighted ideologically and, still today, academics, journalists and government agencies define terrorism in their own way depending on a variety of often conflicting assumptions and agendas.6 Where consensus does exist, however, is on the centrality of communications and publicity to terrorism. Many experts argue that terrorism is and always has been a form of ‘political shock

Winston Wheeler Dixon, ‘Something Lost – Film after 9/11’, in Winston Wheeler Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 2004), 1–24; Rebecca Bell-Metereau, ‘The How-To Manual, the Prequel, and the Sequel in Post-9/11 Cinema’, in Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11, 142–161. On Stuart Baird’s Executive Decision (1997) and Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1998) in particular, see Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 52–64. On the 9/11 hijackers’ penchant for skyjacking movies, see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 303, 309, 349. 6 This book will explore the various ways in which cinema has defined terrorism, but it may be useful to set out here certain characteristics potentially relevant to a broad, politically neutral category of terrorist action. These include the deliberate deployment, or threat of deployment, of violent action against people or property; the production of anxiety and fear by this action; the pursuit of this action by individuals, sub-state groups or states motivated by criminal, political or religious reasons including the desire to demonstrate their power; the intimidation or impact on individuals who are neither directly involved in the violent action nor the primary targets of the actors’ motivation; and the often clandestine or semiclandestine nature of the action and responsible actors. Taken from J. David Slocum, ‘Introduction: The Recurrent Return to Algiers’, in J. David Slocum (ed.), Terrorism, Media, Liberation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 1. On the difficulty of defining terrorism, and its changed meaning over the last 200 years, see Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Alex Schmid and Albert Jongman, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988); Conor Gearty, Terrorism (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996); Richard English, Terrorism: How to Respond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5

3

Cinematic Terror

theatre’, staged (as it were) for maximum dramatic impact for different audiences simultaneously. This is not to suggest that terrorism is entirely symbolic – the violence conducted often has very real physical and emotional costs. What it signifies is that the history of terrorism is inextricably connected to the history of communications.7 Ever since the birth of ‘international terrorism’ in the late 1960s, journalists, politicians and scholars have pored over the relationship between terrorism and the mass media. Is that relationship dangerously symbiotic, many ask, with the media giving terrorists, as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously put it in the 1980s, ‘the oxygen of publicity’? Conversely, would it be more accurate to describe most media organizations as government spokesmen due to their tendency to brand terrorists as irrational and evil? Are people passive consumers or active makers of their own meanings of what they see and hear about terrorism in the mass media? Behind these and other questions lies the assumption that propaganda and the power to control information are vital components of terrorism. Such questions also suggest that the mass media – our main sources of information and instruments of propaganda – are critical antagonists, helping to frame contemporary conflict and shape social reality.8 Given how important these questions are, it is striking how little sustained attention has been paid over the years to cinema’s relationship to terrorism. The lack of research is all the more surprising given what terrorism and cinema have in common – theatricality, visuality, drama and performance.9 Compared with the extensive work that has been conducted on the nexus between terrorism and the

Brian M. Jenkins, International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1974); Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn, The Theatre of Terrorism: Mass Media and International Terror (New York: Longman, 1994). 8 Important works on the media-terrorism debate, most of which focus on the news media in the West, especially the United States, include Philip Schlesinger, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott, Televising Terrorism: Political Violence in Popular Culture (London: Comedia, 1983); Yonah Alexander and Richard Latter (eds.), Terrorism and the Media: Dilemmas for Government, Journalists and the Public (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1990); David L. Paletz and Alex Schmid (eds.), Terrorism and the Media (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992); Steven Livingston, The Terrorism Spectacle (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994); Philip Jenkins, Images of Terror: What We Can and Can’t Know about Terrorism (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2003); Pippa Norris, Montague Kern and Marion Just (eds.), Framing Terrorism: The News Media, Government and the Public (New York: Routledge, 2003); Benjamin Cole (ed.), Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia (New York: Routledge, 2006); Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro, Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture and the War on Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Philip Seib and Dana M. Janbek, Global Terrorism and the New Media: The Post-Al Qaeda Generation (London: Routledge, 2010). For the July 1985 speech to the American Bar Association in London in which Margaret Thatcher first used the phrase ‘oxygen of publicity’ in public, see http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106096 (23 April 2014). 9 On the connections between terrorism, drama and performance see, for instance, Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996) and John Orr and Dragan Klaic (eds.), Terrorism and Modern Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). 7

4

Introduction

news media, scant effort has been made to scrutinize cinema’s overall record on terrorism, the implication being that as an ‘entertainment’ medium it is somehow less important or influential than, say, newspapers and television.10 Recent scholarship probing Hollywood’s role in the ‘war on terror’ over the past decade or so, or, alternatively, revisiting classic movies about terrorism such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docu-drama The Battle of Algiers, has indicated that cinematic terrorism does have a history and that movies about terrorism can carry political weight. However, much of this scholarship tends to be coloured by present-ism, which means that wider historical insights about cinema’s treatment of terrorism often get lost.11 This book is the first attempt to map how cinema has treated the subject of terrorism since moving pictures were invented. Rather than focusing on the relationship between film and terrorism since September 2001, the book takes a long view, seeking to show both that terrorism itself has a history and that cinema and terrorism have enjoyed a close relationship for over a century. There are several advantages to this historical approach. By adopting a far-sighted perspective, it is possible to identify important patterns in the way cinema has dealt with terrorism. By looking beyond the present day, we can explore the changes in cinema’s definition of terrorism over time and show that film-makers have not only reflected and projected official discourse on terrorism but also shaped and critiqued that discourse. Most importantly, by adopting the tools of the historian’s trade, we can document how films about terrorism have actually been made, why film-makers have focused on particular aspects of terrorism at the expense of others and what effects (if any) cinema has had on public perceptions of terrorism. This is not to deny, of course, that down the years there has been excellent work done on cinema’s take on particular conflicts or political groups that are associated with terrorism. This includes Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989); Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (London: Verso, 1999); Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Brian McIlroy, Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (Richmond, BC: Steveston Press, 2001); Lina Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006); Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs (New York: Olive Branch, 2009); Mark Connelly, The IRA on Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). Several books about film and war are also of relevance – for instance, Alun Evans, Brassey’s Guide to War Films (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2000); Robert Eberwein (ed.), The War Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); James Chapman, War and Film (London: Reaktion, 2008). 11 See, for instance, Dixon, Film and Television after 9/11; Robert Cettl, Terrorism in American Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); Prince, Firestorm; Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Helena Vanhala, The Depiction of Terrorists in Hollywood Blockbuster Films, 1980–2001: An Analytical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, ‘Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism’, New Political Science, 28, 3, September 2006, 335–351; Tom Pollard, Hollywood’s 9/11: Superheroes, Supervillains, and Super Disasters (London: Paradigm, 2011); David Slocum, ‘9/11 Film and Media Scholarship’, Cinema Journal, 51, 1, Fall 2011, 181–193; Klaus Dodds, ‘Screening Terror: Hollywood, the United States and the Construction of Danger’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1, 2, August 2008, 227–243; special issue, ‘Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, 40 Years On’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 335–413. 10

5

Cinematic Terror

Coupled with a long view, the book also adopts a global outlook on the relationship between cinema and terrorism. Cinematic Terror is the first full-length study of how film-makers in different parts of the world – including Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East – have framed terrorism. Without ignoring Hollywood’s critical role as an arbiter of terrorism over the years, it highlights what we can learn about both cinema and terrorism by looking through other film industries’ viewfinders. In turn, this allows us to compare national film industries’ approaches towards terrorism, to see how the label ‘terrorist’ has been mobilized and circulated in countries with different political systems, and to pinpoint which film industries have been the chief architects of cinematic terrorism and which film-makers have been its most prolific practitioners. Taking both a long and international view of cinema and terrorism naturally means that some things get omitted. It is not my intention here to provide a comprehensive history of terrorism on the silver screen – a complete history analysing every film made about terrorism from China to Chile or Namibia to Norway over the past 120 years is a daunting task that awaits another author. As an international historian with a keen interest in the politics of film,12 my priority is instead to identify the main contours of cinema’s portrayal of terrorism across time, space and genre. I also want to uncover the commercial, cultural and political influences on film-makers’ depiction of terrorism from one era to the next, and to assess cinema’s use as a propaganda tool by a range of individuals and organizations in many of the most prominent campaigns of terrorism and counterterrorism carried out since the 1890s. Cinematic Terror seeks to achieve all of this by marrying three methodological approaches. First, the book takes a wide chronological and geographical sweep, plotting cinema’s changing treatment of terrorism over time and delineating certain national cinemas’ coverage of a range of contentious political, ethnic, religious and geostrategic issues that have consistently played an integral part in terrorist activities. Second, Cinematic Terror takes an evidence-based approach, using as wide a range of primary sources as possible, including unpublished scripts, film-makers’ private papers, interviews, censors’ reports, reviews, box-office returns, audience response evidence and government documents. Finally, the book looks at film and terrorism from a textual and contextual point of view. Analysis of the style and content of films is fused with a full appreciation of the historical and cultural circumstances of production and reception. This allows the reader to get ‘behind the scenes’ of cinematic terrorism, to understand fully what audiences were exposed to on screen and to get a sense of how viewers reacted to what they saw.

My previous work on the relationship between politics and cinema has focused mainly on the Cold War. See, for example, Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) and Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010). 12

6

Introduction

Cinematic Terror charts its course through fourteen chapters. These chapters take a combined chronological and thematic approach by focusing on the principal ways in which cinema has defined terrorism across different eras, beginning in the early 1900s and running through to today. Some chapters cover longer time periods than others, depending on the number and range of terrorism films released and on cinema’s shift in approach towards the subject of terrorism during that period. Each chapter focuses on one particular film, the exceptions being the first, which excavates silent cinema’s overall treatment of terrorism, and the ninth, which examines a film series. The key films and series are, in chronological order, Sabotage (Britain, 1936), Ashes and Diamonds (Poland, 1958), Exodus (USA, 1960), The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966), State of Siege (France/Italy/West Germany, 1973), Operation Thunderbolt (Israel, 1977), The Third Generation (West Germany, 1979), Die Hard (USA, 1988–2013), Bombay (India, 1995), Michael Collins (Ireland/USA, 1996), Countdown (Russia, 2004), Paradise Now (Palestinian territories/Netherlands/Israel/ Germany/France, 2005) and Cloverfield (USA, 2008). Given the book’s wide arc of time and space, film case studies are imperative. Case studies not only enable us to avoid the ‘catalogue-and-digest’ style that bedevils many film histories, they also allow us to unearth the mechanics and techniques of the cinema of terrorism in culturally and politically specific contexts. Each of the casestudy films has been carefully selected according to key criteria – including the era in which they were made, where and by whom, genre, their ideological messages, political and cultural significance and availability of archival sources – thereby ensuring that the films dovetail analytically and that they demonstrate cinema’s contribution to the long-running debate about what terrorism is, who uses it, why and to what effect. By identifying ‘model’ movies in this way, Cinematic Terror sets out the main contours of cinematic terrorism and delves deeply into the multilayered relationship between terrorism, film-making and public opinion. Choosing my ‘model’ movies was not a painless exercise, and some readers might wonder why space has not been found for such popular, critically acclaimed or thematically significant films as The Informer (USA, 1935), She Defends the Motherland (Soviet Union, 1943), Black Sunday (USA, 1977), Germany in Autumn (West Germany, 1978), In the Name of the Father (Ireland/Britain, 1993) and Shiri (South Korea, 1999).13 In making my choices, my objective was to combine the canonical

On these films, see Patrick F. Sheeran, The Informer (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002); Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 60–69; Corey K. Creekmur, ‘John Frankenheimer’s “War on Terror” ’, in Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (eds.), A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 103–116; Paul Cooke, ‘The Long Shadow of the New German Cinema: Deutschland 09, Deutschland im Herbst and National Film Culture’, Screen, 52, 3, Autumn 2011, 327–341; Brian Neve, ‘Cinema, the Ceasefire and “The Troubles” ’, Irish Studies Review, 5, 20, 1997, 2–8; McIlroy, Shooting to Kill, 70–90; David Scott Diffrient, ‘Shiri’, Film Quarterly, 59, 3 Spring 2001, 40–46; Hyangjin Lee, ‘History and Story in Division Drama: What Makes a Korean Blockbuster?’, Nosferatu, 55–56 June 2007, 14–24, 214–128. 13

7

Cinematic Terror

and popular with movies about terrorism that are either relatively obscure (especially in the Anglophone world) or have not always been categorized as terrorism films, thereby widening the terrorism filmography field. Whether well known or not, I hope to show that each of my case-study films is a cultural-historical touchstone, providing rich insights into the intersection between film-making, terrorism, propaganda and culture at a key stage in the story of cinematic terrorism. The origins, production, style, content and reception of these paradigmatic films are examined and each film is also fully contextualized through analysing contemporary attitudes towards terrorism and by employing examples of other movies. In this way, each chapter also provides an overview of the range of terrorism films released during a particular period or related to a particular theme, style or genre. Together, the chapters of Cinematic Terror reveal how, over the past century, the subject of terrorism has appeared in a rich variety of overt and oblique celluloid forms and in everything from thrillers to comedies and biopics to creature features. Additionally, the book shows that moviemakers have fought over the meaning of terrorism and defined terrorists in remarkably diverse ways over the past century, from deranged anarchists and freedom-loving nationalists to state-sponsored henchmen and opportunistic thieves. Cinematic Terror therefore demonstrates that there is far more to cinematic terrorism than the sort of crude, xenophobic action-adventures targeted by Robert Altman and others in the aftermath of 9/11. Indeed, some of the most prominent names in film history, including Britain’s Alfred Hitchcock, Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder and India’s Mani Ratnam, have helped push back the boundaries of big screen terrorism by producing genuinely innovative movies and suffered verbal and physical attacks in the process. Overall, the book’s combination of contours and case studies hopes to bring an essential breadth and depth to the often highly charged and politically partisan subject of media and terrorism. Cinematic Terror also, finally, hopes to show the need to take a longer, historical view of today’s Global Age of Terror and of the role of the entertainment media and propaganda within it.

8

CHAPTER 1 SILENT REVOLUTIONARIES

It’s difficult to make anything out at first, partly because the film is so grainy and judders so much. When a steam train pans into view, moving left to right, things start to become clearer. We are looking, from the outside, at the high, forbidding walls of a prison in upstate New York. Inside the train – though we don’t yet see him – is the world’s most notorious ‘terrorist’, Leon Czolgosz. Three months earlier, in September 1901, in nearby Buffalo, Czolgosz assassinated the president of the United States, William McKinley. Now, the self-proclaimed anarchist has his own appointment with death – and we are about to witness it. Dissolve to the inside of the prison, later the same day. Tighter shots accentuate the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. Four uniformed officers fetch Czolgosz from a cell in murderer’s row and bring the prisoner into the execution chamber. Czolgosz is quickly strapped into an electric chair, in the middle of the frame, and stares straight ahead, as if he is meeting eyes with the cinema audience. A crude metal dish, with wires attached, is fixed to his skull; one of his trouser legs is pulled up to the knee, exposing his skin to the imminent voltage surge. The State Electrician, a busy little man with an efficient manner, checks that everything is ready – and pulls the switch. Three bursts of electricity, each lasting about four seconds long, shoot through Czolgosz’s veins. Because the film is silent we cannot hear any cries of pain but we do see Czolgosz’s body dramatically spasm and lift off the seat, showing us how powerful each surge is. The terrorist heaves so violently it looks as though the straps will break. He drops prone after the current is turned off. Czolgosz will have been ‘fried alive’, as the watching journalists put it. Moments later, two doctors unbutton Czolgosz’s shirt and check he is no longer breathing. When the physicians nod to the warden and stand back, thereby allowing us to see the body unencumbered, we know it is all over. No words are spoken, no inter-titles are necessary. Czolgosz and the film are at an end. Owing to a paucity of archival records, it is impossible to get a complete picture of how cinema dealt with the subject of terrorism during the medium’s formative decades. This is particularly the case for the early silent era, when most films were made on highly flammable nitrate and the majority of films about terrorism, because they usually related to topical, day-to-day news items, were deemed to be of little permanent value. Enough material survives, however, especially in American and British archives, to suggest that film-makers fell in love with terrorism – if not terrorists themselves – immediately.

Cinematic Terror

That cinema should develop a special relationship with terrorism begins to make sense once we realize that the two were effectively born simultaneously. When the Lumière Brothers publicly exhibited their first films in Paris in 1895, famously changing the face of modern media history, Europe and the United States were in the throes of what many now call the first Age of Terror. Though the roots of modern-day terrorism might be said to lie in the Jacobins’ Reign of Terror following the 1789 French Revolution – when the government in Paris proclaimed that a systematic campaign of violence and intimidation was necessary to create a democracy – it took another century before the word ‘terrorist’ really captured the public’s imagination.1 It was then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that revolutionary terrorism first began to be used as a coherent strategy and, just as importantly, when mass communications existed to carry its threat far and wide. The decades preceding the First World War were a time of profound economic, technological, social and cultural change in large parts of the industrialized world. Movements calling for political ‘progress’, even revolution, followed alongside. Most people involved in these movements, including many anarchists and nihilists opposed to all state power, campaigned peacefully. However, encouraged by, among other things, the recent invention of dynamite and a communications revolution that included mass-circulation newspapers and the cinema, small groups of bomb-wielding, gun-toting anarchists and nihilists declared war on the political establishment in Europe and the United States. Central to their strategy was what they termed the ‘propaganda of the deed’, high-profile actions designed to attract the maximum publicity for their cause using the newly emerging media as vehicles of mass dissemination.2 With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that many of these groups’ political objectives and motives for using violence varied wildly. Their actions, designed though they were to speak louder than words, also killed relatively few people; some historians have calculated, for instance, that anarchists killed little more than a hundred people between 1880 and 1912.3 This was not how things seemed at the time, however, mainly because it was less an issue of how many people the self-proclaimed terrorists were killing and more who their victims were. During that same period, anarchists murdered six heads of state, including the king of Italy and the president of the United States. As a result, fears of impending doom grew widespread. Politicians and the new popular press in particular gave the Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, ‘The Invention of Modern Terror’, in Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 95–112; Charles Townshend, A Very Short History of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22–23, 36–37. 2 Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, ‘The “Golden Age” of Terrorism’, in Chaliand and Blin (eds.), History of Terrorism, 175–196; Townshend, Short History, 53–60; Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2006), 13–57. 3 Carr, Infernal Machine, 39. 1

10

Silent Revolutionaries

impression that civilization itself was in jeopardy, threatened by an orchestrated international conspiracy intent on chaos and destruction.4 No entertainment medium could pass up the opportunity afforded by stories of politically inspired murder and mayhem. For a medium, like film, that was just finding its feet during this era and could uniquely claim to be able to ‘capture’ these stories in moving images, terrorism was a godsend. Most film-makers eagerly capitalized on the drama, excitement and fear generated by revolutionary terrorism. It didn’t bother them at all if they were disfiguring its objectives or exaggerating its threat, nor if they faced accusations of plagiarism. Most borrowed heavily from the newspapers and lurid potboilers of their age, a characteristic shared, as we shall see, with many film-makers who engaged with terrorism much later. Like the journalists and novelists of the age, many a middle-class film-maker leading an ordered lifestyle possibly found the idea of turbulence and disarray faintly intriguing. The more sophisticated film technology grew, the more ‘life-like’ the filmmakers claimed their images of terrorism were. At the same time, the more that film-making shifted from being centred on small-scale local studios around 1905 to fully industrialized international ‘dream factories’ owned by a wealthy elite by the end of the silent era in the late 1920s, the less open cinema’s treatment of terrorism in fact became. This conservatism was strengthened by systems of government censorship and industry self-regulation. At first, film censorship by local and municipal authorities in many countries was a haphazard process, allowing for the rare film championing organized political violence to slip through the net. However, by 1920 most countries had enacted censorship legislation, often with the support of the film industries’ leaders. Even in liberal democracies, movies that might ‘excite class feeling’ or ‘discredit the agencies of the government’ were to all intents and purposes banned.5 During cinema’s first two decades, American film-makers appear to have taken a particularly keen interest in the terrorist surge. There are commercial and political reasons for this. Beginning in earnest with Edwin S. Porter’s seminal 1903 Western The Great Train Robbery, armed outlaws and bandits of one sort or another played a prominent role in exciting crime dramas and ‘chase’ films made in the United States. From a different perspective, President William McKinley’s assassination in Carr, Infernal Machine, 40–51; David C. Rapoport, ‘Reflections on “Terrorism and the American Experience” ’, Journal of American History, 98, 1, June 2011, 115–120. 5 Richard Maltby, ‘Censorship and Self-Regulation’, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 235–247; Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), excerpted in Steven J. Ross (ed.), Movies and American Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 43–57. Sloan (47) highlights one particularly radical Franco-American film, titled Why? and made in 1913, that portrayed New York’s wealthy classes as slave drivers and which culminated with workers burning down Manhattan. 4

11

Cinematic Terror

1901 must have come as a frightening portent to many Americans, a clear indication that no one, not even the best-protected man in the country, was safe from anarchist terrorism. US film-makers likely saw McKinley’s killing in the state of New York as all the more sensational, given that this was where many of them worked before relocating to Hollywood in the 1910s.6 Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison, which was outlined in detail at the head of this chapter, is among the very earliest surviving examples of how the US film industry framed anarchist terrorism. The four-minute-long film, comprising four self-contained individual shots, was made in late 1901 by the aforementioned movie pioneer Edwin S. Porter. Execution of Czolgosz was not only one of the first celluloid comments on real-life terrorism anywhere in the world but also one of the rare multi-shot narratives of the earliest period of cinema. It was a refined piece of work for its time, in other words, one that combined a purposeful elaboration of plot with changes of scene, focus and tone. It was also, to quote industry parlance, a sure-fire money earner. Executions were a macabrely popular subject during the very earliest, novelty phase of cinema and few murderers had greater pulling power than Leon Czolgosz. More importantly for us, Execution of Czolgosz is also a very early example of the seamless fusion of documentary and fictional material that would come to characterize so much of cinematic terrorism in the decades ahead. The initial, grainy shots of Auburn Prison’s exteriors are genuine but the rest of the film, which is set mainly inside the prison’s execution chamber and has Czolgosz played by an actor, is faked. So cleverly are the gruesomely re-enacted scenes of Czolgosz’s electrocution folded into the piece, however, there is no way viewers could tell the difference between which parts of the film were fact and which were fiction. Presumably, Porter’s sleight-of-hand was intended to give audiences a vicarious thrill at being able to watch a hated man whose actions had inspired mass hysteria die or even to fulfil an eager public’s communal sadism. But the docu-drama also served as a warning to any watching would-be terrorists. Like the majority of this period’s so-called ‘anarchist films’, made in the United States and elsewhere, the lesson from Execution of Czolgosz was clear – conduct terrorism at your peril!7 Soon after Execution of Czolgosz appeared, terrorists entered the fictional mainstream of American film. Building on hysterical novels from the 1890s that David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 18–27; Scott Miller, The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Random House, 2011). 7 Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (London: Verso, 1999), 16–17; Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1991), 184–190. Execution of Czolgosz can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UYS xfyIqrjs (19 April 2013). 6

12

Silent Revolutionaries

warned of malignant terrorist conspiracies,8 melodramas lasting approximately ten to fifteen minutes – the mainstay of film production before the First World War – showed violent fanatics plotting to destabilize the United States. Few such films purported to explain the terrorists’ behaviour. Why should they when most people viewed cinema as a form of entertainment rather than education and when, by necessity, actions, not words or exposition, drove silent cinema? The minority of films that did delve into the causes of terrorism invariably put it down to jealousy, degeneracy, criminality or plain insanity. Like the blending of fact and fiction, this de-politicization of political violence would, as we shall see, come to form another key ingredient of cinematic terrorism in the years ahead. So, too, would xenophobia. In turn-of-the-century America, politicians and newspapers were quick to link terrorism to the recent arrival of a new generation of immigrants from politically troubled parts of the world, even when no such link existed. Highlighting Leon Czolgosz’s Polish parentage, for instance, hid the fact that the assassin had been born in the United States and led many people to believe that the United States was slowly being invaded by a revolutionary fifth column. Many American film-makers were happy to jump on this bandwagon though others were not, mainly because they feared it might hit their bottom line. Illiterate, non-Englishspeaking immigrants formed a disproportionately large part of the film-going audience in the United States during this period.9 The earliest surviving film dealing with the perceived threat to the American Way of Life posed by immigrant terrorist cells is The Voice of the Violin. Directed for the Biograph Company in 1909 by none other than D. W. Griffith, the legendary ‘Shakespeare of the screen’, The Voice of the Violin was a sixteen-minute melodrama made and set in New York. The Voice of the Violin was by no means a major project. Griffith dashed off some 450 films for Biograph between 1908 and 1913, more than one a week on average, across a range of genres that included contemporary street dramas and Westerns.10 Working at such speed required a film-maker to tell a story quickly and neatly, which more often than not meant fusing high drama

Such was the attraction of anarchist terrorism to American novelists in the 1880s and 1890s that even as apolitical a writer as Henry James penned The Princess Casamassima (1886), a story of a London bookbinder’s involvement in radical politics and an assassination plot. On this and other books of the period like it, see Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21–92 and Carr, Infernal Machine, 37–46, 52–57. 9 Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime – Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 301–424; Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds.), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999). 10 Cook, Narrative Film, 53–63. David Parkinson argues that through his work at Biograph Griffith ‘shaped the basic elements of film-making into a language and syntax that would serve cinema for over half a century’. David Parkinson, History of Film (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 23. 8

13

Cinematic Terror

with extreme stereotypes, and it is these aspects of The Voice of the Violin that make it so compellingly typical of the era. Herr Von Schmitt (played by Arthur Johnson), a poor, young music teacher who has recently moved to New York from Germany, is in love with one of his students, Helen (Marion Leonard). During a lesson in his tiny apartment one day, Von Schmitt tells Marion how he feels about her but learns that her father, a capitalist snob, won’t countenance his daughter marrying below her station. Angry and upset, Von Schmitt joins a group of anarchists – mostly fellow German immigrants – who espouse equality. When lots are drawn at his first meeting with the group, Von Schmitt finds he has volunteered to blow up a Manhattan businessman’s mansion. Von Schmitt is appalled but trapped into carrying out the bombing, not least because he has taken the group’s peculiar oath of allegiance. Later that day, Von Schmitt and his co-conspirator break into the mansion’s basement, place the bomb and light its long fuse. Just before leaving, however, Von Schmitt hears the melody of his own violin composition, being played by Helen upstairs – this is her father’s home! Realizing that the source of his misdirected anger at class differences is about to be killed, Von Schmitt struggles with his accomplice but is overpowered and tied up in the basement himself. With supernatural effort, Von Schmitt crawls towards the bomb and bites through the fuse with only seconds to spare. When the family finds him, they treat the teacher as a hero. Helen’s father is now more than happy for the two to be together – and everyone lives happily ever after. The Voice of the Violin is on one level a harmless, sentimental story of romance and redemption, capped by a typically Griffithian last-minute rescue. Early on in the film, Griffith brings out the tenderness Von Schmitt feels for Helen by skilfully capturing their body language as he shows her how to hold a violin bow. He then makes us laugh, as Helen tries several times to pull a shabby curtain across her nosy chaperone’s face so the couple can be alone. Griffith telegraphs large amounts of narrative and psychological information through the sets: simple décor for the immigrant teacher’s apartment; the cluttered opulence of a Manhattan brownstone for the rich businessman. Like Execution of Czolgosz, we have exterior and interior shots, with the added bonus this time of seeing terrorists ‘in action’: recruiting new members, initiating them in strange ceremonies, surveilling targets and deploying one of early cinema’s classically spherical bombs. On another level, The Voice of the Violin oozes political paranoia and treats anarchism and terrorism as something close to a depraved contagion. The terrorists in the film are given no backstory whatsoever and presented as a ragtag bunch of bearded firebrands, scruffy workers, mannish women with crazed stares and sinister, senior figures in dark robes and pointed hoods. The anarchists behave more like an underground cult than a political sect and either parrot utopian, pseudo-Marxist slogans proclaiming ‘Down with wealth’ or with outstretched arms pantomime their creed ‘No high, no low, but all equal’. Von Schmitt himself, an early example of the 14

Silent Revolutionaries

gullible celluloid ‘intellectual’ seduced into committing violence by clichéd, idealistic rhetoric, comes across as a fool duped into a dark, demented conspiracy. Unlike a great many films to come, The Voice of the Violin does at least hint of a motive for the terrorists’ actions by alluding to a real class structure in the United States. It even shows us an emaciated girl, one of society’s ‘have-nots’, who is paraded before the anarchists at their meeting like a laboratory specimen. At the same time, the film implies that class differences can be overcome simply by pluck or love, the corollary being that any political violence amounts to wrong-headed, alien extremism. In the end, while we don’t get to see the death and destruction the anarchists’ bomb would have caused, the film does show us how easily extremists will resort to killing people. Moreover, it gives us an early taste of the ‘guilty pleasure’ many filmgoers have presumably felt down the years at watching a fiendish terrorist plot almost reach its horrifying conclusion.11 While many American films like The Voice of the Violin defined political violence inside the United States as terrorism, and therefore immoral, paradoxically others often sympathized with very similar actions overseas. This was particularly the case if that violence took place in unreconstructed autocracies like Russia. From the early 1880s (when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated) through to the First World War, the heroic image of Russian nihilist terrorism exercised a peculiar magnetism in Europe, North America and Asia. At its height between 1905 and 1907, terrorist violence in the Russian empire aimed at overthrowing absolute monarchy claimed some 9000 lives, when soldiers, policemen, factory owners and suspected spies were shot, stabbed or blown up. Despite this death toll, these ‘terrorists of a new type’ (as historian Anna Geifman calls them) were celebrated as freedom fighters in some parts of the world, where their revolutionary activities found their way into romanticized books and magazine stories.12 In the decade before the First World War, film companies in several countries produced significant quantities of melodramas dramatizing the bravery of Russian nihilists violently challenging Tsarist repression. In the United States, for instance, to where a great many Russians had recently emigrated, including Jews fleeing antiSemitic pogroms, audiences were treated to ten-minute one-reelers like The Nihilists (Wallace McCutcheon, 1905), in which an aristocrat’s daughter in Russian Poland assassinates a Tsarist governor with a bomb following her father’s fatal deportation to Siberia. In My Official Wife (James Young, 1914), one of the early stars of the US screen, Clara Kimball Young, played the leader of a group of revolutionaries trying Steven Higgins, ‘The Voice of the Violin’, in Paolo Cherchi Usai (ed.), The Griffith Project, Vol. 2 (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 49–50; Porton, Anarchist Imagination, 17–18; The Bioscope, 11, 236, 20 April 1911, Review suppl. xv. The Voice of the Violin can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sJyQMxTSmaU (17 April 2013). 12 Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 123–153; Carr, Infernal Machine, 32–36. 11

15

Cinematic Terror

to kill the Tsar himself. This film later became famous owing to false rumours that the future leader of the Bolsheviks’ Red Army, Leon Trotsky, had appeared in it while visiting New York.13 Most of these films did not advertise themselves as explicitly political. Rather, terrorism was often being used here as an opportunity to put assaults on women and sadistic floggings on the screen – which accounts for so many female nihilists.14 Verisimilitude was rarely a director’s priority either. One wry reviewer thought the street scene shown at the opening of A Russian Heroine (1910), for instance, was ‘the funniest looking village imaginable. If the peasants of Russia are willing to live in a village of that sort they should be oppressed’.15 Such films still often managed to carry the right sort of politically patriotic message, however, by showing the nihilists’ desire to live in the United States, the so-called Land of Liberty. Some productions even equated Russia’s insurrectionists with the leaders of the American Revolution, though whether this meant the films were implying that men like George Washington were ‘good terrorists’ is highly unlikely.16 Inside Russia itself, during the last years of Tsarism, cinema was heavily censored by the government and Orthodox Church. Any films showing ‘agitational activity’ or strikes were prohibited. Despite these restrictions, surprisingly a small number of films were made in Russia defending anti-state violence. Most of these seem to have been financed in fact by foreign companies like the French giants Pathé and Gaumont, which had opened production studios in Russia in order to cut costs via cheap labour or to expand audiences. The Dawn of the Russian Revolution, which lasted thirty-eight minutes and was made for export to France just before the Great War started, is among the best known of these films. This was an early example of the depiction of what nowadays would be defined as state terrorism, via the harrowing story of a Russian nihilist who is tortured by the Tsar’s secret police and left to die in a Siberian labour camp. The nihilist’s wife was played by Vera Baranovskaya, best known for her moving role in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s classic revolutionary fable Mother (1926).17 Elsewhere in Europe, few film-makers offered nihilists and anarchists much sympathy. On the rare occasion that Denmark’s Nordisk Film, the second-largest film

Variety, 17 July 1914, 17; Moving Picture World, 16 December 1916, 1347; Brownlow, Behind the Mask, 353–359. 14 John Collins’ The Cossack Whip (1916) marks the apotheosis of this sort of anti-tsarist film. In it, an evil Cossack, who has earlier whipped a woman before leaving her to die in the snow, is shackled and similarly flogged by the dead woman’s avenging sister. A guard-turned-revolutionary then kills him. Motion Picture News, 16 December 1916, 3843; Variety, 17 November 1916, 26. 15 DASH, ‘A Russian Heroine’, 29 January 1910, Variety Film Reviews, 1907–1920, Volume One (New York: Garland, 1983), unpaged. The director of A Russian Heroine is unknown. 16 Brownlow, Behind the Mask, 353–355, 358. 17 Jay Leyda, Kino (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 48–49, 68; Birgit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (London: Berg, 2009), 8, 11. 13

16

Silent Revolutionaries

company in Europe by 1914 after France’s Pathé, broke its own self-denying ordinance on portraying revolutionary violence on screen it condemned it outright. In Death Flight, for instance, directed by Eduard Schnedler-Sorensen in 1911, audiences delighted in watching evil nihilists being routed by a brave aristocrat. Often, whenever a likeable character looked about to commit an act of terrorism, he would suddenly, like Von Schmitt in The Voice of the Violin, see the error of his ways. In the climax to The Anarchist, directed by the Irish-born film-maker Herbert Brenon in France in 1913, the terrorist (played by the renowned American actor King Baggot) is on the verge of hurling two bombs into a crowd. When he hears sweet music, played, as fate would have it, by a little girl to whom he had previously given his prized horn, the revolutionary hands himself into the authorities.18 Despite the fear and revulsion aroused by anarchist, nihilist and nationalist violence in the run-up to Great War, some film-makers also saw terrorism as a source of comedy. The madcap bomber-cum-anarchist was a staple figure in the Keystone Cops and other comedy series made in Hollywood during this period. Charlie Chaplin’s 1916 farce Behind the Screen saw striking stagehands blowing up a film set.19 One of Nordisk’s earliest successes was The Anarchist’s Mother-in-Law, directed by and starring the prolific Viggo Larsen in 1906. This was a slapstick comedy set around a philandering anarchist being chased by his mother-in-law (played by a man in drag) after he is seen flirting with the housemaid. Like so many other films of this era, The Anarchist’s Mother-in-Law could not resist presenting anarchists as cheats and crazed bombers. It finished with the mother-in-law being blown up by dynamite.20 The burgeoning British film industry seems to have developed a particular taste for comedies starring anarchists during this era. Some of these, like the Burns Film Company’s George Robey Turns Anarchist (1914), which starred the eponymous music-hall comic trying to blow up Parliament, were satirically edged and could be linked to reports of recent (and historic) terrorist attacks on London’s famous landmarks. Other films were rather more bizarre and suggested that in some circles anarchism was a byword for odious sexual deviancy. In Walturdaw’s The Anarchist and His Dog (1907), an Englishman bravely saves a woman from a bearded foreigner’s

Isak Thorsen, ‘ “We Had to Be Careful”: The Self-Imposed Regulations, Alterations and Censorship Strategies of Nordisk Films Kompagni 1911–1928’, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, 19, 2010, 112–126, http://www.scancan.net/article.htm?id=thorsen_1_19 (12 April 2013); Jack Lodge, ‘Herbert Brenon – Filmography’, Griffithiana, 57–58, October 1996, 122–133, 151; John Wakeman (ed.), World Film Directors: Volume I – 1890–1945 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987), 50–55. 19 Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Los Angeles: California University Press, 2008); Theodore Huff, ‘The Classic Mutual Comedies’, in Richard Dyer MacCann (ed.), The Silent Comedians (London: Scarecrow, 1993), 88–89. Charlie Chaplin became one of Hollywood’s first major movie stars between 1913 and 1916. On what some have seen as Chaplin’s own unique brand of ‘innocent utopian socialism’, see Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11–50. 20 Motion Picture World, 6 April 1907, 80; Motion Picture World, 20 April 1907, 112. 18

17

Cinematic Terror

attempts to rape her in a park in broad daylight. In the following scene, when the lunatic tries to exact revenge on the couple by killing them with a home-made bomb, the terrorist gets his comeuppance. His faithful dog retrieves the bomb, chases his master all the way to his bomb factory and unwittingly despatches him to hell.21 Naturally, during a period in which Britain experienced its own fair share of violent anarchist incidents, the British film industry did not treat terrorism entirely as a subject for mirth. When two anarchist burglars fought a gun battle with 700 policemen and a unit of military marksmen, watched by Home Secretary Winston Churchill, in the East End of London in January 1911, the newsreel companies were there to record it. As a result, the so-called Siege of Sidney Street was a rare early example of genuine ‘breaking news’ (as opposed to pre-scheduled events or footage shot after the event) captured on film.22 Cinemagoers got to see the more serious side of terrorism in fictional dramas, too. Walter Booth’s Aerial Anarchists (1911) owed more than a little to E. Douglass Fawcett’s celebrated 1893 book, Hartmann the Anarchist: Or, the Doom of a Great City, which was about international anarchists attacking London in airships loaded with ‘infernal machines’. Yet Aerial Anarchists is noteworthy for forming part of the first science fiction film series made in Britain. Trick photography showed the anarchists, who wanted to crush the British Empire, using a giant-flying machine to obliterate St. Paul’s Cathedral and other London landmarks. ‘The scenes showing the destruction of St. Paul’s, the symbolic heart of London, must have had considerable impact on the unsophisticated cinema audiences of 1911’, writes historian Michael Paris, ‘adding a new and “realistic” dimension’ to the popular, bellicose literature of the time’. Aerial Anarchists can be seen as early evidence of film-makers’ ability to marry terrorism with images of mass destruction.23 More fascinating still is Alexander Butler’s The Anarchist’s Doom, released in 1913. Almost half an hour in length, this drama appears to be one of the longest films explicitly about terrorism made anywhere to date. Set in London, its plot centres on an anarchist group’s devious efforts to acquire a scientist’s secret formula for a new explosive, a test tube of which, one shot of a newspaper report informs us, ‘is sufficient to destroy the largest building in the city’. When the scientist refuses to sell his invention to the group’s mastermind, the bearded, Spanish-sounding Sardios (played by one of Britain’s best-known actors of the silent age, Fred Paul), he is first drugged and then murdered. On these two films, and where The Anarchist and His Dog can be viewed, see Simon Baker, ‘The Anarchist and His Dog’, BFI screenonline http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1114493/index.html (17 April 2013); http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150020836 (17 April 2013). 22 Bryony Dixon, ‘The Great East End Anarchist Battle’, BFI screenonline http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ film/id/716188/index.html (11 September 2013); British Pathé, ‘London – Sidney Street Siege 1911’ http:// www.britishpathe.com/video/london-sidney-street-siege (12 September 2013). 23 Bioscope, 13, 262, 19 October 1911, 145; Houen, Modern Literature, 30–32; Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000), 100–101. 21

18

Silent Revolutionaries

The Anarchist’s Doom goes to great lengths to reveal the trappings of the secret anarchist society: its cavernous den beneath a run-down bar, strange greetings and diabolical plans. Yet it is the role played by the scientist’s widow Mary (Blanche Forsyth) that really makes the film stand out. Determined to avenge her husband’s death, Mary brazenly seduces Sardios and then agrees to marry him only if she is allowed to join his society. The terrorist falls for the trap and the film is set up for a dramatic denouement. When the time is right, at the society’s general meeting, Mary enters the den and blows everyone up – herself included – using her husband’s invention hidden inside a handbag. The result is a massacre, with up to a dozen anarchists’ bodies piled on top of one another amid the smoking debris. The final images are of Mary’s bloodied body being dug out of the timbers and bricks by the police. This is a remarkable scene and just might be the first portrayal of suicidal counterterrorism ever shot.24 The closer we get to the outbreak of the First World War, the more the cinema of terrorism began to merge with another developing genre, the spy film. This was especially the case in those countries that formed Europe’s secret yet rickety alliance system, where fears of foreign invasion, lethal weaponry and enemy intelligence networks could easily be linked to the ‘threat’ posed by immigration and domestic subversion. As war fever and xenophobia increased after 1910, it was easy for the public to see aliens as anarchists, and anarchists, in turn, as spies. Sometimes, filmmakers could give the public a helping hand. In 1913, Alexander Butler directed Fred Paul and Blanche Forsyth again, in O. H. M. S. This time, Paul, minus the beard, played a German spy stealing military secrets from a British naval officer. Once again, Forsyth killed him, on this occasion with the spy’s own gun. At the very least, O. H. M. S. suggests that film-makers could be highly opportunistic when it came to depicting politics on the screen.25 During the Great War itself, a conflict triggered by what Charles Townsend calls ‘the culminating act of the first age of terrorism’,26 the assassination by Yugoslav nationalists of the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, spy films flourished. A bevy of images of showing ‘enemy agents’ stealing military plans and sabotaging nations’ defences on the one hand indicated that terrorism had been superseded by a greater threat. On the other hand, given the extent to which they leant on pre-war films about terrorism, these images may well have blurred the Rachael Low, The History of British Film: Volume II – 1906–1914 (London: Routledge, 1997), 274; Simon Baker, ‘The Anarchist’s Doom’, BFI screenonline http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1114528/index .html (17 April 2013), where the film can be viewed. 25 Wesley K. Wark (ed.), Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 1991); Simon Baker, ‘O. H. M. S.’, BFI screenonline http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1114362/ (11 September 2013), where the film can be viewed; Simon Baker, ‘Early Spy Films’, BFI screenonline http://www.screenonline .org.uk/film/id/1114408/index.html (11 September 2013). O. H. M. S. stood for ‘On His Majesty’s Service’. 26 Townshend, Short History, 60. 24

19

Cinematic Terror

boundaries between espionage and terrorism still further. What is certain is the war showed film-makers that there was a lucrative market for political intrigue, if dealt with in an appropriate, entertaining fashion. The world’s first ‘total war’ also saw governments use propaganda, including via the movies, on a scale never seen before. Opening propaganda’s Pandora’s Box, as some historians have called it, left a lasting legacy for the media and terrorism alike.27 Even before the Great War had ended, another conflict had started, one that would see terrorism’s meaning on screen shifting slightly again. In the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a new, cultural Cold War between Soviet Communism and Western capitalism began. Before long, each side was accusing one another of what it called ideological and industrial terrorism. Film-makers played a central role in what would turn out to be a gargantuan battle for hearts and minds over the next seventy years, especially between what became known as the East and the West after 1945. This extraordinarily long cinematic Cold War formed an important backdrop to and framing device for celluloid terrorism right up until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.28 A number of the very earliest Bolshevik movies equated capitalist economic and industrial sabotage with terrorism. The most influential was The Project of Engineer Prite (1918), a production that helped to lay the very foundations of Soviet film aesthetics. Prite was directed by one of the giants of the Soviet avant-garde, Lev Kuleshov, and was set in the United States. It told the story of a young working-class engineer, Mack Prite, whose new invention, a revolutionary hydro-turbine, threatens the capitalists’ monopoly on electricity production. The aristocratic director of a transnational oil trust is, together with other business leaders, prepared to go to any lengths to destroy Prite’s invention, not least because the egalitarian-minded engineer drinks and shakes hands with the workers in his new electric station in a genuinely socialist manner. The film ends happily and triumphantly. The capitalist saboteurs are caught, Prite’s electric station is run by a workers’ collective and the working-class hero gets his girl, the oil trust director’s pretty daughter.29 For their part, many American anti-Bolshevik movies made during the First Red Scare of 1918–1920 presented the newly formed Communist Party of the United States as nothing less than a front for terrorism, extortion and even rape. Fred Niblo’s Dangerous Hours (1920), which centred on a New York shipyard strike

Alan R. Booth, ‘The Development of the Espionage Film’, Intelligence and National Security, 5, 4, October 1990, 136–138; Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 176–197. 28 Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010). 29 Nikolai Izvolov and Natascha Drubek-Meyer, ‘Annotations for the Hyperkino Edition of Lev Kuleshov’s Engineer Prite’s Project (1918), Academia Series, Ruscico, 2010’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 4, 1, 2010, 65–93; Beumers, Russian Cinema, 34–35. The film (with Russian inter-titles) can be viewed at http:// www.filmannex.com/movie/the-project-of-engineer-prite/25705 (3 December 2013). 27

20

Silent Revolutionaries

and boasted tremendous mob scenes, is perhaps the most notorious of these lurid melodramas. Less well known are documentaries like Starvation (1920). Supported by the US government and made by navy photographer George Zimmer, Starvation manipulated harrowing, real-life footage of a hungry, unemployed, desolated postrevolutionary Russia to prove that Bolshevism amounted to, as the film’s chief financier put it, ‘an after the war terror’ that threatened to carry a deadly disease across Europe.30 Arguably the most imaginative and effective American film that twinned Bolshevism and terrorism during this period – and the final film to be looked at in this opening chapter – is D. W. Griffith’s feature-length historical epic made in 1921, Orphans of the Storm. So far in this chapter, all the films we have looked at focused on the subject of terrorism more or less directly. Orphans of the Storm shows us that if we want to appreciate the history of cinematic terrorism fully, we must also take into account those films that have treated the subject obliquely. Appropriately for the architect of The Birth of a Nation (1915), the world’s first feature-length ‘blockbuster’, D. W. Griffith took cinemagoers back to the very birth of modern terrorism with Orphans of the Storm. Orphans was a lavish costume drama set around the French Revolution. It starred Lillian Gish, ‘the supreme actress of the silent cinema’,31 as Henriette Girard, an innocent young woman who brings her ailing sister Louise (Dorothy Gish) to Paris in the hope of finding a cure for her blindness. When Henriette is abducted by the lecherous Marquis de Praille, Louise is left helpless in the city and forced into begging by a family of thieves. A dashing, kind aristocrat, Chevalier de Vaudrey, helps Henriette escape and the two fall in love. In the eyes of evil, fanatical revolutionaries like Robespierre, this makes Henriette a friend of the nobility and therefore ‘an enemy of the people’. Amidst the Reign of Terror, in which hundreds are guillotined, Henriette narrowly escapes execution only with the help of Robespierre’s moderate, democratic rival, Danton. In the end, the sisters are miraculously reunited and a doctor restores Louise’s sight. Henriette marries de Vaudrey and France is restored to some sort of peace. As might be expected given that Griffith was the most famous film-maker in the world during this period, Orphans of the Storm probably made more at the box office in the United States and overseas than all of the films we have looked at so far put together. With its innovative use of monochromic filters and fade-ins to accentuate the class divisions in eighteenth-century France, the film was seen as yet another example of Griffith’s enormous talent for expressive storytelling. Though some critics at the time categorized Orphans as an overtly political film, it is unlikely many ordinary viewers did. This is not to say they were not influenced politically by the film, however.

Motion Picture World, 14 February 1920, 971, 1116; Brownlow, Behind the Mask, 445–448, 453–457. Philip Kemp, ‘Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish’, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Oxford History, 40–41.

30 31

21

Cinematic Terror

Orphans of the Storm is not a one-dimensional reactionary film. Indeed, its indictment of aristocracy caused alarm among right-wingers in France and Japan while drawing plaudits in the Soviet Union.32 Nonetheless, key scenes and inter-titles in Orphans of the Storm draw clear, ugly comparisons between Jacobin terrorism back in the 1790s and contemporary events in Russia. Not all revolutions are bad, the film says, but many can end up producing anarchy and mob terrorism. Legitimate calls for equality and progress, when combined with violence, can pave the way for dictators like Robespierre/Lenin, who utilize terrorism as a state weapon. That weapon is wholly indiscriminate and victimizes ‘politically blind’ innocents like Louise and Henriette. In one sense, Orphans was a speculative sequel to The Voice of the Violin, showing us what might happen if that film’s motley crew of anarchists got power. In another sense, the film served as a far more serious warning to Americans not to follow Russia’s all too real lead down the road to socialism and become a ‘terrorist state’.33 Revolutionary terrorists continued to appear on celluloid during the remaining years of the silent era but far less frequently than during the previous two decades. As we have seen, the First World War did ignite a Cold War between capitalism and Communism. It also sparked anti-colonial terrorism in countries like Ireland, as we shall see later. Overall, however, the Great War had the effect of pushing terrorism onto the margins of political rhetoric and action, and in the Roaring Twenties a number of countries, including some of those with the largest film industries, experienced, on the surface at least, a fair degree of economic and political stability. The 1930s tells a very different story, of course, which we will look at in the next chapter. Before we do that, it is worth assessing what our survey of silent cinema’s treatment of terrorism has told us. It is clear, first of all, that terrorism and film enjoyed a close relationship during cinema’s formative years. Film-makers in several countries saw terrorism as a way to make money and entertainment from the outset, branching out over time across a range of genres including melodrama and comedy. It is apparent, secondly, that the first generation of film-makers behaved more like

William M. Drew, ‘D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm: A Re-evaluation’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 18, 2, April 1990, 76–86, especially 81–82. Vladimir Lenin was a great admirer of Griffith’s work. When, in 1919, the Soviet leader saw Griffith’s monumental Intolerance (1916), the fourth part of which depicted the tragedies of working-class life in the United States, he arranged to have it shown throughout Russia. Lenin then tried, through an intermediary, to persuade Griffith to take charge of the Soviet film industry. Though Griffith declined the offer, his work (including Orphans of the Storm) made a great impact on a number of the USSR’s finest film-makers, including Sergei Eisenstein. Leyda, Kino, 142–143; Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 63, 200; Iris Barry and Eileen Bowser, D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 35, n. 11. 33 On Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s 1983 film Danton, another version of the French Revolution that spoke about contemporary politics and the meaning of terrorism, see Chapter 3. 32

22

Silent Revolutionaries

fascinated magpies, stealing plots and themes from newspapers and novels, than fully creative artists. Presumably they thought this was a safer route to box-office success. Underlying this approach was a cautiousness that, when combined with the political conservatism of the film industries’ bosses and local censors, had the effect of portraying the terrorist as the quintessential agent of chaos, as a danger not only to the political establishment but to society as a whole. At same time, cinema began during this early era to flex its ‘visual muscles’ as regards terrorism. It is not so much that films engaged with terrorism in ways that other media could not during the silent era and more that films could show people what terrorism was. Thanks to the movie camera, audiences could see that revolutionary terrorists were at best naïve fools and at worst crazed predators. They could watch – and be entertained by – terrorists plotting murder and mayhem. And they could witness with their own eyes how revolutionary terrorism, if allowed to succeed, ruined ordinary people’s lives. For many people during cinema’s formative years, seeing was believing. What silent cinema did not show was the politics behind terrorism. Films defined terrorists as violent revolutionaries but none explained why they wanted a revolution or saw violence as an important or necessary tool to achieve it. Terrorist protagonists did take centre stage on occasions – cinema’s emphasis on the individual required this – but films rarely if ever told a story from the terrorists’ perspective. This imbalance can be put down to several factors, including the exigencies of screen entertainment, the restrictions and demands of the silent medium and political self-regulation and censorship. Whatever the cause, the upshot is that early cinema effectively silenced the terrorist, depriving him and her of a real voice and identifying terrorism as a modern abhorrence in the process. To what extent, if at all, this changed when ‘talking pictures’ came to the screen will be looked at in the chapters ahead.

23

CHAPTER 2 AGENTS OF SUSPENSE

The camera focuses on a smiling, innocent face. Stevie’s having the time of his life. An awkward twelve-year-old schoolboy who lives at the back of a grubby cinema in London’s East End, he’s been given the responsibility of delivering an important package all the way across town. Stevie’s having to make the trip on foot. Among the things he’s carrying are two canisters of inflammable nitrate film which cannot be taken on public transport for safety reasons. Stevie knows he’s got a deadline to make – ‘Piccadilly Circus, by 1.30 at the latest’, the cinema manager told him that morning – but he’s only a child and as he walks the streets of London there’s so much to see and do. Anyway, it’s not his fault when he gets delayed by a hawker who insists on using him as a cosmetics guinea pig. The crowd laughs uproariously when the loquacious salesman pours a bottle of hair tonic down Stevie’s neck and the boy’s teeth are clumsily scrubbed clean with Salvodon, ‘the very latest in dental hygiene’. And it isn’t every day a poor Eastender gets the chance to watch the glittering Lord Mayor’s Parade on The Strand. There’s only one problem. Inside Stevie’s package is a bomb. Manufactured by a shady international organization and designed to wreak havoc on London’s Underground subway system, it is timed to explode at 1.45. Stevie doesn’t know this but the cinema audience assuredly does. As Stevie ambles away from the Lord Mayor’s Parade, a sinister X-ray view of the bomb’s mechanism shows us that time is nearly up. It’s already 1.30 and Stevie is still a long way from his destination. When, finally, he decides to save time by hopping aboard one of London’s iconic red buses bound for Piccadilly Circus, the terrible race is on. The tension is unbearable; the suspense gripping. As we see ever-shorter, accelerating, cross-cutting shots of Stevie keeping a tight hold on the package, of his shoulder being nibbled by an old lady’s cute puppy, of the bus getting held up in traffic jams and of time ticking away on a variety of roadside clock faces, the music builds to a crescendo. Surely someone or something will come to the rescue, as cinematic convention demands? But it does not. At 1.45, the bomb goes off. The noise of the explosion is deafening. Mercifully, the bomb’s horrendous effects are mostly hidden from view and left to the audience’s imagination. The shock to the audience’s senses is nonetheless overwhelming. Having been lifted off the road by the force of the explosion, we can see that the bus is now a mangled wreck. Inside it, a blaze rages, the fire doubtless enhanced by the nitrate film that Stevie was taking such good care of. Poor Stevie

Agents of Suspense

and all the others aboard the bus didn’t stand a chance. They will either have burned to death or been blown to pieces. This is cold-blooded murder – and cinematic terrorism in the raw. Though it is now almost eighty years old, Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage still packs a punch. For the bus-bombing sequence alone, the movie is remarkable. No film made before it had dared to depict so graphically the chaos inflicted on innocent people by the indiscriminate actions of political extremists. But there are other reasons why Hitchcock’s 1936 thriller-cum-melodrama ranks as the world’s first fully fledged terrorist feature film. No movie made up to that point could claim to have captured the detailed reality of a terrorist group’s modus operandi as convincingly as Sabotage. No film before it had prompted fears that real-life activists might actually copy the terrorist techniques revealed on screen. Equally, no film before Sabotage had so clearly demonstrated the premium that film-makers placed on the visually spectacular, ‘criminal’ actions of terrorists rather than their motives. In these and other ways, Sabotage anticipated and even inspired many other terrorism movies to come, which is why the film forms the basis of our first case study. The origins of Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage lie amidst two developments that would have a profound and lasting effect on global politics and culture: the birth of cinema’s sound era and the build-up to the Second World War. In October 1927, the Hollywood studio Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson pronounced the immortal line ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’ with more or less perfect synchronization between his lips in the film and his voice recorded in parallel on a disc. A new age of cinema had begun, and with it the ability of film-makers to capture people’s hearts and minds via image and synchronized sound. Exactly two years later, in October 1929, the Wall Street Crash put an end to the Roaring Twenties and heralded a long period of deep economic and political instability throughout the world. As many countries lurched from one existential crisis to another, film-makers found themselves increasingly drawn into the political fray, with some of them linking entertainment to the most noxious forms of nationalistic propaganda. Even those who did not do this nonetheless fully appreciated how sound technology had strengthened cinema’s already immense powers of persuasion.1 As the 1930s progressed and silent movies gave way to ‘the talkies’ virtually everywhere, the spectre of terrorism returned to the big screen, particularly in Europe. This phenomenon was fostered primarily by the polarization of European politics and by the open commitment of governments in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to external aggression, subversion and internal repressive On the early sound era, and its relationship to politics, see Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Sound Cinema 1930–1960, Introduction’, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Oxford History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 207–210; Cook, Narrative Film, 205–238; Nicholas Pronay and D. W. Spring (eds.), Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1982). 1

25

Cinematic Terror

violence. It was also caused by outbreaks of ethnic and anti-colonial violence in the Middle East – which, as shall see, affected the distribution of Hitchcock’s Sabotage – and a resurgence of racial discord and attacks on immigrants in the Depression-hit United States. One Hollywood film which powerfully tapped into this latter development and that showed how the American film industry’s definition of terrorism had changed somewhat since the First World War era was Black Legion. Named after a clandestine organization held to be responsible for the murder of a factory worker in Michigan in 1935, Black Legion was directed by Archie Mayo for Warner Bros. in 1937. The movie starred Humphrey Bogart as a brutal racist and effectively accused white supremacist groups in the United States of conducting secret ‘reigns of terror’ against African Americans and foreigners. Warner Bros. had a reputation in right-wing quarters for pedalling liberal propaganda during this era and so it is not surprising that the Ku Klux Klan tried to sue the studio for Black Legion’s use of patented Klan insignia. Progressive educational associations responded to this by distributing study guides that encouraged people to see Black Legion as a documentary about the threat of fascism in the United States.2 Terrorism also made a screen comeback in the 1930s due to the furore caused by single terrorist outrages. The assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia by Croat and Macedonian nationalists in the French city of Marseilles in October 1934 was by far the most important of these. If Edwin Porter’s Execution of Czolgosz back in 1901 had been the first docu-drama depicting a terrorist’s death, King Alexander’s shooting was the first political murder to be actually filmed live. For weeks if not years after the event, newsreel images of Alexander’s gruesome death captivated and appalled audiences across the world. The notoriety of the assassination, combined with its filmed coverage, helped lead to the first attempt to establish an international convention against terrorism by the League of Nations in 1937. The convention, which defined terrorism as a new form of supranational crime against the state and whose techniques included sabotage, assassination, the use of explosives and the procurement of weapons, was never ratified.3 Hitchcock’s Sabotage appeared on cinema screens in the midst of both this terrorist revival and a spy mania in mid- to late 1930s Europe. Indeed, the film fused these two phenomena perfectly. As we saw in Chapter 1, espionage, and its concomitant, subversion, had first developed into popular cinematic subjects during ‘The Black Legion’, Motion Picture Herald, 9 January 1937; ‘ “Black Legion”: Powerful Melodrama’, Hollywood Reporter, 5 January 1937; ‘Black Legion Study Guide’, US Commission on Human Relations, Progressive Educational Association, in Black Legion Core File, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles (AMPAS). 3 Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel 1911–1967 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 178–179; Ben Saul, ‘The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 4, 1, March 2006, 78–102; Carr, Infernal Machine, 58–59. For the sensational reporting of King Alexander’s assassination by the American newsreel company Universal, see https://archive .org/details/1934-10-17_King_Alexander_Assassination (17 April 2013). 2

26

Agents of Suspense

the era of the First World War, when it often glamourized an otherwise disturbing theme. The renowned Austrian producer/director Fritz Lang made the first true espionage feature, as opposed to adventures, romances or comedies on the spy motif, in 1928 with Spies, but it was in 1930s Britain that the genre really flourished, drawing principally on threats to far-flung parts of its empire and fears of another war with Germany.4 Having been rejuvenated by sound, British cinema was at the height of its influence and creativity during this era. There were a remarkable 903 million cinema admissions registered by the British film industry in 1934, for instance, a statistic that underlines historian A. J. P. Taylor’s well-worn phrase that film-going was ‘the essential social habit of the age’.5 Britain was the biggest film producer in Europe in the 1930s, with a sophisticated, ready-made global distribution network courtesy of the empire. Two studios dominated production during this era, Associated British Picture Corporation and Gaumont-British. Led by production chief Michael Balcon, often called the father of the British film industry, Gaumont-British produced highbudget, quality movies aimed at breaking into the US market and establishing Britain’s credentials in the international film industry. Alfred Hitchcock was Balcon’s standout protégé and Gaumont-British’s star director. Hitchcock was, unusually, allowed considerable control of the production of his films at Gaumont-British. This reflected the experience and skills Hitchcock had accumulated by working in Germany in the 1920s before crafting Britain’s first sound feature in 1929, Blackmail, and his status as Britain’s preeminent director of the period.6 It was Hitchcock, of course, who became known as the master director of spy films during the 1930s and beyond, when he plied his trade in Hollywood. In a series of movies stretching from the run-up to the Second World War to the height of the Cold War – The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Notorious (1946), North by Northwest (1959), Torn Curtain (1966) – Hitchcock established himself as the nonpareil of creativity in all aspects of film-making, from casting, staging and editing to nearly every imaginable audio and visual technique, and the crowning genius of sophisticated humour, suspense and cleverly plotted espionage. Hitchcock’s agent heroes were invariably independent amateurs drawn accidentally into thwarting the subversive schemes of totalitarian regimes. In a very loose sense, these heroes appear to have reflected Hitchcock’s own political views.7

G. O’Brien, ‘Fritz Lang’s Spies: Now and Forever’, Film Comment, 31, 4, 1995, 66–69; Booth, ‘Espionage Film’, 138. 5 Beat Brupbacher, ‘Unmasking Alfred Hitchcock: A Study of Selected Films in their Context from Murder! (1930) to Marnie (1964)’, unpublished D. Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1992, 56; A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 392. 6 Tom Ryall, ‘A British Studio System: The Associated British Picture Corporation and Gaumont-British’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2005), 35–42. 7 Booth, ‘Espionage Film’, 140; Tom Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (New York: Continuum, 1996). 4

27

Cinematic Terror

Film historians have a habit of bracketing Sabotage with Hitchcock’s other classic espionage thrillers of the 1930s, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and those mentioned earlier. Yet Sabotage contrasts sharply with these films in many respects, not least because of its greater level of violence, its comparative lack of humour (one critic has called Sabotage Hitchcock’s ‘most savagely bleak film up until Psycho’)8 and its focus not on spying but on the machinations and powerful consequences of terrorism. Significantly, Hitchcock chose to focus on this subject through the prism of sabotage, a highly manipulable term (as Chapter 3 will show), like terrorism, but which had come to represent a sensational threat to national security in 1930s Britain. During that decade, the nation’s security service, MI5, regarded sabotage as the most serious subversive threat in time of war and was particularly nervous about attacks by Communists on Britain’s energy and transport infrastructure. Evidence of wider British anxieties about sabotage and terrorism can be found in numerous parliamentary debates and in novels of the period like Hammond Innes’ Sabotage Broadcast.9 Sabotage was adapted from a far better known novel than Innes’, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which had been published back in 1907. Described by the American author Tom Reiss after 9/11 as ‘the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside’,10 The Secret Agent is the morally and politically complex story of a group of spies, anarchists and agents-provocateurs plotting and counter-plotting in the back streets of London in the 1880s. The novel centres on Verloc, a seedy bookshop owner, phony-anarchist and double-agent, who, on the orders of his paymasters in the Tsarist Russian embassy, becomes embroiled in an ambitious terrorist plan to bomb the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park. The Russian government is lobbying for an international treaty on terrorism (akin, in a way, to that constructed by the League of Nations in 1937) and hopes that the public outrage caused by the Greenwich atrocity will force Britain’s liberal government to J. Hoberman, ‘Double Agents’, Village Voice, 12 November 1996, 69. The suspense-horror film Psycho was released in 1960. In Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), Dan Auiler calls Sabotage Hitchcock’s darkest film after his 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo (457). 9 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 161, 177; Hammond Innes, Sabotage Broadcast (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1938). A search for the word ‘sabotage’ in the electronic version of Hansard, the official report of debates in the British Houses of Parliament, finds 289 hits for the 1930s compared with 52 for the 1920s and 557 for the 1940s. The word ‘terrorism’ finds 406 hits in the 1900s, 382 in the 1910s, 564 in the 1920s and 661 in the 1930s, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ search/sabotage and http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/search/terrorism (3 November 2011). Sabotage carried the death penalty in Britain throughout this period. 10 Tom Reiss, ‘The True Classic of Terrorism’, New York Times, 11 September 2005, http://www.nytimes .com/2005/09/11/books/review/11reiss.html?ref=josephconrad&_r=0 (18 April 2013). 11 On 15 February 1894, French anarchist Martial Bourdin was killed when a bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park. The incident was considered by many to be part of the first modern-day terrorist plot in Britain. Mary Burgoyne, ‘Conrad among the Anarchists: Documents on Martial Bourdin and the Greenwich Bombing’, in Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape (eds.), The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 147–185. 8

28

Agents of Suspense

back Moscow’s diplomatic efforts and stop émigré socialists and anarchists using London as a base for their terrorist attacks on Russia.11 Significantly, Conrad was more interested in the psychology than the mechanics of terrorism and directed scorn at both the anarchists and police agents that inhabited the murkier side of late Victorian European politics. His characters and scenarios foreshadowed many fictional and real-life types and terrorist incidents of the next century. Chief among these was Verloc’s intellectually disabled brother-inlaw Stevie, who is killed when employed by Verloc to carry out the terrorist attack at Greenwich, and the Professor, the book’s arch theorist of terrorism who straps home-made explosives to his body. Subplots involved some terrorists blowing up themselves accidentally and others speaking of the virtues of dying through political action.12 When a book is adapted for the screen it will inevitably change in one form or another.13 Yet the process by which The Secret Agent morphed into Sabotage has a lot to tell us about cinematic terrorism’s characteristics during and beyond the 1930s. Underlying this process – and alluded to in Chapter 1 – is the issue of censorship. Whereas some countries, like Sweden and Germany, had established a system of state film censorship by the eve of the First World War, Britain, like the United States, had opted for self-regulation.14 In theory, a system which allowed film-makers to decide for themselves what could and could not be produced was more liberal and increased the opportunities film-makers had for political debate, including the definition of terrorism. In practice, the organization set up in Britain (in 1912) to adjudicate on matters of censorship, the British Board of Film Censors, proved to be morally and politically deeply conservative. The BBFC’s members, who were often retired civil servants or military men with experience of counter-subversion operations, liaised regularly with government ministers and put a red line through any script they deemed ‘controversial’. The BBFC effectively banned any strikers, mutineers or guerrillas being depicted as heroes, any ‘subjects calculated or possibly intended to foment social unrest or discontent’ and any stories that could upset foreign governments.15 Hence the Board’s rejection of two Gaumont-British scripts in 1933, one titled ‘Sabotage’ and the other ‘OGPU’, that focused on alleged British sabotage in the Soviet Union. The fact that Sabotage made it onto the big screen at all indicates that the BBFC was loosening its restrictions On the content, context and influence of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, see Houen, Modern Literature, 34– 92; Leonard Orr and Ted Billy (eds.), A Joseph Conrad Companion (New Haven, CT: Greenwood, 1999); Simmons and Stape (eds.), Secret Agent. 13 On the broad issue of adaptation see, for instance, Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner (eds.), True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Screen Cinema: Impure Adaptation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the Christ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 14 James Chapman, Cinemas of the World (London: Reaktion, 2003), 67–71. 15 Jeffrey Richards, ‘British Film Censorship’, in Murphy, British Cinema, 155–162; Pronay and Spring (eds.), Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–1945, 98–125. 12

29

Cinematic Terror

somewhat in the mid-1930s. All the same, Gaumont-British can have been under no illusions about the far-reaching changes it needed to make to The Secret Agent for it to pass the censors’ ‘controversy’ test.16 Hitchcock’s interest in Conrad’s The Secret Agent pre-dated the 1930s. The director had been one of the few people to catch Conrad’s own adaptation of the novel for the London stage in 1922.17 Hitchcock began script work on Sabotage with Charles Bennett and Ivor Montagu in early 1936, while on holiday in Switzerland. Bennett was a prolific, apolitical playwright-turned-screenwriter who had already collaborated with Hitchcock on several spy films, including The 39 Steps. Montagu, Sabotage’s associate producer, was by contrast a well-known Communist who combined working in the commercial cinema sector with making low-budget, leftwing documentaries. Evidence suggests that Montagu was a Soviet agent in Britain during if not before the Second World War and both this and his Communist affiliation may help explain the scripts’ anti-Nazi hints. By the end of February 1936, Sabotage’s dialogue had been completed by two more experienced screenwriters, Ian Hay, who between 1938 and 1941 would be Director of Public Relations at the War Office, and Helen Simpson.18 It is apparent from these early scripts how much importance this richly creative team of film-makers attached to action and suspense and to the need to alter the social and political messages of The Secret Agent. Unlike Conrad, Hitchcock and his associates were not at all interested in a revolutionary politics gone wrong, or its attendant ironies. Instead of looking into the nature of terrorism, their focus was on creating a startling example of its practice. Thus, whereas Conrad’s novel never actually dramatized the bombing at Greenwich (confining it to a dream passage), Sabotage pushed its bombing sequence to the very centre of events. By relocating the bombing from Greenwich in the south of London to Piccadilly Circus in the heart of the city’s West End, the film also made it both more morally repugnant and visually spectacular. More importantly, Sabotage’s scripts made little or no use of Conrad’s insights into what causes terrorism or motivates terrorists. Gone are the anarchists’ determination Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 128–129. This ‘Sabotage’ was based on the real-life trial in early 1933 of two British employees of the engineering firm Metro-Vickers working in Moscow, whom the Soviet authorities falsely accused of sabotage. ‘OGPU’ was about the activities of Soviet state security officers among a group of British expatriates in Moscow. OGPU, the All-Union State Political Directorate, was the secret police of the USSR between 1922 and 1934. Part of its remit was combating anti-state terrorism. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (London: Harper Collins, 1990), 107–149. 17 Mark A. Wollaeger, ‘Killing Stevie: Modernity, Modernism, and Mastery in Conrad and Hitchcock’, Modern Language Quarterly, 58, 3, September 1997, 324–325. 18 Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius (London: Plexus, 1999), 154–155; Bennett’s obituary, Guardian, 19 June 1995; D. J. Wenden, ‘Montagu, Ivor Goldsmid Samuel (1904–1984)’, rev. Sarah Street, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004); online edn, January 2011, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31459 (18 April 2013); Andrew, Realm, 378–379. 16

30

Agents of Suspense

to direct their attack at the ‘sacrosanct fetish of science’ (the Observatory) and to ‘make a clean sweep of the whole social creation’. Indeed, all of the book’s references to anarchism and socialism were deleted, leaving the impression in the film that the terrorists were either financially motivated or – like so many cinematic terrorists to come – deranged psychopaths. Similarly, though early iterations did hint at the Professor’s willingness to die for his cause, the shooting scripts entirely domesticated his nihilistic savagery, presumably in order to avoid the BBFC’s moral as much as political objections. The upshot is that this most vital and intriguing of characters was turned from a suicidal revolutionary into an eccentric old madman who simply provides explosives from the upstairs of his pet shop. The scripts also changed Stevie from a young man with the mental age of a young child into an ordinary schoolboy. This decision was probably taken on moral grounds, though whether this actually made the character’s horrific death more or less shocking to viewers is debatable.19 It can, of course, be argued that it made commercial sense to transform The Secret Agent’s sprawling, backtracking narrative into a linear, four-day framework, to add humorous (as opposed to satirical) elements and to situate the story in present-day rather than Victorian London. By making Verloc sound vaguely Germanic courtesy of the forenames Karl Anton and deleting early script references to his controller being the Russian-sounding Vladimir (as in the book), Sabotage also tapped into contemporary fears of Nazi espionage. At the same time, by obfuscating Verloc’s links to a foreign embassy, the shooting script virtually eradicated the book’s point about what we would now call state-sponsored terrorism. By focusing on the investigative heroics of a chirpy, flirtatious police detective rather than the book’s venal Inspector Heat, Sabotage also beefed up the film’s romantic side while eliminating Conrad’s scorn for the anti-democratic surveillance activities carried out by Britain’s antiterrorist agencies.20 The filming of Sabotage took place through the early summer of 1936 at Gaumont-British’s Lime Grove Studios in West London and at locations dotted around the city. Hitchcock had originally wanted Robert Donat, star of The 39 Steps, to play the role of the policeman Ted Spencer, but the actor’s chronic asthma led to his replacement by the lesser known John Loder. The heavily accented Austrian-born Oskar Homolka, who made something of a career out of playing Communist spies and Soviet-bloc military officers, was hired as Verloc. The American Sylvia Sidney, best known for her gangster’s moll roles in Hollywood Inspector Talbot to Ted Spencer just after the Professor has detonated his bomb in the cinema: ‘Those Boys Ought to Have Known That the Professor Wouldn’t Be Taken Alive’: Sabotage, S230 Full Treatment (69), 17 April 1936, Script Collection, British Film Institute Library (BFIL), London; Christopher Hampton, ‘The Slimy Road that Led to the Heart of Darkness’, Sunday Telegraph, 8 February 1998, 17–18; Merritt Abrash, ‘Hitchcock’s Terrorists: Sources and Significance’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 39, 3, 2011, 165–173. 20 Sabotage, S231 Shooting Script, undated, Script Collection, BFIL; Sabotage, S11014 Marked Copy of Shooting Script, undated, Ivor Montagu Collection, BFIL; Paula Marantz Cohen, ‘The Ideological Transformation of Conrad’s The Secret Agent into Hitchcock’s Sabotage’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 22, 3, July 1994, 199–120. 19

31

Cinematic Terror

movies, was chosen to play Verloc’s wife, partly to boost Sabotage’s box office on the other side of the Atlantic.

Figure 2.1  Alfred Hitchcock (left) and Oskar Homolka relax on the set of Sabotage. Courtesy of Gaumont-British/Photofest.

On set, Hitchcock demonstrated his customary flair for capturing London’s hustle and bustle, often with the help of – for their time – highly realistic-looking painted backdrops. The director was, as always, a stickler for detail. Ivor Montagu left the production half way through, exasperated by the amount of energy and money Hitchcock insisted on spending on the construction of a timeline for the climactic bombing scene. The black-and-white film was edited down to seventyfour minutes in length by another luminary of British film, Charles Frend, best known for the quietly patriotic movies he made at Ealing Studios during the Second World War. In July 1936, having persuaded Hitchcock to make Verloc’s death at the hands of his wife appear more like an accident and to delete images of babies being given Guinness outside public houses, the BBFC approved Sabotage’s release.21 Sabotage has an unconventional opening. As the credits roll and ominous music begins, we are given a close-up of a dictionary definition – ‘sa-botage: Wilful Spoto, Genius, 158; Martin Hunt, ‘Frend, Charles (1909–1977)’, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/ id/512316/ (3 November 2011); BBFC Scenarios, 15 June 1936, 87–88, and 18 July 1936, 109: BFIL. The budget for Sabotage is not known. 21

32

Agents of Suspense

destruction of buildings or machinery, with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness’.22 A bright light then fills the screen, only to flicker and die. There is a blackout in London, one of the world’s greatest metropolises. Engineers in a giant power station find sand in the machinery – ‘Sabotage! Who did it?’ one of them asks. Cut to a sternlooking, bushy eye-browed, middle-aged man walking into close-up, the power station in the background. Passengers file calmly out of immobilized Underground trains. Some of them think it’s fun and are laughing as they play with candles and matches. Others aren’t so sure. Accompanied by the ominous music we heard at the start, the man we saw earlier, Karl Verloc (Homolka), checks no one is following him, and enters a set of dingy rooms at the rear of the Bijou Cinema, in the city’s poor East End. He washes sand from his hands, takes off his jacket and shoes, and lies down on the bed. When his pretty, young American wife and co-manager of the Bijou (Sidney) comes into the bedroom and asks whether she should reimburse an angry crowd of customers, Verloc, who has a thick middle-European accent, pretends to have been asleep. Within minutes, however, all the lights have come back on, startling Karl and allowing everything and everyone to get back to normal, including Ted (Loder), a greengrocer’s assistant who has just begun working on a stall next to the Bijou and who used the blackout as an opportunity to flirt with Mrs Verloc. When Ted brings in a cabbage for the Verlocs’ dinner he asks Karl where he’d been that evening. Karl lies, telling him he hadn’t set foot outside the cinema. As the audience has already perhaps suspected, Ted is not a grocer but an undercover detective who is watching the Verlocs. Later that evening he takes a taxi to New Scotland Yard. Reporting on Karl Verloc’s arrival at the Bijou after the blackout had started and his denial about having been out that day, Ted asks Superintendent Talbot (Matthew Boulton) about the case they are investigating. TED:  What’s the idea, Sir? What’s the point of all this wrecking? TALBOT:  Making trouble at home to take our minds off what’s going on abroad. Same as in a crowd. One man treads on your toe and while you’re arguing with him his pal picks your pocket. TED:  Who’s behind it? TALBOT:  Ah, they’re the ones you and I’ll never catch. It’s the men they employ that we’re after. In The Hitchcock Murders (London: Faber, 2001), Peter Conrad tells us that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘sabotage’ is ‘any malicious or wanton destruction’, and that Hitchcock’s addition of the psychological purposes ‘with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring uneasiness’ succinctly defined the film-maker’s desire to alarm his audience (12). Looked at from another perspective, it might be argued that Hitchcock’s redefinition of sabotage anticipated future definitions of terrorism, including the present-day US Defence Department one – ‘the calculated use or threat of violence to inculcate fear, intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies’. Townshend, Short History, 3. 22

33

Cinematic Terror

The next day, Thursday, Verloc boards a bus to meet his controller at London Zoo, tailed by another undercover detective, Hollingshead (Stanley Warmington). In the aquarium, the haughty, well-dressed controller (Austin Trevor) derides Verloc’s blackout for its failure to inspire terror – indeed, Londoners laughed at it, he growls. The controller refuses to pay Verloc until he has earned his money by ‘putting the fear of death into people’, namely, by delivering ‘a parcel of fireworks’ to Piccadilly Circus Underground Station on Saturday, the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. As we hear children playing in the background, Verloc objects to being connected to anything that involves the loss of life but says he needs the money and so reluctantly takes the address of the organization’s bomb-maker. Dismissed by his controller, the sullen Verloc stares into a fish tank and conjures up an image of a bomb-blasted Piccadilly Circus buckling, warping and streaming into oblivion.23 Meanwhile, across the city, after ‘bumping into’ them in the street, Ted takes Mrs Verloc and her young brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) for lunch at a fashionable restaurant, Simpson’s. Mrs Verloc dotes on Stevie, who has effectively been in her care since he was a baby. Ted’s cover is nearly blown when a waiter recognizes him as a detective, but after quizzing Mrs Verloc, and entertaining Stevie with tales of gangsters, Ted is convinced that the American knows nothing of her husband’s secret activities (and doesn’t love him either). Later, at Scotland Yard, a close-up shows Ted tearing up the cash voucher he had intended to submit for the lunch. The detective is clearly falling for Mrs Verloc. Cut to Verloc entering a bird shop in the rundown area of Islington, secretly watched by Hollingshead. After arguing with a customer about a canary that won’t sing, the aged, oddball proprietor takes Verloc into his ‘other department’ upstairs. While his daughter and father-less granddaughter look on, the proprietor (William Dewhurst) shows Verloc his time-bomb equipment, hidden carelessly in the kitchen amidst the girl’s toys and the clutter of other household items. The self-styled ‘supplier to the fighters’ tells Verloc that he will send him the bomb package on Saturday. It will be primed to go off at 1.45 that afternoon. The next day, Friday, Verloc meets with his accomplices in the rear of the Bijou Cinema to discuss the bombing operation. They are a motley crew, some with foreign accents, some not. Ted secretly listens in, only to be spotted by one of the plotters and pulled into the room. Ted feigns innocence and makes a quick escape, but one of the men recognizes him as Detective Sergeant Spencer of Scotland Yard. When the crew refuse to help with the operation and promptly scatter, Verloc feels trapped. At the Scripts show that this dream sequence originally included ‘cars and buses plunging into a colossal hole in the road’ caused by the Underground bomb, and that Verloc’s face was ‘terror stricken’ as he turned to face the camera afterwards. It is likely the BBFC would have objected to the former and presumably the latter would have elicited some sympathy for Verloc. As it is, the filmed dream sequence of Piccadilly Circus’ tall buildings collapsing cannot but remind today’s viewers of the collapse of New York’s World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. 23

34

Agents of Suspense

Figure 2.2  Sabotage: Verloc (Homolka) meets with the Professor (William Dewhurst) in the back of the bird shop.

close of the scene, his wife hands him an envelope just delivered by the postman. The message inside reads ‘London must not laugh on Saturday’. Saturday arrives – ‘Lord Mayor’s Show Day’, the screen reminds us. Verloc desperately tries to contact the bird shop owner by telephone to call off the operation but is told it’s too late. At that moment, the package arrives, hidden at the bottom of a bird cage and with a note: ‘Don’t forget. The birds will sing at 1.45’. Verloc is about to leave with the package, only for his path to be blocked by his wife and Ted talking outside about Karl’s suspected sabotage. Improvising quickly, Verloc secretly asks Stevie to deliver the package, telling him he must deposit it at the cloak room at Piccadilly Circus Underground Station by 1.30 at the latest. He gives Stevie a couple of film canisters as well to put Ted off the scent should he stop the boy. This means Stevie will have to walk because it is illegal to take inflammable nitrate films on public transport. Proud to have been given such a task, Stevie sets out with the best of intentions but first gets held up by a street vendor, and then gets delayed and distracted by the Lord Mayor’s Parade on The Strand. Running out of time, Stevie persuades a bus conductor to let him on board but it’s too late. At 1.45, the package explodes. Stevie and everyone else on the bus are killed.

35

Cinematic Terror

Figure 2.3  Sabotage: Pointing to the brown-paper package containing the bomb, Verloc tells Stevie (Desmond Tester) he has a little job for him. Courtesy of Gaumont-British/Photofest.

Back at the Bijou, Mrs Verloc grows increasingly worried about her brother, and then works out from a newspaper report that he has perished in the bus bombing. When confronted by his wife, the heartless, unrepentant Karl admits to giving Stevie the bomb but blames her ‘Scotland Yard friend’, saying he would have carried the package himself had Ted not been spying on him. At dinner, Mrs Verloc kills her husband with a carving knife – half deliberately, half accidentally – when it looks as though he might be about to permanently silence her. When Ted finds out, he takes Mrs Verloc outside onto the street and persuades her to run away with him. Before they can do so, however, the bomb-maker arrives at the cinema to retrieve the bird cage lest the police find it and link him to the bus atrocity. When the police surround the Bijou, trapping him inside, the bird shop owner sets off another device, destroying the cinema and with it all evidence of Mrs Verloc’s crime. As the emergency services arrive to put out the fire and deal with casualties, she and Ted walk quietly away from the scene. The fact that the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ are not actually uttered once in Sabotage (in stark contrast with Conrad’s The Secret Agent) indicates a certain unease or unfamiliarity with these terms in the British film industry prior to the Second World War. Plenty of newspaper reviewers used the words, however, yet in ways that suggest ordinary viewers might have been utterly confused by what Verloc’s gang 36

Agents of Suspense

Figure 2.4  Sabotage: More concerned about his overcooked cabbage than having killed

Stevie, Verloc is moments away from being knifed by his wife (Sylvia Sidney). Courtesy of Gaumont-British/Photofest.

represented or were seeking to achieve. So, while Britain’s biggest selling Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, parroted the line offered by Superintendent Talbot,24 the London Evening Standard and American trade paper Motion Picture Herald referred to the gang as ‘anarchists’ or ‘anarchistic terrorists’;25 Britain’s Empire News, on the other hand, simply called the gang ‘a dirty spy network’. Perhaps this also illustrates how newspapers and the public can often impose their own interpretation on a film, regardless of plot clarity.26 The one thing that all newspapers agreed on when reviewing Sabotage, however, was how credibly the film depicted the terrorists’ tactics. Earlier films such as D. W. Griffith’s The Voice of the Violin had shown terrorists in action but their tactics often came across as amateurish and bizarre. In Sabotage, the terrorists’ clandestine meetings, code words, attacks on power supplies, blackmail and increasing violence are presented as deviant but not in the least freakish. They come across as all the more real and dangerous because of Hitchcock’s undoubted skills, the more sophisticated ‘Sabotage’, News of the World, 6 December 1936. ‘Sabotage’, Evening Standard, 15 December 1936; ‘Sabotage’, Motion Picture Herald, 19 February 1937. In the United States, Sabotage was released under the title The Woman Alone. 26 ‘A Genuine Thrill’, Empire News, 6 December 1936. 24 25

37

Cinematic Terror

technology now available to film-makers and the greater attention to detail afforded by longer, feature films. By taking the increasingly more mobile cameras onto the streets of London, Hitchcock gave Sabotage the feel of reportage. By using sound dialogue instead of inter-titles, Sabotage allowed viewers to hear local and foreign accents. By the subtle and not so subtle use of music, unencumbered by inter-titles, Sabotage could more fluently and effectively play on viewers’ emotions. And by using the latest editing techniques, Sabotage could cleverly link images of Verloc with those of gangsters and, through pace and timing, consolidate Hitchcock’s reputation as the Master of Suspense. Critics also agreed on how powerfully Sabotage condemned political violence. Hitchcock’s bus-bombing sequence was classed as a textbook example of montage technique and an unprecedented depiction of a terrorist outrage.27 Stevie’s death in Sabotage is actually far less graphic than his sister imagines it in The Secret Agent (‘after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone … like the last star of a pyrotechnic display’)28 and the scene might now look rather tame by today’s standards of screen violence. All the same, Hitchcock’s emphasis on the humanity of those bombed on the bus – the camera lingering on Stevie, an old lady and the friendly conductor in particular – was without question radical for its time. It led to Hitchcock being physically attacked by one critic, and anticipated similar scenes in numerous terrorism films to come, from The Battle of Algiers (analysed in Chapter 5) to Die Harder (see Chapter 9). The bus explosion in effect broke a cinematic taboo on the murder of innocents, something Hitchcock later said he deeply regretted and for which he even apologized.29 Sabotage stands out in its depiction of the banality of terrorism, too. Few if any films up to this point had painted so vivid a picture of a terrorist who is, as one newspaper put it, ‘at once homely and macabre’.30 Oskar Homolka received unanimous praise for his understated, ‘yet immensely powerful performance’ as Karl Verloc, one that, according to the Daily Telegraph, made ‘a completely human figure of the half-hearted anarchist’.31 Verloc is all the more believable because the camera gives us an insider’s view of the effect his terrorist activities are having on his family life and because it shows us his prosaic, suburban surroundings. This, together For more on Hitchcock’s use of montage in Sabotage, see Mark Osteen, ‘ “It Doesn’t Pay to Antagonize the Public”: Sabotage and Hitchcock’s Audience’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 28, 4, October 2000, 259–268. 28 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Fairfield, IA: First World Library, 2007), 245. 29 Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 24, 36; John Orr, Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2005), 89–91; Auiler, Secret Notebooks, 25–26; Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor and Tone (London: BFI, 2000), Chapter 1; Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (London: Cameron and Hollis, Moffat, 1999), 171–172. ‘There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it’. This is how Hitchcock defined the distinction between suspense (the anticipation) and shock (the bang). On this, and for a viewing of Sabotage’s bus scene, see British Film Institute website, ‘39 Steps to Hitchcock: Step 2 – The Master of Suspense’, http://explore.bfi. org.uk/39steps#/?item=2 (18 April 2013). 30 ‘Sabotage’, Evening Standard, 15 December 1936. 31 ‘Sabotage’, Daily Telegraph, 7 December 1936. 27

38

Agents of Suspense

Figure 2.5  Sabotage: Out of time: Stevie, old lady and dog, just seconds from death. with depicting a canary seller as a bomb-maker, illustrated Hitchcock’s favourite device of juxtaposing the ordinary and the extraordinary. Sabotage was all the more effective for being a domestic melodrama and a thriller rolled into one, especially when it came to blending subtly inhuman terrorism with gentle tragedy. Its comedic elements – ‘as light as a sea-breeze’, according to one critic – brought the terrorist violence into sharper relief.32 One important theme contemporary critics did not pick up on but which is of significance here is the linkage Sabotage made between violence, terrorism and entertainment. Changing Verloc from a shopkeeper in The Secret Agent to a cinema manager in Sabotage allowed Hitchcock to suggest that there was a correlation between Verloc’s customers’ appetite for screen violence and the political violence conducted by his gang. This point is made most strongly when, just after hearing the news of her brother’s death, a distraught Mrs Verloc watches a scene from a Walt Disney cartoon playing in the cinema, Who Killed Cock Robin? On a different level, literary scholar Peter Conrad suggests Hitchcock also wanted to make his audiences uneasy by linking the technologies of terrorism and film, demonstrated at the outset when Verloc’s attack on the power station causes the Bijou Cinema’s projector to Paul Dehn, ‘Sabotage’, Sunday Referee, 6 December 1936. Dehn would go on to write a number of British terrorist-related features, including Seven Days to Noon (John and Roy Boulting, 1950), Orders to Kill (Anthony Asquith, 1958) and Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964). 32

39

Cinematic Terror

fail. By calling attention to the inflammability of nitrate film stock (which was the standard until the 1950s), which inadvertently adds to the power of the bus explosion, Hitchcock might also have been hinting at film’s potential use as a terrorist weapon.33 If ordinary cinemagoers did indeed feel uneasy about these and other sorts of connections Sabotage brought to the fore, they were not alone. The film was heavily cut or banned in countries dotted around the globe. In the United States, some local censorship boards requested the deletion of various elements of the bus-bombing sequence, including the X-ray view of the bomb’s timing mechanism and references to the bomb’s ultimate target being a packed Underground station. In the Canadian province of Quebec, where the Catholic Church helped impose extremely strict film censorship, Sabotage was banned outright for the ‘sympathy [it] created for premeditated murders’, for showing ‘terrorists with bombs’ and for failing to show those committing crimes being punished.34 These were two examples principally of moral or paternalistic censorship but elsewhere Sabotage was outlawed for explicitly political reasons. Brazil was experiencing a period of intense political and economic unrest in the mid- to late1930s, where the dictatorship of Getúlio Dornelles Vargas feared a Communist coup led by Luís Carlos Prestes, a revolutionary forerunner of Che Guevara. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that Sabotage was banned by the authorities soon after its release in Brazil in 1937, officially on the grounds that the film was ‘an incitement to terrorism and a threat to public order’.35 The British authorities in charge of mandated Palestine took the same action, accompanied by an almost identical statement, in 1937–1938. In 1936, Arab unrest at increasing Jewish immigration had bubbled over into open revolt against British rule in Palestine, with the Arabs practising what the authorities in Jerusalem and London denounced as terrorism (sabotaging crops, mining railways, bombing oil pipelines, etc.). In the circumstances, Sabotage, ‘the story of a scheme organised by foreign saboteurs to destroy London’, according to British officials, was deemed ‘entirely undesirable for exhibition’. Behind such coded language lay the obvious fear that Hitchcock’s movie might encourage further terrorist acts against British targets or even teach the Arabs terrorist techniques.36 In years ahead, generating such controversy could virtually guarantee a film’s commercial success. In the event, Sabotage generally performed poorly at the box office in Britain and elsewhere, especially compared with Hitchcock’s other films of this era. It is unclear why exactly it did so. While some trade papers called Sabotage’s Smith, Humor and Tone, Chapter 1; Conrad, Murders, 24. US Production Code Administration Files for The Woman Alone – Ohio, 22 January 1937, New York, 29 January 1937, Quebec 27 February 1937, AMPAS. 35 Spoto, Genius, 175. 36 Chief Secretary’s Office, Jerusalem, Palestine, to Colonial Office in London, 30 November 1937, CO 323/1421/6: The National Archives, London; Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 24–25, 57. 33 34

40

Agents of Suspense

story ‘ponderous’ and, interestingly, criticized the film for failing to explain the terrorists’ motives sufficiently,37 the majority of critics gave it rave notices. Sabotage was the only Hitchcock film from this era for which the acclaimed writer Graham Greene expressed any enthusiasm, observing in the magazine Spectator that the director had achieved a new level of technical proficiency. This was a view shared by the American film trade bible Variety. Elsewhere in the United States, the literary mandarin Mark Van Doren described Sabotage as the epitome of ‘movie art’.38 The fact that Sabotage was banned in certain countries obviously did not help the film’s box office. But it may well be that some cinemagoers were also put off by sensational reports of the film’s high violence quotient – early evidence perhaps of graphic cinematic terrorism not being to everyone’s taste. Sabotage thereafter largely disappeared from view, apart from critics’ periodic references to Stevie’s death being, as the influential British writer Penelope Gilliatt put it in 1961, ‘greedily callous’. Comments like this were sometimes linked to recent terrorist incidents in Europe’s remaining colonies.39 Someone who held a very different view to Gilliatt’s was the leading British critic Raymond Durgnat. Writing a book about Hitchcock in the early 1970s, at the height of the Irish Republican Army’s bombing campaign in London and other British cities, Durgnat called Sabotage ‘the profoundest film of Hitchcock’s thriller period, and perhaps of his career’.40 Hitchcock himself clearly did not entirely enjoy his foray into the world of cinematic terrorism. The director would always claim that his primary strategy when making films was that of ‘putting the audience through it’. The bus-bombing sequence in Sabotage was the starkest, some say the most sadistic example of this so far in his career,41 and one he never repeated. Though Hitchcock went on to make a number of other films that focused on international political intrigue, including one about sabotage at the height of the Second World War,42 none of these was as explicitly about terrorism as Sabotage. Perhaps he felt the subject was just too provocative. This is not to say that Hitchcock did not learn any positive lessons from Sabotage. Echoes of Sabotage re-emerged in many of his later films. The technique of crosscutting for the purpose of suspense recurred again and again, most memorably in Lionel Collier, ‘Reviews’, Picturegoer Weekly, 6 February 1937; ‘Sabotage’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 December 1936, 213–214; ‘Sabotage’, Daily Telegraph, 7 December 1936; ‘Sabotage’, Variety, 16 December 1936. 38 Van Doren, cited in Hoberman, ‘Double Agents’, 69; Spectator, 11 December 1936, cited in Wollaeger, ‘Killing Stevie’, 337. 39 Gilliatt, ‘Sabotage’, Observer, 30 April 1961. Cinema’s treatment of anti-colonial terrorism in the decades following the Second World War is explored in Chapters 4 and 5. 40 Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock or The Plain Man’s Hitchcock (London: Faber, 1974), cited in Barr, English Hitchcock, 163. 41 Barr, English Hitchcock, 171. 42 The plot of Hitchcock’s 1942 Hollywood thriller Saboteur (1942) involved fifth-columnists bombing the Hoover Dam, on the border between Arizona and Nevada, and a ship in New York City. Marshall Deutelbaum, ‘Seeing in Saboteur’, Literature/ Film Quarterly, 12, 1, 1984, 58–64; George Turner, ‘Saboteur: Hitchcock Set Free’, American Cinematographer, 74, 11, November 1993, 67–72; George Turner, ‘Saboteur: Hitchcock Set Free’, American Cinematographer, 74, 12, December 1993, 88–93. 37

41

Cinematic Terror

the crop-dusting sequence of North by Northwest. The use of temporal juxtaposition and spatial selection to imply murderous violence in Verloc’s death scene recurred in Psycho to create the ‘slasher’ sequence which, according to Suzanne Speidel, ‘changed the manipulation of mise-en-scène for ever’.43 Hitchcock’s own death in 1980 did not put an end to Sabotage’s afterlife. Over the past two decades, Sabotage has been rediscovered by the public and appropriated by a raft of cultural and political commentators. Stage one of this process began in February 1996, with the release of British director Christopher Hampton’s The Secret Agent, the second cinematic version of Conrad’s novel. Though Hampton’s starstudded film was more faithful to the book, and came out at a time when terrorism was a far more pressing issue than it had been in the 1930s, most critics felt The Secret Agent singularly lacked Sabotage’s ‘authentic whiff of terror’.44 Then, in April 1996, US Federal Bureau of Investigation officers arrested Ted Kaczynski, the so-called ‘Unabomber’ who had been waging a war on technology in the United States for more than twenty years. Stories soon appeared in the international press about Kaczynski being a great fan of Conrad’s The Secret Agent and of his having used the Professor as the inspiration for his terrorist activities.45 The second stage of Sabotage’s revival started on 11 September 2001. Within weeks of the terrorist attacks, the prominent American columnist Michael Sragow was telling his readers that Sabotage was ‘more timely than ever’. Echoing these sentiments in the American men’s style magazine GQ a few months later, Terrence Rafferty went as far as to call Sabotage’s bus-bombing sequence ‘the most vivid depiction of the obscenity of terrorism in the history of the movies’. Sabotage was released on DVD, first in Germany in 2007, then in Britain and the United States in 2008.46 A year or so later, stories emerged from war-torn Iraq to suggest that Hitchcock’s Sabotage and Conrad’s The Secret Agent had been gruesomely prescient. Credible sources in newspapers reported that al-Qaeda had been recruiting children, some with intellectual disabilities such as Down’s syndrome, as unwitting suicide bombers. What had started out as fiction had now, it would seem, become fact.47 Suzanne Speidel, ‘Times of Death in Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent and Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage’, in Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen (eds.), From Page to Screen: Adaptations of the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 145. 44 Tom Charity, ‘Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent’, Time Out, 11–18 February 1998, 73; Philip French, ‘The Secret Agent’, Observer, 15 February 1998, 10. 45 Hoberman, ‘Double Agents’, 69; Houen, Modern Literature, 14–16. 46 Michael Sragow, ‘Hollywood’s “Sabotage” More Timely Than Ever’, Los Angeles Times, 6 October 2001, XL; Terrence Rafferty, ‘Sabotage’, GQ, December 2001, 11, http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/ Sabotage_(1936) (19 April 2013). 47 Robert Fisk, ‘Robert Fisk: WikiLeaks and the Shaming of America’, Belfast Telegraph, 27 October 2010, http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-fisk/robert-fisk-wikileaks-and-the -shaming-of-america-28568222.html (20 September 2013); https://ojihad.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/ birds-of-paradise-al-qaeda%C2%B4s-child-bombers-in-wikileaks-iraq-logs/ (20 September 2013). On the use of children as suicide bombers in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see Anat Berko, The Smarter Bomb: Woman and Children as Suicide Bombers (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2012). 43

42

CHAPTER 3 SYMBOLS OF RESISTANCE

We open in the countryside, with a close-up shot of a cross on top of a Catholic church. The camera then tilts down to two men, Maciek and Andrzej, who are lounging in the sunshine near to the church entrance. The birds are chirping and everything seems tranquil, serene almost. Maciek in particular looks as though he hasn’t a care in the world, and Andrzej is quite happy to help a little girl place flowers above the church door. ‘Who is this guy again?’ Maciek asks Andrzej casually, mysteriously, whilst yawning and putting on his sunglasses. ‘Szczuka, Secretary of the District Workers’ Party’, comes the reply. The sound of a vehicle approaching changes the scene’s mood in an instant. ‘Quick, they’re coming!’ a third man, a lookout, yells. Andrzej urgently grabs a machine gun. Maciek picks up his gun more slowly and, almost comically, brushes the biting insects off it. He then moves into position, next to a dirt track. As a jeep comes round the bend, Maciek coolly sprays it with bullets. The jeep veers off the road and almost crashes into the church. The driver, a large man in a white overcoat now covered in blood, writhes in pain – and dies when the engine explodes. Maciek goes over to check the passenger, who is lying in a ditch. From a distance the man, who only looks about twenty years of age, appears dead, but once the camera has focused on his face he is on his feet and running for his life. Is he making for the sanctuary of the church? Maciek reloads, chases the man up a small hill and, frenziedly, mercilessly, fires off a whole magazine into his back at the church door. Strangely, some of the bullets ignite into flames, burning holes in the victim’s jacket. The man dies screaming, as the Madonna near the altar looks on ironically. ‘Jesus and Mary!’ exclaims the lookout solemnly, his body glinting in the sunshine and framed by the church doorway. ‘Let’s get out of here!’ Before its release in Poland in 1958, few films anywhere in the world had opened as violently, as iconoclastically and as puzzlingly as Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds. Even fewer films had centred on as magnetic an anti-hero as Maciek Chelmicki, a confused, trigger-happy Second World War resistance fighter who dresses incongruously like the fifties Hollywood icon James Dean and who dies so sadly at the end, writhing in agony on a huge rubbish tip. Wajda’s ability to make us both fear and love the semi-sadistic Maciek is only one of the reasons why Ashes and

Cinematic Terror

Diamonds put Polish cinema on the international map. Today, fifty years later, Wajda’s drama still ranks as one the seminal films of East and Central European cinema.1 Over the past five decades, Ashes and Diamonds has justifiably been acclaimed for the light it sheds both on Poland’s tragic political fate at the end of the Second World War and on the manner in which Eastern European directors used symbolism to subvert Soviet domination during the Cold War.2 But Wajda’s complex drama is just

Figure 3.1  Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) (left) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) prepare for the ambush at the start of Ashes and Diamonds. For the high esteem in which both Ashes and Diamonds and Andrzej Wajda have been held over the decades, see, for instance, Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema: From Its Origins to 1970 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 591–596; Basil Wright, The Long View: An International History of Cinema (London: Paladin, 1976), 414–416; Marek Hendrykowski, ‘Changing States in East Central Europe’, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Oxford History, 634; Derek Malcolm, A Century of Films: Derek Malcolm’s Personal Best (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 13–14; Cook, Narrative Film, 606–612; ‘The 100 Best Films of World Cinema’, Empire Magazine, http://www.empireonline.com/features/100-greatest-world-cinema-films/default.asp?film=38 (10 July 2013). 2 Janina Falkowska, Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), 53–64; Paul Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower, 2005), 1–47; David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 365–368; Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1982), 112, 115; Boleslaw Michatek, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda (London: Tantivy, 1973), 37–47. 1

44

Symbols of Resistance

as important for the vital questions it poses about the legitimacy of violence in and out of wartime and for its exploration of the driving forces behind politically motivated murder. Crucially for us, Ashes and Diamonds focuses on the ambiguities of what might be called resistance-terrorism, a phenomenon borne out of the total war that erupted only three years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage had appeared in 1936. In doing so, Ashes and Diamonds marks something of a shift in cinema’s treatment of terrorism in the 1940s and 1950s, away from the sort of blanket condemnation seen in Hitchcock’s Sabotage towards absolution when carried out in the name of patriotism. The Second World War seriously challenged prevailing notions of terrorism, not least in Britain, where Sabotage had caused such a stir. Soon after the Nazis’ occupation of France in 1940, Britain’s new Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, called for the formation of a ‘democratic international’ in Europe that would, among other things, emulate the ‘terrorist acts’ that the Irish Republican Army had carried out against the British just after the Great War and that were currently being used against the Imperial Japanese Army by guerrillas in China. Prime Minister Winston Churchill subsequently gave his military and intelligence chiefs orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’. The result was the creation of the Special Operations Executive, a body that provided bombs and explosives training to the European resistance and parachuted agents into Europe in order to carry out ambushes, acts of sabotage and assassinations alongside partisan groups – all activities that would later be described in other contexts as ‘state-sponsored terrorism’.3 The actions carried out by European resistance groups between 1939 and 1945, as Matthew Carr reminds us, broke all of the rules of war famously adopted by the world’s ‘civilized nations’ at the Hague Peace Conference in 1907. Across the continent, resistance units killed Axis soldiers, informers or collaborators with whatever weapons they could get their hands on, from bombs in cinemas frequented by soldiers, to individual assassinations with gun or knives. The Nazi response to this unprecedented explosion of irregular warfare was an equally unprecedented policy of massive reprisals against civilian populations, often on the grounds that they were harbouring ‘terrorists’. In Czechoslovakia in 1942, the village of Lidice was razed to the ground and its inhabitants executed in response to the assassination of the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich. To what extent these horrendous campaigns of tit-for-tat terrorism affected the course of the Second World War is debatable. What is certain is that by the end of the war, as Carr puts it, ‘the concept of “resistance” was regarded both in Europe and beyond as a morally unassailable right and an admirable manifestation of patriotic heroism’.4 Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History – Volume 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 410; Carr, Infernal Machine, 63–64. 4 Carr, Infernal Machine, 64–65; M. R. D. Foot, S. O. E.: An Outline History of the Special Operations Executive 1940–1946 (London: Pimlico, 1999), 69. 3

45

Cinematic Terror

During the Second World War, films produced by the Grand Alliance partners – all in one way or another influenced by government propaganda agencies – consistently championed the rights of European anti-Nazi resistance groups to use what Berlin at the time and many others since have termed terrorist methods. Undercover, for instance, a 1943 British drama produced by Sabotage’s very own Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios, glorified Yugoslav guerrillas blowing up train loads of German troops. Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas, made in Hollywood in the same year by Louis King, justified bombings and sabotage, and even hostagetaking and assassinations, in the name of Serbian patriotism and religious freedom.5 Another 1943 American movie, Hangmen Also Die!, directed by Austrian exile Fritz Lang, depicted Reinhard Heydrich’s assassins as freedom fighters. The Silent Village, a 1943 docu-drama directed by Britain’s most famous film-maker/poet, Humphrey Jennings, relocated the Lidice massacre to a village in Wales in order to capture the full horror of the Nazis’ ‘reigns of terror’ in Europe for a British audience.6 Few films of this type depicted terrorist violence in any real detail. Most preferred instead to present such activities in melodramatic terms or to cut away from scenes of murder so as not to upset censors or viewers. By contrast, Soviet films were often brutally explicit, sadistic even. This was a measure of the ideological-cum-racial basis of the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany and testament to the terrible losses the Soviet Union suffered in the Third Reich’s quest for Lebensraum. Canonical productions like Freidrich Ermler’s She Defends the Motherland (1943) and Lev Arnshtam’s Zoya (1944) saw groups of vicious Russian partisans being led, pointedly, by women. Having lost their menfolk and had their world turned upside down by bestial Germans, these wives and mothers had no qualms about blowing up tanks, burning buildings, kidnapping Nazi generals and slaying German soldiers with pickaxes. To avenging angels like ‘Comrade P.’ in She Defends the Motherland, the word ‘terrorist’ – used pejoratively by German characters – was almost a badge of honour.7 Resistance-terrorism continued to be an integral part of the war movie genre in the aftermath of the Second World War. Though it was rarely if ever labelled ‘terrorism’, especially in films made by the victorious powers, cinemagoers were left in little doubt that the ‘good war’ against fascism had altered the definitional parameters of political violence. Different film industries historicized Second World War resistance according to their particular commercial and political needs. Thus, American and Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 163–165; T. M. P. Pryor, ‘Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas’, New York Times, 19 March 1943, 15. Undercover was directed by Sergei Nolbandov. 6 Jürgen Schebera, ‘Hangmen Also Die (1943): Hollywood’s Brecht-Eisler Collaboration’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 18, 4, October 1998, 567–573; James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 229–231. 7 Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 60–69; D. Gillespie, Russian Cinema (London: Longman, 2003), 128–129. 5

46

Symbols of Resistance

British movies predominantly used the subject of wartime resistance as a vehicle for celebratory action and daring-do. Films like the US-made Betrayed (Gottfried Reinhardt, 1954), set in Holland, and the British-made Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950), about a female Special Operations Executive agent in France, submerged resistance within the ever-popular espionage genre.8 Elsewhere in Europe, a cycle of movies sought to overcome the shame of Nazi collaboration often by exaggerating the ferocity, scale and success of resistance exploits. Prime examples of this are Arne Skouen’s Nine Lives (1957), about Norwegian saboteurs, and René Clément’s award-winning The Battle of the Rails (1946), a rousing reconstruction of French railway workers’ efforts to sabotage German troopreinforcement trains.9 Similarly, in Asia, films made in the Philippines, China and other countries sought to glorify violent resistance to the Japanese empire. This includes what is commonly regarded as Chinese cinema’s first epic, The Spring River Flows East (Cai Chusheng/Zheng Junli, 1947), a two-part family-based drama that featured brave guerrillas fighting the Japanese close to Shanghai and portrayed Mao Tse-Tung’s post-war rivals for power, the Koumintang, as Tokyo’s lackeys.10 In the late 1940s and 1950s, Poland’s film industry probably asked more questions about the meaning and morality of resistance-terrorism during the Second World War than any other. This should not surprise us. After all, if terrorism directed against foreigners and collaborators was justified more than anywhere else between 1939 and 1945, it was arguably here where the European theatre of the Second World War opened. Occupied by both the Germans and Russians after September 1939, Poland saw one in five of its population killed during the war. After the collapse of the Third Reich, Poland then became one of the fault lines of the now fully fledged Cold War. The country lay in the midst of what was an ideological quagmire, as groups of partisans helped to restructure the borders of Poland and many other countries in Europe, and nationalists and Communists competed for territory, power and the public’s hearts and minds.11 If the British film industry was at the peak of its powers when Hitchcock made Sabotage in 1936, Poland’s was only just recovering from the darkest period in its history when Ashes and Diamonds was released in 1958. The future home of some of the world’s leading cinematographers, including Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieślowski, Poland had started making feature films in 1908, when the country was still part of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Film production grew steadily, ‘Betrayed’, Variety, 21 July 1954, 6; John Ramsden, ‘Refocusing the “People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33, 1, January 1998, 49. 9 Linn Ullmann, Profession: Director Arne Skouen and His Films (Oslo: Norsk Filminstitutt, 2001); Leshu Torchin, ‘La Bataille du Rail/Forbidden Games’, Cineaste, 32, 1, Winter 2006, 66–68. 10 Zhiwei Xiao and Yingjin Zhang, Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (London: Routledge, 1998), 106, 248. 11 Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (London: Penguin, 2012). 8

47

Cinematic Terror

if unspectacularly, in the decades after independence in 1918, but during the Second World War it ceased altogether and much of the industry’s equipment and facilities were destroyed by bombing. When peace arrived, the new Communist government, like its Soviet patron, treated film as an important asset and so nationalized the industry. The corollary of official support for Polish cinema during the late 1940s and early 1950s was a strict adherence to Soviet-imposed Socialist Realism. Film-makers’ fears of being ostracized or imprisoned if they violated this ideological straitjacket stymied both creativity and production. As a result, though Poland had over 2600 cinemas by the mid-1950s, its movie industry was turning out less than ten feature films a year.12 As soon as film production had restarted in Poland in 1947, the war provided one of the main focuses of attention. Leonard Buczkowski’s musical Forbidden Songs (1948), Antoni Bohdziewicz’s The Others Will Follow (1949) and Jerzy Zarzycki’s Unvanquished City (1950) are just some of the movies that centred on resistance.13 In one way or another, all such films presented a heavily distorted picture of Polish resistance to Nazism. In reality, that resistance had been led chiefly by the 400,000-strong Home Army, which coordinated its activities with the pro-Western émigré government in London. A smaller People’s Army, which was allied to the Soviet Union, had also fought Nazism but its role was far less influential than the films would have viewers believe. By portraying the Communist underground as the singular embodiment of resistance, Poland’s cultural commissars not only helped justify the Communist Party’s monopoly on power after the war, but they also airbrushed the Red Army’s invasion of the eastern half of Poland in 1939.14 It was this rewriting of Polish history, and eliding of Josef Stalin’s reign of terror in Poland between 1939 and 1941, that lay behind Andrzej Wajda’s making of Ashes and Diamonds. Wajda was born in Suwalki, a military town in northeastern Poland, in 1926. His father, a cavalry officer, was murdered by the Red Army in 1940 in what came to be known as the Katyn massacre.15 In 1942, Wajda became a courier for the Home Army and fought for Poland’s independence from both Germany and the USSR. After the war, when many former members of the Ania Witkowska, ‘Poland’, in Richard Taylor, Nancy Wood, Julian Graffy and Dina Iordanova (eds.), The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema (London: BFI, 2000), 184–189. 13 Ewa Mazierska, Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Black Peters and Men of Marble (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 41–43; Tadeusz Miczka, ‘Cinema under Political Pressure: A Brief Outline of Authorial Roles in Polish Post-War Feature Film 1945–1995’, Kinema, 4, Fall 1995, http://www.kinema .uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=336&feature (10 July 2013); Marek Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), 8, 175–176. 14 Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (London: Penguin, 2005); Witkowska, ‘Poland’, in Taylor et al., BFI Companion, 186. 15 Falkowska, Wajda, 13. On Wajda’s Katyn, released in 2007, see William Johnson, ‘Revisiting the Past’, Film Quarterly, 62, 4, Summer 2009, 10–13, and Nick Hodge and Marta Urbańska, ‘Andrzej Wajda on Katyn: The Full Transcript’, Krakow Post, 23 June 2009, http://www.krakowpost.com/article/1388 (11 July 2013). 12

48

Symbols of Resistance

Home Army were openly terrorized, tortured and shot, Wajda became an art student. He then studied at Poland’s most prestigious film school, in Łódź, under Aleksander Ford, the country’s most powerful director. Ford, like most members of Poland’s cultural establishment during this era, was an ardent Stalinist. Wajda remained a nationalist.16 Wajda’s nascent film-making career was given a major boost when Stalin died in 1953. The political and cultural thaw that followed brought a restructuring of film production in Poland, giving film-makers greater artistic control. Ideological constraints, policed by the Central Office of Cinematography, still existed, but filmmakers could circumvent these to some extent. The result, as Ania Witkowska tells us, was a new era in Polish cinema. Between 1954 and 1963, a group of films known as the ‘Polish School’ emerged, characterized by romantic pessimism, a preoccupation with the subjection of the individual to the forces of history, and a re-evaluation of Poland’s tragic war years. Film-makers turned the constraints of the censor to their advantage, using striking visual symbols, allusion and tone to create a rich subtext. Critics were fascinated and international audiences, including those in the West, began watching Polish films for the first time ever.17 Andrzej Wajda’s loose trilogy of films set in Poland during the Second World War – A Generation (1954), Kanal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) – were at the very heart of the Polish School. Each marked a move, politically and stylistically, away from Socialist Realism and the Stalinist interpretation of Polish wartime resistance. A Generation, which marked Wajda’s feature film debut and has been described by David Caute as ‘arguably the first genuine tragedy in East European cinema’, told the story of two young factory workers who join the Communist underground during the Jewish-led Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. One of the men, a complicated individual who dresses like a 1950s Western intellectual and who eventually commits suicide, had little in common with the cardboard cut-out heroes of Socialist Realism, and the film’s visual style resembled German Expressionist films of the 1920s. Kanal was the first film to be made about the abortive Warsaw Uprising of 1944, which the Red Army notoriously had refused to help despite being on the outskirts of the Polish capital. This film too was highly Expressionist and, without rehabilitating the Home Army’s strategic decisions, painted an unprecedentedly positive image of at least some its members.18

Caute, Dancer Defects, 365; Anna Misiak, ‘Politically Involved Filmmaker: Aleksander Ford and Film Censorship in Poland after 1945’, Kinema, 20, Fall 2003, http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article .php?id=114&feature (10 July 2013). 17 Witkowska, ‘Poland’, in Taylor et al., BFI Companion, 184–189. 18 Caute, Dancer Defects, 365; Stuart Liebman, ‘The Art of Memory: Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy’, Cineaste, 32, 1, Winter 2006, 42–47; Ewa Mazierska, ‘A Generation: Wajda on War’, 25 April 2005, with A Generation DVD (Criterion Collection), http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1053-a-generation-wajda-on-war (10 July 2013); John Simon, ‘Kanal’, 25 April 2005, with Kanal DVD (Criterion Collection), http://www .criterion.com/current/posts/1054-kanal (10 July 2013). 16

49

Cinematic Terror

In Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda would do more than revise the official history of Polish resistance during the Second World War. He would question where the dividing line lay between war and peace and, by extension, between being classed a freedom fighter and a terrorist. Ashes and Diamonds was based on the novel of the same name, written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, a former plenipotentiary of the émigré government in London. Published in 1948, the book was one of the literary landmarks of its period. Andrzejewski’s story sought to capture the chaotic reality of Poland in 1945 and to promote national reconciliation, by convincing members of the Home Army (now officially dissolved) of the futility of continued resistance and calling upon the authorities to use clemency towards their opponents. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, several attempts at adapting Ashes and Diamonds for the screen were made but foundered on the dangerous rocks of political correctness. It was only after Władysław Gomulka’s reformist Communist government assumed office in Warsaw in October 1956 that one was able to come to fruition.19 Working with Andrzejewski on the script in 1957, Wajda changed important aspects of the novel, though nothing like to the extent that Hitchcock had done with Conrad’s The Secret Agent when making Sabotage. The script of Ashes and Diamonds kept the basic outline of Andrzejewski’s story but condensed time and space, thus giving the drama great theatrical intensity. More significantly, whereas the novel centred on a variety of characters, including the heroic Communist official, Szczuka, the script revolved around just one, Maciek Chelmicki, a guerrilla-cumterrorist who is a member of the Home Army under orders to kill Szczuka. For the role of Maciek, Wajda made the inspired choice of unknown thirty-one-year-old actor Zbigniew Cybulski. Brilliant at bringing out Maciek’s gentle and violent sides, Cybulski was an unorthodox, charismatic personality whose insistence on wearing fifties’ style dark glasses, jacket and tight jeans would make Maciek a hero of both the ‘lost’ generation of 1945 and that which had recently reached political maturity under Communism, who associated his civilian warrior’s uniform, gestures and restlessness with fashionably rebellious Hollywood ‘misfits’ like James Dean and Marlon Brando. Overall, Wajda’s changes served to heighten identification with the Home Army on the one hand and to universalize the political dilemmas faced by the characters on the other.20 The script for Ashes and Diamonds attracted a mixture of anger and admiration when Poland’s state censors scrutinized it in early 1958. One of the censors, writer Andrzej Braun, was deeply troubled by Maciek’s tendency to treat murder as an adventure. Wajda made the necessary alterations to the script but then undid many Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds translated by D. J. Welsh; intro. Heinrich Böll (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965); Falkowska, Wajda, 53; Coates, Red and the White, 22, 35–38. 20 Andrzej Wajda, The Wajda Trilogy: Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal, A Generation, intro. Boleslaw Sulik (London: Lorrimer, 1973), 18–21, 24–25; Ernie Brill and Lenny Rubenstein, ‘The Best Are Dead or Numb: A Second Look at Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds’, Cineaste, 11, 3, 1981, 25–26; Coates, Red and the White, 26–27, 30–32. 19

50

Symbols of Resistance

of them by encouraging the cast and crew to improvise on set and to overcome or undermine ideologically correct dialogue via image and performance. Cybulski did this better than anyone else – ‘It is precisely the way he is that contains that certain “something” representing political obscenity’, Wajda wrote later of his lead actor’s subversive persona. Despite Wajda’s trickery, and Aleksander Ford’s complaint after a private screening that the film could only create enemies of socialism, Ashes and Diamonds was cleared for distribution. At the eleventh hour, Wajda received a telephone call demanding that he cut Maciek’s soon-to-be famous death-throes at the end of the movie lest they generated sympathy for a murderer, but the director refused. Ashes and Diamonds then premiered in Warsaw in October 1958.21 Andrzej Wajda’s work has always betrayed a fascination with the Polish tradition of poetic metaphor and political allusion. Ashes and Diamonds, a black-and-white film lasting 110 minutes, is saturated with metaphors and symbols, some of them ‘baroque’ (a word commonly applied to Wajda’s work) or even absurdist. The film has, as one critic put it at the time, ‘a deliberately disjunctive style and a purposive, maddeningly broken rhythm’.22 Yet while Ashes and Diamonds is complex in various ways, its central story of love and violence – set in a tight time frame of less than twenty four hours – is quite simple. The action centres on an exhausted rubble-strewn provincial town somewhere in Poland. It is the afternoon of 8 May 1945, the last day of war. Germany has surrendered. The Russian-sponsored government is taking over the country, and units of the nationalist underground, the Home Army, are contesting the takeover in a series of desperate armed actions, including the assassination of leading Communist functionaries. While the mayor of the town is preparing a victory banquet and crowds gather in the streets to hear the latest news and enjoy the first days of peace, two members of the nationalist resistance arrive, under orders to kill the new District Secretary of the Communist Party, Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski), who has recently come back from Russia. They are assisted by a third man, Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela), a young opportunist, who is the mayor’s secretary and thus has a foot in both camps. The two conspirators’ first attempt to assassinate Szczuka outside the town goes horribly wrong. Not knowing what their target actually looks like, they murder two innocent cement workers in a jeep instead, the youngest of whom – we soon learn – had only just returned from a forced labour camp in Germany. The horrified Drewnowski, who had acted as the assassins’ lookout, rushes back to town, where it is his job to organize the mayor’s banquet. The conspirators, Andrzej (Adam Andrzej Wajda, Double Vision: My Life in Film (London: Faber, 1989), 122; Coates, Red and the White, 38–40. The budget for Ashes and Diamonds is not known. 22 C. A. Lejeune, ‘Ashes and Diamonds’, Observer (London), 21 June 1959, Ashes and Diamonds Press Book, BFIL. 21

51

Cinematic Terror

Pawlikowski) and Maciek (Cybulski), also make their way to town, where they tell Drewnowski that they mean to carry out their orders at the hotel where the banquet is to be held, and where Szczuka is staying. Both Andrzej and Maciek are seasoned underground fighters who have done more than their fair share in the struggle against the Germans. Both are beginning to be sickened by the interminable bloodshed, however, which has now turned into a fratricidal struggle of Pole against Pole. When, that evening, Andrzej, the older of the two, reports the failure of their first attempt to Major Waga (Ignacy Machowski), he asks if it is absolutely necessary that Szczuka should die. Waga is adamant. The nationalist resistance fought for freedom in the struggle against the Germans, not for the regime they have now. The fight must continue and orders must be carried out. Waga also informs Andrzej that a resistance group headed by Captain Wilk was rounded up the previous day and its leader killed. Andrzej is to take his place, leaving Maciek to carry out the assassination of Szczuka. At the hotel, meanwhile, Maciek has managed to book a room adjoining Szczuka’s. While the preparations for the banquet are going ahead, the handsome, flirtatious Maciek loiters in the bar and chats with the pretty bartender, Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska). Maciek is more and more attracted to her and finally asks Krystyna to come up to his room later when she knocks off duty. One by one, all the notabilities of the town arrive at the hotel for the banquet, led by the mayor (Aleksander Sewruk). It is a great occasion for this ambitious careerist, for he has just learned that he has been given a ministerial post in the government and consequently will soon be leaving for Warsaw. However, neither Szczuka and his Communist associates, nor the two nationalist conspirators, are in sympathy with the mixed mob of flag-wavers, aristocrats, opportunists and hangers-on who are assembling for the victory banquet. The Poland of May 1945 is not what either side had fought for. Szczuka is, to be sure, a loyal party functionary, but he is beginning to realize that in a country so weighed down by grief and suffering, all the simple ideological slogans have become inappropriate. He is also worried about the lack of news of his teenage son, who was left with his wife’s family when he went into exile in Russia, and whose whereabouts his sister-in-law, an ardent nationalist, will not reveal to him. Upstairs in his room, Maciek is planning his next move when to his surprise Krystyna taps on his door. The couple, who have gone through a similar hell in the last six years, quickly fall in love with one another. Sharing his secrets with Krystyna in bed, Maciek’s suppressed longing for a new life rises to the surface. He realizes that he is tired of killing and being hunted: he wants to study instead, to take up a normal profession, perhaps to get married. Face to face with Andrzej in the hotel’s cellar later, however, Maciek’s resolve not to murder Szczuka falters. Maciek has obeyed orders for too long, and the new life he envisages is too dreamy, for him to stand up against the taunt of ‘Deserter’. Consequently, he agrees to carry out the assassination, after which he will go his own way.

52

Symbols of Resistance

At the banquet, meanwhile, the blind-drunk Drewnowski completely disgraces himself and loses his chance of accompanying the new minister to Warsaw. At the same time, an awful piece of news arrives for Szczuka. His son has been found but is among Wilk’s nationalist resistance group recently rounded up by the Security Forces. Without waiting for the arrival of his party car, and despite knowing that Home Army assassins are after him, Szczuka sets off on foot to the prison where his son is being interrogated. Spotting his chance, Maciek follows and shoots Szczuka down at pointblank range when they reach a dark, lonely street.

Figure 3.2  Ashes and Diamonds: Maciek flinches while slaying Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski). Dawn arrives. As the banquet ends in a drunken travesty of old-time patriotism, Maciek says goodbye to Krystyna. There will be no new life for the assassin. Maciek walks to the square where Andrzej’s truck is parked, half wondering whether he should not go with him after all. What other life is there for him? Just then, however, Drewnowski arrives and offers to accompany Andrzej. Knowing that Drewnowski is 53

Cinematic Terror

only offering his services to the nationalist cause because he has lost his job with the new regime, Andrzej beats him up and drives off. Picking himself up, Drewnowski suddenly catches sight of Maciek and calls out to him for help. Maciek is embarrassed and runs off to catch a train. Close to the station, however, he literally bumps straight into a military patrol, which is on the look out for saboteurs and Home Army outlaws. When the patrol calls on him to stop, Maciek loses his head and is shot trying to escape. After an agonizing attempt to reach safety, he collapses and dies, alone, on a vast rubbish tip. Ground-breaking though it was in depicting the horrors of political violence, Hitchcock’s Sabotage had given little thought to the causes and meaning of terrorism. Sabotage is the sort of film that centres on entertainment, not on challenging political and moral questions. Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds is quite different. Without mentioning the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ explicitly, the film reflects on many of the thorny issues about violence and politics which the Second World War had brought to the fore. That the film does so indirectly, and so imaginatively – akin, albeit in different ways, to D. W. Griffith’s French Revolutionary drama Orphans of the Storm – underlines the importance of widening our frame of analysis when examining the history of cinematic terrorism. Ashes and Diamonds first of all asks us to consider what the difference is between a soldier and a terrorist. Andrzej and Maciek might be members of the Polish Home Army but they don’t look and sound like regular soldiers; they don’t wear uniforms for one thing. The two protagonists are certainly battle-scarred patriots. In a moving, semi-religious scene in the hotel bar half way through the movie, as a cabaret artist sings mournfully off camera, Maciek lights glasses filled with vodka as a memorial to his friends who perished during the Warsaw Uprising. Now that the Nazis have been defeated, does this mean that the war, and Maciek’s role as a brave soldier of the nationalist resistance, is over? Maciek does not think so, because he believes, justifiably, that Poland still remains occupied. Murdering a political target – even one like Szczuka who appears a good man and with which Maciek has shared a cigarette – is therefore in his mind morally justifiable. It is also entirely valid from a tactical standpoint. The likes of Maciek and Andrzej would be committing suicide if they met the enemy’s militarily stronger forces face on. They must act like guerrillas instead, instilling fear by killing unarmed politicians in the hope that the enemy will yield. Isn’t the enemy equally, if not more, guilty of terrorism anyway? This depends on how the word is defined and by whom. Both Maciek and Szczuka are idealists, wanting to see a new Poland (or ‘diamond’) rising from the ashes of the Second World War, and both are prepared to use violence to achieve it. The thoughtful, middle-aged revolutionary, Szczuka, is a sympathetic character: he fought for others’ freedom during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, puts love for his son before his own safety, and does not share Maciek’s sadistic impulses. Yet the audience was well 54

Symbols of Resistance

aware of what atrocities Szczuka’s sort had countenanced during the war itself (like the massacre at Katyn) and in forging a ‘new society’ in Poland afterwards, when even suspected opponents of the Communist regime were eradicated. If that was not state-sanctioned terror, many might have asked, what was it? There is more than one form of terrorism, in other words, one carried out by individual assassins and another, which is more deadly because of its greater scale, ordered by governments. To suggest that Ashes and Diamonds wholly approves of Maciek’s actions, however, would be erroneous. If the film is on anyone’s side, it is on the side of the victims of political violence, the numbers of which increase during a civil war. This message is brought out at the very beginning of the movie when we see the terror in the young cement worker’s eyes as he tries in vain to escape Maciek’s hail of bullets. It is underscored twenty minutes later when, looking across the hotel courtyard from his room window, Maciek sees the traumatic effect the news of that killing has on the man’s fiancée, who is the hotel’s maid. The maid’s hysteria is rendered all the more palpable and intimate to the audience by being viewed through another window, as if the cinemagoer is encroaching on private grief. When, through the same open window, we then see the maid’s boss attempt to ‘comfort’ the woman by sexually assaulting her, the victim’s anguish and viewer’s sense of shame at witnessing it are complete. The appalling physical and emotional consequences of political violence are illustrated most powerfully towards the end of Ashes and Diamonds. When Maciek and Krystyna go for a walk after having made love, they are forced to shelter from the rain in a bombed-out church. Dominating the church’s interior is a statue of a crucified Christ, hung upside-down as a symbol, perhaps, of the war’s effect on religious values. The audience is invited to laugh when the free-spirited Maciek uses of all things a communion bell to repair Krystyna’s shoe on the altar, only to be pulled up short by a shock cut that shows the assassin then throwing back a sheet to reveal – to his and the audience’s surprise – the bullet-ridden corpses of the two cement workers. When, a little while later, Maciek kills Szczuka (a scene brushed over in Andrzejewski’s book), many viewers presumably got the same feeling of disgust in the pit of their stomachs. Felled by Maciek’s shots, Szczuka sinks into his assassin’s chest, the Communist’s arms outstretched like Christ on the cross. At that very moment, fireworks celebrating peace explode in the sky. This time it’s Maciek’s sorrow, mixed with guilt, that is palpable, as he sees a reflection of the fireworks in a puddle besides Szczuka’s body and throws away his pistol virtually in tears. As Maciek’s emotional torment suggests, it might be argued that the greatest victim in Ashes and Diamonds is the arch terrorist himself. Wajda presents us with an assassin who is trapped, conditioned not by the sort of brainwashing terrorist ‘masterminds’ we will see in many films to come, but by despair and the wider forces of history. Maciek is faced with the choice between a growing awareness of the immorality of his mission and betraying those who have died for the nationalist cause. He is, moreover, incapable of adapting to peacetime. As Wajda scholar Boleslaw Michatek argues, 55

Cinematic Terror

Figure 3.3  Ashes and Diamonds: Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska) and Maciek, flanking Jesus. Maciek is one of those people whom the Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski called ‘contaminated by death’, a generation that had been brutalized during the war to the point that they knew only violence.23 The tragedy of tit-for-tat terrorism and violence, of a nation of wasted individuals, reaches its climax with Maciek’s extraordinary drawn-out death. Highly Expressionist, this sequence is far and away the most memorable, and famous, in Ashes and Diamonds. It begins with Maciek being shot not because he poses a threat to the military patrol – he discarded his pistol immediately after slaying Szczuka – but because he panics and won’t listen to the patrol’s orders to stop running. (Some viewers might have read this as evidence of Maciek’s suicidal state of mind by this point in the film.) Hiding amidst an eerily beautiful laundry yard, Maciek then emerges from behind a billowing, blood-spattered white sheet – an obvious allusion to both the earlier church scene and the red-on-white Polish flag. Maciek knows he’s been shot but, oddly, sniffs the blood on his hand just to check, almost like a child might. Half-running, half-limping, Maciek then escapes the patrol and finds himself alone. The sun is now up and the day is beautiful. Maciek coughs and splutters, his body becoming more and more contorted with agony, until he reaches a rubbish tip on the outskirts of town. Still he won’t stop, though, until, eventually, the pain brings him to his knees. As Maciek’s body thrashes in foetus-like convulsions amidst the town’s detritus, we see a cloud of black crows whirling above and hear the whistle of the train Maciek should have caught. ‘No!’ Maciek cries just before he dies like a dog Michatek, Andrzej Wajda, 42.

23

56

Symbols of Resistance

and his soul is consigned to the rubbish heap of history. Apart from Communist Party hardliners, few in the audience are likely to have taken any pleasure from Maciek’s terrible demise. The young man had regretted fulfilling his mission and had just fallen in love, but still felt ensnared. Maciek’s pain and anguish was meant to symbolize that experienced by his whole nation.

Figure 3.4  Ashes and Diamonds: Maciek crawls to his death. Zbigniew Cybulski’s electrical performance utterly dominates Ashes and Diamonds from start to finish. Cybulski imbues Maciek with a remarkable sense of depth and complexity, possibly giving us cinema’s first heroic terrorist. Cybulski’s Maciek is at once charming and diffident, an impulsive killer and a dynamic martyr. His sunglasses are coolly fashionable yet sad, a mask to protect his eyes from sunlight after spending too long underground during the Warsaw Uprising – ‘a souvenir of unrequited love for my homeland’, he whispers to Krystyna in bed. Maciek may kill frenziedly but it is he, the closet lover of literature, who tells Krystyna that a gravestone inscription about ashes and diamonds comes from a nineteenth-century poem by Cyprian Norwid. Images of other Polish national symbols – a beautiful white horse that approaches Maciek in the hotel courtyard, the drunken banquet guests dancing a somnambulistic polonaise at dawn while Maciek is dying – all serve to complicate (or even excuse) the terrorist’s violence. Close-ups of him laughing, low-angle shots of him trapped by the hotel’s ceilings and the sparse use of music all make us think of Maciek as a human being rather than a sadist or psychopath. 57

Cinematic Terror

Other images and dialogue play with the conflict between the means and ends of terrorism. Andrzej and Maciek do not kill for killing’s sake for they have a clear goal, a free Poland. They can also justify what Major Waga calls the ‘skilful removal’ of civilians like Szczuka, which, as Waga puts it, ‘will resonate at the level of both politics and propaganda’ – an important phrase that implies an understanding of the relationship between violence, fear, public opinion and power. The problem arises when triggerhappiness or poor intelligence leads to the killing of innocents. Neither Andrzej nor Maciek seem too bothered by this issue – indeed, the very next thing Maciek does after watching the hotel maid crying over the death of her fiancée is load his gun. This being said, at least Andrzej and Maciek are honest and have ideals, the film seems to end up saying. It is those who do not – the turncoats like Drewnowski, the careerists like the mayor and the drunken guests from opposite sides of the political spectrum dancing arm-in-arm like marionettes the morning after the banquet – who are more contemptuous. People like them either want to bury their heads in the sand in the hope that their nation’s problems will simply go away or, if they are aristocrats, flee Poland like parasites with their wealth. It is those people who are prepared to get their hands dirty, like Andrzej, Maciek and Szczuka, who deserve most respect, Ashes and Diamonds suggests, not the toadies, compromisers and opportunists. After all, it was the former who had helped save Poland from the marauding Nazis during the war. Now that late 1950s Poland was entering another new, post-Stalinist era, the film implies, perhaps it was time for nationalists and Communists to unite. Ashes and Diamonds was immediately recognized as an exceptionally important film, even by those who hated it. In Poland itself, the political and cultural establishment reacted to it highly ambiguously, revealing serious divisions over the freedoms film-makers should be allowed in Poland in the late 1950s on the one hand and disagreements over the definition and depiction of terrorism on the other. Thus, some elements within government utterly condemned what they saw as the film’s romanticization of Maciek’s clandestine activities and clearly wanted the film banned. One of the country’s leading critics, Zygmunt Kaluzynski, joined in with this opposition, labelling Maciek a ‘gun-toting punk’. Such phrases conveyed a latent anti-Americanism among many members of the Polish film elite. Conversely, and somewhat paradoxically, the majority of Communist Party newspapers reacted positively to Ashes and Diamonds, seeing it as a step forwards politically and culturally. Many critics who did not like the movie’s political messages nonetheless acknowledged its artistic brilliance. ‘It is a spellbinding, stirring work which imposes its own view of the world’, wrote one reviewer. ‘You may, as I do, disagree with it, but there is no denying its stature’. Discussion of Ashes and Diamonds went far beyond professional critics to include the grand-dame of Polish letters, Maria Dabrowska.24 Michatek, Andrzej Wajda, 40; Falkowska, Wajda, 62. Further reviews of the film can be found at the Wajda website http://www.wajda.pl/en/filmy/film03.html (10 July 2013). 24

58

Symbols of Resistance

What, so far as we can tell, did ordinary cinemagoers in Poland make of Ashes and Diamonds? When some spectators were unusually granted the freedom of anonymity and polled on exiting cinemas, a minority complained that the film was too hostile to the Home Army. By contrast, a tiny number looked at the movie through Cold War spectacles and denounced its whitewashing of ‘traitors to the Polish nation, who murdered for American dollars’.25 Notwithstanding these opinions, and the constraints imposed by censorship, it seems that most Poles who saw Ashes and Diamonds were captivated. Since the Communists had taken control of Poland in 1945, no indigenous film had had the nerve to speak to power in this way. Almost overnight, despite being castigated as a terrorist in some newspapers, Maciek became a folk hero in many circles, where he was seen as an intelligent, sexy, mixed-up, contemporary-looking tough-guy entangled in the twin dilemmas of war and love. Zbigniew Cybulski himself quickly became a leader of the so-called ‘young and wrathful’ school of Polish actors and remained a cult figure long after his tragic death in a train accident in 1967. Over the years, Cybulski/Maciek grew into a mythic cypher for a generation of Poles, encouraging them to think, among other things, about the fuzzy boundaries between war, patriotism, resistance and terrorism.26 Of the East European film industries in the 1940s and 1950s, only Poland’s was allowed such a nuanced exploration of what was called the ‘historic anti-fascist struggle’ during the Second World War. Accordingly, after its release Ashes and Diamonds was shown little if at all in neighbouring Communist countries and was banned in the USSR and Fidel Castro’s Cuba for decades.27 Having such a subversive reputation in the East naturally did the film no harm at all in the West. Despite the Polish government’s best efforts, Ashes and Diamonds won prizes at both the Cannes and Venice film festivals in 1959. Riding this wave of acclaim, the film soon became one of the best-known productions from the Eastern bloc in Western Europe and the United States. Though its audiences there were restricted to art houses, critics adored the movie. Most called it a ‘masterpiece’. One American viewer, journalist Nora Sayre, felt Zbigniew Cybulski’s performance made James Dean’s anguish in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Nicholas Ray’s classic drama about emotionally confused suburban American teenagers, look positively childish. One of Britain’s leading cultural magazines thought Ashes and Diamonds was ‘one of the most moving and impressive anti-political films ever made’.28 It did not take long for Ashes and Diamonds to influence other film-makers, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Wajda’s metaphors and symbols soon started Coates, Red and the White, 17. Coates, Red and the White, 40–42; Falkowska, Wajda, 61–2. 27 Falkowska, Wajda, 62; Caute, Dancer Defects, 367–368. 28 Andrzej Wajda, ‘On Ashes and Diamonds’, Ashes and Diamonds DVD (Criterion Collection, 2005); Sayre, Running Time, 112; Times Educational Supplement and other British and American reviews on the Contemporary Films Ltd. flyer for Ashes and Diamonds, Ashes and Diamonds Press Book, BFIL. 25 26

59

Cinematic Terror

Figure 3.5  Ashes and Diamonds: The American view. reappearing in a variety of Polish films, especially the scene with vodka glasses, which was based on the custom of commemorating the dead with candle lamps.29 More significantly for us, the avant-garde French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard borrowed the rubble-strewn landscape of Ashes and Diamonds for the setting of his absurdist 1964 anti-war movie, The Carabineers.30 Wajda’s film also anticipated the nomenclature and tropes used in many terrorism films to come. This includes Maciek’s reference to ‘safe houses’ and images of moths being lured to burning lights to symbolize terrorists’ suicidal tendencies. Wajda’s use of parallel montage in Ashes and Diamonds, in particular to depict the dramatic and spatial irony of killers and their victims being in rooms adjacent to one another, became a popular cinematic

Tadeusz Miczka, ‘Andrzej Wajda’s Duties to the Audience (Oscar 2000)’, Kinema, 13, Spring 2000, 28–29. On the all-round influence of Ashes and Diamonds on Polish cinema, see Coates, Red and the White. 30 Pauline Kael, Going Steady: Film Writings 1968–1969 (New York: Little, Brown, 1970), 106, 140, 219. 29

60

Symbols of Resistance

device. One of the most recent examples of this was in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 drama Munich, another film that explored the morality of assassination.31 The popularity of Ashes and Diamonds opened the way for Andrzej Wajda to become a leading critic of the Communist regime in Poland during the later stages of the Cold War. Having always thought of the regime as a form of state terror, Wajda delivered a devastating indictment of Stalinism and post-Stalinism in 1978 in Man of Marble. This took the form of a film-within-a-film and centred on a reporter’s investigation into what had become of a fictional Stakhanovite bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut, the subject of a gigantic marble statue in the early 1950s who had fallen from favour and been purged from all records. In 1981, Wajda delivered a sequel, Man of Iron, which spelt out the fate of the disgraced worker-hero Birkut during the protest strikes at the Gdansk shipyards in 1970. Before it was banned, Man of Iron quickly became the most popular Polish film of all time, whose effect some compared with Constantin Costa-Gavras’ 1973 movie State of Siege about state-sponsored terrorism in Latin America (to be analysed in Chapter 6). Pointedly, Wajda named the heroic striker in both Man of Marble and Man of Iron Maciek.32 Two years later, in 1983, Wajda made Danton, a Franco-Polish production with Gérard Depardieu in the title role. Set around the French Revolution, this costume drama was widely interpreted as a critique of the Polish government’s recent imposition of martial law. Many Poles equated the leader of the free trade union movement Solidarity, Lech Walesa, with the character of Danton and General Wojcech Jaruzelski, Poland’s prime minister, with the tyrannical dictator behind the Reign of Terror, Robespierre.33 Long before Danton appeared, Wajda had become a vocal supporter of Solidarity. He had produced a docu-drama on the birth of the movement and made a high-profile visit to Walesa during the famous Lenin shipyard strike at Gdansk in 1980. The strength and popularity of that strike would prove to be a turning point for anti-Communist resistance in Poland. During it, curiously Polish and foreign journalists chose to nickname many of the young strikers Maciek and Cybulski, as if Ashes and Diamonds had in one way or another inspired their exploits – as if image and action had indeed become one.34

David Thomson, ‘Mission Intractable’, Sight & Sound, 16, 2, February 2006, 28–30; Robert Sklar, ‘Munich’, Cineaste, 31, 2, Spring 2006, 55–57. 32 Janina Falkowska, The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda: Dialogism in Man of Marble, Man of Iron, and Danton (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996); Caute, Dancer Defects, 368–373; Clifford Lewis and Carroll Britch, ‘Light Out of Poland: Wajda’s Man of Marble and Man of Iron’, Film and History, 12, 4, December 1982, 82–89. 33 Lenny Rubinstein, ‘Danton’, Cineaste, 13, 1, 1983, 36–37; Omar Kholeif, ‘Danton’, Film International, 7, 41, 2009, 63–64. 34 Caute, Dancer Defects, 370–373; Clifford Lewis, ‘Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy: A Retrospective’, Film Criticism, 10, 3, Spring 1986, 34; Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 41. 31

61

CHAPTER 4 EPIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS

It’s an idyllic night-time scene, set around an isolated inlet on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus just after the Second World War. Though the skies are dark, the Technicolor hues on screen are sumptuous: blues, yellows and reds, softened by the half-moon, light up the fine sand on the beach and the ancient stone walls nearby. Everything is quiet. There is no music and the only sound we hear is that of the waves gently lapping ashore. As the camera shifts out to sea, we catch a glimpse, through a pair of binoculars, of a man about a hundred metres offshore. He is diving athletically into the sea from a small motor boat. Who is this stranger and why can’t he land his boat normally? A moment later, we learn why: British colonial soldiers are on the hunt for terrorists. Looking out to sea again, the soldiers’ future nemesis appears on the shoreline, climbing onto the rocks. His comrade, who has been watching through the binoculars, rushes out to greet him. The stranger, destined to become the film’s hero, is now in full view. In close-up, the man resembles a bronzed Adonis. As the camera lingers on his lithe, wet body and handsome face, he towels himself dry. His masculine torso is bathed in moonlight. A necklace with a large Star of David hangs around his neck. He is purposeful and speaks forcefully with a strong American accent. His name is Ari Ben Canaan. Still half-naked and drying his hair, Ari strides into the middle distance, towards his comrade’s car. He has a mission, to build a homeland for the Jews, by whatever means are necessary. There is no time to waste. Paul Newman’s entrance, ten minutes into Hollywood’s lavish 1960 combat-epic Exodus, is an iconic moment in cinema. Ari Ben Canaan’s sensual image of male beauty and measured aggression is often seen as marking a turning point in the filmic representation of Jews, replacing their stereotypical roles as victims and weaklings with muscular heroes and tough-guys.1 It might equally be argued that Newman’s character marks a watershed in the representation of cinematic terrorism. Here, for the first time on film, was a terrorist not only being portrayed as a freedom fighter but as something resembling an eroticized demi-god. Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 1–3; Patricia Erens, ‘Jews in American Cinema’, in Gary Crowdus (ed.), A Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, IL: Lake View, 1994), 214–223. 1

Epic Freedom Fighters

Figure 4.1  Exodus: Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman) arrives in Cyprus, greeted excitedly by Reuben (Paul Stevens).

Exodus shifts our attention away from post–Second World War Europe to the Middle East during the same era. Its focus is Palestine. In the late 1930s, Britain had come under increasing attack from both Arab and Jewish terrorist groups staking their claim to mandated Palestine, which explains, as we saw in Chapter 2, why Hitchcock’s Sabotage was never shown there. In the late 1940s, resistanceterrorism, akin to that depicted in Poland a decade later in Ashes and Diamonds, played an essential part in the violent founding of Israel and came to act as a controversial model for other nationalist causes in and beyond the Middle East. Exodus celebrates the establishment of Israel in May 1948 through the fictionalizing of actual events that took place during Palestine’s final years as a British mandate, including the notorious bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 by the militant Zionist organization Irgun. The film was made on location, in Israel and Cyprus, thereby strengthening its claim to be historical accurate. Directed by the Jewish-American Otto Preminger, the Academy Award–winning Exodus has been widely interpreted as the definitive account of both the origins of the Jewish state and of the Arab-Israeli conflict in popular culture. As a consequence of this, the movie has generated considerable debate over the past six decades as regards terrorism. Some have argued that Exodus epitomizes Hollywood’s racist vilification of Arabs; others argue that the film’s validation of suicidal political activism puts issues surrounding modern-day suicide bombing into important historical context.2 This 63

Cinematic Terror

chapter reassesses these and other competing claims about Exodus, points to the epic being an early illustration of Hollywood’s global influence as a producer of cinematic terrorism, highlights the role that governments played in crafting cinematic images about terrorism during this era and, finally, demonstrates cinema’s ability to help set the public’s political parameters about a region – the Middle East – that would soon become the hub of cinematic terrorism in large parts of the West. Exodus has peculiar origins. On the surface, the movie was a straightforward adaptation of a well-known novel, another illustration, like Sabotage, one might think, of early cinematic terrorism borrowing from more established fictional sources. In fact, the novel in question, Leon Uris’ Exodus, started life in Hollywood. In 1955, one of the oldest and biggest studios in Los Angeles, Metro-GoldwynMayer, commissioned Uris, a Jewish-American journalist-cum-screenwriter, to write a literary account of Israel’s founding that could be turned into a movie. When Uris’ 600-page book was published in 1958, timed to mark Israel’s tenth anniversary, it became the biggest seller in the United States since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936), eventually selling fifty million copies worldwide. However, when MGM’s executives read Uris’ widely publicized script for the movie adaptation they backed out of the project. During a period in which the new medium of television appeared to be killing cinema, the studio’s money men were acutely aware of the importance of Hollywood’s international markets. Fears about the British public’s response to the movie, plus rumoured threats of an Arab boycott, made Exodus look a decidedly risky investment.3 Hollywood director/producer Otto Preminger then stepped into the breach, in alliance with another studio, United Artists. Both Preminger and Arthur Krim, president of United Artists, were prominent Jewish-Americans who were determined to make Exodus in Israel as their contribution to the nascent Jewish state. Preminger was instinctively pro-Israeli but he did not share Leon Uris’ hard-core Zionist views and consequently in the film was determined to modify the novelist’s fierce anti-British and anti-Arab bias. He was successful, though only to an extent. Uris was replaced as chief scriptwriter by Dalton Trumbo, a Gentile and award-winning scenarist who through the 1950s had fallen victim of another form of political extremism, Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist.4 Trumbo sought to de-emphasize For a brief introduction to this debate, see Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs (New York: Olive Branch, 2001), 189–191; Cettl, American Cinema, 118–119. 3 Exodus Pressbook, BFIL; Otto Preminger, Preminger, An Autobiography (New York: Garden City, 1977), 165–172; Rachel Weissbrod, ‘Exodus as a Zionist Melodrama’, Israel Studies, 4, 1, 1999, 141; Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (London: Faber, 2009), 255. 4 ‘Exodus – Production Notes’, Jewish Cinemateque, Jerusalem. On Trumbo and the blacklist, see Larry Ceplair and Stevan Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Trumbo’s involvement in Exodus led to the American Nazi Party joining the war veterans’ organization, the American Legion, in marching against the movie when it was released. Fujiwara, Otto Preminger, 261. 2

64

Epic Freedom Fighters

Uris’ Zionist themes in favour of the book’s message of peace and brotherhood, primarily by toning down the hostility between the Jews and their two enemies, the British and the Arabs, and by eliminating many of the causes of the tension between the three groups. Trumbo also attenuated the minor tensions between the Jews and the Americans in the novel, and sought to make the Nazis the principal villains of the story. ‘I think my picture is much closer to the truth, and to the historic facts, than is the book’, Preminger told reporters. ‘It also avoids propaganda’.5 In seeking to achieve greater ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’ in this way, Exodus was a quintessentially liberal Hollywood product. Its high production values, stellar cast and beautiful landscapes would also characterize it as a typically Hollywood movie. Yet Exodus would probably not have seen the light of day without the blessing of the Israeli political establishment, which saw both the book and film as the perfect instrument to bolster national pride and Israel’s international image. Exodus had the backing of Israeli cultural diplomats from the start. While travelling around Israel in 1956 and 1957 to research his novel, Uris was accompanied by an Israeli Foreign Office official, Ilan Hartuv, who would later be appointed liaison between the Israeli government and Otto Preminger’s production staff.6 When the book was published, Israel’s prime minister, David Ben Gurion, sent Uris a letter of congratulations and copies of the novel to United Nations delegates in Jerusalem looking into the IsraeliPalestinian dispute. ‘It is a vulgar and extremely bad book’, Ben Gurion said privately, ‘but extremely good for our tourist trade’.7 Otto Preminger got the full cooperation of the Israeli government for Exodus. His chief conduit was an old friend, Meyer Weisgal, who had been active in the Zionist Organisation of America since 1915 and had helped reorganize the Israeli government’s information services in the early 1950s. Through Weisgal, Preminger met Ben Gurion, Finance Minister Levi Eshkol and Commerce Minister Pinhas Sapir, all of whom did all they could to accommodate the biggest film to be shot in Israel to date. In exchange, Preminger agreed to give the Israeli royalties from Exodus, plus the income from all of the film’s world premieres, to the Weizmann Institute of Science, a research institute near Tel Aviv which Weisgal headed and Arthur Krim worked for in New York. Back in the late 1940s, Weisgal himself had been infuriated by what he saw as the media’s demonization of the Zionists’ use of violence against the British, as he recorded in his diary at the time: ‘Political violence in other parts of the world … is given the name of patriotism, resistance, revolt, partisan warfare, Marxism, de Gaullism, revolution. In Palestine it becomes a very simple thing: terror’. To Weisgal and others, Exodus was an opportunity to set the record straight.8 Weissbrod, ‘Melodrama’, 139–141; Foster Hirsch, Otto Preminger (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007), 324–325. Hartuv was taken hostage in 1976 aboard the aircraft destined to be rescued famously in Entebbe, Uganda, by the Israeli armed forces. This rescue is the subject of Chapter 7, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ middle_east/5101412.stm (15 November 2011). 7 Tom Ryan, Otto Preminger Films Exodus (New York: Random House, 1960); Weissbrod, ‘Melodrama’, 143–144; Leonard Mosley, ‘Exodus’, Daily Express (London), 4 May 1961. 8 Meyer Weisgal, Meyer Weisgal … So Far (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 229, 302–317. 5 6

65

Cinematic Terror

Thanks partly to Weisgal, Israelis went to great lengths to help with the production of Exodus once filming got under way in 1960. The Israeli army helped transport the cast and crew around Israel, and the navy lent Preminger three destroyers, with their Hebrew letters painted over so they could double as British warships. Moshe Dayan, former Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, assigned his own son (and budding actor) Assi to work with the crew on building Gan Dafna, a fictional kibbutz bordering on the Arab community where much of the action in the film was set. Authenticity was accentuated via filming in Haifa, around Galilee and at the Crusader fortress of Acre, which the British had used as their main prison in Palestine and where many Irgun terrorists had been executed.9 In return for this state assistance, the cast and crew were expected to do all they could to present Israel in a favourable light, on- and off-screen. Paul Newman, who was chosen to play the central role of Ari Ben Canaan following his recent success opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), came under particular pressure. The actor, whose father was Jewish, was consistently reminded of his Jewish heritage and of his ‘responsibility’ in representing Israel and its history. Some Gentiles like Eva Marie Saint, the female lead who had just starred alongside Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s Cold War thriller North By Northwest (1959), took on the role of roving reporters during the production, obliging the international press with stories of Israel’s steadfastness and democratic spirit. Saint waxed lyrical about Israel’s stoicism in the face of constant Arab invasion threats and about the greater opportunities Israeli women had compared with their Arab counterparts.10 Not everything went smoothly. Preminger and his general manager Martin Schute found themselves caught in a turf war between representatives of former underground movements, the Irgun and Haganah, over how the film would bestow them with due credit in Israel’s struggle for independence. Having got his hands on one script, the Irgun’s former leader and future Israeli prime minister, Menahem Begin, harangued the film-makers for giving his one-time terrorist organization ‘short shrift’. Preminger then had to deal with a delegation of native-born Israelis (or Sabras) who decried Paul Newman’s heroic character, Ari Ben Canaan, insisting that Israel had been founded through collective action rather than the Hollywood-style heroics of a single political adventurer. On the other side of the fence, some Israeli Arabs, perhaps whipped up by Egyptian radio broadcasts calling for a boycott of the movie, physically attacked those Arabs who were employed on the production; some, according to press reports, even issued Preminger and Newman with death threats. Others pleaded with Preminger not to depict Arabs attacking the children’s ‘Exodus – Production Notes’ and ‘The Logistics of “Exodus” ’, Jewish Cinemateque, Jerusalem. As well as becoming a director, Assi Dayan later starred in Operation Thunderbolt, analysed in Chapter 7. 10 Hirsch, Preminger, 326, 330; Louella O. Parsons, ‘Eva Marie Saint Loses Weight, Yen to Travel Filming’, Los Angeles Examiner, 2 October 1960. 9

66

Epic Freedom Fighters

village at Gan Dafna. ‘You don’t want to rewrite the script’, Preminger countered, ‘you want to rewrite history’.11 Meanwhile, the British military bluntly turned down Preminger’s requests for logistical assistance with filming on the island of Cyprus, where the first part of Exodus was set, on the grounds that the film was anti-British. Since 1955, British soldiers based in the colony had come under fierce attack from EOKA terrorists demanding union with Greece, and the last thing senior military chiefs wanted to get involved in during the final tense weeks of British rule in Cyprus (the island was granted independence in August 1960) was a film that appeared to show terrorism succeeding. After all, the British government had spent the last decade encouraging film-makers to say the opposite in other troubled parts of the empire, like Kenya and Malaya. In the event, British soldiers in Cyprus did help in a roundabout way with the production of Exodus, by guarding the hundreds of imported rifles needed for the film. EOKA was willing to pay as much as $100 for a rifle on the black market.12 For its part, the US Department of Defence banned any of its personnel stationed in the Mediterranean from either lending assistance to or appearing in Exodus when off-duty. This was highly unusual given the Pentagon’s long history of cordial relations with Hollywood. It could have been a response to the active oil lobby in the United States echoing concerns by Arab states about Exodus. It might also have reflected the much closer relationship Pentagon officials shared with the British rather than Israeli military during this period.13 At 3 hours 40 minutes, Exodus is by far the longest of the films analysed in this book and was in fact the lengthiest Hollywood film since, appropriately perhaps, Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind in 1939. Exodus criss-crosses several genres. It is part conversion narrative, part history-meets-swashbuckling-romance, part war movie. Its widescreen format, high-contrast lighting, rich colours, soaring score and Holy Variety, 22 July 1960; ‘Exodus – Production Notes’ and ‘The Logistics of “Exodus” ’, Jewish Cinemateque, Jerusalem; Jon Whitcomb, ‘On Location with Jon Whitcomb: The Saga of Exodus: Movie Version’, Cosmopolitan, November 1960, Eva Saint Marie’s personal file on Exodus, AMPAS; Hirsch, Preminger, 326, 331–332. 12 ‘British-American Hassle Brewing Over “Exodus” Filming in Cyprus’, Los Angeles Mirror News, 20 May 1960, Section 2, 6; ‘Cyprus Exhibs Cut “Exodus” More Than Island’s Censor; Distrib Cancels Showings’, Variety, 21 March 1962; ‘Exodus – Production Notes’, Jewish Cinemateque, Jerusalem. On the propaganda war fought by the British over Cyprus, Kenya and Malaya during this period, including filmic efforts to portray insurgents as terrorists, see Carruthers, Hearts and Minds; Susan L. Carruthers, ‘Two Faces of 1950s Terrorism: The Film Presentation of Mau Mau and the Malayan Emergency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 6, 1, Spring 1995, 17–43; Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 50–56. 13 ‘Inside – International’, Variety, 20 July 1960; Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 41–42. On the Hollywood-Pentagon special relationship, see Lawrence Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002). 11

67

Cinematic Terror

Land location link the movie to the Biblical epics that dominated the American box office in the 1950s. It has also been called the first Jewish Western, owing to its frontier landscapes and tropes of rugged, pioneering national righteousness.14 It is 1947, and Kitty Fremont (Saint), an American nurse, arrives in Cyprus to see the island’s British commander, General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson). Kitty wants to know details about the death of her husband, a newspaper photographer who was friends with the general in the Palestine mandate and was killed there in a strafing attack by an unidentified plane. Kitty miscarried after hearing that her husband had been killed. Cyprus resembles a vast prison camp. Every day, the docks are packed with Jewish refugees from ships headed for Palestine, but intercepted by the British navy and brought into Famagusta harbour. Some 30,000 Jews are interned on the island – men, women and children who have been liberated in Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and other parts of Europe, only to end up in dreary, overcrowded discomfort and the hopeless knowledge that, as before, they have no place to go. At their meeting, Sutherland, who recognizes the need to take Kitty’s mind off her personal tragedy, suggests that she help out at the refugee camp in Caraolos where facilities and medical personnel are desperately limited. Kitty is initially not interested. ‘I feel strange among them’, she says, referring to the Jews. However, she changes her mind after being sickened by bigoted comments by Major Caldwell (Peter Lawford), Sutherland’s anti-Semitic aide. Elsewhere on Cyprus, the square-jawed Ari Ben Canaan (Newman), a top agent of Haganah, the Jewish underground organization in Palestine, has landed under cover of night on a daring mission to defy the British blockade of the Palestine coast and to take all the refugees from an intercepted ship, the Star of David, into Palestine. Jewish intelligence intends this bold operation as a symbolic act to coincide with the upcoming United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine to provide the Jews with their own state. In this operation Ari is helped by a Cypriote patriot, Mandria (Hugh Griffith). In the detention camp at Caraolos, Kitty meets some of the people with whom she is to become deeply involved in the months to come. They include fifteen-year-old Karen (Jill Haworth), a German refugee for whom she feels immediate affection and who is hoping to find her father in Palestine; Dov Landau (Sol Mineo), a bitter, soulscarred product of the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp; David Ben Ami (Michael Wager), commander of the refugee camp and a secret member of the Haganah; and old Dr. Odenheim (Martin Miller). Ari obtains a dilapidated Greek freighter, the Olympia, and fits it for the trip to Palestine. Disguised as a British officer, he commandeers arms, trucks and Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 161–162. It is worth mentioning that Leon Uris had written the screenplay for the classic Hollywood Western Gunfight at the O. K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957). 14

68

Epic Freedom Fighters

supplies from a British depot, and with the help of forged papers, convoys the Star of David group on board the vessel which he now calls the Exodus. The ship’s path is promptly blocked by British destroyers. The passengers vow to blow themselves up if British troops board the Exodus and to starve to death rather than return to their barbed-wire confinement. ‘Fight! Don’t Beg! Fight!’ shouts the bull-voiced Yugoslav peasant Lakavitch (Gregory Ratoff). The Jews’ vote to go on hunger strike instantly becomes world news and results in a delay of the UN vote on partition.15 Kitty, fearing for Karen’s health and safety, boards the Exodus and pleads with Ari for the child’s release. Ari responds by saying that it is ten years too late for Americans like her to start caring about Jews. He also compares Haganah’s actions with those used by Americans fighting for their independence from the British 170 years earlier. Karen refuses to leave anyway, and the hunger strike continues for more than four days before world opinion and Sutherland’s sympathetic intervention in London force the British authorities to permit the Exodus to sail. Kitty stays on board to help look after the children. The sharp differences between the Jewish factions working and fighting within Palestine to make the country free and independent are brought into focus almost immediately after the refugees land at Haifa. The Exodus youngsters are taken from port to Gan Dafna, a youth village in Galilee, where they are welcomed by Barak (Lee J. Cobb), a Palestinian pioneer and Ari’s father. Barak introduces the youngsters to Taha (John Derek), the leader of a nearby Arab village and a life-long friend of Ari’s. Barak saved Taha’s life many years ago after Syrian Arabs had killed his father in his own mosque. Barak teaches the newcomers the importance of hard work and religious tolerance – ‘Allah – speak always that name with respect’, he intones – while Taha gives thanks to the Jews for having made the land around his village fertile. Barak, Chairman of the National Committee of the Jewish Palestine Agency, represents the Haganah position, which calls for the use of force only to defend the interests of the country or to maintain advantages already gained. Haganah believes in the effectiveness of peaceful negotiations, though it also has trained the Palmach, a military underground force. By contrast, the militant group Irgun is convinced that only through terrorism can the British be induced to leave Palestine. Back in Haifa, Dov attempts to make contact with the Irgun but is arrested by the British police. After his release, and a gruelling interrogation by Akiva (David Opatoshu), leader of the Irgun and Barak’s estranged brother, Dov joins the group and soon becomes one of its most daring and effective ‘freedom fighters’. Tension spreads throughout Palestine as the United Nations moves closer to a decision on partition. In Jerusalem, Kitty again meets Ari and, despite their strong In the 1940s, both the Haganah and Irgun were acutely aware of the role that the media, including cinema, could play in furthering their cause. One of the most innovative propaganda techniques employed during this period was their ‘hijacking’ of cinemas in Palestine to project slides bearing political slogans or insignia of the Zionist underground organizations. Carruthers, Hearts and Minds, 30. 15

69

Cinematic Terror

and obvious differences, they are attracted to each other. The American woman first rejects him out of fear of becoming involved. Ari meets with Akiva, his uncle, to try to dissuade him from carrying out further terrorist acts on the eve of the UN vote. Haganah feels that these acts hurt the Jewish cause, but Akiva turns Ari down, arguing forcefully that the British will never allow them a homeland through diplomatic negotiations alone. Kitty’s understanding of Ari continues to grow as she, too, is fired by his love for Palestine and his dedication to the cause of freedom. On their way to Ari’s home, they confess their love for each other on a hilltop commanding a magnificent view of the Valley of Jezreel. Kitty goes to Gan Dafna where she is reunited with Karen, whom she wants to adopt and take to America. Karen had been brought up by a Danish family after her parents and brothers had been arrested by the Nazis. Though her mother and brothers perished in Dachau concentration camp, there is reason to believe that her father, who had been a prominent scientist, might have been spared and could be alive in Palestine. Ari helps in locating him in Jerusalem, but when Karen finally confronts her father he is insane and unable to recognize her. Dramatically, the Irgun blows up a wing of the King David Hotel, the British military headquarters in Palestine. Akiva and other Irgun leaders are caught by the British and condemned to die in the grim prison at Acre, but Dov escapes. Acting on his own to save his uncle, Ari joins forces with the Irgun to free the

Figure 4.2  Exodus: Kitty (Eva Marie Saint), Karen (Jill Haworth) and Ari turn to see

Jerusalem’s King David Hotel going up in smoke. Courtesy of United Artists/Photofest. 70

Epic Freedom Fighters

men from Acre. Dov gives himself up in order to engineer the break, which is successful. Akiva, however, is fatally wounded in the escape and Ari is badly hit. Kitty helps smuggle Ari past British guards to Taha’s home, where she nurses him back to health. With political and paramilitary pressures mounting on Britain, the UN votes for partition in early December 1947, awarding a homeland to the Jews, with the British withdrawal set for the following May. In a grand speech in Jerusalem Square, Barak implores the Palestinian Arabs to stay so they can build a future together, but their attacks on Jewish settlements mount immediately. The Arab Grand Mufti’s ‘stormtroopers’, led by a former Nazi officer, Von Storch (Marius Goring), demand that Taha join in an operation to wipe out Gan Dafna. Taha warns Ari and Kitty of the impending attack and Gan Dafna is partially evacuated at night. The German, suspecting Taha, calls off the Gan Dafna raid. But when Jewish forces enter Taha’s village the next morning, they find it empty and many of its inhabitants brutally murdered. Taha is found hanged, with a Star of David carved into his chest and a huge swastika smeared in ugly red on the side of his house. There is another tragedy. Karen, whose affection for Dov has deepened and grown into real love, is senselessly killed by a refugee Arab. With Taha, she is laid to rest in a moving ceremony in which Ari promises to work for peace between the Jews and Arabs in Israel. In the background, trucks go roaring into the night, heading for the war against the invading Arabs. The film ends with the same image with which it started: Israeli guns are raised aloft in defiance amidst the flames of independence. For all its sprawling length, and the undeniably important role that terrorists played in helping create Israel, Exodus shows us very few acts of terrorism. There is nothing to compare, for instance, with Sabotage’s harrowing bus-bombing sequence. One early script did contain a scene that would have more than matched that sequence, in which Kitty and Ari witness the immediate aftermath of an Irgun truck bombing. The couple sees ‘bodies and body parts everywhere’, and Kitty is shaken by Ari’s grimly casual reaction. Presumably this was deleted because it made the heroic Ari look callous and anyway would not have got past US censors.16 The King David Hotel bombing, which a police officer in the film accurately tells us has killed over ninety people, is only seen at a distance, with smoke rising over Jerusalem’s rooftops. The joint attack on Acre prison by the Irgun and Haganah – described by one critic as ‘an outstanding piece of stage-management’17 – has the spectacular explosions expected of many a terrorism film of the future but none of the blood and gore. Exodus script, written by Dalton Trumbo, December 1960, 144–146, Eva Marie Saint Collection, AMPAS. The US censorship body, the American Motion Picture Association, approved Exodus in December 1960. ‘Exodus’, 12 December 1960, MPPA Files, AMPAS. 17 Penelope Gilliatt, ‘Birth-pangs of Israel’, Observer, 7 May 1961. 16

71

Cinematic Terror

Visually absent it may be, but Exodus still has a lot to say about terrorism. Like State of Siege (analysed in Chapter 6), Exodus is principally a film of speeches. Characters explain to each other and the audience the interests, policies and goals they represent. Sometimes this is to persuade, as when Ari urges cooperation between the Haganah and the Irgun. Sometimes it is to enlighten – when, for example, General Sutherland recounts, for Kitty’s benefit, Britain’s ‘troublesome commitments’ to both the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine. Sometimes it is to state positions, as in Ari’s visit to his uncle Akiva.18 In this latter scene, half way through the film, Akiva makes what was one of the most eloquent defences of terrorism yet seen at the cinema. ‘I don’t know of one nation whether existing now or in the past that was not born in violence’, the gentle Akiva tells his nephew. ‘Terror, violence, death: These are the midwives who bring free nations into this world’. When Ari responds by claiming that only the Haganah’s peaceful smuggling of Jews into Palestine has given the Zionists a ‘justifiable’ claim to statehood at the UN, and that the Irgun’s ‘terror’ tactics are damaging the Jews’ international image, Akiva is calmness personified. ‘Justice itself is an abstraction’, he says with the air of a rabbinical scholar. Without action, it counts for nothing, he says, as ‘events in the past ten years’ (a reference to the Holocaust) demonstrated. ‘Let the National Committee try to talk the British out of Palestine’, Akiva concludes, logically we might think. ‘The Irgun will continue to bomb them out’. It is perfectly true, as many film historians have argued, that Preminger’s Exodus takes a more critical line on Zionist terrorism than Uris’s novel. By no means all of the British people in the film are depicted as legitimate Irgun targets. General Sutherland, for instance, is a thoughtful, humane character, and we see ordinary British soldiers stopping to help Jews and Arabs fix their cars. Shortly before dying, Karen gets Dov to question the Irgun’s indiscriminate British killings by likening some of the British to the friendly Danes who had helped Jews like her escape from the Nazis during the Second World War. Unlike in the novel, Preminger’s Exodus does not depict Arab terrorist attacks on the Jews or British in any real detail, thereby to some extent undercutting the Irgun’s moral right to bomb and kill. The film also alludes (though without going into detail) to the Irgun’s most notorious anti-British action of the late mandate period, the hanging of two sergeants, whose bodies were found booby-trapped in an orange grove in Nathanya to the north of Tel Aviv in July 1947.19 At the very least, however, Exodus fuzzes the difference between legitimate force and terrorism. Even in the long exchange between Ari and Akiva, it is significant that Ari condemns the Irgun’s bombings and killings not on ethical grounds but because he deems them politically counter-productive. In an early script, Barak had Fujiwara, Otto Preminger, 271–272. This was the climactic act of the Irgun’s campaign against British rule in Palestine. Only days afterwards came the announcement that the future of Palestine would be turned over to the jurisdiction of the UN. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds, 29. 18 19

72

Epic Freedom Fighters

used the name of Mahatma Gandhi in an impassioned speech against terrorism, telling Ari that no end, however great, justified violence. In the film, though, this appears nowhere and Barak merely echoes his son’s line that Akiva ‘presents us to the world as a bunch of murderers’.20 Moreover, Ari, the film’s chief protagonist, is himself clearly not averse to the use or threats of political violence if circumstances require it. In Cyprus, he wires the Exodus with 200 pounds of dynamite to prevent the British military boarding (Akiva labels him an Irgunist for this). In Palestine, Ari uses explosives and shoots soldiers. By the end of the film it is impossible to distinguish between the Haganah and Irgun, which have joined forces first to evade British ‘justice’, then to repel the Arabs. Having at one point been virtual enemies, Ari and Dov are now comrades-in-arms. The character of Ari Ben Canaan utterly dominates Exodus. Paul Newman’s good looks and youthful persona – not unlike Zbigniew Cybulski‘s Maciek in Ashes and Diamonds – help make him the perfect action-man hero. Ari’s elaborate wardrobe – white linen suits, stolen British army uniform, Arab robes for disguise – always makes him look handsome and attractive. He is a master tactician (politically and militarily), a skilled propagandist, knows the Bible backwards and can distinguish a Chablis from a Chardonnay. Like all proud ‘Sabras’ (the Hebrew word for ‘prickly pears’), Ari has a sharp tongue – telling Kitty early on in the film, for example, that to most Gentiles ‘Jewish meat is cheaper than beef, cheaper than herring’. Yet he can be funny and is never cruel. Above all perhaps Ari is romantic. When we see him kissing Kitty, we know he is doing it out of love and not in order to win her over politically. For her part, by the end, the once anti-Semitic American has fallen for both Ari and Israel – proven by her wearing Haganah uniform with a gun over her shoulder as she watches Taha and Karen being buried. There are other ways in which Preminger’s Exodus legitimizes Zionist terrorism. Akiva might be Palestine’s most wanted terrorist, according to the British, but he is clearly no fanatical madman or sadist. Nor does he show any signs of being violently Arab, which the real Irgun was.21 A delicate, highly educated, ascetic sexagenarian wearing a neatly trimmed beard and steel-rimmed pince-nez, the Irgun’s leader has given up almost everything, including his family, for his commitment to Israel. The organization he runs operates, like the Haganah, along democratic lines. Its members are not brainwashed automatons but ‘freedom fighters’ who have thought carefully about their actions and who are not forced to do anything against their wishes. Thus Dov surrenders voluntarily to the British police so he can help his comrades escape from Acre prison, not because he is ordered to by Akiva. In some early scripts, Dov is portrayed as a fanatic, particularly when he offers to make himself into ‘a human bomb and blow up British headquarters’, a proposal Ari Fujiwara, Otto Preminger, 263–264.

20

Spencer C. Tucker and Priscilla Mary Roberts (eds.), The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Volume 1 – A-H (New York: ABC-CLIO, 2008), 494–495. 21

73

Cinematic Terror

Figure 4.3  Exodus: Ari says goodbye to his uncle, Akiva (David Opatoshu), killed during the prison breakout. Courtesy of United Artists/Photofest.

describes as animalistic.22 In the film, though, while clearly still a firebrand, Dov comes across as a brutalized victim of Nazism. This is brought out most movingly during the seventeen-year-old’s initiation into the Irgun, conducted in what looks like a Haifa dungeon. Though this dimly lit scene ends with Dov pledging an oath of allegiance to the terrorist group with his hand on the Torah, the initiation ceremony has none of the bizarre, cult-like qualities seen in earlier films like D. W. Griffith’s The Voice of the Violin. In order to become a trusted member of the Irgun, Dov is forced by Akiva to confess that he was a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, whose job it was to help in the extermination process by disposing of corpses from the gas chambers. Utterly ashamed of this, Dov then breaks down into Akiva’s arms when he further admits to having been raped systematically by the German soldiers in the camp. Dov’s cries of guilt and shame are all the more heart-rending owing to his character’s rebellious persona, complete with 1950s-style leather jacket. It was this scene more than any other that probably earned Sal Mineo an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, sealing his reputation for being Hollywood’s best-loved ‘troubled teen’.23 Given his experiences during the Holocaust, Dov has what many viewers would have interpreted as unimpeachable motives for revenge against those who sided Exodus script, written by Dalton Trumbo, December 1960, 44–46, Eva Marie Saint Collection, AMPAS. Mineo had also earned a nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1956, playing the sensitive teenager John ‘Plato’ Crawford opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. 22 23

74

Epic Freedom Fighters

with the Nazis during the Second World War, including the Palestinian Arabs loyal to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. However, while Dov is zealous, especially in using the explosives expertise the Germans had taught him in Auschwitz (to blast holes for mass graves), he does not kill for pleasure. On the run after the King David Hotel bombing, Dov looks more like a hunted hero than a terrorist, especially when he finds safe haven inside a church. Once incarcerated in Acre, Dov shows no remorse for killing nearly 100 people (soldiers only, the film implies, but civilians as well in real life).24 This is perhaps understandable when we are told in the film that the Irgun issued three warnings of the attack. When the Irgun’s ringleaders are then swiftly arrested by plain-clothed British intelligence officers, we are left with the impression the British could even have invited the bombing in order to bring Akiva and others out into the open. This is a dirty war, in other words, rather like that depicted in Ashes and Diamonds, in which the normal rules of engagement do not apply.

Figure 4.4  Exodus: Dov (Sal Mineo), a soldier-terrorist, defends Gan Dafna. Courtesy of United Artists/Photofest.

Carruthers, Hearts and Minds, 29.

24

75

Cinematic Terror

Something similar could be said for the Jewish-Arab conflict over Palestine. In the film, the Arabs are not labelled explicitly as terrorists either by the Jews or British, but in many ways their actions are more frighteningly inexcusable than those carried out by the Irgun. Early in the film, General Sutherland expresses dismay at the Arabs’ ‘fanatical’ opposition to Jewish immigration into Palestine. Soon after arriving in Haifa, Dov is warned by the British police not to stray into the Arab areas, where the Grand Mufti’s ‘gangsters’ will ‘slit your throat’. Kitty then learns that Gan Dafna has been named in honour of a young Jewish woman who was engaged to Ari in their youth before being brutally tortured and murdered by Arabs. Dafna’s imposing statue, which is in the background of many village scenes, stands as a constant reminder of the Arabs’ propensity for ‘slaughtering’ the Jews and their alleged collaborators, like the peace-loving Druze. The truly frightening nature and scale of the terrorist threat posed to the Jews by the Arabs is hammered home in the last half hour of Exodus. Thanks to Kitty telling us, we already know that the Middle Eastern Arabs outnumber the Jews a hundred to one. Rather than openly declaring war on the Jews after the UN’s partition vote, however, not only do the Grand Mufti’s Arabs terrorize oases of peace like Gan Dafna in the dead of night. They seek to ‘exterminate’ the Jews in alliance with former Nazi officers, as if to complete Hitler’s Final Solution. In Uris’ book, the one good Arab, Taha, is killed by a Jewish attack on his village. In the movie, Taha is murdered in cold blood by his Arab brothers as a warning to others not to collaborate with the Jews. Karen, the epitome of innocence, also dies at the hands of an Arab who, significantly, is fleeing Palestine not due to Jewish expulsion but because of internecine Arab conflict.25 Dramatic music and slick editing heighten the shock effect of both of these murders. It is of course Ari and Dov, respectively, who come across their bodies, thereby enhancing the murders’ emotional impact on viewers. If Preminger’s Exodus partially justifies Zionist terrorism, does it also show that it worked? If we mean by that do the Irgun’s actions create the sort of Israel Ari says he wanted, in which Jews and Arabs can cohabit, the answer is no. The answer is yes, however, if we mean by that do these and other politically unorthodox actions help force the British out of Palestine. First, the publicity caused by the Exodus passengers’ threat to commit mass suicide, either via dynamite or starvation, leads to a delay in the UN vote on partition. Second, the bombings and Acre prison breakout weaken British resolve at a critical point, without apparently doing the sort of damage to In this way, Exodus affirmed the long-held official Israeli position that the Palestinian Arabs were not driven out by the Jews in 1948 as part of some sort of ethnic cleansing programme and that the Arab refugees’ claim to the right to return was consequently bogus. On this still highly contentious issue, one that helped lead to the creation in 1964 of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, labelled a terrorist body in many countries including Israel and the United States in the years ahead, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 25

76

Epic Freedom Fighters

Figure 4.5  Exodus: Ari takes Taha (John Derek) in his arms after being murdered by Arab extremists. Courtesy of United Artists/Photofest.

Zionism’s international reputation that Ari anticipated. Soon after the prison break, the UN vote is rescheduled, a majority grants the Zionists partition and the Jews their cherished homeland, and the British promise to leave. The Irgun might not be heroic in the mould of Haganah’s Ari and Barak, but they are nation-builders nonetheless. They are, in other words, ‘good terrorists’. Being a Hollywood product, Exodus automatically stood a much greater chance of culturally and politically outpunching Sabotage, Ashes and Diamonds and many of the other films in this book. Yet few people could have anticipated quite how influential

77

Cinematic Terror

and durable the movie would prove to be. Exodus made motion picture history by breaking the $1 million sales barrier even before it opened in New York in December 1960, thanks to an innovative worldwide promotional campaign. It went on to be one of the top five American box-office hits of 1961, eventually grossing $8 million in North America and $22 million worldwide (a solid return on a movie costing $4 million). The film’s oft-described ‘haunting’ score by Ernest Gold, a Jew who had fled to the United States from Nazi-occupied Austria in the 1930s, not only won an Academy Award but went to the top of the US music charts, with lyrics added by the devout Christian singer/actor Pat Boone: ‘This land is mine – God gave this land to me’.26 The movie did not meet with unbridled success everywhere. Exodus seems to have been widely boycotted in the Arab world, following the lead given by Egypt’s president Gamal Abdul Nasser. Syria and Egypt banned Exodus, together with Paul Newman’s other films, on the basis of the actor’s ‘material support for Zionism and Israel’.27 In Britain, Exodus was widely condemned in the press for, as one of the country’s most sober newspapers The Times put it, glamourizing those ‘Jewish terrorists’ who had committed ‘mass murder’ in the King David Hotel. Other British journalists were troubled by the movie’s epic approach, which they felt lent it an ‘ambiguity about violent and non-violent methods’ and ‘about defence and aggression’. Penelope Gilliatt, the famous critic who coincidentally in the same year had accused Hitchcock of callousness in Sabotage, thought little of Preminger’s purported effort to invoke a spirit of Jewish-Arab brotherhood: ‘The closing peroration by Paul Newman to the ideal of peaceful coexistence, delivered in a forest of rifles, amounts in fact to “We must learn to live together, and I shall go on killing you till we do” ’.28 Given how strongly Exodus was imbued with Zionist fervour, the movie was always going to be popular in Israel itself (if not among its Arab minority). Prime Minister David Ben Gurion did not exactly give the film a ringing public endorsement when it first appeared: ‘Not always accurate and a bit too long’, he proclaimed, ‘but a very impressive picture’. Despite this, Israelis flocked to the cinema to watch America’s first big screen version of the birth of their country. Many would have seen the film during the sensational fourteen-week trial in Jerusalem in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann, Fujiwara, Otto Preminger, 267, 271; Dan O’Brien, Paul Newman (London: Faber, 2004), 75; Shawn Levy, Paul Newman (London: Aurum, 2008), 166; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053804/business (20 November 2011); Weissbrod, ‘Zionist Melodrama’, 136–137. $1 million in 1960 is equivalent to $7.75 million in 2012 dollars. Dollar equivalencies are taken from http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/ (10 June 2013). 27 Variety, 2 February 1961; Los Angeles Times, 8 July 1960. 28 ‘Film about a Twentieth-Century Exodus’, The Times, 4 May 1961; Isabel Quigly, ‘Promise and Frustration’, Spectator, 12 May 1961; Derek Hill, ‘Honourable Failure’, Tribune, 12 May 1961; Penelope Gilliatt, ‘Birthpangs of Israel’, Observer, 7 May 1961. Exodus’ anti-British message was enjoyed in later years and in other terrorist hot-spots. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, one British journalist recalls audiences in Dublin cheering every British discomfort depicted in the film. Philip Purser, ‘Exodus’, Sunday Telegraph, 21 November 1971. 26

78

Epic Freedom Fighters

one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust. By April 1962, Hollywood’s trade press was reporting that Exodus had been seen by a quarter of all Israelis.29 By this point, the film (and Uris’ novel) had already started to become more real for some people in Israel and elsewhere than the history it claimed to tell. Following the introduction in 1960 of package tours tracing the route of events in Uris’ book, Israel’s national airline El Al announced in 1961 that it was offering sixteen-day tours that covered the very places where Preminger and his film crew had shot scenes for Exodus.30 In the years ahead, Preminger’s Exodus became what Israeli cultural scholar Yosefa Loshitzky calls ‘an inspiring model text for the heroic-nationalist genre in Israeli cinema’. One of the chief architects of this genre was Menahem Golan, the director whose work is the focus of Chapter 7. More broadly, many Israelis, especially those in government and the military, saw Exodus as a powerful public diplomacy asset. Decades later, when Israel’s international reputation grew weaker amidst allegations of warmongering and colonial occupation, Exodus became increasingly encrusted in nostalgia, as many Israelis pondered how they could improve their country’s image.31 It was in the United States, however, that Exodus seems to have fallen on especially fertile soil. By the time the film was released, Uris’ novel had already sold approximately four million copies there. This figure would rise to twenty million over the next two decades, thanks partly to the film’s release and to the fact that the movie quickly became a regular fixture on US television. The book-and-film phenomenon probably did more to popularize Israel with the American public than any other single presentation through the media, its story becoming, as Middle Eastern scholar Melanie McAlister puts it, ‘the primary source of knowledge about Jews and Israel that most Americans had’. Together, the two Exodus versions first triggered an interest in Zionism among many Americans and then appeared to have a uniquely powerful influence on how Americans thought about the Arab-Israeli conflict.32 ‘Prem Doubts Israelis Will Go For “Exodus” ’, Variety, 5 July 1961; ‘25% Of All Israel Has Seen “Exodus” To Date; Record’, Variety, 3 April 1962. 30 McAlister, Epic Encounters, 162. 31 Loshitzky, Identity Politics, 2. In 2002, Amos Gitai, arguably Israel’s most internationally recognized film-maker, best known for his critiques of the country, made Kedma. Set during the opening stages of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Gitai intended Kedma to be a more realistic answer to the romanticized depiction of the war in Preminger’s Exodus. The final shot of Kedma is identical to that in Exodus. The New York Times’ Stephen Holden interpreted Kedma as ‘a pointed rebuke to a tub-thumping nationalistic epic like Exodus’. Stephen Holden, ‘War-Weary Immigrants Facing Another War’, New York Times, 7 February 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/07/movies/07KEDM.html (20 November 2011); Robin Wood, ‘Exodus Collides with the Kedma’, Film International, 18, 2005, 29–35. 32 McAlister, Epic Encounters, 159; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 79; David Twersky, ‘Novelist Leon Uris Taught Jewish Readers to Stand Tall’, Forward, 27 June 2003, http://www.forward.com/articles/7579/ (20 November 2011). 29

79

Cinematic Terror

Early indications of how Americans interpreted the film and its take on terrorism can be found in the press. When the film first came out, some newspaper reviewers did refer to the Irgun as ‘terrorists’ but the majority echoed the New York Times in calling them ‘paragons of tough resistance fighters’. This fits with the success that the movie had in selling Israeli government bonds at fundraising events in the United States and with Eva Marie Saint being presented with a plaque on Israeli marble by American Zionists.33 Like the novel, the screen version of Exodus portrayed the Jews as both victims and heroes and the Arabs as villains and cowards. Having famous Hollywood actors play Zionist characters and sympathizers made Uris’ newly forged Israel look even more akin, as the African-American writer Alice Walker thought when first watching the movie, to ‘an American-like refuge that had been hard fought and won (morally, politically and militarily) from an indifferent world’.34 It was a short step from this to think of Israel as a natural ‘Western’ ally of the United States. Simultaneously, the ideological spin Preminger put on the democratic, responsibly militarized, progressive Zionists’ desire for peace with the Arabs helped to underpin the United States’ moral case for supporting Israel against its backward, warmongering, ‘terrorist’ neighbours.35 The success of Preminger’s Exodus helped pave the way for other Hollywood narratives celebrating Zionism, some of them also shot in Israel. These include Judith (Daniel Mann, 1966), Cast a Giant Shadow (Melville Shavelson, 1966) and Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993).36 Cast a Giant Shadow, another action movie with a star-studded American cast, starred Kirk Douglas in a fictionalized account of the experiences of a real-life Jewish-American who died commanding units of the fledgling Israel Defence Force (IDF) during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In its depiction of Arabs as proto-terrorists threatening the civilized world, Cast a Giant Shadow anticipated dozens of other US-made drama-adventures, from Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977) through to True Lies (James Cameron, 1994).37 Cast a Giant Shadow was made in close collaboration with the IDF’s Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, a former Haganah leader widely thought to be the inspiration for Exodus’ Ari Ben Canaan.38 Accordingly, Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by an Orthodox Jew opposed to the Oslo Accords between Israel and the ‘terrorist’ ‘Enter “Exodus” ’, New York Times Magazine, 29 May 1960, 22; Bosley Crowther, ‘March-By of Soldiers’, New York Times, 1 January 1961; ‘Glittering Turnout at “Exodus” Premiere’, Los Angeles Times, 22 December 1960; Los Angeles Mirror, 20 February 1961, part 1, 4. 34 Walker cited in McAlister, Epic Encounters, 162. 35 Mart, Eye on Israel, 169–176. 36 Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 295–296; Omer Bartov, The ‘Jew’ in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 199–204; Eric Sterling, ‘All Rules Barred: A Defence of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List’, Film and History, 32, 2, 2002, 62–71. 37 Cettl, American Cinema, 61–62, 45–47, 266. 38 Jason Grant McKahan, ‘Hollywood Counter-terrorism; Violence, Protest and the Middle East in U.S. Action Feature Films’, unpublished PhD thesis, Florida State University, 2009, 151–152; Donna Parker, ‘Rabin Murder Shakes Industry’, Hollywood Reporter, 6 November 1995. 33

80

Epic Freedom Fighters

Palestine Liberation Organization sparked renewed interest in Exodus, which had just been re-released in the United States. Three years later, in 1998, the movie was telecast widely as part of the United States’ celebrations of Israel’s fiftieth anniversary, and special screenings of the film were held throughout the United States, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the western United States.39 Otto Preminger’s Exodus is a film with an unusual production and reception history. It is a history that says as much about Hollywood’s taste for exotic locations and expensive epics, a government’s desire to project its national image on screen, and the United States’ burgeoning interest in the Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century, as it does about the after-effects of the Second World War. However, if we look at Exodus within the context of those films like Ashes and Diamonds examined in Chapter 3 which in one form or another justified the use of terrorism, a broader pattern emerges. That pattern lends support to the argument made by the ‘just war’ political theorist Michael Walzer and others in the 1990s that ‘total war’ between 1939 and 1945 severely eroded the principle of wartime civilian immunity and spawned an illegitimate offspring, an ‘age of terrorism’.40 When Exodus was released in 1960, this new, or second, Age of Terror had yet to reach maturity. But Preminger’s film indicates that elements of it were already beginning to take cinematic form, not least the suggestion that terrorism was a feature of nation-building and that some terrorists could be classed as noble freedom fighters. The next chapter will explore this theme of the ‘good terrorist’ further, by turning attention to the cinematic representation of the struggle against European colonialism in North Africa in the 1960s.

Kevin Thomas, ‘The Return of “Exodus,” ’ Los Angeles Times, 10 September 1998. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1992), Chapters. 11 and 12 especially.

39 40

81

CHAPTER 5 NEWSREEL GUERRILLAS

On 1 May 2003, two months after British and American forces had launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, US president George W. Bush landed aboard USS Abraham Lincoln as the aircraft-carrier returned to Californian waters from action in the Persian Gulf. Jumping down from his jet in full combat gear, many of the waiting journalists could not resist drawing parallels between Bush’s stagecraft and Tom Cruise’s famed role in Hollywood’s Cold War hit, Top Gun. When America’s commander-in-chief then spoke in front of a building-sized banner announcing ‘Mission Accomplished’, the Bush–Cruise connection intensified. ‘In the Battle of Iraq’, Bush declared to the world, ‘the United States and our allies have prevailed’.1 A few months later, belying the president’s triumphalism, the US Defence Department in Washington DC held a special screening of a very different film, one that was twenty years older than Top Gun. Despite heralding from the 1960s, many in the Pentagon believed that The Battle of Algiers could teach the US government valuable lessons in how to deal with the deadly anti-American ‘insurgency’ that had erupted in Iraq since Bush’s victory speech. Leading American journalists, such as Philip Gourevitch and Michael T. Kaufman, agreed. Richard Clarke, America’s former counterterrorism czar, argued that The Battle of Algiers ought to be compulsory viewing for its insights not only into how the United States could defeat terrorism in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities but radical Islam as a whole.2 While it is unusual to come across a film that officialdom treats as a pedagogical tool in this way, it is even rarer to find terrorist groups also singing that film’s praises. On the choreographing of this event, and the links journalists made between it and Cruise’s roles in Top Gun and the Mission Impossible series, see Elisabeth Bumiller, ‘Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights’, New York Times, 16 May 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/us/keepers-of-bush -image-lift-stagecraft-to-new-heights.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (11 December 2011). Top Gun was directed by Tony Scott and released in 1986. To date, Tom Cruise has starred in four Mission: Impossible films, released in 1996, 2000, 2006 and 2011, and directed by Brian De Palma, John Woo, J. J. Abrams and Brad Bird, respectively. 2 Philip Gourevitch, ‘Winning and Losing’, New Yorker, 22 December 2003, http://www.newyorker.com/ archive/2003/12/22/031222ta_talk_gourevitch (3 October 2013); Michael T. Kaufman, ‘The World: Film Studies; What Does the Pentagon See in “Battle of Algiers” ’? The New York Times, 7 September 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/weekinreview/the-world-film-studies-what-does-the-pentagon -see-in-battle-of-algiers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (11 December 2011); interview with Richard Clarke in ‘The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study’, The Battle of Algiers DVD, Disc Three: ‘The Film and History’ (Criterion Collection 249, 2004). 1

Newsreel Guerrillas

Yet The Battle of Algiers has been extolled as a terrorist manual and model for revolutionary action throughout the world over the past five decades. The US-based Weather Underground and Black Panthers, together with the Irish Republican Army, are just three of the groups known to have screened The Battle of Algiers for recruitment and tactical purposes in the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s, both Andreas Baader, of the West German Red Army Faction, and Velupillai Prabhakaran, founder of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, claimed it was their favourite movie. And notwithstanding their very different interpretations of Exodus, both the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israeli Army appropriated The Battle of Algiers as a vehicle for propaganda and training during the 1980s and 1990s.3 If Otto Preminger’s Exodus was primarily a legacy of the Second World War, and the Holocaust in particular, it and many other movies can also be related to the convoluted process of decolonization that shook the world after 1945. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, European governments found themselves embroiled in a series of grubby conflicts against ‘terrorist’ groups challenging colonial rule in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. France’s desperate attempt to retain possession of Algeria between 1954 and 1962 resulted in probably the dirtiest and most iconic colonial war of all, and, in The Battle of Algiers, arguably one of the most influential political films of all time. The Battle of Algiers was made in Algeria and released in 1966. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, a Marxist leader of the Italian resistance during the Second World War and one of the most respected political auteurs of the 1960s and 1970s,4 The Battle of Algiers is widely regarded as the most complete cinematic ‘documentary’ about terrorism to date. The film vividly recreates a critical phase in the Algerian National Liberation Front’s struggle for independence from the French occupying forces in Algiers in the mid-1950s. Backed by the new post-colonial Algerian government, and shot in the streets of Algiers in a newsreel style using non-professional actors, it combines graphic images of murder and torture with an elegiac orchestral score written by renowned Italian composer Ennio Morricone. Unlike most films about terrorism, The Battle of Algiers focuses on the motivations of the activists as much as their actions. Moreover, words are spoken and key roles played by those who actually participated in the war for independence, including some who had been imprisoned for terrorist atrocities. Stylistically and ideologically, The Battle of Algiers differs markedly from Otto Preminger’s Exodus. Most importantly Bill Ayres, Fugitive Days (New York: Penguin, 2003), 57; Bruce Hoffman, ‘A Nasty Business’, The Atlantic Monthly, 289, 1, 2002, 49–52; Klaus Stern and Jörg Herrmann, Andreas Baader: Das leben eines Staatsfeindes (Munich: DTV Premium, 2007),104, 105; Donald Reid, ‘Re-viewing The Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion’, History Workshop Journal, 60, 1, October 2005, 110. 4 Pontecorvo made only five feature films, between 1957 and 1979, yet each examined important cultural and political issues: women’s rights, worker solidarity, the Holocaust, national liberation struggles, colonialism and post-colonialism, and terrorism within the context of nascent republican institutions. See Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo (Oxford: Scarecrow, 2005). 3

83

Cinematic Terror

for us, it represents a step-change in cinema’s approach towards terrorism, one in which the violent freedom fighter is depicted as not just a patriot but the leader of a worthy international cause, and, furthermore, one in which the killing of civilians can be legitimated. The Battle of Algiers begins in October 1957. In a dirty kitchen-cum-interrogation chamber, a broken old man has just been forced into divulging important information to the French military. As a consequence, Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), a leader of the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), is trapped by the French military in a house in the impoverished Arab quarter of central Algiers, the Casbah. Ali reflects back to the time three years earlier in 1954 when he became involved in the struggle for freedom. Ali is an illiterate petty thief, who joins the FLN after witnessing the guillotining of one of its members in prison. By mid-1956, he has become a leader in the struggle to rid the Casbah of its brothels and other vices, seen by the FLN as by-products of French imperialism. Under the leadership of Saari Kader (Saadi Yacef), the Arabs undertake terrorist activities against the French community in Algiers, including teenagers shooting policemen to obtain weapons. Although the capital’s French governorgeneral attempts to crush the uprising by sealing off the Casbah (where most of the FLN are in hiding), the attacks continue. Then a senior police official belonging to an extremist group of pieds noirs (Algerians of European origin) uses his identity card to gain entry into the curfewed Casbah and plant a bomb which kills scores of Arabs. In retaliation, Kader has three Arab women leave the Casbah in European dress and plant time bombs in a crowded cafe, a dance bar and an Air France terminal. By the beginning of 1957, the French are desperate and bring in the crack 10th Paratroop Division headed by the flamboyant Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin). Quick to understand that the FLN is set up like a pyramid in which no one member knows the identity of more than three others, Mathieu uses torture to force captured terrorists to reveal the names of their comrades. The FLN then orders a week-long general strike while the United Nations debates the Algerian crisis. The strike is designed to prove to the UN the Algerians’ support for the FLN and to mobilize a vast popular uprising. As a result, Mathieu intensifies his efforts to break down the structure of the pyramid and capture Kader, Larbi Ben M’hidi and the other group leaders. By the time the UN has decided not to intervene, Mathieu has eliminated all but one of the FLN chiefs – Ali la Pointe. Eventually, the address of Ali’s hideout is discovered, and he and three others, including a twelve-year-old boy, Omar (Mohamed Ben Kassen), are trapped behind the wall of a bedroom. Mathieu delivers the ultimatum that unless they surrender, the house will be blown up. Ali and his comrades refuse to yield, and, as Arabs throughout the Casbah pray, the four FLN militants die. For over three years, until December 1960, there is relative quiet in Algiers. Then, without warning, rioting erupts anew as thousands upon thousands of Algerians roar 84

Newsreel Guerrillas

Figure 5.1  The Battle of Algiers: Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag, right) and his FLN comrades, reconciled to their fate. Courtesy of Igor Film/Casbah Film/Photofest.

through the capital’s streets shouting their cry of freedom. The struggle continues until finally – on 3 July 1962 – Algeria wins its independence. Telling The Battle of Algiers sparingly in this way allows us to capture the production’s studied minimalism. Most of the key films analysed in this book were glossy studio creations. By contrast, The Battle of Algiers was made outside of any sort of studio system and on a relatively modest budget of $800,000, just about the lowest of any film in our study. It is this, together with the involvement of unconventional film-makers and convicted terrorists, which helps account for the movie’s artistic ingenuity and political radicalism.5 The Battle of Algiers started life very differently, not as an experimental ItaloAlgerian project but as a more standard Italo-American one tentatively entitled ‘Para’ and starring, of all people, Paul Newman. ‘Para’ looked back at the Franco-Algerian conflict through the eyes of a playboy French paratrooper-turned-journalist. It Irene Bignardi, ‘The Making of The Battle of Algiers’, Cineaste, 25, 2, March 2000, 18. $800,000 in 1966 is equivalent to $5.8 million in 2012 dollars. Dollar equivalencies are taken from http://www.measuringworth .com/uscompare/relativevalue.php(10 June 2013). 5

85

Cinematic Terror

was written by Gillo Pontecorvo and his frequent collaborator and fellow Italian Communist, Franco Solinas, after the pair had become fascinated with the ideological implications of the anticolonial struggle in Algeria and had visited the country in early 1962. Pontecorvo and Solinas’s critique of anti-colonialism in ‘Para’ centred on a series of flashbacks to 1957, including scenes of brutal French interrogations of FLN suspects, and ended with the chief protagonist switching sides and joining the Algerians in their independence celebrations. When, in 1964, US distributors rejected ‘Para’ on political grounds and the Italian producer Franco Cristaldi backed out of the project owing to fears of reprisals by the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), a French group violently opposed to Algerian independence, Portecorvo started talks with Saadi Yacef, the former FLN military chief in Algiers whom the French had imprisoned for terrorist activities back in the 1950s.6 Following Algeria’s independence in 1962, Yacef had replaced the machine gun with the camera and had become president of Casbah Films, a company half owned by the Algerian state. Yacef had also written a twenty-page film treatment called ‘La bataille d’Alger’ based on his own FLN activities and those of a senior FLN bombmaker, Salah Baazi.7 Touting this around Italy, then Europe’s second biggest producer of movies, in 1964, Yacef found a willing partner in Pontecorvo. The director rejected Yacef ’s one-sided treatment, calling it ‘quite ugly from a cinematic point of view’ and ‘sickeningly propagandistic’,8 but the two men eventually struck an agreement based on a more balanced version of Yacef ’s account composed by Solinas. Financial backing was then secured from Casbah Films, the Italian producer Antonio Musu and loans granted after Italian theatrical associations had guaranteed the film enough distribution to satisfy banking requirements.9 This was a highly irregular, potentially hazardous arrangement, especially for Pontecorvo, whose first film, a Franco-Italian production centred on the Holocaust titled Kapo (1959), had been nominated for an Academy Award. A story principally about Africans and in pseudo-documentary form had commercial limitations, especially in the markets of Europe and North America. As committed to the film as they were, the Algerians lacked any real experience behind or in front of the camera. And to make things more difficult, the cast and crew would have to communicate in a mixture of French, Italian and Arabic. In the event, each side brought different resources, knowledge and skills to a project that experienced remarkably few mishaps. The hospitality and trust Celli, Pontecorvo, 50; David Forgacs, ‘Italians in Algiers’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 351–352; Bignardi, ‘Making’, 14. 7 The treatment was written in collaboration with the Frenchman René Vautier, a Communist and leading film-maker in the struggle against French colonial power. Patricia Caillé, ‘The Illegitimate Legitimacy of The Battle of Algiers in French Film Culture’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 379. 8 Bignardi, ‘Making’, 15. 9 Celli, Pontecorvo, 51–52; John Michalczyk, The Italian Political Filmmakers (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), 191. 6

86

Newsreel Guerrillas

which Yacef and the many other Algerians involved in the production accorded Pontecorvo and Solinas was essential in allowing the two Italians entry into their society – not just in introducing them to the Casbah in Algiers but in enabling them to film inside Qu’ranic schools, to employ Muslim women as actors and to reconstruct events such as the blowing up of the house containing Ali la Pointe and his comrades in their actual historical locations. At the same time, it was the outsider status of the director and screenwriter, plus their grounding in Italian neorealism (a style of film-making which sought an objective portrayal of life via the use of non-professional actors and on-location shooting), that enabled them to create what Yacef was looking for – a dramatic yet authentic representation of the Algerian people’s often violent struggle for freedom in their final years under colonial domination.10 It is The Battle of Algiers’ emphasis on the Algerians’ collective struggle for independence that helps set the film apart from those like Exodus which focus on individuals via star actors. There are occasions in The Battle of Algiers when we cannot but identify with Ali la Pointe, Saari Kader and little Omar. Yet such personalities come to the foreground of the movie only to recede and allow others to take their place as a ‘choral personality’. As Marxists, Pontecorvo and Solinas believed The Battle of Algiers should not only pay homage to and inspire Third World independence movements. It should do so in a way that depicted the masses as the true makers of history, as the illustrious Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein had done in the 1920s and 1930s. Yacef, who co-produced and (as Saari Kader) effectively played himself in the film, concurred.11 All three of these men were heavily influenced by another Marxist, Frantz Fanon, the leading theoretician of the FLN rebellion who before his death in 1961 had argued that racism, violence and exploitation all emanated from Western colonialism. Yacef, for one, cleaved to Fanon’s dictum that violence freed the colonized from their inferiority complex and that terrorism was therefore justifiable, necessary even.12 For their part, Pontecorvo and Solinas did not make The Battle of Algiers as a how-to primer of urban guerrilla warfare, as some groups afterwards read it. Being veterans of the anti-fascist underground during the Second World War, they nevertheless had first-hand experience of organizing strikes and paramilitary activities. Moreover, both of them would go on to make other films that either exposed state-sanctioned terrorism or raised awkward questions regarding the use of political violence, including State of Siege (examined in Chapter 6).13

Forgacs, ‘Italians in Algiers’, 363; Celli, Pontecorvo, xvii. Edward Said, ‘The Dictatorship of Truth: An Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo’, Cineaste, 25, 2, March 2000, 24–25; Joan Mellen, Filmguide to The Battle of Algiers (London: Indiana University Press, 1973), 9–11. 12 Mellen, Filmguide, 24; Mike Wayne, Political Film (London: Pluto, 2001), 19. 13 Pontecorvo’s last feature, Ogro (1979), focused on terrorism in Francoist Spain. Celli, Pontecorvo, 89–102. 10 11

87

Cinematic Terror

The Battle of Algiers was based on prodigious research, all part of Pontecorvo’s quest for authenticity and documentary realism. Pontecorvo and Solinas spent more than a year researching the Franco-Algerian conflict, which over eight years had cost the lives of approximately a quarter of a million Algerians and 25,000 French soldiers.14 They also met representatives of the FLN in Rome, Paris and Algiers, and taped interviews with French paratroopers. For days, the former bomb-maker and FLN commander, Salah Baazi, escorted the film-makers around the Casbah in Algiers, telling them how his organization had made explosives and put them to use. Solinas even scoured the French police archives in Algiers and was therefore able in the film to give the precise time and place of each assassination carried out by the authorities, as well as accurately depict the tone and content of FLN interrogation sessions. The scriptwriter later described the results of this gruelling process: ‘We came away with an idea of the situation as complete as if we had lived through it ourselves’.15 When it came to shooting The Battle of Algiers, in Algiers during the second half of 1965, the former chief of staff of the FLN’s military wing, Houari Boumedienne, who had just seized power in a bloodless coup, put his weight fully behind what he saw as a valuable propaganda venture. Much like David Ben Gurion’s government five years earlier with Exodus, Boumedienne authorized filming in the streets, gave Pontecorvo permission to use soldiers in crowd scenes and put tanks, firearms, trucks and helicopters at the producers’ disposal, thus adding forcefully to the movie’s verisimilitude. Pontecorvo used amateur actors, with the exception of French stage performer Jean Martin (Mathieu), who back in 1961 had been blacklisted for expressing opposition to the Algerian War. French paratroopers and foreign journalists were played by a combination of tourists and Europeans who had remained in Algiers after independence. Most of the Arab actors, including the peasant Brahim Haggiag who played Ali la Pointe, were illiterate, which meant their lines had to be spoken to them just before the cameras rolled. To make the film even more realistic, former insurgents, like Yacef and others who were awaiting execution prior to the declaration of independence, were cast in their original roles.16 Pontecorvo’s efforts to cast all these characters in a pseudo-documentary were highly innovative and, if critics ever since are anything to go by, flawless. True to his neorealist roots, the director used a minimal amount of equipment, only an Arriflex William B. Cohen, ‘The Algerian War and the Revision of France’s Overseas Mission’, French Colonial History, 4, 1, 2003, 228. 15 Jim Dingeman, ‘ “You Cannot Continually Inflict”: An Interview with Saadi Yacef ’, Framework, 49, 2, Fall 2008, 48; Michalczyk, Political Filmmakers, 192; PierNico Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 181. 16 Michalczyk, Political Filmmakers, 192; Bignardi, ‘Making’, 16; Mellen, Filmguide, 16–18; Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 223; Nicholas Harrison, ‘An Interview with Saadi Yacef ’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 407. 14

88

Newsreel Guerrillas

Figure 5.2  The Battle of Algiers: Gillo Pontecorvo (shown pointing) organizes a crowd scene. Courtesy of Igor Film/Casbah Film/Photofest.

camera, hand-held and without a dolly, and shot The Battle of Algiers in black and white. By using a sombre tonality and covered sets, the effect was to make the sunny Mediterranean climate of Algiers appear as an almost Baltic grey. This lent the film a gloomier, solemn appearance befitting its momentous subject matter. By cleverly re-exposing his film stock, and using an abundance of contrast, Pontecorvo also gave The Battle of Algiers the look and feel of a newsreel. His aim was to achieve a granular effect to give viewers the impression that they were viewing an actual documentary rather than a fictionalized representation of the battle of Algiers. Adopting techniques used by television cameramen, chiefly the telephoto lens, helped further, since the style of the news documentaries shown on television in the 1950s and 1960s had come to be associated with actual events.17 The near absence of audience-anticipated narrative ploys, like love stories or last-minute rescues, and the use of documentary-style voice-overs, inter-titles and press conferences, further tempted the viewer to accept the historical veracity of The Battle of Algiers. So, too, did the decision to allow the characters to use Arabic and French colloquialisms. At the same time, the subtlety of Ennio Morricone’s musical score allowed Pontecorvo to get around his aim of making a film that Mellen, Filmguide, 9, 18–20.

17

89

Cinematic Terror

supported the Algerians without reducing it to propaganda or special pleading.18 All this is not to say that the film lacked grandeur – its crowds and music help give it an epic feel – or excitement. Indeed, so well structured was The Battle of Algiers that one commentator many years later likened the film to ‘an expert, fast-paced, unpretentious action-thriller’. Referring to its bomb scenes in particular, another commentator, appropriately for us, called The Battle of Algiers ‘a suspense thriller of the highest Hitchcockian order’.19 In November 2004, a little over a year after the Pentagon’s screening of The Battle of Algiers, the Canadian politician and broadcaster Michael Ignatieff wrote of the appalling new craze in Iraq for home-made videos showing terrorists beheading Western hostages. As shocking as this was, Ignatieff argued, modern terrorists had always sought to exploit the power of images. The ‘first impresario of terrorism’, he argued, had been Saadi Yacef, the instigator of The Battle of Algiers. Fortunately, according to Ignatieff, in rejecting Yacef ’s early, one-dimensional version of the Franco-Algerian War and insisting on a deeper vision of that conflict, Gillo Pontecorvo had created a masterpiece. The Battle of Algiers was the greatest film ever made about terrorism, the Canadian opined, ‘at once a justification for acts of terror and an unsparing account of terror’s cost, including to the cause it serves’.20 Notwithstanding Ignatieff ’s hyperbole, The Battle of Algiers is indubitably a world apart from the films we have looked at so far in our study, especially Sabotage and Exodus. The film’s whole plot revolves around political violence and the escalation in its use by the FLN on the one hand and the French military and civilians on the other. While resembling a resistance-in-war film, it eschews the ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ stereotypes of that genre. And, while it does not flinch on dialogue about terrorism, The Battle of Algiers is strikingly uninhibited in its visual depiction of terrorist and counterterrorist acts. In sum, the two-hours-long film was unprecedented in the ways that it encouraged audiences to question what terrorism was, who might conduct it and by what means, and whether it was effective. Of particular value for us, it also anticipated the media hype that terrorist violence would excite in the decades ahead. The Battle of Algiers should be read, above all, as a condemnation of colonialism. This message is communicated in the city’s very fabric. Pontecorvo captures the beauty of Algiers’ colonial architecture but in such a way that it seems to dominate and encircle the Casbah’s warren of ancient, rundown streets, imprisoning the Arabs On the sound and music in The Battle of Algiers, see Mellen, Filmguide, 24–36 and Peter Matthews, ‘The Battle of Algiers: Bombs and Boomerangs’, Booklet, The Battle of Algiers DVD (Criterion Collection 249, 2004). 19 Larry Gross, ‘A Blast From The Past That Continues To Resonate’, Film Comment, 40, 1, January/February 2004, 22–23; Michael Tapper, ‘A Fistful of DVDs’, Film International, 13, 1, 2005, 65–66. 20 Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Terrorist as Auteur’, New York Times, 14 November 2004, http://www.nytimes .com/2004/11/14/movies/14TERROR.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&position= (12 December 2011). 18

90

Newsreel Guerrillas

in their own city. The French, whose occupation of Algeria we learn stretches back to the 1830s, are in complete charge and treat the Arabs with a mixture of disdain and racist contempt. The policeman who attempts to arrest Ali la Pointe for running an illegal street card game at the film’s outset, for instance, expects him to submit meekly to his superiors. When Ali then flees through the shopping boulevards of the European quarter and punches a young Frenchman for tripping him, he is set upon like an animal. It is little wonder that the French pieds noirs react to the FLN’s attacks on the police later on by indiscriminately bombing those living in the Casbah. On one level, despite being fellow French citizens, the ‘filthy Arabs’ are barely seen as human. On another level, such an act manifests the settlers’ desire to retain their dominant position by any means. The one Frenchman we really get to know, Colonel Mathieu, is a surprisingly accessible, even sympathetic character. A composite figure based in part on Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Jeanpierre, whom Yacef had wounded with a grenade, and on Colonel Yves Godard, whose intelligence unit successfully targeted the FLN’s cellbased pyramidal structure, Mathieu is a human being who has a coherent explanation for wanting to preserve France’s occupation of Algeria. Initially filmed from below to emphasize his imposing stature and rank, Mathieu is no sadist. Indeed, he shares many of the qualities shown by his enemies – personal courage, intelligence, a sense of duty and a selfless devotion to the welfare of a people. As a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance movement, he also understands their motives and actions. In accentuating the humanity of both sides in this way, Pontecorvo wanted to make the argument that colonialism could make enemies of people who otherwise would have much in common.21 More importantly, Pontecorvo sought to show that Mathieu’s systematic, rational use of torture made a mockery of France’s claims to represent the ideals of civilization and starkly exposed its status as a colonial power whose authority rested ultimately on an immoral, unethical system of repression. Torture had been the official policy of General Jacques Massu, leader of the French paratroops during the real-life battle of Algiers. Thousands were, as Mathieu puts it, ‘interrogated’ by these means. The film conveys something of the horrors many of these prisoners underwent via a brief but moving montage sequence. Without dialogue but backed by organ music, a man in a dingy cell is shown being tortured with water, which nearly drowns him; another man, in a crucifixion pose, has a blow torch thrust at his chest; another, a bloodied teenager who already looks dead, is hung upside down; yet another is electrocuted via his earlobes. The camera then dollies in for a close-up of the tearful eyes of the military’s next victim, a gaunt old woman.22 The Battle of Algiers’ sympathies lie squarely with the Algerians and the freedomfighting FLN. Thus, the film is replete with close-ups like the above, of the silent Paul Haspel, ‘Algeria Revisited: Opposing Commanders as Warring Doubles in The Battle of Algiers’, Journal of Film and Video, 58, 3, Fall 2006, 33. 22 Celli, Pontecorvo, 58–60; Mellen, Filmguide, 52. 21

91

Cinematic Terror

Figure 5.3  The Battle of Algiers: Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) marches into Algiers with his crack troops. Courtesy of Igor Film/Casbah Film/Photofest.

victims of French occupation. Elsewhere, mothers plead to the authorities for news of sons who have ‘disappeared’, children rouse their elders to action via the French military’s own loudspeakers and the Casbah’s poverty-stricken dwellers combat the paratroops’ efforts to smash their strike with quiet fortitude. The FLN does not conduct terrorism lightly. It does so mainly out of necessity, to show the people and the enemy the extent of its movement, and to fight fire with fire. Colonial oppression is the overrriding source of the FLN’s violence. This said, The Battle of Algiers neither glamourizes terrorism nor overlooks the blind rage and vengefulness that can sometimes lead to the FLN’s murderous actions. The group’s carnage begins with a series of cold-blooded FLN assassinations, with stabbings in the neck or bullets in the back, of French policemen – legitimate targets, perhaps. After the pieds noirs’ bombing of the Casbah, it ratchets up to incorporate civilians as well as security personnel. The orgy of terror culminates, finally, with a suicidal drive in a stolen ambulance by two FLN youngsters down a heavily populated boulevard in the European quarter. Seemingly motivated by anger and desperation, the teenagers randomly machine gun French civilians outside shops and bars and, when their ammunition runs out, crash their vehicle into a group waiting at a bus stop.23 Gary Crowdus, ‘Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers’: An Interview with Saadi Yacef ’, Cineaste, 29, 3, Summer 2004, 31. 23

92

Newsreel Guerrillas

The film’s most famous and horrifying set-piece is the depiction of the FLN’s first indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, when Kader deploys three women disguised as Europeans to evade checkpoints and blow up a cafe, a dance bar and an air terminal. Based, like almost all of the film’s terrorist incidents, on historical events, the sequence is remarkable alone for its depiction of women as terrorists. (Elsewhere in the movie we see women fighting and dying alongside men, delivering weapons for assassinations, helping men escape, abusing the police, marrying resistance fighters and urging men into battle by their traditional trilling cries.)24 Pontecorvo first shows us the women transforming themselves into revolutionary fighters by solemnly removing their veils and dying their hair, accompanied by traditional Algerian music.25 He then intercuts between the three places where the bombs are left. In the cafe, the camera slowly pans the faces of all the customers, as if through the eyes of Hassiba, the dark-haired woman carrying a bomb in her shopping basket. For a few moments, the audience consequently gets to be a terrorist, to think what it must be like to look at those whom you are about to kill. The immediate effects of the bombs are captured in far greater detail than in Sabotage: visions of hell in which panicstricken and bloodied victims stumble over smashed glass and mangled bodies to reach the safety of the sidewalk. During production, Pontecorvo and Yacef quarrelled over elements of these bombing scenes. In particular, Yacef tried but failed to persuade the director to delete an image of one of the impending French victims, a small boy with an ice cream.26 Pontecorvo pities the innocent victims of terrorism on both sides of the conflict in other ways, too. The literary critic Edward Said notes how the same scored mourning, which has echoes of the opening bars of Bach’s ‘St Matthew’s Passion’, is used for both French and Arab victims. We hear this musical motif when surveying the effects of the cafe bombing and the morning after the explosion in the Casbah (another horrifying scene, this time shot from above to highlight the vast scale of the death and destruction caused).27 One of Pontecorvo’s favourite techniques, the freeze frame, is For a deeper analysis of the representation of women in The Battle of Algiers, see Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne, ‘Women at War: The Representation of Women in The Battle of Algiers’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 340–349; Valerie Orlando, ‘Historiographic Metafiction in Gillo Pontecorvo’s La bataille d’Alger: Remembering the Forgotten War’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 17, 3, 2000, 261–271. 25 Pontecorvo was clearly influenced here by Frantz Fanon’s essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ in his book A Dying Colonialism, published in 1959. On this, see L. C. Moore, ‘The Veil of Nationalism: Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers’, Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, 25, 2, 2003, 56–73. 26 Forgacs, ‘Italians in Algiers’, 358–359. 27 Said, ‘Dictatorship of Truth’, 24–25. Said, who had written at length on how the West had framed and constructed the rest of the world, argued that The Battle of Algiers was unmatched in its depiction of an anti-colonial struggle. Said, a Palestinian-American, regularly appropriated the film for the cause of Palestinian independence and claimed that a film Pontecorvo considered making about the IsraeliPalestinian conflict in the 1990s would have been ‘the logical contemporary extension of the political situation represented in The Battle of Algiers’. Wayne, Political Film, 14; Edward Said (narrator), ‘Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth (1992)’, The Battle of Algiers DVD, Disc One: ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (Criterion Collection 249, 2004). 24

93

Cinematic Terror

used at the end of the scene showing the FLN teenagers driving an ambulance into a bus queue. As the historian and novelist Joan Mellen puts it, this ‘encourages us to pause and reflect, to make value judgments about terrorism and the waste on both sides resulting from the French occupation’.28 In the midst of these and other scenes, The Battle of Algiers offers viewers plenty of food for thought on how terrorism might be defined. Does it include attacks on police and military targets, as the French authorities in the film suggest, or is it confined to attacks on civilians? FLN activists in the film readily admit to using terrorist tactics yet the pieds noirs responsible for killing over seventy Casbah residents do not. And what about the actions of Mathieu’s paratroops? If not strictly illegal, some of them (arbitrary beatings, strike-breaking, torture) are at the very least highly questionable under the terms of the Geneva Conventions on war. And where does the dividing line between legitimate military violence and terrorism lie anyway? When asked by a French journalist in the film whether it is cowardly to use women’s baskets to deposit bombs, the recently captured FLN leader, Ben M’hidi, replies: ‘Isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenceless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets’. This alluded to the far greater firepower the French military possessed compared with the FLN and to the fact that the vast majority of people killed during the war were Algerian Arabs.29 The space The Battle of Algiers gives to this sort of rhetoric testifies to the importance, Pontecorvo believed, propaganda played in conflicts involving terrorism. In the film we see the French authorities using a range of propaganda techniques designed to win the battle for hearts and minds in Algiers, including distributing bread to destabilize the strike and announcing the arrest of the FLN leaders one by one on local radio and loudspeakers. The film also depicts the fascination with violence in the court of world opinion, which learns about events in Algeria through a media filter. Mathieu holds a series of press conferences, where he either openly debates the significance of FLN tactics with journalists and prisoners like M’hidi or tells French reporters that the success of his strategy depends on their ‘accurate’ coverage of it and consequent political support in Paris. No film before The Battle of Algiers had focused so explicitly on the media’s propensity to follow official guidance on terrorist activities. No previous

Mellen, Filmguide, 38. M’hidi’s words closely paraphrased Frantz Fanon’s in his influential book The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Neelam Srivastava, ‘Anti-Colonial Violence and the “Dictatorship of Truth” in the Films of Gillo Pontecorvo’, Interventions, 7, 1, 2005, 102. The name of the Algerian playing Ben M’hidi is not known. In 1969, Marcel Ophüls’ path-breaking television documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, a Swiss-FrenchWest German co-production, posed similar questions about the relationship between military power, resistance and terrorism but, significantly, in the context of the Nazi occupation of France. Siân Reynolds, ‘The Sorrow and the Pity Revisited, or Be Careful, One Train Can Hide Another’, French Cultural Studies, 1, 2, June 1990, 149–159. 28 29

94

Newsreel Guerrillas

film had also shown how terrorist and counterterrorist activities often pandered to the media’s and the public’s voyeuristic impulses.30 Mathieu’s mastery of the media and the dark arts of psychological warfare help the French to win the battle against terror in 1957 but not the war for Algeria in the long run. This, according to The Battle of Algiers, is because of the revolution started by the FLN. In a critical scene set during the early days of the strike, Ben M’hidi explains the FLN’s long-term strategy to Ali la Pointe: ‘Acts of violence don’t win wars; neither wars nor revolutions. Terrorism is useful as a start. But then, the people themselves must act’. This rationale, of terrorism being a justifiable means to an end, is seen to bear fruit with the mass Algerian uprisings of December 1960. Once again, the French authorities respond brutally, firing indiscriminately upon demonstrators. This time, however, it is too late. The tide of Algerian nationalism cannot now be stemmed, and we are told independence arrives less than two years later. Although Ali la Pointe has been dead for years, the film closes with the musical theme we have come to identify with him.

Figure 5.4  The Battle of Algiers: At the end of the film, even tanks can’t hold back the cause of Algerian independence. Courtesy of Igor Film/Casbah Film/Photofest.

The Battle of Algiers is a rarity among films about terrorism, one that has been both popular and critically acclaimed. We should be careful not to exaggerate the Celli, Pontecorvo, 62.

30

95

Cinematic Terror

movie’s influence, especially compared with Hollywood blockbusters like, say, Die Hard (analysed later), which have probably been seen by tens of millions of people worldwide. There are no reliable box-office statistics for The Battle of Algiers but its viewing figures will have been only a fraction of many of the films scrutinized in this book. Moreover, in most places the film was seen, in common with many politically charged documentaries and docu-dramas, it probably preached to the converted in art house cinemas. That said, The Battle of Algiers’ influence over those either with or aspiring to political power appears to have been far beyond the ordinary. The Battle of Algiers was very much a product of the 1960s and quickly became a touchstone for that most political of decades. When it was released in the United States in 1967, a year of violent ideological tension throughout that country, one magazine reported alarmingly that African-Americans were cheering or laughing at each terrorist attack on the French, as if the film were a textbook and prophecy of urban guerilla warfare to come. The separatist African-American organization, the Black Panthers, made viewings of The Battle of Algiers an important element in orientating new members in the late 1960s.31 Mark Rudd, leader of the radical leftist Weather Underground, which was violently opposed to the Vietnam War, then at its height, urged his comrades to wage their own ‘battle of Algiers’ against military installations and police departments in the United States. The Battle of Algiers was ‘the one great revolutionary “sell” of modern times’, America’s pre-eminent film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1973, made by a ‘Marxist poet’ who was ‘capable of convincing the bourgeois cinema public that revolution, in certain circumstances, is a necessary thing’.32 When The Battle of Algiers was released in the mid-1960s, France itself was still reeling from the shock of having lost Algeria and simply not ready for the film. During the Algerian conflict, elements within the French press had frequently condemned the military’s use of torture, with some journalists even equating the military’s actions with those used by the Gestapo against the French resistance during the Second World War. Pontecorvo’s allegations of torture were therefore not new, but his film’s graphic images of it and other forms of terrorism carried out during the war in Algeria certainly were. This helps to explain why, though it was not officially censored, The Battle of Algiers was effectively banned in France throughout the 1960s. It also accounts for the ferocious war of words that broke out between Pontecorvo and senior French officers who had served in Algeria, including General Massu.33 J. Hoberman, ‘Revolution Now (and Then)!’, American Prospect, 1 January 2004, http://prospect.org/ article/revolution-now-and-then (11 December 2011); Mellen, Filmguide, 65. 32 Thomas Riegler, ‘Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Dictatorship of the Truth” – A Legacy’, Studies in European Cinema, 6, 1, 2009, 51; Bignardi, ‘Making’, 22; Pauline Kael, ‘The Battle of Algiers’, New Yorker, 9 November 1973 (BFIL). 31

Cohen, ‘The Algerian War’, 228; Caillé, ‘The Illegitimate Legitimacy’, 380; Mellen, Filmguide, 22–23. On The Little Soldier, a film that centred on the Algerian War made by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960 but banned until 1963, after the end of the war, see Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 207–246. That Massu’s memoir was written in direct response to the film can be seen in the choice of the title, The Real Battle of Algiers (Paris: Plon, 1971). 33

96

Newsreel Guerrillas

When, in the early 1970s, Pontecorvo finally found a distributor, opposition to The Battle of Algiers remained intense. Managers of French cinemas planning to exhibit the film were often dissuaded by threats by OAS supporters and repatriated Algerian Frenchmen. A number of cinemas that dared to show it were firebombed or had objects thrown at the screen. During this period, The Battle of Algiers became something of a rallying call for many on the European extreme right. In October 1971, for instance, the film became the focus of running battles in Paris between far right and far left activists. In Rome, in July 1972, fascist youths attacked audiences with knives and chains.34 Around this time, French movies like R.A.S. (Yves Boisset, 1972) began breaking the longstanding cinematic taboo surrounding the Algerian War, though not without continuing difficulties. René Vautier resorted to a hunger strike to obtain a distribution visa for his film To Be Twenty in the Aures (1971) about a group of pacifist Bretons sent to fight in Algeria. This enduring sensitivity accounts for the fact that The Battle of Algiers was only rarely screened in France in the decades afterwards and was not televised there until 2004.35 The Battle of Algiers’ ongoing influence – and classic status – can be attributed partly to its multiple political interpretations. At the time of its release, and afterwards, many commentators felt the film simply taught people that violence begets violence. Others argued that its real value lay in giving everyone the first inside view of the tactics inherent in asymmetric warfare. ‘Perhaps no other film in the history of art’, claimed Joan Mellen in 1973, ‘has shown so sympathetically and so minutely the delicate workings of a revolutionary organisation’.36 In Algeria itself, some criticized the film for either being too kind to the French or for ignoring events in the countryside, where many argued the revolution had really been won.37 Leftist film-makers in Europe, Africa and Latin America refashioned The Battle of Algiers’ anti-colonial and anti-establishment messages for their own ends. These included the Greek-born Constantin Costa-Gavras (the subject of analysis in Chapter 6) and the French/West Indian director Sarah Maldoror. The latter’s Sambizanga (1972), set around the 1961–1975 Angolan War of Independence, was probably the first major film to take a woman’s perspective on revolutionary terrorism.38 Michalczyk, Political Filmmakers, 189–190; Bignardi, ‘Making’, 22; Benjamin Stora, ‘Still Fighting: The Battle of Algiers, Censorship and the “Memory Wars” ’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 365–370. 35 Cohen, ‘The Algerian War’, French Colonial History, 4, 1, 2003, 229; François Chevassu, ‘R.A.S.’, Image et Son, 275, September 1973, 139–141; François Chevassu, ‘Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurés’, Image et Son, 262, June–July 1972, 149–150; Stora, ‘Still Fighting’, 365–368. 36 Mellen, Filmguide, 68. 37 Mellen, Filmguide, 22, 59, 61; Reid, ‘Re-viewing’, 109. Two Algerian films that paid more attention to rural insurgents, both directed by Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, are The Winds of the Aures (1966) and Chronicle of the Years of Embers (1975), http://lakhdar-hamina.com/wind_of_Aures.htm (2 October 2013), http://www.arabfilm.com/item_print.html?itemID=35 (2 October 2013). Neither of these productions, or any other film for that matter, has been as influential as The Battle of Algiers in projecting the popular image of the Algerian War. 38 Nora Sayre, ‘Sambizanga’, New York Times, 22 November 1973, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/ review?res=9904EFDA1F3CE13BBC4A51DFB7678388669EDE (12 December 2011). Maldoror had worked as an assistant on The Battle of Algiers. 34

97

Cinematic Terror

In the years ahead, other, more mainstream film-makers drew inspiration from The Battle of Algiers, among them American political auteurs Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh and Oliver Stone, and the Indian director/producer Mira Nair.39 One of Hollywood’s seminal anti-terrorist films of the 1970s, John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday (mentioned in Chapter 4), borrowed heavily from The Battle of Algiers despite carrying a very different political message – that Palestinian extremists might carry out atrocities in the United States.40 The same can be said of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action thriller Collateral Damage (Andrew Davis, 2002), which depicted Colombian terrorists striking back at the United States for interfering in their country (and whose release was delayed for six months due to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001).41 Nothing Personal, a lesser known British film made in 1995 about Protestant paramilitaries in 1970s Northern Ireland, rearranged the music from The Battle of Algiers’ bombing scenes for its opening showing the consequences of an IRA pub bombing.42 In real life, through using The Battle of Algiers as a training tool, the IRA seems to have taken Franco Solinas at his word when he told journalists in 1969 that the film ‘champions everyone who is deprived of his rights, and encourages him to fight for them’. Years later, Saadi Yacef expressed dismay with the manner in which the movie had become ‘a kind of manual’ throughout the world. The Algerian’s argument that every political situation was different was of course incontrovertible but for many activists The Battle of Algiers provided exciting, concrete lessons in how to shape a violent revolutionary strategy.43 The film was reportedly ‘required viewing’ for the thirteen Black Panthers charged with conspiracy to bomb public places and murder police officers in New York in 1970. In the same year, Andreas Baader, co-leader of the German left-wing militant RAF, is said to have orchestrated the infamous ‘Dreierschlag’ – three bank robberies in West Berlin in just ten minutes – after the model of guerrilla action depicted in The Battle of Algiers. Inge Viett, a member of the anarchist ‘2 June’ movement which kidnapped a West German mayoral candidate in 1975, called seeing The Battle of Algiers a ‘peak’ event in her guerrilla existence. Years ‘Five Directors’, The Battle of Algiers DVD, Disc Two: ‘Pontecorvo and The Film’ (Criterion Collection 249, 2004). Films made by these directors that explore terrorism in one way or another include Salvador (Stone, 1986), 4 Little Girls (Lee, 1997), 25th Hour (Lee, 2002), 11’ 9’’ 01 September 11 (Nair and others, 2002), Syriana (Soderbergh, 2005), World Trade Center (Stone, 2006), Che: Parts One and Two (Soderbergh, 2008), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Nair, 2012). 40 Frankenheimer ran The Battle of Algiers eight times for his crew during the making of Black Sunday as a model of cinéma-vérité. McKahan, ‘Hollywood Counter-terrorism’, 128. 41 Prince, Firestorm, 45. In another Hollywood production, John Milius’ Red Dawn (1983), which depicts a Communist invasion of the United States, the Russian occupation leader explains his tactics for crushing the young American resistance fighters using almost the same vocabulary Mathieu employs to defend his methods. Gross, ‘A Blast From The Past’, 23. 42 Thadeus O’Sullivan, ‘Private View’, Sight & Sound, 7, 3, 1997, 69. 43 E. Egbert, ‘Pontecorvo We Trust The Face of Brando’, New York Times, 13 April 1969, D11; Crowdus, ‘Terrorism and Torture’, 36. 39

98

Newsreel Guerrillas

later, across the world in Sri Lanka, the notoriously media-shy Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Tamil Tigers, let it be known that The Battle of Algiers was his cinematic blueprint for revolution.44

Figure 5.5.  The Battle of Algiers: Basketball shoes and machine guns – an iconic image of revolutionary terrorism. Saari Kader (Saadi Yacef) is second from left, Ali la Pointe at far right. Courtesy of Igor Film/Casbah Film/Photofest.

The Battle of Algiers appealed so much to these activists because, in their view, the film ultimately demonstrated the efficacy of terrorism in fostering political consciousness and change. Conversely, a range of governments and security agencies have for decades used The Battle of Algiers as a model for counter-revolution. Many have been moved to do so by the film’s portrayal of Colonel Mathieu’s successful decapitation of the FLN in 1957. Within a year of its release, the film was being screened in counter-insurgency classes at the School of Naval Mechanics in Buenos Aires, a secret torture centre run by the Argentinian military that became notorious during the ‘dirty war’ conducted against political subversives in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the early 1970s, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation Hoberman, ‘Revolution Now (and Then)!’; Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg, Nautilus, 1997), 79; Hoffman, ‘A Nasty Business’. 44

99

Cinematic Terror

was also screening prints for its operatives, on the back of reports by police and politicians that The Battle of Algiers had become ‘the cine bible for arsonists and terrorists’.45 The Battle of Algiers then came to be studied by the British and Israeli armies in their searches for tactical clues against the IRA and PLO, respectively. In 2002, the American Bruce Hoffman, doyen of terrorism scholars and an adviser on counterterrorism strategy to several Western governments, wrote: ‘I have long told soldiers, spies and students to watch The Battle of Algiers if they want to understand how to fight terrorism’. The film’s main message, according to Hoffman, ‘is that without intelligence and information, you can’t effectively combat terrorism’.46 As the timing of Hoffman’s assertion-cum-warning implies, and the Pentagon’s screening of Pontecorvo’s film in mid-2003 tells us, The Battle of Algiers gained renewed relevance in many people’s eyes after 11 September 2001. Within days of the terrorist attacks, Congress learned of the film’s insight into the cell structure of groups like al-Qaeda.47 Re-released at the cinema and on DVD soon afterwards, the film continued to be read in a variety of ways by scholars and critics. Echoing Pontecorvo, some argued that it showed how colonialism led to a cycle of terrorist acts by both oppressor and oppressed.48 Others claimed its ultimate message was that a resort to violence bestowed and reinforced political legitimacy.49 Others still suggested it demonstrated how ‘a revolution must outgrow its insurgents, who, while essential in kindling resistance, are perhaps best consumed in the process’.50 In the light of America’s deadly imbroglio in Iraq, the lesson carried by The Battle of Algiers was all too obvious to American counterterrorist strategists like Richard Clarke. This was that the military could win battles but only a coherent political and publicity strategy could win a war.51 The Bush administration seemed a long way off any such strategy when the photographs of US soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison came to public attention in 2004, images Riegler, ‘Dictatorship of the Truth’, 54; Hoberman, ‘Revolution Now (and Then)!’; Horacio Verbitsky, ‘Breaking the Silence: The Catholic Church and the “Dirty War” ’, 28 July 2005 (extract from El Silencio), http://www.opendemocracy.net/content/articles/PDF/2709.pdf (12 December 2011); United States Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders 91st Congress, 2nd Session, 22 July 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1970–1971), 5363–5364. On how French veterans of Algeria helped Latin American dictators learn how to torture and repress, see Marie-Monique Robin’s 2004 documentary Death Squadrons: The French School, http://icarusfilms.com/new2004/squa.html (2 October 2013). 46 Riegler, ‘Dictatorship of the Truth’, 54; Reid, ‘Re-viewing’, 110; Wayne, Political Film, 12; Hoffman, ‘A Nasty Business’; Los Angeles Times, 18 November 2001. 47 United States Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Committee on Government Reform, Statement by Christopher Harmon, 20 September 2001, ‘Preparing for the War on Terrorism’, 107th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2001), 111–112. 48 Haspel, ‘Algeria Revisited’, 33. 49 Celli, Pontecorvo, 62. 50 Mark Parker, ‘The Battle of Algiers’, Film International, 60, 4, Summer 2007, 62–66. 51 Interviews with Richard Clarke and Michael Sheehan in ‘The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study’, The Battle of Algiers DVD, Disc Three: ‘The Film and History’ (Criterion Collection 249, 2004). Sheehan was a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism. 45

100

Newsreel Guerrillas

some people in the press and on the Internet compared with the torture scenes in The Battle of Algiers.52 In the midst of all this, Saadi Yacef, now an aged member of the Algerian parliament, was incredulous when American diplomats invited him to the United States to talk about The Battle of Algiers. In his mind, what was happening in Iraq was just another form of imperialism, and the US government was chasing an illusion if it thought guerrilla warfare could be combated by training manuals. Gillo Pontecorvo, who died in 2006, felt the same, declaring the Pentagon’s interest in The Battle of Algiers ‘a little strange’. In truth, perhaps the strangest thing about this whole episode was that almost everyone seemed to overlook the fact that The Battle of Algiers was, when all is said and done, a piece of cinematic fiction.53

Haspel, ‘Algeria Revisited’, 41; Roger Ebert, ‘The Battle of Algiers’, Chicago Sun-Times, 10 October 2004, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041010/REVIEWS08/410100301/1023 (12 December 2011); Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, ‘The Battle of Algiers: 1966 Film Depicting Algerian War of Independence Against French Occupation Parallels Brutal U.S. Occupation of Iraq’, Democracy Now!, 9 November 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/2005/11/9/the_battle_of _algiers_1966_film (12 December 2011). 53 Reid, ‘Re-viewing’, 110; Crowdus, ‘Terrorism and Torture’, 36; Riegler, ‘Dictatorship of the Truth’, 55. 52

101

CHAPTER 6 DOCU-DEATH SQUADS

We are in Montevideo, Uruguay, sometime in the early 1970s. The government’s secret death squads are at work. Police Captain Lopez’s henchmen first come knocking for a political activist who is barely out of his teens. The man is driven to a quiet, windswept beach in an orange VW Beetle and shot in the back of the head. Cut to another day and another, anonymous victim – a terrified woman being shown photographic evidence of her comrades’ ‘subversion’. She doesn’t bother to snitch or confess – she knows she won’t make it out of the room alive anyway. After expertly shooting from distance a leafleteer on a busy street, Lopez’s men next break into an apartment and machine-gun a couple on a sofa – summary justice for more ‘revolutionaries’. The frightening sequence ends shockingly yet predictably – with the cold-blooded killing of up to a dozen trade unionists herded out of their office, lined up against a wall and despatched in a hail of bullets. Since the late 1960s, a select number of film-makers have specialized in navigating the boundaries of terrorism and conventional politics. Prominent among these is the Greek director Constantin Costa-Gavras, most of whose movies over the past four decades have been made in France. Few directors have produced as many major films about terrorism as Costa-Gavras and fewer still have challenged conventional wisdom about who conducts it, how and why. As a result, Costa-Gavras has had a singular influence on the terrorism genre from a leftist perspective, one to be compared with the Israeli Menahem Golan’s highly conservative stance examined in Chapter 7. State of Siege, released in 1973, typifies Costa-Gavras’ approach towards terrorism. Internationally produced, global in outlook and, as the sequence above indicates, conspiratorial in style, State of Siege was one of the first major movies made anywhere to depict governments as terrorists. In this and other ways – including sharing the same scriptwriter, Franco Solinas – Costa-Gavras’ docu-thriller descended directly from The Battle of Algiers. However, whereas The Battle of Algiers looked back in time and condemned old-style colonial militarism, State of Siege targeted civilian authorities who were choking democracy using more clandestine methods in the present day. Through State of Siege, Costa-Gavras and others on the liberal left sought to show that this form of state-sanctioned terrorism was far more malevolent than the sporadic terrorism carried out by revolutionary groups. Though rarely referred to as terrorism, especially in the mass media, state-orchestrated violence not only led to wide-scale oppression, it was also insidious. Often behind it were the world’s real power brokers, those who dominated political and economic affairs domestically and internationally.

Docu-death Squads

Like Exodus and The Battle of Algiers before it, State of Siege based much of its political claims on the reconstruction of actual events. These centred on the kidnapping and execution of an American, Dan Mitrione, by the radical leftist Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay in 1970. Mitrione was working for the Agency for International Development (or AID), an American organization that offered economic and technical support to states in the developing world but also secretly ran Cold War counter-revolutionary operations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Using Mitrione’s real-life, week-long interrogation as a backdrop, State of Siege on the one hand explored the brutal and tragic consequences of the struggle between Uruguay’s right-wing authoritarian government and the Tupamaros, who were responsible for some of the most daring terrorist acts seen in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, the film accused the US government of conducting proxy terrorist campaigns against its ideological enemies in Latin America and violating human rights while claiming to be the leader of the free world. State of Siege demonstrated cinema’s continuing ability to provoke public debate about terrorism, even in what was globally known by the early 1970s as the television age. During production of the film to the west of Uruguay, in Chile, politicians, intellectuals and actors fought bitterly with each other and Costa-Gavras over the accuracy of State of Siege’s portrayal of Latin American terrorism. On its release, State of Siege was widely acclaimed as technically outstanding but accused of almost everything politically, from encouraging the assassination of American diplomats to emasculating the Tupamaros. In the longer term, State of Siege helped set the stage for a number of movies that critiqued state terrorism and US informal imperialism in and beyond the 1970s. Most histories of terrorism start, as our first chapter pointed out, with the French Revolution, when the terms ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ entered the modern lexicon. Back then, historians remind us, the ‘terror’ came from those inside government not outside and its finest expression was not the bullet or bomb but the guillotine. ‘Government by intimidation’ was how the Oxford English Dictionary first defined ‘terrorism’.1 Since 1789, governments have been on any quantitative measure the most prolific users of terroristic violence. Yet, as historian Charles Townshend, among others, tells us, there is no hint of this in the prevailing discourse, whether promulgated by international lawyers, politicians or the mass media. In that discourse, terrorism is used by extremists – rebels – against the established order – the state.2 By and large, over the past century cinema has continually reinforced this dominant discourse. That said, there have been periods when a number of filmmakers have seriously questioned it. The late 1960s and 1970s represents one such Beverly Gage, ‘Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field’, Journal of American History, 98, 1, June 2011, 75. 2 Townshend, Short History, 23. 1

103

Cinematic Terror

period, when cinematic dissent tied in with wider political and societal developments of the era. These included the counter-cultural movement in the West, public debates about the Vietnam War, the growing distrust of government caused by scandals like Watergate in the United States, and allegations that security and counterterrorist agencies were abusing their powers in countries as far apart as South Africa and West Germany.3 Simultaneously, changes taking place within many national film industries during this period – including the relaxation of censorship rules, the need to appeal to an increasingly youthful audience and the emergence of new sound and camera technologies – plus the flowering of political cinema in parts of the developing world, gave the opportunity for a new generation of film-makers, many of them liberals, to come to the fore.4 Constantin Costa-Gavras personifies these changes. Born in Greece in 1933, CostaGavras was denied a visa for US film school in the early 1950s owing to his father’s support for the Communists in the recent Greek Civil War. He consequently studied film in Paris and then worked for such distinguished film-makers as René Clair and Marcel Ophűls. Costa-Gavras’ debut as a feature film director and screenwriter came in 1965 with The Sleeping Car Murders, a stylish crime drama set on a moving train in the tradition of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.5 Within a decade of making The Sleeping Car Murders, Costa-Gavras had become one of the world’s leading political film-makers. His work was perfectly in tune with the leftward shift that many film industries took in the mid- to late 1960s – epitomized by films like The Battle of Algiers as well as the New Hollywood movement in the United States – and was often based on collaborations with two Communist screenwriters, the Italian Franco Solinas and the Spaniard Jorge Semprún.6 Though Costa-Gavras was more of a radical liberal than a Communist, he wanted to revolutionize the way film dealt with politics. ‘The cinema has never, or rarely, or sufficiently, tackled the reasons that are behind hunger or war’, he contended while making State of Siege. ‘That’s what the political film is trying to do today – to define these causes and reasons’.7

Ken Goffman, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (New York: Villard, 2004), 247–310; Michael A. Genovese and Iwan W. Morgan (eds.), Watergate Remembered: The Legacy for American Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Jeffrey A. Sluka (ed.), Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 4 Nowell-Smith, Oxford History of World Cinema, Part 3, especially 475–496, 527–550, 740–749. 5 For a detailed overview of Costa-Gavras’ career from the mid-1950s through to the early 1980s, see John J. Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (Philadelphia, PA: Associated University Presses, 1984). 6 On this shift to the left see, for instance, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Wave, Neorealism, and the New Cinemas of the 1960s (New York: Continuum, 2008); Isolde Standish, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Continuum, 2011); Jim Hillier, New Hollywood (New York: Continuum, 1994); Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992). 7 Michèle Ray, ‘Interview with Franco Solinas and Costa-Gavras’, in Constantin Costa-Gavras and Franco Solinas, State of Siege (London: Plexus, 1973), 142. 3

104

Docu-death Squads

Costa-Gavras ‘arrived’ on the political film scene in 1969 with his third feature, Z. Shot, like The Battle of Algiers, in Algeria, and written by Jorge Semprún, Z vividly uncovered the machinations behind the May 1963 killing of the Greek pacifist MP Gregoris Lambrakis in Thessaloniki by government-hired antiCommunist thugs. Costa-Gavras and Semprún used Lambrakis’ assassination to indict both Greek fascism and the US-backed military coup that had taken place in Greece in 1967, which had led to the so-called Regime of the Colonels. With dark humour, a faux documentary style and a soundtrack by the famous left-wing Greek composer Mikos Theodorakis – then under house arrest – Z established Costa-Gavras as a master of the entertainingly complex, politically engaged thriller. Z won a plethora of awards, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and was banned in Greece until after the restoration of democracy there in 1974.8 In his next film, again scripted by Semprún, Costa-Gavras demonstrated his political even-handedness by targeting the perversions of Stalinism. The Confession (1971), a Franco-Italian co-production, was based on a 1968 book by Artur London, a Communist minister who had been falsely accused of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment at the infamous Slansky Show Trials in Czechoslovakia in 1952. The film showed the Orwellian terrors wrought by the Czech dictatorship’s state-of-the-art brainwashing techniques that, when combined with drugs and sleep deprivation, force a party loyalist to confess to imaginary crimes in one of the regime’s ‘people’s courts’. Though slower and less commercially successful than Z, The Confession was equally powerful in its denunciation of secret police forces, state-sanctioned torture and other instruments of what the Oxford English Dictionary termed ‘government by intimidation’.9 State of Siege followed, in 1973, completing what Costa-Gavras saw as a trilogy of films examining political violence and oppression. State of Siege tackled the subject of contemporary terrorism far more directly than Z or The Confession. In part, this reflected the surge in international terrorist incidents in the early 1970s, not least the killing of eleven Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group at the 1972 Munich Olympics. More importantly, it testified to Costa-Gavras’ interest in exploring the relationship between terrorism, political oppression and modern-day informal imperialism. Costa-Gavras had three main aims when making State of Siege: to shine a light on the repression currently caused by US neo-colonialism in Latin America; to dissect the overt and covert means by which that repression took place; and to explore the sort of modern-day urban guerrilla methods that state-sanctioned terrorism could (or should, some might say) prompt. Though many viewers would Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, Chapter 4; ‘Z’, Image et Son, 228, 1 May 1969, 21–29; Armond White, ‘Z: Sounding the Alarm’, 26 October 2009, on Z (Criterion Collection DVD, 2008). 9 ‘L’Aveu’, Positif, 119, September 1970, 60–63; ‘L’Aveu’, Image et Son, 331, September 1978, 37–46; Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, Chapter 5. 8

105

Cinematic Terror

see State of Siege as a reconstruction of recent events in Uruguay, as with all his films Costa-Gavras wanted its political messages to be applied universally.10 Costa-Gavras wanted to make State of Siege accessible to a general audience and so figured the best way of getting across his three-pronged message was to focus, like Z and The Confession, on a real-life individual. In fact, Dan Mitrione, the Uruguayan-based AID official who formed the basis for the character Philip Michael Santore in State of Siege, was not Costa-Gavras’ original choice for a film about US Cold War-style terrorism. This, instead, was John Peurifoy, who had meddled notoriously in Greek politics while US ambassador to Athens in the early 1950s, before playing a critical role in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s coup against Jacobo Árbenz’s left-wing government in Guatemala in 1954.11 However, during a visit to Latin America in early 1971 to promote The Confession, CostaGavras became intrigued by the terrorist campaign then being conducted by the socalled Tupamaros in Uruguay and, in particular, by why the group had kidnapped and then killed Mitrione back in August 1970. For Costa-Gavras and Franco Solinas, who agreed to co-write the script, State of Siege was almost as much about finding out what Mitrione had been really up to in Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America as it was about making a film.12 From the start, Costa-Gavras and Solinas approached this dual task more like historians than moviemakers, so determined were they to support what they had to say about Mitrione and the Tupamaros with hard evidence. Through the summer and autumn of 1971, the pair spent months compiling a 300-page dossier on the Mitrione case. Their research took them to Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Washington DC and Mitrione’s birthplace in Indiana. In Uruguay itself, they listened to the Tupamaros’ taped interrogations of Mitrione, gathered documentation (including evidence of torture by the security agencies), interviewed former police officers and prisoners and met with foreigners who knew of Mitrione’s earlier activities. Solinas’ work on The Battle of Algiers gave him radical credibility and an entrée into the Tupamaros’ highly secret cell-based structure, which was modelled on the Irgun’s in Palestine. He and Costa-Gavras were given unprecedented access to the 4000-strong Tupamaros, who, in return for a film they believed would benefit their cause, spoke freely of the group’s structure, ideology and urban guerrilla techniques.13 Costa-Gavras and Solinas were by turns fascinated and outraged by what they learned about Mitrione and the Tupamaros. The organization that Mitrione worked for, the Agency for International Development, had been founded under John F. Kennedy’s presidency in the early 1960s, ostensibly to provide technical support to Robert Grélier, ‘Entretien avec Costa-Gavras et Franco Solinas’, Image et Son, 271, April 1973, 92–93. Ray, ‘Interview’, 143; Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 12 Ray, ‘Interview’, 144–146; interview with Franco Solinas, State of Siege Press Book, AMPAS. 13 Ray, ‘Interview’, 149–152; William Tuohy, ‘ “State of Siege” Details a Bad Neighbor Policy’, Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1973, 18. 10 11

106

Docu-death Squads

governments that were seeking to bring about economic and political stability in the developing world. In reality, the AID had also become a front for the training of a range of right-wing counter-insurgency agencies in Latin America and Asia, and via its police-training unit, the Office of Public Safety, had close links with the CIA. Mitrione himself was nominally employed as a communications adviser by the Uruguayan government but behind the scenes had a long track record of coordinating police counter-revolutionary operations that included torture and murder.14 The Tupamaros themselves, otherwise known as Uruguay’s National Liberation Movement, had surfaced in the early 1960s. The group was at its most powerful in the early 1970s, when its activities succeeded in first embarrassing, then destabilizing the right-wing, authoritarian governments led by Presidents Jorge Pacheco Areco and Juan Maria Bordaberry. The Tupamaros were highly unorthodox terrorists. Their members and secret followers held key positions in banks, universities and the professions, as well as the military and police. They engaged in ‘armed propaganda’ by, for instance, bursting into cinemas with guns to harangue their audiences or project their own short films. And they had a long-range vision of creating a socialist society and courted opinion by Robin Hood-like activities such as robbing casinos and hijacking food for the poor. According to leaked police reports, the Tupamaros’ violence had escalated largely in reaction to the terrorism carried out by the authorities. Costa-Gavras admired the Tupamaros’ political wisdom, courage and technical efficiency.15 Given its deeply political subject matter, State of Siege could not really hope to attract funding from conventional sources. Most of the money came instead from small-scale Italian, German and French financiers, as well as Costa-Gavras himself. Other American investors included the maverick computer billionaire Max Palevsky, a prominent leader of the anti-war group Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace, and Donald Rugoff, whose young distribution company Cinema 5 had developed a reputation for supporting artistic and political boldness.16 Costa-Gavras initially considered casting an American actor like the bullish George C. Scott as Santore, only to change his mind for fear of creating too much of a one-dimensional villain. He ultimately chose the French left-wing actor-come-crooner, Yves Montand, who had played the sympathetic lead roles in both Z and The Confession. Similarly, Ray, ‘Interview’, 149; ‘Program of the Typical Course Dan Mitrione Gave in the United States – Documents Supplied by Police Commissioner X’, in Costa-Gavras and Solinas, State of Siege, 174; Tuohy, ‘Bad Neighbor’, 18; William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (New York: Zed Books, 2003), 171, 200–204. 15 H. Kalishman and Gary Crowdus, ‘A Film is Like a Match – You Can Make a Big Fire or Nothing at All’, Cineaste, 6, 1, 1973, 2–7; Carr, Infernal Machine, 115; State of Siege Production Notes, BFIL; Costa-Gavras ‘State of Siege’, Films and Filming, 11 August 1973, 19. 16 Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, 157; Elaine Woo, ‘Max Palevsky Dies at 85’, Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/06/local/la-me-0506-max-palevsky-20100506 (21 January 2012). The budget for State of Siege is not known. 14

107

Cinematic Terror

Costa-Gavras dumped the original title of the film, Amerikan, an adjective used by the revolutionary left in the late 1960s to denote US totalitarianism, in favour of one that was less partisan.17 Costa-Gavras was unable, for obvious political reasons, to shoot State of Siege in Uruguay itself and so opted for Chile instead. Latin America was at the forefront of the revolutionary political cinema movement (or Third Cinema) that blossomed briefly in the developing world during this era. Much of the impetus for this cinematic militancy came from wars of liberation, famously so in the case of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, or, in Chile’s case, the election of a radical left-wing government. Costa-Gavras calculated that shooting State of Siege in Chile would enhance verisimilitude, keep down costs and lend political and financial support to Salvador Allende who, in 1970, had been the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a Latin American country. For his part, Allende – himself the victim of a US-backed coup in September 1973 – was more than happy to back the project and responded to protests from the Uruguayan embassy in Santiago by arguing that Chile was a free country with no censorship.18 Despite Allende’s imprimatur, and Costa-Gavras’ decision to employ a local director, Helvio Soto, as an assistant, the production of State of Siege through May, June and July 1972 was beset by protests from many political quarters. Chilean Communist Party officials contended that the script moved too strongly towards the New Left in its approval of violent action to attain socialism rather than by constitutional means. Several left-wing actors withdrew from the picture after intellectuals warned that Yves Montand’s character would glorify the CIA. And the right-wing mayor of one Santiago suburb, Las Condes, threatened to take CostaGavras to court for setting up heavy-handed military-style roadblocks without municipal authorization. Political tensions were eased somewhat following a tête-atête between Costa-Gavras and Allende, who, according to the director, read the film’s script ‘like a detective novel’. Eventually, Costa-Gavras was given permission to film where he wanted, including in the National Congress in downtown Santiago, but had to import weapons from France owing to the Chilean Army’s refusal to loan him some of theirs on the grounds of political neutrality.19 State of Siege is one of the most intellectually demanding films of our study, one that requires viewers to follow long passages of political dialogue and frequent flashbacks to different countries. Its two-hour narrative is spare and passionless, its Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, 161; ‘Yves Montand and State of Siege’, in Costa-Gavras and Solinas, State of Siege, 139–140. 18 James Chapman, Cinemas of the World (London: Reaktion, 2003), 313–321; Judy Klemesrud, ‘CostaGavras: I’m Not Anti-American’, New York Times, 22 April 1973, Arts and Leisure, 31. 19 Klemesrud, ‘Costa-Gavras’, 9, 21; Grélier, ‘Entretien avec Costa-Gavras’, 96; ‘ “Siege’s” Chilean Incident’, Variety, 4 April 1973; Hans Ehrmann, ‘Chile Right & Leftist Squeeze On Costa-Gavras’, Variety, 24 May 1972, 1, 70; Cecil Wilson, ‘Trip to Terror’, Daily Mail (London), 20 July 1973, BFIL; Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, 158. 17

108

Docu-death Squads

semi-documentary approach towards historical events, like most of Costa-Gavras’ work, rational and reflective. At the same time, State of Siege’s newsreel immediacy – akin to The Battle of Algiers but this time in colour – brilliantly conveys the climate of terrorism and knife-edged insecurity in which politically unstable countries can live. The movie’s glimpses of political violence are all the more powerful for the understated way in which Costa-Gavras presents them and for the cold, matter-of-fact manner in which the state terrorists carry them out. Mikos Theodorakis’ restrained, Spanish-inflected soundtrack skilfully conveys a sense of place, of fear and, on appropriate occasions, of humour. State of Siege is structured around the week-long imprisonment of Philip Michael Santore (Montand), while flashbacks deal with the American’s mysterious past. The action begins – accompanied by the sound of a doleful harmonica – on the morning that the police discover Santore’s body, on the back seat of a light green Cadillac, in Montevideo. A grand state funeral follows. In the church, there are almost as many security officials as mourners and more dark glasses concealing cynical eyes than dark suits. As we look at the coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes and hear the papal nuncio (Robert Holmes) eulogize Uruguay’s latest, foreign victim of terrorism, Mrs Santore recalls the events that began a week or so earlier. One morning, in broad daylight, armed Tupamaros expropriate a number of vehicles in preparation for a major operation in Montevideo. To her horror, one car owner, a well-dressed middle-class woman, is dropped off in a shanty town close to a bunch of children scavenging in a rubbish dump. The Tupamaros then intercept Santore’s chauffeur-driven limousine on its way to his office and bundle the American into one of the stolen getaway cars. Meanwhile, other members of the group abduct the Brazilian consul, Fernando Campos (Rafael Benavente), who is taken at gunpoint from his office, almost comically, in a rolled-up carpet. At a press conference with a government minister, journalists ask why Santore, who has no known rank or official authority, has been kidnapped. Cut to the nearby offices of the US Agency for International Development, where a well-groomed American tells the same reporters that Santore is one of their employees and that he has merely been advising the Uruguayan government on communications and traffic control. The head of Montevideo’s police, Captain Lopez (Renato Salvatori), confirms this but when he also reveals that Santore had previously worked in Brazil and the Dominican Republic, the experienced political journalist Carlos Ducas (O. E. Hasse) begins to dig deeper. The rebels transport Santore to a hideout beneath a public garage in suburban Montevideo. Wounded in the lower shoulder during his abduction, Santore is surprised to receive conscientious medical treatment by his abductors. A young, masked rebel called Hugo (Jacques Weber) then starts to interrogate Santore, who admits to having been at his AID post in Brazil during the military coup that ousted the left-leaning president in 1964. When Santore describes himself as merely a 109

Cinematic Terror

Figure 6.1  State of Siege: Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand) is kidnapped by the Tupamaros. Courtesy of Cinema 5/Photofest.

technician and a policeman who provides order, Hugo asks if his police techniques include the electrocution that was applied to many Brazilians in the aftermath of the coup, including children. Santore suggests these stories are Communist propaganda, but a graphic flashback showing a naked man being electrocuted in front of a uniformed audience indicates otherwise. Hugo then passes Santore a photograph of the American dining with several Brazilian police officials recently denounced by Brazil’s bishops as torturers. ‘A mere coincidence’, Santore weakly retorts. Over the next few days, the Tupamaros make public radio communiqués announcing Campos’ and Santore’s health conditions and explaining why each is undergoing interrogation. In his next sessions with Santore, Hugo provides proof of the adviser’s involvement in the CIA’s covert and violent efforts to rid the Dominican Republic of constitutional leftists in the mid-1960s. Hugo then discloses the rebels’ detailed information on Santore’s arrival in Uruguay in 1969 and his close association with Captain Lopez. Meanwhile, Uruguay’s parliament vigorously debates what the Tupamaros’ revelations of Santore’s activities reveals about America’s influence over its government. Back in the hideout, Hugo accuses Santore of recruiting Latin Americans for a Washington-sponsored International Police Academy dedicated, as another flashback shows, to eradicating ‘terrorism from the free world’. The American coolly admits to this, and then clashes verbally with Hugo over the relationship between law and 110

Docu-death Squads

order, privilege and capitalism. The rebels then issue a communiqué demanding the release of all political prisoners in exchange for Campos and Santore. The Minister of Internal Security (Maurice Teynac) tells reporters that this is tantamount to criminal extortion and that there can be ‘no negotiation with terrorists’. As the government intensifies its search for the hostages, the police and military crack down heavily on dissidents. A university campus where students are peacefully demonstrating in support of the rebel cause is overrun by jackbooted officers. Tension then builds further when the police search leads to a garage just a few metres away from the hideout. Only the Tupamaros’ clever camouflage and threats to shoot Santore and Campos if they call for help prevents the hostages’ rescue. In another parliamentary session, a left-wing senator (Yvette Etiévant) states that a bipartisan commission has found proof of the habitual use of torture by the police, mostly on students and union leaders, and calls on the right-wing government to resign. Resuming his interrogation, Hugo asks Santore about the Uruguayan police recruits sent to a special training camp in the United States specializing in torture and terrorist techniques, including the use of explosives to assassinate dissidents. Santore explains that if its enemies are going to use terrorist weapons, the police have every right to respond in kind. In reply, Hugo offers several shocking examples – played out on screen – of recent police activity to show that Santore and his ‘fascist’ associates have actually been using the threat of Tupamaros terrorism as a pretext to control the population via torture and violence. When Hugo concludes by proving Santore’s

Figure 6.2  State of Siege: Santore being interrogated in the Tupamaros’ hideout. Courtesy of Cinema 5/Photofest.

111

Cinematic Terror

fascist credentials, the American finally cracks and angrily calls the rebels ‘subversive Communists’ who would destroy the free world’s order and Christian ethics. The following day a rebel communiqué states that the interrogations have determined that Santore is a leading US undercover agent who specializes in instructing Latin American dictatorships in the use of repression, torture and assassination. Unless the nation’s ‘political prisoners’ are released, it continues, Santore and Campos will be ‘brought to justice’. At this point, it looks as though the government will cave in to the Tupamaros’ demands owing to diplomatic pressures, especially when the rebels kidnap another American AID official. After all, most ministers are industrialists or bankers with deep connections to the United States. Within hours, however, the tables have turned. The heavy military dragnet succeeds in capturing most of the rebel leaders, including Hugo, and the state media congratulate Captain Lopez on snaring the terrorists. Having quickly relocated the hostages, Hugo’s replacement gently tells Santore that the Tupamaros would have preferred to spare him but that he should now write a farewell letter to his family. The American knows that the capture of the rebels has strengthened the government’s diplomatic position and that his death is necessary in order to preserve the Tupamaros’ public credibility. When, as predicted, the government later announces that it cannot accede to any of the terrorists’ demands, the remaining Tupamaros conduct a vote and agree to execute Santore.

Figure 6.3  State of Siege: A member of the Tupamaros being manhandled into a vehicle by the Uruguayan secret police. Courtesy of Cinema 5/Photofest. 112

Docu-death Squads

Fast-forward to the present, after Santore’s funeral. The American’s flag-draped coffin is taken to Montevideo airport and, watched by crowds, ceremonially loaded onto an American aircraft. Cut seamlessly to the final scene, set just days later. Santore’s replacement quietly disembarks with his family from another US aircraft and is greeted by Captain Lopez. There are no crowds to witness this, but a close-up of a pair of eyes tells us that the Tupamaros are watching. Their ‘war on terror’ will continue … . When it was released in early 1973, State of Siege did not appear out of thin air. Previously, numerous films made in Communist countries had accused the United States of colonialism or of using the developing world as a political playground.20 Several Hollywood movies, like Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971), had poked fun at the CIA’s nefarious activities in Central America.21 Furthermore, since the late 1960s, the world’s press had carried plenty of stories of alleged American wrongdoing overseas, whether in Southeast Asia, the Middle East or Latin America. It was widely rumoured via the news media, for example, that the CIA had played a part in Che Guevara’s killing in Bolivia in 1967 and that the organization had recently sought to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government in Chile in tandem with the US conglomerate International Telephone & Telegraph.22 Be that as it may, there is little doubt that State of Siege broke new ground in terms of cinema’s depiction of terrorism. This was not an historical film – like Ashes and Diamonds, Exodus or The Battle of Algiers – but one about current affairs. It sought to teach viewers, as Costa-Gavras put it when promoting the film, ‘never again to see an American embassy as a simple embassy, but as an espionage centre, a control centre, a political pressure group’.23 This it does by gradually peeling back the layers of US influence in contemporary Latin America until it is revealed in all its ugliness. As the flashbacks move from recent events to the present day, so the movie’s images of US-sponsored terrorism become increasingly more graphic. The fact that State of Siege is in colour suggests that the events being ‘documented’ could have been ripped straight from the television news. Simultaneously, Costa-Gavras’ unconventional use of dark, misty hues, often capturing Uruguay in the cold and wet of winter, serves as a fitting backdrop to the dreadful, unorthodox terrorist violence on screen. For an assortment of East German, Cuban and North Vietnamese films on this subject, see Gerd Geműnden, ‘Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA “Indianerfilme” (1965–1985)’, Film History, 10, 3, 1988, 399–407; Michael Chanan, Cuban Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 307–308; Jean-Jacques Malo and Tony Williams, Vietnam War Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994). 21 Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 173–187. 22 Oliver Boyd-Barrett, David Herrera and Jim Baumann, Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense, and Subversion (London: Routledge, 2011), 59–65. 23 Tuohy, ‘Bad Neighbor’, 18. 20

113

Cinematic Terror

State of Siege was by no means the first film to draw attention to the contested language surrounding terrorism. However, few movies before it had exposed so thoroughly the cynical way in which governments could publicly label opponents as terrorists and refute terrorists’ political motivations. During Santore’s funeral, no less a figure than the papal nuncio to Uruguay calls terrorism an ‘affliction’ and speaks of a war between ‘civilization’ on the one hand and ‘blind fury’ on the other. Other dialogue in State of Siege highlights the role the media play in the propaganda war surrounding terrorist activities, either as a vehicle for dissent (in the case of Carlos Ducas) or, more often as not, as a mouthpiece for official views. ‘There are no political prisoners in this country’, one minister tells compliant journalists during one of the many press conferences in the film, ‘only common criminals that rob banks and steal cars’. Both Exodus and The Battle of Algiers had depicted terrorism as potentially virtuous, heroic even, but State of Siege goes a step further. Costa-Gavras glamourizes the Tupamaros and thus makes their terrorism appear stylish, even alluring. In real life many of the Tupamaros were young but in State of Siege almost all of them are also fit and attractive. Our very first sight of the Tupamaros is a close-up of two of them kissing and pretending to be lovers as they keep watch on Santore’s house. The French actor Jacques Weber, who plays Hugo, oozes sex appeal, even when wearing a mask to hide his identity. Hugo and his comrades wear fashionable clothes, carry guns nonchalantly and capture the limelight via kidnappings and carefully calibrated propaganda. Not only do the Tupamaros preach equality, we see them put it into practice. The women in the group have the same power as the men and everyone shares a real sense of camaraderie. Even when they have been caught by the police, Hugo and his associates remain cool and composed; they even taunt Lopez and smile for the state’s television cameras. Such bravado could come across as egotism or arrogance were it not for the fact that the Tupamaros clearly have the support of many ordinary Uruguayans. Costa-Gavras demonstrates this lightly, often through humour. When the rebels are expropriating vehicles towards the start of the film, for instance, several workingclass drivers express genuine support for their cause. One particular driver, whose car the Tupamaros had also commandeered several weeks earlier in order to rob a bank, gives the rebels a special piece of advice as he is getting out. ‘Be careful with the brakes and the second gear is bad’, he shouts from the sidewalk, just as a loud grinding sound comes from the clutch. Later, when the jackbooted officers storm the university campus, what starts out as a chilling scene of fascist violence ends up close to slapstick comedy. Like modern-day Keystone Cops, the officers manically run from one loudspeaker to another in a quadrangle trying to silence the students’ protest music. Ultimately, it takes a dozen of them to complete the job by kicking the last defiant wooden speaker to smithereens. Like no other film before it, State of Siege creates an important and challenging distinction between revolutionary and official violence. The former is portrayed as

114

Docu-death Squads

controlled and selective, the latter uncontrolled and indiscriminate. The Tupamaros are the very antithesis of those outlandish revolutionary terrorists depicted in silent movies like D. W. Griffith’s The Voice of the Violin. They have clear (left-wing) political goals and are articulate and humane. Their painstaking use of documentation – we see numerous close-ups of newspapers, photographs, stolen government papers – ‘proves’ the presence of malevolent foreign agents within their country. Although the rebels are prepared to kill Santore if necessary, they do not wish to do so if it can be avoided. The look on their faces when sentencing the American to death is not sadistic glee but sadness. Uruguay’s American-backed ruling oligarchy, on the other hand, is the very essence of unrestrained terrorism. Its state-wide repression is illustrated most potently in the film’s opening sequence, one which shows the security forces desperately searching for Santore in Montevideo’s morning rush-hour. Costa-Gavras juxtaposes the peaceful sound of Latin American pan pipes with menacing images of soldiers on horseback, police officers in patrol cars and shady plain-clothed men brandishing machine guns standing by the roadsides. Everywhere we look, the citizens of Montevideo are having their identities checked, being violently frisked, pushed off buses and thrown onto the boots of cars. It is a chaotic scene, one that appears as though it could tip into mayhem at any moment but for the fact that the look on most citizens’ faces is exhaustion rather than hatred; years of living in a police state has deadened their emotions. The sequence is shot through a cloudy lens to give it a conspiracy effect and overlaid with the sound of helicopters and police megaphones. As disturbing as the film’s opening is, little prepares us for what we see later on the State of Siege. Many of the images of state-sanctioned terrorism in the film are shocking even today, forty years after they were first shown. The principal torture scene, which takes place during what appears to be a grotesque teaching session for the Brazilian security forces back in the mid-1960s, begins with a camera panning down from the ceiling of a giant hall filled with uniformed spectators and coming to rest behind a naked, blindfolded man who is strapped to a tall metal stool on a stage. When the camera switches around to look at the man from the front, we can see everything – his penis, pubic hair, gag and two other naked men awaiting their turn behind him. The only sound we hear is that of an electrical humming. A police officer on the stage calmly presses an electrode to the man’s testicles – cut to the blank, perhaps bored face of a senior officer in the crowd – then to his gums. The humming has turned into a low-pitched buzz. Accelerating shots follow, alternating between faces in the crowd and various parts of the victim’s body – nipples, nose, even eyes – being electrocuted. Eventually, one young spectator vomits and runs out of the hall. The scene reminds us a little of Edwin Porter’s Execution of Czolgosz, the obvious difference being that in this case the terrorist is not the one strapped to the chair and the voyeuristic cinema audience is perhaps meant to feel guilt rather than gratification.

115

Cinematic Terror

Figure 6.4  State of Siege: Close-up of a Brazilian dissident having his gums electrocuted. The terrorism of torture in Latin America, directed by Santore.

Back to the present day and in Uruguay itself, State of Siege is equally explicit in showing us what happens when governments employ extra-legal death squads to torture and execute real or suspected members of the political opposition. The sequence in which Captain Lopez’s thugs first murder a young political activist on a grey, isolated beach and then interrogate a young, heavily bruised woman whose eyes tells us she knows she is about to die captures both the clandestine nature of so much of the state’s violence and the authorities’ ability to make subversives ‘disappear’. The next scene of a young leafleteer being shot on a packed street in broad daylight by a roof-top marksman speaks of the authorities’ sense of impunity. Together, these scenes and the others that quickly follow – the eerie sound of wind and low piano notes running through all of them – illustrate a government’s far greater power to terrorize compared with small groups like the Tupamaros, whether it is in Uruguay or anywhere else. And then there is Philip Michael Santore himself. The American is not the stereotypical sociopath or fanatic some audiences might have expected. His wife and children (all seven of them) clearly love him, and in many respects the Uruguayan government’s foreign ‘adviser’ looks and sounds like a sober and sincere civil servant. Yet just as Oskar Homolka’s weak and homely Verloc had captured one aspect of the banality of terrorism in Hitchcock’s Sabotage, so Yves Montand’s refined, reasonable and well-travelled Santore represents another. A functionary who claims that he is just taking orders and who believes his job is perfectly normal, the American is the arch state terrorist. It is the subtlety, size and sophistication of the American’s

116

Docu-death Squads

Figure 6.5  State of Siege: Lost to the world: A Tupamaros suspect (Gloria Laso) being grilled personally by Captain Lopez.

violent counter-revolutionary operation – not unlike Colonel Mathieu’s in The Battle of Algiers – that make Santore the main villain of the piece. Santore has not killed anyone personally but he has the blood of hundreds all over his hands. State of Siege caused considerable controversy when it was distributed widely in 1973. As we might expect, the movie was banned in Uruguay itself, where the military had in fact just defeated the Tupamaros and installed a junta that would remain in power till 1985. State of Siege was simply too much for some critics in West Germany, many of whom interpreted it as a veiled vindication of the sort of terrorism conducted at the Munich Olympics. The extreme right in France, echoing their recent views on The Battle of Algiers perhaps, said much the same thing.24 Conversely, Uruguayan political exiles in Europe used State of Siege to campaign for robust international action against the government in Montevideo. Some argued that their country was now ‘a concentration camp’ that housed over 10,000 political prisoners and that modern-day Uruguay was the key to understanding the ‘Watergate methods’ applied in the developing world by the CIA and Pentagon. Many European leftists noisily agreed. The AID countered these allegations by condemning the film as ‘anti-American propaganda’ and denying that Mitrione had had anything to do John Kafka, ‘Germans Goad Costa-Gavras on His “Siege” ’, Variety, 11 April 1973, BFIL; Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, 178–179. 24

117

Cinematic Terror

with torture. The organization also rejected the notion that ‘overthrowing order is sometimes essential to development’, one of the Tupamaros’ mantras.25 Not surprisingly, as the AID’s statements indicate, State of Siege troubled and offended many people in the United States, provoking newspaper editorials, television panel debates and demonstrations. The film divided viewers according to the hard-drawn political lines of a period dominated by defeat in Vietnam, urban unrest, Watergate and war in the Middle East. Before its general release in the country, State of Siege was hastily withdrawn from the American Film Institute’s inaugural programme at the John F. Kennedy Centre in Washington DC on the grounds that it ‘rationalised an act of political assassination’ and was therefore highly inappropriate for the venue. The movie was then charged by the State Department with unjustly besmirching the life of Dan Mitrione and with effectively condoning the recent terrorist killings of other US diplomats, notably the US ambassador to Sudan, Cleo A. Noel, Jr., by Black September gunmen in March 1973.26 Conservative commentators, counter-insurgency analysts and retired US diplomats castigated State of Siege for either spinning ‘irresponsible fairy tales’ about urban terrorism or for being ‘a hyped-up tract on Yankeeism in Latin America’. One journalist, Smith Hempstone, who would go on to become US ambassador to Kenya in the late 1980s, claimed that the film falsely indicted the United States by employing the same techniques as Josef Goebbels’ Big Lie theory. As with The Battle of Algiers a few years earlier, the US federal authorities categorized State of Siege as a particularly dangerous piece of propaganda. One lengthy report on it written by a member of an influential foreign policy think tank for a Congressional committee on international terrorism warned that ‘this new apology for revolutionary violence’ could end up ‘playing the midwife to murder’ on the streets of America and overseas. Appropriately for us, the report’s author christened Costa-Gavras the ‘Hitchcock of the Left’.27 State of Siege was not only acquitted by many liberal US critics but applauded on a number of potentially conflicting levels, once again illustrating the scope that existed for films about terrorism to be widely interpreted and appropriated. Uruguayan News Emergency Unit (London), ‘State of Siege and Uruguay 1973’ and ‘Hunger and Tortures in Uruguay’, State of Siege Production File, BFIL; Bob Kuttner, ‘AID on “State of Siege” ’, Village Voice, 24 May 1973, BFIL. 26 ‘AFI Board Has Mixed Feelings on Cancelling “State of Siege” ’, Variety, 3 April 1973, 1, 27; ‘State of Siege’, Filmfacts, 16, 6, 1973, 143–145. 27 ‘State of Siege’, Playboy, July 1973; Paul D. Zimmerman, ‘Dirty Yankies’, Newsweek, 23 April 1973; James L. Loeb, ‘Movie Mailbag’, New York Times, 6 May 1973, 1, 13; Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, 179–180; United States Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on The Near East and South Asia of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, Ernest W. Lefever, Brookings Institution, ‘The Unmaking of a “Documentary” – Film vs. Fact’, Appendix 6, 11 June 1974 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974), 207–219. On the US government’s fears of ‘urban subversion’ in the early to mid-1970s, see Carr, Infernal Machine, 110. 25

118

Docu-death Squads

Liberals praised the film for objectively asking questions about the uses of terror; for depicting the failure of terrorism to accomplish anything except to perpetuate itself; and for performing a public duty by informing people about aspects of US foreign policy they knew little about due to the failure of the nation’s media.28 Theodore Sorenson, President Kennedy’s former speechwriter and Special Counsel, sparked a row in the New York Times by labelling State of Siege simplistic but an ‘important film’ that would hopefully shake viewers out of their ‘slumbering indifference’ to Latin America.29 Costa-Gavras was presumably heartened by Sorenson’s viewpoint, and by the US Congress’s decision in 1974 to abolish Mitrione’s discredited employer, the Office of Public Safety.30 Critics on the far left in the United States and elsewhere contributed to the war of words over the film by lamenting State of Siege’s Hollywood-style focus on the individual and thereby, in contrast with The Battle of Algiers, explaining political realities in personal and psychological terms. The film told us little to nothing of the wider ideological and economic background to the Mitrione case, they argued, largely because its conventional form subverted the radical content. State of Siege had therefore missed a golden opportunity to examine, as Costa-Gavras himself had promised, the deeper ‘causes and reasons’ behind terrorism and political oppression, and had chosen instead to focus on the Tupamaros’ more headlinegrabbing actions. Costa-Gavras’ reaction to this – and to similar criticisms of his later films – was that State of Siege was designed for a mass audience and therefore had to be made in a certain style and form. This was a fair point yet one that highlights the built-in political restrictions of mainstream cinema even during this most dissenting of eras.31 Whether it is defined as radical or reactionary, State of Siege was in the vanguard of films that examined aspects of state terrorism in the 1970s. These were made in a variety of genres and countries. Orders, a 1974 Canadian docu-drama directed by Michel Brault, looked back at the clash between the Canadian authorities and the separatist organization Quebec Liberation Front during the so-called October Crisis in 1970. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, a 1975 West German drama directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, accused that country’s government, Joy Gould Bloum, ‘Political Assassination in a Far-Off Country’, Wall Street Journal, 20 April 1973; Rosalyn Drexler, ‘Movies’, Vogue, June 1973, 48; Judith Crist, ‘Movies’, New York, 16 April 1973, 86. 29 Theodore Sorensen, ‘ “State of Siege” Speaks “A Warning to Us All” ’, New York Times, 24 June 1973, D–15; ‘Movie Mailbag’, New York Times, 15 July 1973; ‘Movie Mailbag’, New York Times, 6 May 1973, 1, 13. 30 Blum, Killing Hope, 204. Some of the OPS’s responsibilities were switched to other bodies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 31 H. Kalishman, ‘State of Siege: Persuading the Already Persuaded’, Cineaste, 6, 2, 1974, 36–39; Peter Biskind, ‘State of Siege’, Film Quarterly, 27, 1, 1973, 51–54; David Wilson, ‘State of Siege’, Sight and Sound (London), 42, 4, 1973, 238; John Dawson, ‘State of Siege’, Listener (London), 26 July 1973, BFIL. 28

119

Cinematic Terror

police and mass media of cynically turning public hysteria over terrorism to its own advantage.32 The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974) and Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975) are just two examples of Hollywood’s celebrated mid-1970s cycle of politically charged conspiracy thrillers, at least part of which can be linked in style and content to Costa-Gavras’ work.33 Costa-Gavras himself returned to the subject of state terrorism – of a different type – in 1975 with the prize-winning Special Section. Another fact-based drama, Special Section focused on the Vichy government’s treatment of Communist ‘terrorists’ during the Second World War following the killing of a German naval officer.34 In 1982, the director made his first English-language film with Hollywood money. Almost a companion piece to State of Siege, Missing probed the US government’s highly contentious role in the 1973 coup in Chile, which saw the death of President Salvador Allende and the establishment of a right-wing dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet.35 The Academy Award–winning thriller was closely based on the real-life disappearance of American expatriate writer Charles Horman after the coup and his father’s discovery that Washington had been systematically involved in death-squad terrorism aimed at eliminating left-wing opposition.36 Missing went beyond merely condemning CIA terrorism to offer a trenchant critique of the United States’ whole Cold War machine and anticipated campaigners like Noam Chomsky who argued in the later 1980s that Washington had exported a ‘culture of terrorism’ to regions such as Latin America and the Middle East.37 The film forced US Secretary of State Alexander Haig to issue an official denial of US Michel Ciment, ‘Les Ordres’, Positif, 171–172, July–August 1975, 106; D. Ketinich, ‘The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: Who’s the Terrorist in West Germany?’, Jump Cut, 19, December 1978, 4–5. See Chapter 8 for more on The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. 33 Peter Lev, American Films of the 1970s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 49–55; Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 250–261; Guy Hennebelle, ‘Z Movies or What Hath Costa-Gavras Wrought?’, Cineaste, 6, 2, 1979, 28–31. 34 Louise Sweet, ‘Secciόn Especial’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 44, 520, May 1977, 106–107. 35 Missing was not the first film to be made about the Chilean coup. Having fled to France in the wake of Pinochet’s seizure of power, Helvio Soto, the Chilean associate producer of State of Siege, made It’s Raining on Santiago, a semi-documentary recreation of the coup, in 1976. Better known is Patricio Guzmán’s threepart The Battle of Chile (1975–1979), which was produced in France and Cuba, and was described in Cineaste in 1981 as ‘one of the most important Marxist documentaries ever made’. Jean Narboni, ‘Viva Oupe! Il Pleut sur Santiago’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 264, February 1976, 64; Dennis West, ‘The Battle of Chile’, Cineaste, 11, 2, 1981, 35–37. 36 For the genesis and development of Missing, see scripts in the Core Script Collection, AMPAS and Collection 073, Box F114 & F146, Arts Library, University of California Los Angeles; Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras, 215–235; Gary Crowdus, ‘The Missing Dossier: An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cineaste, 12, 1, 1982, 30–38. On the truth or falsehood of the film’s allegations, and the controversy Missing triggered, see Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 104–124. 37 Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1988); David C. Wills, The First War on Terror: Counter-Terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 32

120

Docu-death Squads

complicity in the Chilean coup and Costa-Gavras successfully fought a libel suit filed by the US ambassador to Chile during the coup, Nathaniel Davis.38 Missing’s message about US support for death-squad terrorism continued to reverberate through the 1980s in other American films like Under Fire (Roger Spottiswoode, 1983) and Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1987), and the movie seems to have played a small role subsequently in maintaining the international media’s interest in the Chilean coup.39 After al-Qaeda’s September 2001 attacks on the United States, several films – including the international portmanteau 11’ 9’’ 01 September 11 (2002) and Eugene Jarecki’s US documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) – portrayed the Chilean coup, which took place on 11 September 1973, as the ‘Other 9/11’.40 One year after Missing had appeared, in 1983, Costa-Gavras turned his attention from Latin America to the Middle East, then the hotbed of international terrorism according to most Westerners. Hanna K was a US-Franco-Israeli drama centred on an Israeli lawyer defending a Palestinian accused of terrorism after trying to regain possession of his family home. The well-known advocate for Palestinian rights Edward Said called Hanna K ‘a statement of great and lasting significance’, while scholar Cheryl Rugenberg argued that it was the first film to come out of the United States that reflected the Palestinian perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Costa-Gavras was bitterly disappointed by Hanna K’s commercial failure, which he attributed to what he saw as America’s powerful pro-Israel lobby.41 Five years later, Costa-Gavras visited the theme of terrorism once again via the American-made Betrayed (1988). A romantic drama like Hanna K, Betrayed highlighted the threat of white supremacist attacks on Jews, blacks and homosexuals in the United States. Fourteen years later, Costa-Gavras, now just short of seventy years of age, made Amen. This was a joint Franco-German-Romanian production that focused on Pope Pius XII’s controversial accommodation with the Third Reich’s reign of terror against international Jewry during the Second World War. Though its immediate subject was the Holocaust, Amen extended the criticism Costa-Gavras ‘Film Gets Bad Reviews in D. C.’, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 10 February 1982, AMPAS; Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood. 39 William J. Palmer, The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 133–141; Peter Kornbluh and Erin Maskell, eds., ‘Chilean Judge Requests Extradition of U.S. Military Official in “Missing” Case’, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 366, 30 November 2011, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB366/index.htm (21 January 2012). 40 Patricia Keeton, ‘Re-evaluating the “Old” Cold War: A Dialectical Reading of Two 9/11 Narratives’, Cinema Journal, 43, 4, Summer 2004, 114–121; Transnational Institute, ‘Events Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the Coup in Chile’, 2003, http://www.tni.org/node/63720/4175 (21 January 2012). 11’ 9’’ 01 September 11, referred to briefly in Chapter 5, was a compilation of nine short films by international filmmakers responding to the September 2001 attacks. The segment made by the British director Ken Loach centred on a London-based Chilean exile recounting the 1973 coup and placed the United States in the role of a terrorist helping to stamp out democracy. 41 Cheryl Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 340–342; Richard Porton and Ella Shohat, ‘The Trouble with Hanna’, Film Quarterly, 38, 2, Winter 1984–1985, 50–55. 38

121

Cinematic Terror

had made of the Catholic Church in State of Siege. It also sought to shed further light on the banality of terrorism, in this case on the bureaucratization of state-sanctioned mass murder.42 Taken together, all of these films demonstrate Constantin Costa-Gavras’ unusually sustained interest in defining and redefining terrorism on screen from one era to the next. It is of course impossible to measure the influence his films have had on cinemagoers’ attitudes towards terrorism over the past forty years or so. Many of the movies, like their progenitor The Battle of Algiers, probably preached to converted liberal-leftists. Yet even if this is the case, we should not underestimate the role CostaGavras’ terrorist oeuvre may have played in reinforcing anxieties about government repression or, in the case of big box-office hits like Missing, raising some mainstream viewers’ awareness of state-paid death squads. At the very least, his films will have encouraged some cinemagoers to challenge received wisdom about terrorism. We might say the same thing about film-makers, too, particularly regarding State of Siege. Costa-Gavras’ debut feature about terrorism had more than its fair share of imitators through the 1970s and 1980s. State of Siege continued to be a reference point for directors in the early twenty-first century also. In 2002, the American actordirector John Malkovich made The Dancer Upstairs, a thriller set in Latin America based on the Maoist Shining Path terrorist movement which had almost brought down the Peruvian government in the 1990s. The Dancer Upstairs resembled State of Siege in the way it was shot (mainly in Ecuador, using Spanish and Argentinian actors), in the way it universalized the political dilemmas depicted (partly by having all actors speak English) and, most importantly, in the way it portrayed terrorism as a reaction to fascism. In an intriguing inter-textual twist, the police finally capture the terrorist leader in The Dancer Upstairs via a videocassette containing home-movie footage found in his apartment. The footage has been taped over a copy of one of his favourite movies, State of Siege.43

Chris Petit, ‘Betrayed’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 56, 663, April 1989, 105–106; Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas, ‘Filming the Story of a Spy for God: An Interview with Costa-Gavras’, Cineaste, 28, 2, 2003, 14–20. 43 James Mottram, ‘Easy on the Megaphone’, Sight and Sound, 12, 12, 1 December 2002, 16–18. 42

122

CHAPTER 7 SCHLOCK AND AWE

The years immediately following Constantin Costa-Gavras’ State of Siege saw the flowering of a brand new geopolitical phenomenon, ‘international terrorism’. During the mid- to late 1970s, self-proclaimed terrorist groups espousing world revolution, like the Japanese Red Army, and globetrotting ‘terrorist masterminds’, like the Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (better known as Carlos the Jackal), frequently captured the headlines. These ‘super entertainers of our time’, as one of the West’s leading ‘terrorologists’ Walter Laqueur called them,1 were all part, according to many politicians and commentators, of a worldwide conspiracy bent on the destruction of liberal democracy. If, as many believed, the source of so much of this inter-connected terrorist activity was an increasingly unstable Middle East, its arch protagonists were those who assassinated, kidnapped and hijacked in the name of Arab or Palestinian freedom. Operation Thunderbolt, an Israeli action-adventure released in 1977, encapsulates mainstream cinema’s approach towards international terrorism generally and the Arab-Israeli dispute in particular during the 1970s.2 The movie re-enacted the famous Entebbe Raid, a daring mission performed by the Israeli military in Uganda in July 1976 to free over a hundred aircraft passengers held by a multinational group demanding the release of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Operation Thunderbolt made heroes of the counterterrorists at Entebbe and sought to beat the ‘super entertainers’ at their own game of media manipulation by depicting the Israelis’ actions as more spectacular than that of their foes. Operation Thunderbolt contrasted starkly with films like State of Siege, stylistically as well as politically. The Israeli production provided high-tempo, escapist entertainment centred on a simple narrative of good versus evil. Action took precedence over analysis, meaning that little to no space was given to considering the terrorists’ motives or to whether terrorism was a legitimate tool of policy or strategy of combat. According to Operation Thunderbolt, by the late 1970s, terrorism had effectively turned into a pernicious, homogeneous movement that was deluded by an internationalist ideology of hate. All acts of terrorism, wherever they might take place – the film said – were now being perpetrated by murderers hooked on radicalist violence who could only be defeated by state-sanctioned force. Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 223. The film also went under the titles Mivtza Yonatan and Entebbe: Operation Thunderbolt.

1 2

Cinematic Terror

Like Exodus a generation earlier, Operation Thunderbolt quickly achieved cult status in Israel but its legacy was felt far beyond that country’s borders. Operation Thunderbolt helped instigate a global trend of hyperbolic, vengeful counter-terrorism films stretching far beyond the 1970s. Its success also helped establish the actionadventure as one of the staple terrorism genres, a development which had important implications for how political violence was depicted on screen. Inspired by his success, the producer and director of Operation Thunderbolt, Menahem Golan, went on to make more than twenty other terrorism films across the world over the decades ahead, rendering him the most prolific and possibly most influential practitioner of cinematic terrorism to date. The figure of the terrorist appeared on global cinema screens on an unprecedented scale during the 1970s. This shift from what might be called bit part to lead role reflected not only the marked increase in the sheer amount of real-life terrorist activities during the seventies but also the heightened theatricality of those activities. Carlos the Jackal’s audacious hostage-taking during a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna in 1975, for example, or the kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in Rome in 1978, were the very stuff of choreographed drama. This was of course something the perpetrators appreciated and which helps explain why the increasingly ubiquitous news media were encouraged to treat the terrorists’ activities as ‘spectacles’, often played out live on prime-time television for a worldwide audience.3 The quintessential international terrorist tactic of this era was aircraft hijacking. Skyjacking is widely thought to have had been ‘invented’ in the late 1950s by Cuban-connected Latin American activists,4 but it was Palestinian militants who perfected the technique a decade or so later. Beginning with the hijacking of an Israeli El Al flight in July 1968, an act that scholar Bruce Hoffman identifies as the founding moment for modern, international terrorism,5 Palestinian paramilitaries or guerrillas allied with them hijacked or attempted to hijack more than thirty aircraft from a variety of countries over the next ten years. One of the earliest, most notorious incidents involved the hijacking of four aircraft bound for New York by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in September 1970 and which ended with three empty planes being blown up in front of the world’s Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 157–172; Alan O’Leary, Tragedia all’italiana: Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970–2010 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), Chapter 2. 4 David Gero, Flights of Terror: Aerial Hijack and Sabotage since 1930 (London: Patrick Stephens, 1997); Carr, Infernal Machine, 199. 5 Hoffman writes that this was the point at which Palestinian militants expanded the scope of their tactics, that is, from making direct attacks on the Israeli government to bringing their fight to the rest of the world. Hoffman sees this as a turning point between anticolonial terrorism, conducted mainly in the territory under contest, and international terrorism, which targeted representatives of Western power wherever they might be. Gage, ‘American Experience’, 90. 3

124

Schlock and Awe

media at Dawson’s Field in Jordan. Journalists flocked to terrorist spectaculars like ‘Skijack Sunday’, giving militants what orthodox commentators called their perfect publicity ‘platform’.6 In the early 1970s, feature films quickly seized upon the opportunity to put cinemagoers in the passenger seat, so to speak, and to help them ‘visualize’ the claustrophobia and fear associated with being skyjacked. Many of these films could be linked to the ‘disaster’ movie craze of the era.7 Examples of this developing sub-genre, which looked at hijacking from the passenger-victims’ point of view rather than that of the terrorists’, include the American-made Skyjacked (John Guillermin, 1972) and Soviet-made Abiturientki (Alex Mishurin, 1974). However, one key problem for filmmakers was that many of the real-life hijackings in the early 1970s ended with the authorities either agreeing to the terrorists’ demands or bungling their attempts to free the hostages by force. These incidents consequently offered little in the way of a model for heroic, feel-good cinematic counterterrorism. All this was to change with the Entebbe raid of 1976.8 The real-life drama that climaxed in Uganda in early July 1976 opened a week earlier in the skies above Europe. On 27 June, Air France Flight 139, with 268 passengers and crew on board en route from Lod in Israel to Paris, was hijacked after a stop in Athens by members of the PFLP and the German guerrilla group Revolutionary Cells. After diverting first to Benghazi in Libya, the plane landed at Entebbe Airport, near the Ugandan capital Kampala, on 28 June. At Entebbe, the hijackers, who were supported by the forces of Uganda’s president, Idi Amin, transferred the passengers into an old airport terminal building. They then issued public demands for the release of forty Palestinians held in Israel and threatened to start killing the hostages on 1 July if their demands were not met. Almost all of the non-Israeli hostages were then freed. When the 1 July deadline passed and negotiations broke down, the Israeli cabinet gave the goahead for a military rescue, codenamed Operation Thunderbolt. On 4 July, following a gruelling 2500-mile flight from Israel, a 100-strong Israeli special forces unit landed in darkness and stormed the old Entebbe Airport terminal building. In less than an hour, the unit killed all the hijackers and rescued all but four of the remaining 106 hostages. Only one Israeli soldier lost his life, the unit’s leader Yonatan Netanyahu.9 Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (London: John Murray, 2000), 377; Gérard Chaliand, Terrorism: From Popular Struggle to Media Spectacle (London: Saqi Books, 1987). 7 On the commercial success during the 1970s of movies that depicted attempted escapes from natural and man-made catastrophes – tropical cyclones, fires, shipwrecks, damaged nuclear power plants, crippled aircraft and so on – see Stephen Keane, Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower, 2001), 19–50; Ken Feil, Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press, 2001), 1–30. 8 J. Fox, ‘Skyjacked’, Films and Filming, 18, 11, August 1972, 52–54, http://kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/ sov/100/annot/ (1 May 2013); Gero, Flights of Terror. 9 Morris, Righteous Victims, 383–385. 6

125

Cinematic Terror

It is not difficult to understand why this whole episode immediately entered into Israeli folklore, nor why the Israelis’ Entebbe mission prompted some countries to rethink their counterterrorist strategies.10 Similarly, it is not hard to see why the episode, which had held the attention of much of the world’s media for a week, was so attractive to film-makers. As one film critic later put it, the Entebbe episode had almost everything a producer could wish for: a mix of characters thrown together by fate, an upbeat twist on the tried-and-tested airline disaster theme, the potential to be presented as a showdown between evil and innocence, and a last-minute cavalry rescue akin to old-fashioned Hollywood Westerns.11 Even before its ‘happy ending’ on 4 July, one of the largest studios in the world, Universal, in Hollywood, had begun developing a story based on the hostage crisis at Entebbe. ‘The [Israelis’] mission reads like a movie script’, Universal’s president Sidney Sheinberg proclaimed a week or so later. In mid-July, another, smaller American company, Merv Griffin Productions, began making its own plans for a movie about Entebbe, enthused by its president, Murray Schwartz, having been one of the rescued hostages.12 Even the veteran Academy Award-winning director Lewis Milestone, perhaps best known for his classic First World War movie All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), dashed off a treatment. In all, a total of seventeen different film projects emerged, in the United States alone.13 By the summer of 1977, three major films based on the Entebbe crisis had appeared. Victory at Entebbe and Raid on Entebbe were star-studded American television dramas that aired first in the United States in late 1976 and early 1977 respectively and thereafter internationally on the small and big screen. As might be expected given the congratulatory message US president Gerald Ford had sent the Israelis soon after their mission,14 both of these action movies heaped praise on the Israeli military’s ‘miraculous’, ‘heroic’ achievement.15 Neither of the tele-films appears to have left a big political imprint but they did not go unnoticed. Radical Simon Dunstan, Israel’s Lightning Strike – The Raid on Entebbe 1976 (London: Osprey, 2009); Max Hastings, Yoni – Hero of Entebbe (New York: Dial Press, 1979); McAlister, Epic Encounters, 185–186. 11 J. T., ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, Independent Film Journal, 20 January 1978. 12 ‘Israeli Rescue Film Due for U’, Variety, 7 July 1976, 1; ‘Israeli Uganda Raid as 20th-Fox Telespec’, Variety, 14 July 1976, 51; ‘Entebbe Raid Movie Planned by NBC and Fox’, Variety, 4 August 1976, 33; ‘Entebbe Derby’, Time, 26 July 1976. The films planned by Universal and Merv Griffin Productions did not come to fruition. 13 ‘The Entebbe Incident’, fifteen-page treatment, dated 1976, 18, f. 188, Lewis Milestone Collection, AMPAS; Operation Thunderbolt publicity one-sheet, Variety, 24 November 1976, 20. 14 Herbert Druks, The Uncertain Alliance: The United States and Israel from Kennedy to the Peace Process (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 153. 15 Victory at Entebbe was distributed by the American Broadcasting Company, directed by Marvyn J. Chomsky and starred Anthony Hopkins, Burt Lancaster, Richard Dreyfuss and Elizabeth Taylor. Raid on Entebbe was distributed by the National Broadcasting Company, directed by Irvin Kershner, and starred Peter Finch, Charles Bronson, Martin Balsam and Horst Buchholz. Louise Sweet, ‘Victory at Entebbe’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 44, 517, February 1977, 32–33; Richard Combs, ‘Raid on Entebbe’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 44, 517, February 1977, 29–30. 10

126

Schlock and Awe

pro-Palestinian activists placed bombs in theatres playing Victory at Entebbe in Germany and Italy, alleging that the film was Zionist propaganda. By contrast, in Los Angeles, the powerful Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded Raid on Entebbe a Golden Globe as the best television movie of 1977.16 Many Israelis, including government ministers, valued highly the American entertainment industry’s championing of the Entebbe raid, not least because of Hollywood’s unmatched global reach.17 Some resented it, however, including members of the Israeli film industry. Entebbe was an Israeli story, they protested, and one that the Israelis could tell best.18 They had a point. The Israeli film industry had grown significantly in size and maturity since the making of Exodus back in 1960. By the mid-1970s, as befitting a country which laid claim to being the greatest per capita movie-going nation, Israel boasted some twenty-five production companies, two studios and an abundance of skilled film technicians. Thanks to the efforts of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry’s Film Centre, Israel had recently also attracted a great deal of outside investment from foreign film companies eager to exploit the country’s climate, lower costs and diversity of landscapes.19 State support for the Israeli film industry came from other quarters, too. Keen to bolster the nation’s image overseas, the Israeli army had grown used to collaborating with foreign directors making movies that cast Arabs as terrorists or that suggested military dynamism could provide the solution to political problems. The number of such collaborations, often with American film-makers, had increased significantly through the early half of the 1970s. These included John O’Connor’s The Prisoner in the Middle (1974), a movie that centred on American efforts to prevent a nuclear bomb falling into the hands of Arab terrorists in Jordan, and Otto Preminger’s Rosebud (1975), which saw Palestinian activists hijacking a luxury yacht to force the West to break relations with Israel.20 Among those who lobbied for an Israeli-made screen version of the Entebbe raid was the leading force in the Israeli film industry, Menahem Golan. An ardent Zionist who had changed his name from Globus to commemorate the Israelis’ capture of the Golan Heights during the 1967 Six Day War, the producer/director was born on the Palestine-Syrian border in 1929. After fighting in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence ‘German Cops Nab Terrorists in Bombing of “Entebbe” Cinemas’, and ‘Italian Terrorists’ Raids on “Entebbe” Cues WB Pullout’, Variety, 19 January 1977, 46; Dunstan, Israel’s Lightning Strike, 59. 17 McKahan, ‘Hollywood Counter-terrorism’, 160–162. 18 Operation Thunderbolt publicity one-sheet, Variety, 24 November 1976, 20; Menahem Golan’s email correspondence with author, 10 July 2011. 19 J. Lapid, ‘Israeli Cinema Brushes Off War’, Variety, 9 January 1974, 5; A. Massis, ‘Film and Videotape Production Facilities in Israel’, Millimeter, 3, 6, June 1975, 31; ‘Choose Your Locations in Israel’, Israel Film Centre advertisement, Variety, 5 January 1977, 65; Will Tusher, ‘Israelites Still Go to Movies Most, But … ’, Hollywood Reporter, 26 April 1976, 38; Will Tusher, ‘Menahem Golan Israel Picture Industry’s Mr. Big’, Hollywood Reporter, 26 April 1976, 38. 20 McKahan, ‘Hollywood Counter-terrorism’, 158–159; Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 379–380; Cettl, American Cinema, 213–215, 228–229. 16

127

Cinematic Terror

and then working in the theatre and film businesses in Britain and the United States, Golan had created Noah Films with his cousin, Yoram Globus, in Israel in 1963. Noah’s initial output consisted of youth, sex and exploitation films, but the company would go on to produce some of Israel’s biggest box-office hits during the late 1960s and 1970s.21 Noah regularly banged the anti-Arab drum via films like Trunk to Cairo (1966), a spy story starring the American Second World War hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy that depicted Egyptian efforts to destroy Israel with atomic weapons, and Eagles Attack at Dawn (1970), a combat drama about Israeli commandos rescuing comrades from a hellish Syrian prisoner-of-war camp.22 Throughout his long career, Menahem Golan often talked of film production as another way of ‘making war’.23 This helps explain his approach towards Operation Thunderbolt. Ever the opportunist, Golan had, like Universal Studios in Los Angeles, started sketching out a script based on events that were unfolding in Entebbe even before the Israeli military had conducted its rescue mission. He had also asked the Israeli Minister of Defence, Shimon Peres, for permission to accompany the nation’s special forces if they were given orders to fly to Uganda, with the intention of making some sort of documentary. Peres turned down this request and when Golan then learned days after the successful mission that the Israeli government had given Warner Bros. in Hollywood an exclusive deal to film the Entebbe story, he was furious. A fortnight later, however, the Warner Bros. project collapsed due to spiralling costs and the Israeli government’s concerns about disclosing its military secrets to a foreign studio. Consequently, Golan received a telephone call from the head of the Israeli Film Centre telling him that ‘God had intervened’ and that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had personally guaranteed Golan the government’s full cooperation if he took over the project.24 In October 1976, a month after the Entebbe raid, Noah Films put its other productions on hold and threw itself into making Operation Thunderbolt. Golan gave himself only 90 days in which to complete the project. Cashing in fully on Entebbe commercially and politically meant transferring it to the big screen as quickly as possible, before the episode began to recede into the background or was superseded

Alan Stanbrook, ‘The Boys from Tiberius’, Sight & Sound, 55, 4, 1986, 234–238; ‘Indie “Rebels” Weather the H’wood Storm’, Variety, 29 February 1984, 41; Amy Kronish and Costel Safriman, Israeli Film: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 184–185; Andrew Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go: The True Story of The Cannon Film Empire (London: Sphere, 1987), 3–4. 22 Amy W. Kronish, World Cinema: 6: Israel (London: Flicks, 1996), 43, 53; Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/ West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 104–114; Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 504–505. Eagles Attack at Dawn also went under the title The Great Escape. 23 McKahan, ‘Hollywood Counter-terrorism’, 160–162; Robert Riedman, ‘Will Cannon Boom or Bust?’, American Film, 1, July/August 1986, 52–59. 24 Menahem Golan’s email correspondence with author, 10 July 2011; ‘ “Entebbe” Film Cancelled’, The Advocate (Newark, Ohio), 18 October 1976, 20; ‘Say Israel Secrecy Is Reason Why Warner Drops “Entebbe” ’, Variety, 20 October 1976, 3; Dial Torgerson, ‘Under Way’, Los Angeles Times, 13 December 1976, Part IV, 1, 14. 21

128

Schlock and Awe

by other terrorist incidents. Moreover, as Golan recalled years later, ‘now there was a competition between two Hollywood productions [Victory at Entebbe and Raid on Entebbe] and one Israeli one, and everyone wanted to be the first to be on the screen’. Inevitably, this meant cutting corners – but not all of them. Operation Thunderbolt was to be Golan’s first prestige project and a movie that in his eyes would help put Israeli film and Israeli counterterrorism on the map.25 Having effectively been hired by the Israeli government to make the official screen version of the Entebbe crisis, Golan was in a position to recruit just about who he wanted. Yehoram Gaon, one of Israel’s leading actors and most popular singers, was chosen to play the Israeli commandos’ self-sacrificing leader, Yonatan Netanyahu. The handsome Assi Dayan, who had worked on Exodus and was the son of Israel’s now legendary former defence minister Moshe Dayan, co-starred as Netanyahu’s second-in-command. Gila Almagor, one of Israel’s leading ladies of stage and screen and Rachel Marcus, the widow of one of Israel’s most revered poets, Natan Alterman, played hostages. The roles of the terrorist leaders were assigned to two well-known German-speaking actors, Klaus Kinski and Sybil Danning.26 Golan took on a Hollywood screenwriter, Clarke Reynolds, to help fashion the film’s international appeal.27 The movie’s cinematographer was Adam Greenberg, a former Israeli Air Force cameraman whose illustrious career included working on James Cameron’s science-fiction classic The Terminator in 1984. Operation Thunderbolt’s music, was written by Dov Zeltser, one of the founding fathers of Israeli popular music, and performed by the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.28 Golan could afford to hire this cast and crew because Operation Thunderbolt had the biggest budget to date for an Israeli film, $2.7 million. A third of the money came from Irving Levin and Sam Schulman, two Jewish-Americans with film interests who, respectively, also owned the Boston Celtics and Seattle SuperSonics basketball teams.29 The budget allowed for filming in Israel and Athens and in two language versions, Hebrew and English. It also paid for the construction of a fullsize replica of the Entebbe Airport terminal building at the very place where the fated Air France Airbus had started its journey, Ben Gurion International Airport at Lod near Tel Aviv. Considerable sums of money were saved by the fact that the movie’s real stars, the Israeli military (both personnel and equipment), came free of charge. Golan added further layers of authenticity by casting some of the actual troops and hostages as themselves, by recruiting army officers as consultants, and Menahem Golan’s email correspondence with author, 10 July 2011. Kronish and Safriman, Israeli Film, 163, 175–176, 183. 27 Operation Thunderbolt shooting script, November 1976, Script Collection, AMPAS; Operation Thunderbolt script by Clarke Reynolds, undated, Script Collection, BFIL. 28 Kronish and Safriman, Israeli Film, 187–188. 29 Menahem Golan’s email correspondence with author, 10 July 2011; Marcia Borie, ‘Golan-Globus: Israeli Cousins Partnered in Film Production’, Hollywood Reporter, 10 May 1977, C–62; Will Tusher, ‘Mr. Big’, 38. $2.7 million in 1976 is equivalent to $11 million in 2012 dollars. Dollar equivalencies are taken from http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php (10 June 2013). 25 26

129

Cinematic Terror

by integrating television news footage of Israeli parliamentary sessions during the hostage crisis into the film’s final cut.30 As the brief synopsis of Operation Thunderbolt below shows, the two-hour-long film closely followed the outline of the hijacking crisis which most official Israeli sources and international news media outlets had firmly established back in 1976. In other words, this archetypal hijacking movie tells viewers nothing about the geopolitical or cultural background to the crisis and focuses above all on action, together with the physical and psychological trauma caused by terrorist violence. At the same time, the movie manages to distinguish itself from the two other Entebbe films – both of which, despite Golan’s speedy efforts, were released several months before Operation Thunderbolt – by telling the story principally from the Israeli military’s viewpoint. June 27, 1976. An Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris is hijacked by PFLP terrorists led by two Germans, Boese (Kinski) and Halima (Danning), who force the pilot, Captain Bacos (Henry Czarniak), to change course for Libya. One of the hostages pretends to be pregnant and is released at Benghazi Airport, where the aircraft refuels. Back in Israel, Colonel ‘Yonni’ Netanyahu and other members of the Sayeret Matkal, an elite counterterrorist unit, are alerted. The hijacked aircraft meanwhile flies to Entebbe in Uganda, where the passengers are herded into a disused air terminal. The hijackers demand the release of terrorists held in Israel and other countries in Europe, and the relatives of the hostages pressure Yitzhak Rabin’s government to comply. After a frightening visit to the terminal by the Ugandan leader Idi Amin (Mark Heath), the Israeli and other Jewish hostages are segregated from the rest of the passengers, who are put on a plane for Paris. Bacos and his crew bravely stay with the hundred or so Jewish captives at Entebbe. After ministerial discussions in Israel, General Dan Shomron (Arik Lavie), the controller of Israel’s ground forces, is instructed to plan a rescue operation while Rabin’s government affects to negotiate with the terrorists. Shomron effectively delegates the plan to Colonel Netanyahu. In Entebbe, one of the hostages, Dora Bloch (Marcus), chokes on her food and is taken away, apparently to hospital for emergency treatment; the fragile old lady will not be seen again. With the terrorists’ deadline approaching, Netanyahu’s rescue plan is given the green light, and four Hercules aircraft carrying tanks, commandos and a decoy black Mercedes – the same as Idi Amin’s – take off for Uganda. The surprise attack is extraordinarily successful, with all of the terrorists and a number of Ugandan troops killed, although Yonni and three of the hostages die in the shooting. The rescued passengers are rapidly evacuated and return to an emotional welcome in Israel. Menahem Golan’s email correspondence with author, 10 July 2011; Robert Rosenberg, ‘Israel Raid Film Nears Finish’, Los Angeles Times, 10 January 1977, Part IV, 8; ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, Variety, 16 February 1977. 30

130

Schlock and Awe

Figure 7.1  Operation Thunderbolt: Israeli hostage Nurit Aviv (Gila Almagor) runs for her life when the Entebbe raid reaches its climax. Courtesy of G. S. Films/Photofest.

Publicity material accompanying Operation Thunderbolt’s release in the summer of 1977 shows that Golan and the Israeli government wanted the film to get across a range of messages. The first was that Operation Thunderbolt was the only film that gave audiences an inside, warts-and-all view of how the Israelis had devised and executed the Entebbe rescue mission. The second was that Israel was a state under terrorist siege, whose military personnel, including its elite anti-terrorist units, were citizen soldiers, ordinary people drawn from all walks of life prepared to risk their lives at a moment’s notice. The third message was that, despite claims to the contrary, the Israeli government would never have given in to the terrorists’ demands at Entebbe and had only opened up channels to them in order to allow for extra time to prepare a military operation. The fourth was that by refusing to back down Israel had struck a blow against terrorism not only for itself but for the whole world. The final message was that Israel had now established itself as one of the leaders of what ought to be seen as a global war on terror and was faced, like others in the free world, by criminal gangs linked to the Eastern bloc who wanted to hold the West to ransom.31 Operation Thunderbolt transmits all of these messages highly impressively. Even before the action starts, inter-titles thanking the Israeli government and military for their assistance not only flaunt the film’s official imprimatur but also make it more ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, Publicity material, undated, Jewish Cinemateque, Jerusalem, Israel.

31

131

Cinematic Terror

believable. The movie is unexpectedly candid about the divisions in Israel caused by the hijacking and about the criticism some of the hostages’ relatives levelled at the Israeli government for its initial indecisiveness. Golan even allows the terrorists’ leader, Boese, a human side by depicting his refusal to murder hostages during the commandos’ climactic attack on the Entebbe air terminal. The military hardware on view throughout, from the camouflaged jeeps to the giant Hercules transporters, is enough to satisfy even the most demanding war film aficionados. Showing how the terrorists used champagne bottles and candy tins to smuggle guns and grenades aboard the Air France flight is both eye-opening and entertaining. Operation Thunderbolt is shot in what might loosely be called a ‘you-are-there’ style. This, together with the film’s pro-Israeli point-of-view shots and moving soundtrack, makes it is almost impossible not to sympathize with those suffering the horrors of a hijacking and not to root for the Israeli ‘good guys’ when they wreak vengeance on the cruel terrorists in the air terminal. The frenetic style, the cross-cutting parallel action, and the thrills and spills take viewers’ minds off the absence of any real explanation for what might have caused the terrorists to act the way they have. Many a viewer must have shed a tear seeing Yonni die aboard one of the returning Hercules, surrounded by his comrades and the grateful Israelis he has helped save. The mixture of relief, joy and pride when the hostages are greeted by their relatives after touching back down on Israeli soil at the very end is palpable. Operation Thunderbolt’s model of a citizen soldier, and professional counterterrorist, is of course Yonni Netanyahu. In real life, the thirty-year-old Yonatan Netanyahu had not been involved at all in planning the Entebbe raid and had almost botched the operation itself by shooting a Ugandan sentry prematurely and thereby losing the commandos the element of surprise when attacking the terminal.32 In the film, Netanyahu is depicted as the flawless, tragic hero around whom Operation Thunderbolt pivots. Yonni, as everyone affectionately calls him, is no suave, slick maverick like the great British screen-spy James Bond, who could also be seen combating terrorists during this era.33 Instead, he is a simple yet charismatic leader of a team, a taciturn philosopher-soldier with a big heart, both for his girlfriend and for his men, many of whom are part-time farmers or teachers. Yonni puts his nervous Dunstan, Israel’s Lightning Strike, 47; Moshe Betser and Robert Rosenberg, Secret Soldier (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 295–297. 33 This study does not look at the James Bond series in detail. This is partly because the movies, which date back to Terence Young’s Dr No in 1962, fit more easily into the spy rather than terrorism genre, and partly because the movies have been explored at length elsewhere. See, for instance, James Chapman, Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Christoph Lindner, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman (eds.), Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005); Klaus Dodds, ‘Popular Geopolitics and Audience Dispositions: James Bond and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31, 2, June 2006, 116–130. 32

132

Schlock and Awe

comrades at ease just before the assault by cracking a joke about their ‘free trip’ to Africa. He proves he is no sadist by ordering them only to shoot the Ugandans if shot at, a restraint he pays for with his life. But Yonni and his men are also perfectionists who amount to a lethal anti-terrorist force. They pore over the architectural plans of the disused Entebbe Airport terminal, thereby demonstrating the prowess of Israeli intelligence. They endlessly rehearse rescues of grounded hijacked planes – ‘Do it again, but quicker!’ orders Yonni. They show their remarkable endurance by flying thousands of miles in stormy weather yet still being ready for battle. And they spectacularly rout the terrorists in a blaze of gunfire and explosions. Operation Thunderbolt’s warning is loud and clear – terrorize Israel at your peril! This sort of gung-ho message would be hard to reconcile with a narrative which showed the Israeli government being prepared to cave in to the terrorists’ demands, so it is not surprising that Operation Thunderbolt omitted to say that the Israeli cabinet had at one point in the Entebbe crisis agreed to exchange the hostages for the Palestinians

Figure 7.2  Operation Thunderbolt: Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu (Yehoram Gaon) gives his men a pep talk before taking off for Entebbe. Courtesy of G. S. Films/Photofest.

133

Cinematic Terror

held in Israeli jails.34 Even if it had done this, the film provides ample evidence of the futility of trying to negotiate with terrorists whose interior lives are a closed book but whose stated aim is ‘global revolution’. With his bulging eyes and a fondness for phrases like ‘this dirty world must be destroyed in order to be rebuilt’, Boese epitomizes the terrorist madman of this cinematic era. Moreover, like his vicious accomplice, the statuesque blond in dark glasses, Halima, Boese is a mere cat’s paw. The real villains of the plot, the twin terrorist masterminds, are seen directing matters from afar by telephone – Wadie Haddad of the PFLP and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Haddad was known throughout the news media to have strong connections with both Carlos the Jackal and the Soviet bloc, and died in an East German hospital in 1978 allegedly at the hands of the Israeli secret service Mossad.35

Figure 7.3  Operation Thunderbolt: Boese (Klaus Kinski) and Halima (Sybil Danning), international terrorists incarnate. Courtesy of G. S. Films/Photofest.

Yehuda Avner, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (London: Toby Press, 2010), 309–311. Irvin Kershner’s Raid on Entebbe was more open about these negotiations. 35 In reality, Arafat had distanced himself from the PFLP and Haddad’s more radical acts. See Morris, Righteous Victims, 383–385. 34

134

Schlock and Awe

If Israel’s moral right to lead the West’s war against this global terror network were not already apparent, it is spelled out clearly in what is arguably Operation Thunderbolt’s most moving scene. This depicts the Jewish hostages being separated, one by one, from the other passengers after landing at Entebbe. During the hijacking itself, we noticed from the tattooed serial numbers on their forearms that a number of the Israeli passengers were Holocaust survivors. In the terminal, when the Germanspeaking Boese and Halima mysteriously start reading out Jewish-sounding names from passports and ordering those people into a hastily arranged annexe surrounded by armed guards, panic erupts. As mournful music builds and shots of crying old ladies combine with the faces of confused children, it is like the Jews are being selected for the gas chambers once again. ‘Can you believe this is happening in 1976?’ whispers a young Australian woman. ‘And they call themselves freedom fighters’, her boyfriend replies. In the real crisis, the hijackers targeted the Israelis for political not ethnic or anti-Semitic reasons. Watching Operation Thunderbolt, the clear impression we get is that the Nazis have returned but this time as Communist-sponsored, Arab-loving terrorists.36 Curiously, Operation Thunderbolt had its first public screenings not in Israel but in South Africa, one of Tel Aviv’s few friends in the developing world after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and another firm believer in the mythical Soviet-directed terror network.37 The movie’s world premiere then took place in Los Angeles in the United States, Israel’s closest and most powerful ally. At the time of the Entebbe mission a year earlier, both Israelis and Americans had made great play of the fact that the hostages had been rescued on the very day when the United States was celebrating its bicentennial, 4 July 1976, and adverts for Operation Thunderbolt reminded everyone of this. Posters for the film also lent the Israelis’ rescue a religious air by depicting an arm reaching down from the heavens to lift the hostages to safety. Immediately after the Los Angeles premiere, at the cost of $125 a head, guests were invited to a supper party with General Dan Shomron, an event sponsored by the State of Israel Bonds. At the party, Irving Levin and Samuel Schulman were presented with a specially minted Entebbe Medal.38

Here, Operation Thunderbolt anticipated allegations made in the 1980s, including by Ronald Reagan’s administration in the United States, that the Soviet bloc was using terrorism as a proxy force. Now largely discredited, the most influential account of Moscow’s international terrorist conspiracy was The Terror Network, written by an American journalist based in Italy, Claire Sterling, and published in 1981. Among the American films that provided ‘evidence’ of this conspiracy were Avalanche Express (Mark Robson, 1979), Bulletproof (Steve Carver, 1988) and Invasion USA (Joseph Zito, 1985). Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine (New York: New Press, 2006), 218–223; Cettl, American Cinema, 35–36, 57–58, 160. 37 ‘3 “Entebbe” Pics, 20% of Playoff ’, Variety, 9 March 1977; Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Vintage, 2010). 38 ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, Publicity material, undated, Jewish Cinemateque, Jerusalem, Israel; full-page advertisement for Operation Thunderbolt, Variety, 14 June 1977. 36

135

Cinematic Terror

Though it did well at the South African box office, Operation Thunderbolt appears to have done only moderate business initially in the United States, one of Golan’s chief political and commercial targets. However, the movie’s international profile and sales were then lifted considerably by an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. Operation Thunderbolt subsequently toured US cities again in 1978, including New York where it received powerful backing from the Israeli delegation to the United Nations and where it helped to raise funds for US-based Zionist organizations.39 In Israel itself, such was the popularity of Operation Thunderbolt that one television company was prepared to pay a record $20,000 to air the film for the first time in May 1978, as part of the country’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations.40 By this time, Operation Thunderbolt had already been banned in several countries, including the Philippines, on the grounds that it was inimical to Arab nations. In Switzerland, two cinemas showing the film were attacked by unidentified arsonists, an act that the local press condemned as ‘terrorist censorship’.41 What, so far as we can tell, did those people who got to see Operation Thunderbolt make of it? Judging from the comments of a minority of critics, some viewers might have found their sympathies for Israel dampened somewhat by Golan’s heavyhandedness. Others might have been irritated by the film’s ‘political platitudes’ (as one American commentator put it) or by its elevation of Yonatan Netanyahu to martyrdom status.42 One American critic found Operation Thunderbolt derivative and boring – ‘just another melodramatic air disaster picture’. A senior member of the Israeli commando unit that took part in the Entebbe raid admitted many years later that he thought the film was ‘ridiculous’.43 Operation Thunderbolt is the sort of film that critics usually despise, categorizing it as over-the-top action ‘schlock’ that tries to appeal to the lowest common boxoffice denominator and the audience’s basest instincts. On this occasion, however, the majority of critics could not have been more complimentary. The consensus among them was that Operation Thunderbolt was a great deal more convincing than the other two, American-made Entebbe films, partly because it was less polished but mainly because it was a ‘poignant’ Israeli production.44 Reminding us that movies of this type are above all about entertainment, reviewers praised Operation Thunderbolt

‘Operation Thunderbolt (Israeli-Color) Announces U. S. Release’, Variety, 18 January 1978; ‘Thunderbolt Bow’, Hollywood Reporter, 13 January 1978. 40 ‘TV House Paid a Record $20,000 for Showing of Menahem Golan’s Entebbe Film’, Variety, 24 May 1978. 41 ‘Entebbe Pic Screening Sparks $160,000 Arson Loss At 2 Swiss Sites’, Variety, 5 April 1978; ‘Philippines Shelve 3 “Anti-Arab” Films’, Variety, 29 March 1978. The Philippino ban might have been to placate the many Arab countries that employed Philippinos. 42 Michael Sragow, ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 25 May 1979, B3; Clyde Jeavons, ‘Entebbe: Operation Thunderbolt’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 October 1977, 210. 43 J. T., ‘Operation Thunderbolt’; Dunstan, Israel’s Lightning Strike, 60. 44 ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, Box Office, 2 January 1978; Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go, 10. 39

136

Schlock and Awe

as an exhilarating, suspense-filled, feel-good adventure with genuinely ‘chilling’ terrorists. Others had an eye on the movie’s political vision. ‘A stirring display of triumphant heroism at a time when people everywhere are overcome with a sense of futility at the escalating terrorism in today’s world’, proclaimed the Los Angeles Times, for example.45 Positive noises about Operation Thunderbolt were not just confined to the United States. Some audiences in France reportedly got so carried away watching Operation Thunderbolt that they cheered hysterically when the hijackers were killed at the end of the movie. Little wonder the film inspired a video arcade game a few years later. More importantly perhaps, former hostages from Entebbe and other terrorist crises publicly endorsed Operation Thunderbolt’s authenticity and its lesson in the need to deal with terrorists ruthlessly.46 This, in turn, emboldened politicians and others with a similar hawkish view, including some who had been directly affected by the Entebbe episode. Two years after Operation Thunderbolt had been made, Yonatan Netanyahu’s younger brother Benjamin, a former leader in the Sayeret Matkal, helped set up the Jonathan Institute with the aim of mobilizing governments and public opinion in the West in the fight against international terrorism. An ardent right-winger and critic of peace negotiations with the PLO, Benjamin Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres to become Israeli prime minister in 1996.47 Operation Thunderbolt was a landmark production. It brought Israeli cinema to international regard for the first time and significantly boosted international coproduction in the country. It was also followed by dozens of counterterrorist action films, many of which were made in Israel. Some of these productions closely resembled Operation Thunderbolt’s docu-adventure format and were loosely based on real terrorist incidents. Others were more akin to action-fantasies that used terrorism as a plot device for exotic locations, special effects and spectacular stunts. What linked virtually all of these films was their uncomplicated plots, formulaic action set-pieces, systematic depoliticization of terrorism and chauvinistic celebration of violent antiterror tactics. Action-adventures by their very nature allow little scope for analysis of the events being portrayed on screen and invariably opt for one-dimensional heroes (representing ‘us’) and villains (‘them’). This tends to make it a politically conservative genre and consequently a popular terrain for the glorification of counterterrorists,

‘Broadway Ballyhoo’, Hollywood Reporter, 23 January 1978; Kevin Thomas, ‘Israeli Film of Raid on Entebbe’, Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1979, Part IV, 18. 46 Tony Crawley, ‘A Special Report on The Third Entebbe Movie’, Photoplay, December 1977, 22–23; Box Office, 13 May 1978; http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8925 (17 April 2012); http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=YourSinclair/Issue46/Pages/YourSinclair4600096 .jpg (17 April 2012). 47 Avi Shlaim, Iron Wall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 564–565; Dunstan, Israel’s Lightning Strike, 50, 58. 45

137

Cinematic Terror

whether they are glamorous elite military units or brave civilians conducting their own vigilante campaigns.48 Bolstered financially and politically by the success of Operation Thunderbolt, Menahem Golan went on to become the king of the hawkish counterterrorism action-adventure through the 1980s and 1990s. In 1979, Golan and Globus moved to Hollywood and bought controlling shares in a minor production company, Cannon. By the mid-1980s, Cannon’s profits had risen from a meagre $8000 to nearly $150 million and its share price from around 20 cents to $38. Cannon’s meteoric rise was down to a combination of corner-cutting, the targeting of the international film market and questionable accounting practices. For over a decade, the company punched out movies for under $5 million each, a third of the Hollywood average, by using nonunion labour and deferred cast salaries. It cut lucrative deals with network and cable television and bought up theatrical circuits in Europe. Cannon specialized in action films, the type of B-film fare for which the ancillary market, including videocassettes and cable TV, and off-peak exhibition, had an insatiable appetite.49 While based in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s, as we have seen, Golan had directed or produced a number of action-adventures denigrating Israel’s Arab neighbours and portraying them as terrorists. While managing Cannon in the 1980s and 1990s, Golan conducted what amounted to a systematic campaign of Arab vilification in everything from children’s pictures like Aladdin (Bruno Corbucci, 1986) to Agatha Christie murder-mysteries like Appointment with Death (Michael Winner, 1988).50 However, it was in his terrorist-centred features that Golan could most effectively vent his anti-Arab spleen. A brief outline of a small but representative cross-section of these films, most of which Golan produced, will serve as an illustration. The Ambassador (J. Lee Thompson, 1984) was a thriller starring veteran Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum as an American diplomat trying to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The film turned on Soviet-backed attempts to blackmail the diplomat via his wife’s adulterous relationship with an Arab terrorist, in order to sabotage the peace process, destabilize the West and prolong the Cold War. Hell Squad (Kenneth Hartford, 1984) was a variant on the 1970s hit US television series Charlie’s Angels and featured a group of scantily clad Las Vegas showgirls sent on a mission to the Middle East to free a diplomat’s son held by PLO terrorists. American On this general action-adventure trend, much of which has been dominated by Hollywood, see, for example, Helena Vanhala, The Depiction of Terrorists in Hollywood Blockbuster Films, 1980–2001: An Analytical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); Eric Lichtenfeld, Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle and the American Action Movie (Westport, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007); Yvonne Tasker (ed.), The Action and Adventure Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004); Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). We shall look at Hollywood’s contribution to the genre of action-adventure terrorism since the 1980s in Chapter 9. 49 McKahan, ‘Hollywood Counter-terrorism’, 166–169; Menahem Golan’s email correspondence with author, 10 July 2011. 50 Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 551. 48

138

Schlock and Awe

Ninja 4: The Annihilation (Cedric Sundstrom, 1991) was part of Cannon’s popular martial arts film franchise aimed predominantly at teenagers and focused on efforts by Islamic fundamentalists to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York City.51 Chain of Command (David Worth, 1993) was an action-drama that paired a former American Green Beret with a female Mossad agent to defeat Arab terrorists plotting with cynical American businessmen to control Middle Eastern oilfields. Deadly Heroes, directed by Golan himself in 1993, was an action-adventure that centred on a rescue mission by a US Navy Seals team to seize an American aircraft hijacked at Athens International Airport by Arab terrorists.52 Deadly Heroes bore more than a passing resemblance to Operation Thunderbolt, not least because it highlighted security weaknesses at the very airport where the PFLP hijacking to Entebbe had originated. The one Cannon film that ought really to be seen as the sequel to Operation Thunderbolt, however, is The Delta Force, which Golan produced and directed in Israel in 1986. Commentators have tended to dismiss The Delta Force as little more than ‘mindless junk’,53 but this does an injustice to a film that underscores Israel’s influence on the representation of terrorism on the big screen and that in many ways marks the apogee of cinema’s hawkish reaction to the threat posed by ‘international terrorism’ during the 1970s and 1980s. As the films above indicate, Golan shifted in the 1980s to focusing on the United States’ fight against international terrorism rather than Israel’s, a perfectly sensible move from a commercial point of view and from the perspective of President Ronald Reagan’s high-profile ‘war on terror’.54 On The Delta Force, Golan not only collaborated with Hollywood’s most popular counterterrorism action-hero, Chuck Norris, with whom he had just made Invasion USA, about a Soviet-led terrorist attack on Florida,55 but also depicted American and Israeli Special Forces working together, to rescue passengers (many of them Jewish-Americans) from a US aircraft hijacked in the Middle East by Islamist terrorists preaching ‘world revolution’. Golan once again sought to cash in financially and politically by ‘screening’ a recent real-life incident, the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in Greek air space by radical Islamists. The key difference was that, whereas the TWA hijacking had in fact concluded peaceably, with Israel releasing over 700 Shia prisoners in exchange for the passengers, The Delta Force ended with a successful military rescue operation that eradicated the terrorists. Nick Roddick, ‘The Ambassador’, Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1985, 16; Julian Petley, ‘Hell Squad’, Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1985, 308; ‘Ley’, ‘American Ninja 4: The Annihilation’, Variety, 25 March 1991, 90. 52 Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 129–130; Cettl, American Cinema, 63–64, 91–92. 53 Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go, 109–110. 54 On what some have called Washington DC’s ‘first war on terror’ see Wills, First War on Terror; Carr, Infernal Machine, 223–267. 55 Palmer, Films of the Eighties, 129–130. 51

139

Cinematic Terror

Figure 7.4  The Delta Force: Menahem Golan (pointing) directs. Courtesy of Golan-Globus Productions/Photofest.

The Delta Force was the largest feature film to be made in Israel to date, with a budget of $8 million, a 250 member crew and 1000 extras. It had a mixed Israeli and American cast, with veteran Hollywood stars Shelley Winters and George Kennedy linking the film explicitly with the disaster genre from the 1970s.56 Both the Israeli military and retired US Special Forces personnel were intimately involved in the production, on and off screen. Indeed, the two finished up wrangling over the technical ‘realism’ depicted and competing with each other over which had the best counterterrorism record. Chuck Norris was able to slay the fictional terrorists while riding on the Delta Force’s very latest hi-tech vehicles, making The Delta Force look all the more like ‘the real thing’, especially to those raised on a diet of military technofetishism. The Israeli authorities again allowed Golan to film at Ben Gurion airport, which this time doubled as Beirut.57 Aside from being even louder and more action-packed, what distinguished The Delta Force from Operation Thunderbolt more than anything else was the Stephen Silverman, ‘Chuck Norris Pilots Delta Force to Happy End’, New York Post, 7 November 1985; Itour Gelbitz, ‘Delta Force Takes Aim at Terrorists’, Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 1985, 10. 57 The Delta Force Press Kit, Production Notes, undated, Cannon Publicity Department, AFI/Mayer Library Files, Cinematic Arts Library, Doheny Memorial, University of South California, Los Angeles; Marcha Pomerantz, ‘Preoccupation’, Jerusalem Post, 22 March 1985; Edward Guthmann, ‘The Delta Force Chuck Norris Kicks Terrorists’ Butts in Beirut’, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 February 1986, 19; David Lewin, ‘Hijack Drama With a Twist’, The Advertiser, 19 April 1986. 56

140

Schlock and Awe

satisfaction Chuck Norris’s Major Scott McCoy and his Delta Force unit took in killing the terrorists. Both Golan and Norris readily admitted that they wanted to give viewers the vicarious, ‘therapeutic’ pleasure of violent, nationalistic retribution but they also hoped movies like theirs would encourage audiences to push governments into taking firmer action against terrorists.58 Refusing to engage with the terrorists’ motivations even less than Operation Thunderbolt was all part of this, as it left viewers with the impression that the terrorists were either sadists or religious fanatics and therefore ‘monsters’ with which no one could negotiate rationally. So, too, was the film’s opening scene. This was based on the bungled attempt by Delta Force commandos to rescue fifty-three American embassy hostages in Tehran in April 1980 (an action itself inspired by the Entebbe raid) and showed Norris’ men being stabbed in the back – like America’s Vietnam War veterans in Sylvester Stallone’s

Figure 7.5  The Delta Force: Major Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris, right) takes pleasure in killing the chief terrorist Abdul (Robert Forster) in hand-to-hand combat. Courtesy of Golan-Globus Productions/Photofest.

‘Tough Guy Says U.S. Has Wimpy Image’, Daily Herald (Chicago), 5 July 1985, 2; Itour Gelbitz, ‘Delta Force Takes Aim at Terrorists’, Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 1985, 10; Chuck Norris and Joe Hyams, The Secret of Inner Strength (New York: Little, Brown, 1988), 165–169. 58

141

Cinematic Terror

Rambo series – by weak-willed Washington bureaucrats.59 In these and other ways, The Delta Force helped take anti-terrorist vengeance on screen to a new level: one that smacked far more of muscular vigilantism than Operation Thunderbolt and that saw portrayals of the ‘Arab terrorist’ being displaced by Islamist holy warriors whose ultimate aim was global domination. Here, in other words, was visual evidence that terrorism was at the heart of an increasingly violent ‘clash of civilizations’ between East and West. The Delta Force spawned two sequels60 as well as a series of video games,61 and the film itself continued to have influence well beyond its sell-by date. After 9/11, The Delta Force was many Americans’ favourite counterterrorist wishfulfilment movie.62 Filmic narratives about terrorism increased dramatically in the 1970s. Skyjacking proved especially popular for cinematic treatment, as did real or imagined military missions designed to rescue passengers and punish terrorists. Menahem Golan’s Operation Thunderbolt played a formative role in developing this hijacking sub-genre, one that served to amplify the threat of ‘international terrorism’ and that continued to attract disproportionately large audiences well into the twenty-first century. Even Communist China joined the fray in the 1980s, with thrillers like Zhang Yimou’s Codename Courage.63 Skyjacking’s on-screen popularity – plus the fascination with ‘disaster’ thrillers – might help to explain why so many people thought al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon in September 2001 resembled a movie.64 Soon after 9/11, Menahem Golan, now in his seventies, announced his intention of making his greatest terrorism film yet, ‘Siege’. Proving that he still had an eye for The Delta Force Press Kit, Production Notes, undated, Cannon Publicity Department files, AFI/Mayer Library Files, Cinematic Arts Library, Doheny Memorial, University of South California, Los Angeles; Jeremy M. Devine, Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Over 400 Films about the Vietnam War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995), 198–236. 60 On Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990) and Delta Force 3: The Killing Game (1991) see Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 159–161. 61 http://www.novalogic.com/ (24 April 2012). 62 See, for instance, ‘I Love This Movie!!!’, 17 June 2003, http://www.amazon.com/The-Delta-Force-Chuck -Norris/dp/0792846850 (17 April 2012). According to one source, The Delta Force ranks as the 26th biggest terrorist film hit since 1977, http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=terrorism.htm (17 April 2012). 63 Codename Courage was released in 1987 and centred on the hijacking of a Taiwanese businessman’s private jet by a group calling itself the Taiwan Revolutionary Army Front. When the jet lands in mainland China, the authorities cannot just storm the aircraft because the death of the businessman might seriously damage China’s economic development. Eventually, the Taiwanese and Chinese governments deal with the crisis discreetly, http://www.allmovie.com/movie/codename -cougar-v142112 (2 May 2013). 64 Hollywood produced a number of hijacking action adventures in the 1990s. According to one source, one of these films, Air Force One (Wolfgang Petersen, 1997), ranks as the biggest terrorist film hit since 1977, http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=terrorism.htm (17 April 2012). Executive Decision (Stuart Baird, 1997), ranked eighth, depicted an attempt by radical Islamists to fly a hijacked aircraft armed with a Soviet nerve agent into Washington DC. On these two films see Cettl, American Cinema, 18–19, 117. 59

142

Schlock and Awe

exploitation and an appetite for a quick profit, the Israeli’s treatment was set around an audacious plan by Osama bin Laden to despatch terrorists in one-man submarines to Tel Aviv in order to capture the world’s leaders who have gathered to sign a peace accord between Israel and Palestine. ‘Siege’ did not come to fruition but had it done so there is little doubt the movie would have been yet another of Golan’s counterterrorist call-to-arms and that it would have been disparaged by liberal critics tired of his ‘trashy’ output.65 The truth is, however, that if profits are anything to go by, over the years the Israeli film-maker has been far more in touch with the average cinemagoer’s taste in cinematic terrorism than many other directors, particularly his polar opposite, Constantin Costa-Gavras. Indeed, Golan’s own violent ‘spectaculars’ might have done more than most films in wresting control of the cameras back from the terrorist ‘super entertainers’ whom the Israeli and others believed had figuratively hijacked the news agenda in the 1970s. Crude and cartoonish they may be but perhaps that is what has made Golan’s and others’ action-adventures such powerful reinforcers of Western anti-terrorist orthodoxy. At the very least, such movies have provided an imaginative space where viewers can safely contemplate the evils of terrorism while watching its protagonists being routed.

Don Groves, ‘Cannon Fire Power in Cannes’, Variety, 26 May 2003.

65

143

CHAPTER 8 AVANT-GARDE NARCISSISTS

It was difficult to avoid them in the West a few years ago: images of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara on posters, clothing and film; Palestinian keffiyehs worn as hip fashion accessories; T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Prada-Meinhof ’ or the Red Army Faction’s Heckler-and-Koch machine-gun logo. To many, this militant or terrorist ‘chic’ was utterly benign. Others saw it as deeply offensive, especially to past victims of terrorism. Confusion reigned, particularly in Germany, a country that back in the 1970s seemed to be hovering on the brink during the Red Army Faction’s campaign of violence. There, modern-day movies that purported to challenge the ‘terrorist chic’ image of seventies urban guerrilla warfare, like Uli Edel’s Academy Award-nominated 2008 drama The Baader Meinhof Complex, stood accused of further glamourizing it.1 Thirty years before Edel’s movie, in 1979, another film focused on the ‘fashion’ for terrorism in Germany. Instead of profiting from that trend, however, The Third Generation sought to excoriate it. The Third Generation was made by the darling of the New German Cinema movement, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A pitch-black farce about a gang of bored middle-class West Berliners who are more concerned with ‘chic’ mannerisms and gangster movie myths than with politics, and who embark on a terrorist ‘adventure’ that involves kidnapping an international tycoon while dressed in carnival costumes, The Third Generation might initially sound as though it carried a similar message to Operation Thunderbolt – that terrorists are homicidal maniacs. But Fassbinder’s film came at terrorism from a very different angle than Menahem Golan’s and carried multiple messages, among the most important of which was that most contemporary political extremists were fools who unwittingly helped serve the interests of the establishment. The Third Generation is very much a period piece. Made by an avant-garde filmmaker at the peak of his powers when his country was in political turmoil, it offers us a compelling insight into the relationship between cinema, art and terrorism in Germany in the late 1970s. The importance of The Third Generation goes beyond this, however. First, the film demonstrates that not all films from the early phase of the new, or second, Age of Terror came from the political right or pedalled simplistic ‘German Baader-Meinhof Epic Takes on “Terrorist Chic” ’, Agence France-Presse, 21 September 2008, http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jfpXdJrrdenrYiu_qtXCXUsHM1aA (20 June 2012); Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (eds.), Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German LeftWing Terrorism (New York: Rodopi, 2008). 1

Avant-garde Narcissists

images of hate. At the same time, The Third Generation shows that a number of European left-wing film-makers, in contrast with others like Constantin CostaGavras, emerged from the 1970s scornful of political militancy and likely to see terrorists as shallow opportunists. Third, The Third Generation suggests that, seventy years on from D. W. Griffith’s The Voice of the Violin and forty years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage, screen terrorism had matured to the point that some filmmakers deemed it was ripe for satirizing. Finally, Fassbinder’s movie testifies to the ability of comedies to capture often neglected characteristics of terrorism better than ‘straight’ screen treatments of the subject. The impact that left-wing terrorism had on West German politics in the 1970s has been compared by many commentators with the effects that the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 had on the United States.2 Forty years ago, German terrorism revolved around two main groups, both rooted in the middle-class student and Vietnam War protest movements of the late 1960s: Revolutionary Cells, two of whose members were killed by the Israelis at Entebbe in 1976, and the more famous Red Army Faction, popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, among others, initially modelled the RAF’s organization, tactics and outlook partly on the Uruguayan Tupamaros. This was reflected in the group’s penchant for stealing cars and robbing banks, in order to finance attacks on US military bases. After a while, however, the RAF’s actions escalated into a deadly crusade against what the self-stylized revolutionaries called the remnants of Nazism and creeping Western imperialism. By the mid-1970s, all of the RAF’s leaders were either in jail or, like Meinhof, dead. Nevertheless, their acolytes on the outside continued the group’s campaign by assassinating prominent politicians and businessmen and even carrying out attacks on ‘bourgeois’ West German institutions overseas, like the embassy in Sweden. These violent and sensational activities reached their climax in September and October 1977, when RAF members tried to secure the release of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe from Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart by kidnapping the president of the German Employers’ Association (and former SS officer), Hanns Martin Schleyer, and by hijacking a Lufthansa jet, which was eventually recaptured by German special forces at Mogadishu airport in Somalia. Within hours of this dramatic Entebbe-style raid, the RAF’s leaders had been found dead in their cells, with the government claiming suicide and the RAF murder, and Schleyer had been executed. What became known as the ‘German Autumn’ was the culmination of a period of near civil war in West Germany, one characterized by regular terrorist outrages, mysterious deaths, revolutionary propaganda, daring Stefan Aust, The Baader Meinhof Complex (London: Bodley Head, 2008), xii.

2

145

Cinematic Terror

jail breaks, the drastic curtailment of civil liberties and an unprecedented growth in the powers of the security services.3 Given the greater maturity of the press in Germany compared with some of the other countries we have looked at so far in this study, plus the stigma attached to censorship following the Nazi era, we might expect the West German media to have taken a range of approaches towards this outbreak of violent militancy. There was scant evidence of this, however. The country’s news media were united in their opposition to the RAF, seeking to delegitimize the organization, for instance, by systematically referring to it as the Baader-Meinhof gang, a term eschewed by the RAF itself. Many German newspapers, particularly those owned by Axel Springer, the country’s most powerful media magnate, made no secret of their support for the capitalist-oriented, transatlantic alliance and rejected all forms of political extremism outright. Tabloids like Springer’s bestselling Bild fanned mass hysteria in its coverage of the RAF’s activities and, like the press in general, dismissed the organization’s violence as the mischievous work of impressionable and impatient middle-class upstarts.4 Remarkably few films were made about terrorism in West Germany during the 1970s. This can be attributed mainly to directors’ natural nervousness about tackling such a sensitive subject and to the fear that they might be labelled troublemakers by an increasingly reactionary government and press. It can also be put down to the German film industry’s reliance on public funds, which were administered either directly by the Ministry of the Interior or indirectly through the agency of the Film Production Board. In 1974, in response to the recent growth of political extremism, a new version of the German Film Law was introduced, forbidding the Film Production Board from subsidizing any projects that ‘offend against the constitution or the laws, or which offend moral or religious feeling’. The rule that film-makers only received the Board’s subsidies on completion of their projects, rather than at the beginning, acted as a further deterrent to most radically minded, cash-strapped directors and meant that ‘unsuitable’ material rarely slipped through the nets.5 To get around this form of indirect censorship, the few, left-wing film-makers who were determined to use the big screen to pass judgement on the current terrorist activities in West Germany took to doing so mainly obliquely and via microcosmic Stefan Aust and Anthea Bell, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the RAF (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Carr, Infernal Machine, 131–146. Ulrike Meinhof died in Stammheim Prison in May 1976. 4 On the Springer empire’s coverage of terrorism, and the RAF’s attacks on the empire’s offices, see Aust and Bell, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the RAF, xvi, 21, 34–36. On the RAF’s efforts to manage the media in more subtle ways see Joanne Wright, Terrorist Propaganda: The Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, 1968–86 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 5 Jan Dawson, ‘The Sacred Terror: Shadows of Terrorism in the New German Cinema’, Sight & Sound, 48, 4, October 1979, 242–245. 3

146

Avant-garde Narcissists

case histories. Two minor and now relatively unknown examples of this are Alexander Kluge’s Strong Man Ferdinand (1976) and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1977), both of which looked at the complex factors that could prompt individuals to take up arms against big business or the state. Ferdinand was the tragicomic story of a factory guard obsessed with security, while Christa Klages was inspired by the real-life case of a female bank robber.6 Two other, less oblique and more commercially successful examples of this filmic approach towards terrorism are Reinhard Hauff ’s Knife in the Head (1979), a mystery involving a terrorist suspect rendered amnesiac by a police bullet, and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), which was directed by von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff. Katharina Blum (briefly mentioned in Chapter 6) was based on Heinrich Böll’s novel about a young woman whose life is destroyed when the police suspect her of harbouring a violent criminal. The taut domestic thriller was the first major box-office success of the New German Cinema movement and implied that the resurgence of a reactionary law-and-order mentality in the face of home-grown terrorists was a greater threat to West Germany’s fledgling democracy than the terrorists themselves.7 One film during this period that did deal with terrorism directly was Germany in Autumn (1978). This is the most famous omnibus project of the luminaries of the New German Cinema and was funded principally by the Film Authors’ Distribution Cooperative (or Filmverlag der Autoren), a production and distribution enterprise set up in 1971 to foster independent, political film-making.8 Germany in Autumn explored the spectral atmosphere of West Germany in late 1977 via an unusual combination of documentary, dramatized vignettes and archival footage. Its various segments – some politically explicit, others implicit, many of them ironic – were bookended by the state funeral of Hanns Martin Schleyer and burials of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe. Germany in Autumn did not seek to provide any sort of rational, ordered account of how West Germany had reached crisis point. Its chief concern was to puncture what its makers saw as the German media’s univocality on terrorism, in which the likes of Schleyer were treated as martyrs or saints and the RAF’s members as sub-human.9 One of the most disconcerting segments of Germany in Autumn was by the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In this highly personal, thirty-minute fictional piece set during September and October 1977, we see Fassbinder berating his real-life mother, Richard Linnett, ‘The Third Generation’, Cineaste, 11, 1, December 1980, 39–42. John Pym, ‘Messer im Kopf (Knife in the Head)’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 47, 555, April 1980, 70; Robert M. Stowe, ‘Knife in the Head: German Social Realism Meets Cinema Verité’, Senses of Cinema, 60, 7 October 2011; Lester D. Friedman, ‘Cinematic Techniques in “Lost Honour of Katharina Blum” ’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 7, 3, July 1979, 244–252. 8 On this Cooperative see Ron Holloway, ‘From Filmverlag der Autoren to New German Cinema’, KINO, 24 August 2008, http://www.kino-germanfilm.de/?p=389 (22 June 2012). 9 Dawson, ‘Sacred Terror’, 242–245; Martin Blumenthal-Barby, ‘Germany in Autumn: The Return of the Human’, Discourse, 29, 1, 1 January 2007, 140–168. 6 7

147

Cinematic Terror

the actress Lilo Pempeit, for thinking that Germany needed a brief period of benign authoritarianism to solve its present crisis, and brutalizing his real-life lover, the actor Armin Meier, for his right-wing views on the RAF. On the one hand, Fassbinder’s piece seemed to amount to a challenge to those who believed that the German state should have unfettered counterterrorist powers. On the other hand, in exhibiting his own fusion of righteousness and sadism and exposing the idolatry and masochism of those who submit to it, Fassbinder appeared to be revealing the psychology underlying totalitarian regimes.10 This ambiguity was the hallmark of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work. Born into a middle-class family in small-town Bavaria at the end of the Second World War, Fassbinder had started making films at the age of nineteen. By the time of his death, of a drugs overdose in 1982, Fassbinder had completed over forty feature-length films, two television mini-series and twenty-four stage plays. German film went through an artistic renaissance in the 1970s and it was Fassbinder more than anyone else who helped put the New German Cinema on the international map. Many of his films explored deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientation, class and

Figure 8.1  Germany in Autumn: Rainer Werner Fassbinder argues with his mother, Lilo Pempeit, about criminality, terrorism and democracy.

Tony Pipolo, ‘Straight from the Heart: Re-viewing the Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, Cineaste, Fall 2004, 18–25. 10

148

Avant-garde Narcissists

politics; demonstrated a rare sensitivity to social outsiders; and reflected on taboo subjects like the Holocaust. They attracted notoriety partly because of Fassbinder’s own complex, scandalous private life – his bisexuality, violent tendencies and lovers’ suicides – and partly because of their anarchistic style. Fassbinder rarely tackled a subject in a linear, direct fashion; he preferred instead to probe it via a range of visual and aural cinematic techniques that often lacked any obvious narrative and which asked viewers to reach their own conclusions.11 Like many of his films, Fassbinder’s politics defied easy categorization. Akin to members of the RAF, the director rebelled against what he saw as his ultraconservative, morally stagnating upbringing and believed, like many on the political left, that West Germany had yet to cleanse itself of its Nazi heritage. However, although Fassbinder knew prominent members of the RAF (including Andreas Baader himself) and interpreted their terrorism partly as a justifiable reaction to a climate of violence created by the state, he argued that violent political action was ultimately self-defeating. To a degree, this was similar to the Chilean Communist Party officials who had been opposed to Costa-Gavras’ State of Siege on the grounds that the film favoured a violent rather than a constitutional road towards socialism. The difference was that Fassbinder had no time for political parties and was more of nihilist than a socialist. What interested Fassbinder most about urban terrorism, and which he dealt with at length in The Third Generation, was the narcissistic nature of political activism and the contradictory motives of political activists. This interest stemmed partly from his (and others’) belief that Baader had no understanding of revolutionary politics and that Meinhof and Ensslin, two highly intelligent women who did, had fallen for Baader erotically and his ‘dangerous abstractionism’. Fassbinder, in other words, wanted to get under the terrorists’ skin to show them as human beings rather than as one-dimensional ideologues, sadists or automatons, and in the process to reveal the mixture of the political and the personal ‘in all its unvarnished, complex glory’.12 Fassbinder was at the crest of his popularity when he began work on The Third Generation in West Berlin in November 1978. This was thanks to the success of his previous film, The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), a drama which had looked at the impact of the Second World War on Germany through a triangular love affair. Reputations counted for little in the face of the structural and political obstacles to the treatment of terrorism on the big screen in West Germany, however, and The Third Pipolo, ‘Straight from the Heart’, 18, 20; Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 16–17, 25; ‘The Third Generation’, in Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing (eds.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Anarchy of the Imagination (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 128–133. 12 ‘Interview with Juliane Lorenz’, The Third Generation DVD (Infinity Arthouse, 2006); Jane Shattuc, ‘R. W. Fassbinder as a Popular Auteur: The Making of an Authorial Legend’, Journal of Film and Video, 45, 1, 1993, 40–57; Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 26, 28. 11

149

Cinematic Terror

Generation was almost strangled at birth. Having originally agreed to fund the film, both the Berlin Senate, which subsidized projects that used and promoted the city’s facilities, and WDR, West Germany’s most liberal public service broadcasting company, pulled out on political grounds just before shooting started. To make things more difficult logistically and financially, for the same reasons West Berlin’s police commissioner also prevented Fassbinder from filming in the city’s famous town hall, the Rathaus Schöneberg, and staging a robbery in a local bank.13 At this point, a mainstream film-maker probably would have shelved the project but Fassbinder was able to overcome these difficulties by hastily arranging a coproduction deal with the Film Authors’ Distribution Cooperative and by finessing his high-speed, comparatively low-budget production style. Fassbinder always saw the importance of reacting quickly, radically and spontaneously to an ongoing event instead of being constrained by the conformist, long-winded nature of the conventional scripting-financing process. In line with this, on The Third Generation he worked from an extended synopsis rather than a detailed script and wrote the actual dialogue scenes himself just hours before each day’s shoot. Fassbinder also omitted rehearsals and rarely shot more than a single take of any scene, thus forcing his actors to improvise and leaving the film rough at the edges. To cut costs further, he shot most of the film indoors using just three or four locations, thereby giving the film a claustrophobic quality.14 Fassbinder could do this because of the extraordinarily close, if temperamental, relationship he had developed over the years with a stock company of actors and technicians. During production of The Third Generation, members of this ‘commune’, as he called it, doubled up on jobs to save time and money. Fassbinder himself wrote, produced, directed and photographed, while the actors Harry Baer and Raúl Giménez were, respectively, the executive director and production designer. Julianne Lorenz, one of Fassbinder’s lovers, not only acted as assistant director and editor but counselled those who threatened to walk off set due to Fassbinder’s habitual bullying and, in this case, demands for extra money to complete the project. Lorenz also translated for the actors who had no German, notably Eddie Constantine, an American whose noirish private-eye roles in French B-movies had made him into a European cult icon. The Third Generation ultimately cost approximately DM 800,000 ($1.5 million) and, after being edited down to 105 minutes in length, was ready for release in May 1979.15 ‘This is the Only Way We Can Do Films Here – A Conversation with Wolfram Schütte’, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 37–38; Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 38; Frankfurter Rundschau, 20 February 1979, in Sheila Johnston, ‘The Third Generation’ Programme Notes, BFIL; ‘Interview with Lorenz’, The Third Generation DVD. 14 ‘Interview with Lorenz’, The Third Generation DVD; ‘This is the Only Way’, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 31–32. 15 Pipolo, ‘Straight from the Heart’, 18–19; ‘International Sound Track’, Variety, 13 June 1979; ‘Interview with Lorenz’, The Third Generation DVD. $1.5 million in 1979 is equivalent to $4.75 million in 2012 dollars. Dollar equivalencies are taken from http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/ (10 June 2013). 13

150

Avant-garde Narcissists

The Third Generation was not the first film comedy about terrorism to appear. As we saw in Chapter 1, anarchists were the butt of several European film-makers’ jokes prior to the First World War. Many years later, on the eve of the massive civil unrest that struck France and other European cities in May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard had made La Chinoise, a comedy about middle-class Parisian students hatching a Maoist cultural revolution via bombings and assassinations. Not surprisingly, given Godard’s early influence on Fassbinder, The Third Generation bore many similarities with La Chinoise, particularly from a stylistic perspective, but it was the German film that carried the more bitingly satirical message about terrorism.16 In La Chinoise, Godard seemed to be saying that the students of the New Left were at once genuine political revolutionaries and at the same time confused bourgeois youngsters merely flirting with radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction. Fassbinder held a slightly different view. To him, this ‘first generation of terrorists’, the revolutionaries of 1968, were committed idealists who had sought change realistically, through words and demonstrations. However, the ‘second generation’, represented by individuals like Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, had in Fassbinder’s opinion ‘lost reality’, going from legality to armed, almost masochistic struggle. The current, ‘third generation’ of terrorists, Fassbinder asserted, was even worse. A mindless RAF spin-off, it pursued ‘actionism’ as an end in itself, without any concrete aims or any sense of social utopia, but with real desperation. Moreover, by flirting with ‘trendy’ violence, this generation was unwittingly acting as the cat’s paw of capitalism. Urban terrorism in Germany had, in other words, run its course. The ‘fourth generation’ should, Fassbinder claimed, change society dramatically yet peaceably, through anarchism.17 Variously described as a claustrophobically intense soap opera, a black farce of political mannerisms, a burlesque about the most explosive of Germany’s longstanding issues, or, as the film’s opening subtitle puts it, ‘a comedy in six parts, about party games, full of suspense, excitement and logic, horror and madness’, The Third Generation places many more demands on the viewer than the average film about terrorism. At the time of its release, some critics felt that there were too few pleasures in return. Others believed the film’s refusal to allow the viewer a secure perspective – via sudden shifts in tone and mood, changes in levels of reality and a constant babble of audio-visual interference – was one of its strongest features Jacques Aumont, ‘This is Not a Textual Analysis (Godard’s La Chinoise)’, Camera Obscura, 8–10, Fall 1982, 130–161. 17 ‘Interview with Lorenz’, The Third Generation DVD; ‘This is the Only Way’, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 37; ‘Madness and Terrorism – Conversations with Gian Luigi Rondi about Despair and The Third Generation’, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 124, 127. For more on the debates about violence within the West German left during the 1970s see Karin Hanshew, ‘ “Sympathy for the Devil?” The West German Left and the Challenge of Terrorism’, Contemporary European History, 21, 4, 2012, 511–532. 16

151

Cinematic Terror

because it challenged people to question their assumptions about terrorism and the depictions of it by the mass media.18 The Third Generation’s plot – if that is the right word for a film comprising dozens of mini-scenes – centres on a group of political activists who will ultimately kidnap P. J. Lurz (Constantine), an international dealer in computer surveillance equipment based in West Berlin. The group claims to be opposed to all the ‘bourgeois characteristics’ that, in its view, underpin West Germany’s ‘oppressive, fascist regime’. To the activists, Lurz epitomizes the evils of bourgeois capitalism. His kidnapping and ransom money will significantly bolster the group’s finances and notoriety. The chief twist in the story is that, unbeknown to the terrorists (and initially to the audience), Lurz is bankrolling the group. The dealer’s profits have dwindled recently due to a decline in terrorist activities and he believes that a new wave of political violence will drive up sales of his equipment to Germany’s business community and security agencies. Lurz has therefore helped set up the group in alliance with Gast (Hark Bohm), the policeman in charge of his security, and August (Volker Spengler), a professional organizer of terrorist cells. August is colluding with Lurz mainly for the money; Gast is a vicious manipulator in search of a pretext for expanding police powers.

Figure 8.2  The Third Generation: P. J. Lurz (Eddie Constantine), begetter of terrorism. Courtesy of Filmverlag der Autoren/Photofest.

Richard Combs, ‘Dilettantism and Realpolitik’, Times Education Supplement, 19 September 1980; Wolf Donner, ‘Valiant Anarchists’, Der Spiegel, 17 September 1979, 257, 260. 18

152

Avant-garde Narcissists

The film starts with Suzanne (Hanna Schygulla), Lurz’s secretary, receiving a coded telephone message in his office: ‘The World as Will and Idea.’ Suzanne is secretly a member of the terrorist cell and the cryptic message – we soon learn that it is a saying by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – signals it is time for the cell to initiate their operations. Various clandestine meetings follow, held mainly in one of the terrorists’ own tasteful apartments. These gatherings are bizarre, fragmented affairs. It is not at all apparent what the terrorists’ operations amount to, nor why they are planning to carry them out. Instead of discussing politics and strategy, the cell members gossip, bicker, spout philosophical clichés, sip wine and play games of monopoly. Away from the meetings, the terrorists either have sex with one another or physically and mentally abuse one another – sometimes all three. After what feels like weeks of prevarication, August finally tells the terrorists it is time to do something. Beginning with a raid on a passport office, the cell gradually gets involved in planning and carrying out increasingly bloody activities, including bombing the Rathaus Schöneberge. Quite what the gang is hoping to achieve still remains a mystery, however. Some of the terrorists are more committed to their cause and better at conducting violence than others. One of them is so frightened during a robbery he urinates in his trousers; another uses an armed bank robbery to settle a personal score, that is, to kill her husband. All the while, the clueless, clumsy terrorists fear being betrayed to the authorities and so use childish secret passwords, disguises and assumed names. Eventually, Lurz concludes that he no longer needs the terrorists, and so he instructs August to eliminate them. The gang is promptly set up with fatal assignments. However, after suffering several casualties, the terrorists unwittingly appear to turn the tables on Lurz. They grow suspicious of August and abandon him to pursue schemes of their own. One of their first solo efforts is the absurd kidnapping of Lurz, which sees the terrorists dressed up in garish Karneval costumes and machine-gunning the tycoon’s Mercedes-Benz limousine in broad daylight. At the film’s end, Lurz is being forced to ‘stand trial’ as an enemy of society in a dingy cellar. A video-recording of his plea for help from the authorities ends with a close-up of the businessman’s face – he is smiling. It is far from clear exactly what Fassbinder was trying to achieve with The Third Generation. The film’s action is dramatically unfocused, its 1940s thriller score is disturbingly anachronistic and its six wildly eclectic parts, each with their own cryptic epigraph apparently drawn from graffiti found in Berlin’s public toilets, barely cohere. In press interviews during and after production, Fassbinder purposely created confusion about the movie’s meaning and messages. This extended to the film’s very title. In some quarters, Fassbinder said this referred to his father’s generation, which, in his opinion, had missed the opportunity after the Second World War to set up

153

Cinematic Terror

Figure 8.3  The Third Generation: Suzanne (Hanna Schygulla) clownishly takes aim at Lurz’s car. Courtesy of Filmverlag der Autoren/Photofest.

a truly free German society and which had opted instead for materialistic excess.19 Elsewhere, Fassbinder declared that the title actually alluded to the current crop of terrorists who, as he put it, were drawn to ‘the ecstasy of adventure experienced in the absence of ulterior motive’.20 Fassbinder’s mind games aside, The Third Generation offered a highly original critique of contemporary terrorism, one that was applicable to West Germany especially but other countries too. Fassbinder’s belief that the groups which had mutated from the original RAF were ‘deluded adventurers’ whose violence was inadvertently helping to maintain the status quo – or ‘this more and more frightening, perfect system’, as he called it – is hinted at in a number of ways.21 The armed militants in the film are characterized more as fashion victims than political ideologues, from the way they dress and snort cocaine to their predilection for absurd explanations of government oppression. What few ideas they do possess have obviously arrived According to Fassbinder, the first generation was the German bourgeoisie that lived between 1848 and 1933, while the second generation was ‘our grandfathers, and how they experienced the Third Reich and how they remember it’. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘The Third Generation’, The Third Generation pressbook, BFIL. 20 Fassbinder, ‘The Third Generation’, The Third Generation Pressbook, BFIL; ‘The Third Generation’, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 131–133. 21 Andrew Sarris, ‘Fassbinder and Sirk: The Ties That Unbind’, Village Voice, 3 September 1980, 37–38. 19

154

Avant-garde Narcissists

pre-digested, second or third hand. They have no programme, purpose or politics and work purely on a moment-by-moment, thrill-by-thrill basis. In short, they are more about style than substance. The terrorists are a distinctly odd, dysfunctional bunch, decadent, immature and thoroughly bourgeois. Suzanne, Lurz’s secretary, is married to a frustrated pianist and is in a sadomasochistic relationship with her father-in-law, the evil Inspector Gast. Rudolf (Baer) works in a high-class record store and in his spacious apartment looks after a heroin addict he has picked up from the street. Petra (Margit Carstensen) is a self-pitying neurotic who hates – and ultimately murders – her kind banker husband. Hilde (Bulle Ogier) is a talented history teacher but a manic depressive who allows herself to be abused by men, including those in the group. Franz (Günther Kaufmann) is an unemployed ex-soldier handy with explosives. August, Lurz’s middleman, is prone to transvestism. And Paul (Giménez), who is revered by the others for having attended terrorist training camps in Africa, is a sadist with the same macho good looks and inarticulateness of Andreas Baader. Together, this band of ineffectual, middle-class, snobbish, sexually promiscuous miscreants play at being ‘terrorists’. They import conspiratorial postures and clothes (fedoras and trench coats) from 1940s American film noir. They copy terrorist

Figure 8.4  The Third Generation: Petra (Margit Carstensen), with Franz (Günther

Kaufmann) behind, shoots her husband during the terrorists’ bank raid. Courtesy of Filmverlag der Autoren/Photofest. 155

Cinematic Terror

actions from movies and the nightly television news – for example, when one of them asks Suzanne why they should demand the release of all political prisoners in East Germany in exchange for Lurz, her reply is abrupt: ‘Because that’s just what you do!’ And they indulge in dispassionate carnage and indiscriminate looting, and deploy increasingly outlandish tactics. The would-be rebels parrot notions of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’, yet they allow themselves to be manipulated by a rigidly hierarchical structure, headed by the contemptuous August and his sexist secondin-command, Paul. The female cell members claim to be feminists but act more like affected political groupies, ogling Paul or blathering about the latest ‘fabulous’ play at the Schaubühne Theatre. This portrait captures a politically naïve clique of iconoclasts whose activities resemble self-therapy sessions rather than revolutionary manoeuvres. These urban guerrillas are nothing like those depicted in State of Siege. In that film, the Tupamaros kidnap for legitimate political reasons, whereas ‘the third generation’ does so because it forms part of a gratuitous, fascistic cult of action and danger. In State of Siege, the terrorists only kill as a last resort. In The Third Generation, their disturbing ambivalence to violence, directed either against each other or outsiders, smacks, as one critic accurately put it, ‘of a bevy of self-absorbed egos determined to realise the puerile, swashbuckling fantasies which goad their bored, frustrated, and well-fed lives’.22 Placing bombs and shooting bank executives just for the thrill of it is bad enough, but what makes it worse is the would-be rebels’ failure to realize they are merely puppets. State of Siege had already warned of politicians’ ability to exploit terrorism by introducing authoritarian laws they wanted anyway. The Third Generation goes a step further and takes the often made observation – that terrorists’ actions have no positive consequences and end in supporting the establishment they oppose – to its logical extreme. This is epitomized in Inspector Gast’s ironic line to a laughing Lurz, ‘I recently had a dream that capitalism invented terrorism to force the state to protect it better.’ Eddie Constantine’s string-pulling plutocrat is no stereotypical fascist – ironically, he is something of an aesthete who loves chess and European cinema. All the same, Lurz is a powerful depiction of what many on the left saw as the symbiotic link between terrorism, capital and the police and which in Germany, Fassbinder and others argued, had severely restricted civil rights. The film’s final irony has Lurz apparently caught in his own trap, kidnapped by the very monsters he has spawned. Yet, in reality the master-manipulator is still in control and is more than happy to play along with the popular iconography of terrorism by patiently submitting to endless retakes of his ‘scene’ in their video-taped ultimatum to be issued to the news media. The film’s final shot of Lurz’s smirk, multiplied between himself and his monochromatic videomonitor double, is chilling. Linnett, ‘The Third Generation’.

22

156

Avant-garde Narcissists

As weirdly pathetic as they are, the characters in The Third Generation are often secondary to the climate of noise and racket in which they live. For the film, composer Peer Raben used a strategy he called ‘Muzik-Shock’ that was designed to overload the viewers’ senses to the point of disorientation.23 There is virtually no sequence in The Third Generation in which the characters and audience are not being bombarded by multimedia sounds. From the opening scene in a corporate penthouse where Suzanne is watching a video-cassette of a fictionalized assisted suicide while listening to an off-screen telephone conversation, the spectator is overwhelmed by the choice of meanings offered by the film’s multi-track sounds and images and by the impossibility of making any kind of coherent sense from the babel of new technology. The flickering television and computer screens in the corner of countless frames (images within images echoing the theme of wheels within wheels) connect and question both the medium of film and the ideology of surveillance,24 both of which, The Third Generation is saying, are at the heart of contemporary terrorism. The Third Generation comments on the relationship between terrorism, technology and the media in other ways too. Its use of staged parodies – of Lurz’s ultimatum scene, for instance, or the gangster-like gunning down of Petra – points to the mediated form that so much contemporary violence took. The film’s use of actual recordings of news reports (about German workers’ strikes, war in Asia, a crisis in Iran, and so on), which often drown out what the terrorists are saying to one another, speaks of a nation hooked on television’s hysterical coverage of political violence. Here, Fassbinder was not arguing, as many commentators and politicians on the political right did during this period, that the omnipresent media was guilty of giving a voice to terrorists. Rather, it was that the media was exploiting terrorism for commercial and authoritarian purposes on the one hand and that the disorientation and disjointedness it caused was helping to give life to terrorists on the other. The Third Generation is designed to make its audience laugh and think at the same time. Its frenetic pace, sloganeering, theatricalism and high camp stylistically sets it apart from the other films in our study and might seem from a distance to take the audience into the realm of pretentious make-believe. Yet, at the same time, The Third Generation is very much grounded in reality. It gives us a feel for West Berlin, from its grimy subway stations to landmarks like the modernist high-rise Europa-Centre. It fittingly captures elements of ‘the Szene’, the trendy, alternative in-crowd that was heavily involved in terrorism in West Germany. And its references to recent events are obvious: the Schleyer abduction (complete with MercedesBenz) is interpreted ironically; the Dusseldorf police’s shooting of one of Schleyer’s Chris Chang, ‘Burn after Reading: Peer Raben’s Shock Tactics’, Film Comment, 45, 3, May/June 2009, 16. Fassbinder claimed his telephone had been tapped for years because of his earlier association with members of the RAF. ‘The Walls are Closing in on us Birds of Paradise: From a Conversation with Renate Klett about Political Developments and Germany in Autumn’, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 136. 23 24

157

Cinematic Terror

Figure 8.5  The Third Generation: As the television blares in the background, August (Volker Spengler, foreground) reaches for a pen so the cell members can draw lots for a raid on the local passport office.

kidnappers, Willi-Peter Stoll, in 1978 is effectively restaged; and the suicide of one of the cell’s members, the good-natured Franz, alludes to the RAF leaders’ contentious deaths the year earlier in Stammheim Prison. In some senses, in its ironic, even sardonic, psychological probing into what makes a terrorist, The Third Generation was a screen update of the novel on which Hitchcock’s Sabotage had been based, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Like that book, Fassbinder’s film comically exposes the personal and ideological flaws that will cause terrorist groups to implode and laughs at self-deception through politics and undigested philosophy. It also challenges us to look behind the scenes of terrorism, to question the tendency of film and other mass media forms to reduce political violence to the aberrance of a few isolated, abnormal psychologies. The Third Generation’s overriding message, echoing The Secret Agent’s, seems to be that terrorism both feeds on and fosters oppression. The Third Generation is a model of cinematic provocation. Made by a renowned troublemaker soon after the tumultuous political events it portrays, the movie was bound to cause arguments, if not worse. Its overt attack on the media guaranteed yet further controversy, given critics’ and journalists’ navel-gazing habits and the German press’s aggressively conservative stance on terrorism. Add to this the fact 158

Avant-garde Narcissists

that The Third Generation was one of the first comedic treatments of terrorism on film made anywhere and we might have expected Fassbinder’s self-styled fairy tale to make significant waves overseas as well as in Germany. To say that The Third Generation got a mixed reception in West Germany itself would be an understatement. The fact that some newspapers and magazines were positive about the film indicates that the political and media landscape had altered somewhat since the darkest days of the German Autumn. Der Spiegel, for instance, the country’s highest-selling weekly news magazine, applauded Fassbinder for daring to handle the topic of terrorism so ‘brazenly’. Tag, a small-scale arts journal, thought the film’s ‘picture of a kind of modern media fascism in Germany’ was spot-on. Tip, Berlin’s liberal cultural weekly, went as far as calling The Third Generation ‘one of the most radical and most significant of modern German films’.25 In other quarters in West Germany, The Third Generation found a less appreciative audience. At one screening in Hamburg, a projectionist was beaten unconscious and copies of the movie were destroyed by neo-Nazis accusing Fassbinder of glorifying the extreme left. In Frankfurt, self-proclaimed heirs of the Baader-Meinhof group – that is, representatives of the ‘third generation’ itself – labelled the film a betrayal and threw acid at the screen. Not for the first (or last) time in his incendiary career, Fassbinder received death threats. Many mainstream critics objected to The Third Generation’s mordant political humour on artistic as well as ideological grounds. Others simply said the film left them confused and irritated.26 The Third Generation seems to have divided opinion overseas just as strongly. Unpredictably, France’s conservative daily newspaper Le Figaro praised it highly, especially for its ‘frightening’ qualities. Britain’s liberal daily The Guardian commended it for being, at one and the same time, funny, moving and grotesque. On the other side of the Atlantic, one of America’s most influential critics, the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, argued that The Third Generation proved Fassbinder was ‘the most dazzling, puzzling, prolific, and exhilarating film-maker of his generation – anywhere’.27 By way of contrast, Britain’s socialist magazine The New Statesman thought The Third Generation was ‘a deeply silly charade’ while New York’s liberal Village Voice called it ‘under the circumstances unforgivably frivolous’.28 Meanwhile, the leftist New York journal Cineaste criticized Fassbinder for focusing exclusively on the personal dimension of German terrorism and thereby, like the mainstream Donner, ‘Valiant Anarchists’; Frieder Butzmann, ‘Filmscore/ Music /Soundtrack’, Tag, 24 October 1981; Jochen Brunow, ‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation – Strange Truth, Tragic Lies’, Tip, 19, 1979, 31, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin. 26 ‘Interview with Lorenz’, The Third Generation DVD; Robert Katz and Peter Berling, Love is Colder than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (London: Cape, 1987), 151; Petra Fuchka, ‘Terrorism as Comedy’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15/16 September 1979, Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin. 27 Le Figaro, 3 May 1979; Richard Roud, ‘Film Reviews’, Guardian, 21 May 1979; Vincent Canby, ‘Film: Fassbinder on Terrorism’, New York Times, 9 September 1980, C9. 28 John Coleman, ‘The Third Generation’, New Statesman, 19 September 1980; Molly Haskell, ‘Rifling the Cannes Fest’, Village Voice, 28 May 1979. 25

159

Cinematic Terror

media generally, fatally overlooking its wider geopolitical causes – namely US militarism and the Cold War.29 Despite causing so much heat and occasional violence, The Third Generation unequivocally failed at the box office both in West Germany and elsewhere. This can be attributed partly to the diminution of terrorist incidents within Germany, meaning the film was less topical that it might have been, and partly to exhibitors’ fears of either coming under physical attack or being criticized for giving screen time to a tasteless piece of pro-terrorist propaganda. Treating terrorism as a laughing matter was perverse enough according to many commentators, and Fassbinder’s highbrow, decorative style seems to have made The Third Generation all the more offensive and alienating.30 Of course, as German cinema’s enfant terrible, Fassbinder wanted his films to offend and alienate; that was the only way he knew of making people think. All the same, The Third Generation patently did not trigger the wider debate about terrorism Fassbinder also wanted. Like almost all avant-garde films, The Third Generation played largely to the initiated in art houses and on university campuses and then effectively disappeared from view. German television opted not to screen the film even after Fassbinder’s early death a few years later had accorded him cult status. Whether this was purely for commercial reasons or, rather like The Battle of Algiers in France, The Third Generation was deemed to be overly inflammatory, is not clear. During the 1980s, the RAF continued to wage its war on Western imperialism, mainly by attacking US air bases in West Germany. The group officially dissolved in 1998.31 Notwithstanding its commercial and political limitations, The Third Generation signalled a subtle shift taking place in cinema’s approach towards terrorism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, a number of films tapped into the growing view held in West Germany and elsewhere that terrorism was sometimes less explicitly political than movies like State of Siege or Operation Thunderbolt would have it. Like The Third Generation, a significant number of these films took a satirical look at terrorism, partly to circumvent censorship regulations and partly, like Fassbinder’s movie, to highlight the often inchoate character of terrorism and narcissistic nature of political violence. Such movies indicated that cinematic terrorism was entering a new phase, one that was both more self-referential and less deferential. One fascinating example of this is Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Man Who Stole the Sun. Made in Japan just months after The Third Generation, it centred on the theme of nuclear terrorism. Cinematic stories of crazed loners (usually scientists) Linnett, ‘The Third Generation’. Sheila Johnston, ‘The Third Generation’ Programme Notes, BFIL; David Robinson, ‘The Third Generation’, The Times (London), 19 September 1980. 31 ‘Interview with Lorenz’, The Third Generation DVD. 29 30

160

Avant-garde Narcissists

holding governments to ransom with atomic weapons dated back to thrillers from the early 1950s, like the British-made Seven Days to Noon.32 Hasegawa’s film put a contemporary, satirical twist on this sub-genre, telling the tale of Makato Kido (played by rock star-cum-actor Kenji Sawada), a Japanese science teacher who first becomes an accidental hero by helping to save his students from the clutches of a school bus hijacker and then uses his classes to build his own atomic bomb. Motivated by a ragbag of political and personal hang-ups, the teacher-terrorist manages to extort the Japanese government into televising baseball games without commercials and then threatens to explode his deadly weapon unless the police overturn a drugs-related ban on the rock group The Rolling Stones performing live in Japan. Eventually Kido clashes with a police detective, and the film ends ambiguously with the teacher looking as though he might die of radiation poisoning before he can see his plan through to its conclusion. The Man Who Stole the Sun was a major hit in Japan and would go on to achieve international cult status. Though in many ways it paralleled Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) in its satirical treatment of the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Hasegawa’s film broke significant taboos in a nation still traumatized by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Several scenes were considered highly provocative, including a sequence in which Kido uses scraps of plutonium metal to poison people in a public swimming pool. Some of the bomb-making footage was cut at the behest of the Japanese authorities in ‘the interests of public safety’.33 The success of The Man Who Stole the Sun demonstrates the ability of film comedies to capture the absurdities of terrorism often more powerfully than earnest, ‘straight’ screen treatments of the subject. Comedies of this sort were made in several parts of the world in the 1980s and 1990s. One of Hollywood’s earliest terrorism comedies was Richard Brooks’ Wrong Is Right (1982). This starred the former James Bond actor Sean Connery and was an elaborately plotted satire of international amorality that portrayed the US president as a fundamentalist Christian reliant on a caricatured preacher for guidance on how to defeat Islamic terrorism.34 Ten years later, Danish director Jens Jorgen Thorsen pushed the boundaries of taste yet further with The Return (1992), a satire that depicted Jesus coming back to earth to save it David Seed, ‘Seven Days to Noon: Containing the Atomic Threat’, British Journal for the History of Science, 45, 4, December 2012, 641–652. Other dramas from this era that dealt in a variety of ways with nuclear terrorism include the American-made The 49th Man (Fred F. Sears, 1953), Port of Hell (Harold D. Schuster, 1954), and Hell and High Water (Sam Fuller, 1954); the Japanese-made Children of Hiroshima (Kaneto Shindo, 1952); and the Anglo-American-made Dr No (Terence Young, 1962). See Robert E. Hunter, ‘Expecting the Unexpected: Nuclear Terrorism in 1950s Hollywood Films’, in Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler (eds.), The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 211–237; Mick Broderick, Nuclear Movies (London: McFarland, 1991), 70; Chapman, Licence To Thrill, 65–110. 33 Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Cinema (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge, 2005), 275–277. 34 Cettl, American Cinema, 291–292. 32

161

Cinematic Terror

from environmental pollution and being condemned to death after falling in with a group of plane hijackers.35 Terrorism and Kebab, made in 1993 by the Egyptian director Sherif Arafa, was a very different, extraordinarily popular film that poked fun at the authorities in Cairo for treating a man complaining about bureaucratic corruption as a terrorist.36 In the immediate aftermath of September 2001, few film-makers felt comfortable with mixing terrorism with humour. Yet it did not take too long for at least some, particularly in North America and Britain, to take a satirical look at what the media called the latest New Age of Terror. The resulting movies – among them Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004), Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Jon Hurwitz/Hayden Schlossberg, 2008), In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009) and Without You Laden (Abhishek Sharma, 2010) – all had their own particular targets but each offered an angle on terrorism with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder might have sympathized.37 The one film that Fassbinder perhaps would have appreciated most was Chris Morris’s Four Lions (2010), a so-called ‘jihad satire’ that chronicled the thoroughly incompetent efforts of four British Muslims in England to plan and execute a terrorist attack. Four Lions was a richly inventive exploration of present-day fanaticism, while its final, absurd scenes of the terrorists blowing themselves up while running the London marathon dressed as clowns and animals suggested that Morris was more of a Fassbinder fan than he let on.38 By this point, The Third Generation itself had reappeared on the radar, both on DVD and on select cinema screens in Europe, North America and Asia.39 Even in the post-9/11 age its influence remained extremely limited, but The Third Generation did help inspire at least one movie. Directed in 2004 by the experimental Canadian film-maker Bruce La Bruce, The Raspberry Reich satirized the ‘terrorist chic’ of a group of modern-day, radical homosexuals who kidnap a wealthy industrialist’s son in the name of ‘the Sixth Generation of the Baader-Meinhof Gang’. La Bruce’s film proffered an uncompromising picture both of the present-day posturing of the radical left and of the corporate media’s co-optive powers in the early twenty-first century. Posters for The Raspberry Reich showed a half-naked man posing in front a giant image of Che Guevara, with his genitals hidden by a revolutionary star. One cannot help feeling that Fassbinder would have approved.40 P. Risby Hansen, ‘Jesus Vender Tilbage (The Return)’, Variety, 346, 10, 23 March 1992, 108. P. Lenti, ‘Al-Irhab Wal Kabab (Terrorism and Kebab)’, Variety, 351, 7, 21 June 1993, 44. 37 Brian Lowry, ‘Par’s Attack of the Puppet People’, Variety, 396, 9, 18 October 2004, 32, 39; Rahul Hamid, ‘Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay’, Cineaste, 33, 4, Fall 2008, 57–58; Susan L. Carruthers, ‘In the Loop’, Cineaste, 35, 1, Winter 2009, 57–58; Richard Kuipers, ‘Tere bin Laden’, Variety, 419, 12, 9 August 2010, 20. 38 Juliet Jacques, ‘Four Lions’, Cineaste, 36, 2, Spring 2011, 55–57. 39 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079083/releaseinfo (22 June 2012). 40 Dennis Harvey, ‘The Raspberry Reich’, Variety, 393, 12, 9 February 2004, 86; Antonio Pasolini, ‘A Quick Chat with Bruce LaBruce’, Kamera.co.uk, undated, http://www.kamera.co.uk/interviews/a_quick_chat _with_bruce_labruce.php (22 June 2012). 35 36

162

CHAPTER 9 SERIAL KILLERS

Looking back from a forty-year vantage point, movie buffs and political scientists might see the 1970s as some sort of ‘golden age’ of cinematic terrorism, when films like State of Siege, Operation Thunderbolt and The Third Generation presented the world with contrasting definitions of terrorism across multiple genres. The period that followed was quite different. Terrorists continued to appear in a range of genres in the 1980s and 1990s but were categorized for the most part simply as criminals or murderers rather than as political warriors of one sort or another. This shift to the political right had various causes, one of the most importance of which was the power of Hollywood. As Edwin S. Porter’s Execution of Czolgosz and Otto Preminger’s Exodus, among others, demonstrate, American film-makers had been helping to define terrorism for decades prior to the 1980s, despite producers repeatedly claiming that political movies were ‘box office poison’. It was during the eighties and nineties, however, that Hollywood really stamped its authority as the world’s single most powerful arbiter of terrorism imagery. During this era, terrorists appeared in more American feature films than in all of the previous decades put together.1 Such an impressive body of films – almost all of which focused on the psychopathology of terrorists and had little to say about the political and cultural contexts in which they operated – represented one of Hollywood’s major sources of profits and political influence worldwide. Of all the terrorism movies Hollywood produced during this period, the most popular seem to have been those that made audiences laugh as well as grip their seats. John McTiernan’s Die Hard, released in 1988, is the exemplar in this field. Part terrorism disaster thriller, part wise-guy action comedy, Die Hard pitted a gnarled New York policeman, John McClane (played by Bruce Willis), against a multinational gang of sociopaths holding business executives for ransom inside a giant, fictional tower block in Los Angeles. In contrast with the Israeli and US Special Forces depicted in Operation Thunderbolt and The Delta Force, John McClane has no experience whatsoever in counterterrorism and is only pulled into the situation because his wife is one of the hostages. Despite this, through a combination of Terrorism’s emergence as a major theme in American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s is examined in Cettl, American Cinema, 169–170; Vanhala, Blockbuster Films; Palmer, Films of the Eighties, 114–164; Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, ‘Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism’, New Political Science, 28, 3, September 2006, 335–351. 1

Cinematic Terror

courage, ingenuity and chutzpah, the archetypal reluctant Hollywood hero singlehandedly rescues the hostages and wrecks the gang’s plans which, it turns out, have nothing to do with politics but are instead confined to stealing a small fortune from the tower block’s capacious vaults. Die Hard was Hollywood’s highest grossing terrorism film of the 1980s and to date has been followed by four sequels, plus a host of video games and copycat movies. Between 1988 and 2013, the five-part Die Hard film series banked in excess of $1.5 billion, making it cinema’s most profitable terrorism franchise so far.2 This phenomenal success alone makes Die Hard worth exploring but so too does the argument that the series has provided cinemagoers with a potent conceptual template for understanding terrorism at critical junctures over the past three decades. Defining terrorism not as a political tactic but as a cynical form of criminality has had potentially far-reaching consequences, especially for Americans and others primed to regard terrorism as the new ‘other’ after the collapse of Soviet Communism in the early 1990s and then New York’s Twin Towers in September 2001. Die Hard reminds us that film-making is first and foremost a business and that economics plays a fundamental role in the depiction of terrorism on screen. Hollywood found itself in the financial doldrums in the 1960s and 1970s, buffeted by structural upheaval and competition from television as well as many of the film industries featured in the previous chapters.3 Since the 1980s, the engine of Hollywood’s revival as an economic and cultural force has been the blockbuster, a big-budget, heavilymarketed, high-concept, multi-functional audio-visual entertainment product often centred on action and exploiting the American film industry’s economies of scale. Benefitting from saturation media coverage and global distribution, blockbusters have tended to reap huge revenues in a relatively short period. This success, in turn, has encouraged sequels, hybrid genres, formulas and franchises, all with common ingredients designed to give audiences something new yet familiar.4 The business of a franchise is to play variations on the established, familiar format. The five Die Hard films do this with aplomb. Their format of features include John McClane himself, a ruggedly attractive, street-level hero forced to save the day because of an imperilled relative; a semi-unwilling sidekick with whom he can banter; an array of unhelpful or impotent superior officers and experts, who get in the way of the hero or show up after he has done the job; a suavely sinister mastermind often at http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/13/entertainment/la-et-mn-die-hard-review20130214 (13 May 2013). As noted in Chapter 7, the James Bond movies have been omitted from this study because they fit more easily into the spy rather than terrorism genre. For the record, however, the inflation-adjusted net profit of the James Bond movie franchise exceeds $10 billion. Stan Taylor, ‘Introduction: Spying in Film and Fiction’, Intelligence and National Security, 23, 1, 2008, 1–4. 3 Chapman, Cinemas of the World, 130–134; Hillier, New Hollywood. 4 Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26–79; King, Spectacular Narratives. 2

164

Serial Killers

the end of a telephone; a devious scheme that blends terrorism with extortion; hordes of super-skilled but disposable killers; a narrative structure that centres on fights, chases, explosions, athletic feats and stunts; an escalation from alarmingly credible action to computer-augmented absurdities; and a final clash between hero and villain in which the latter dies.5 The producers of the first two Die Hard instalments were Hollywood’s resident experts in action movie franchises of the 1980s and 1990s. To Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon, financiers, among others, of Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix series, Die Hard’s terrorism theme seems merely to have been a hook for another money-making enterprise with the powerful studiocum-distributor Twentieth Century Fox. Director John McTiernan, who had recently worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger on Predator (1987) and would go on to make Hollywood’s last Cold War action movie The Hunt for Red October (1990), felt the same. Fox’s boss, Rupert Murdoch, who ran a media empire that would be at the heart of the ‘war on terror’ for decades to come, personally approved the casting of the television star Bruce Willis as John McClane for a then eye-watering $5 million.6 Given this, and the durability of Die Hard’s format, it might come as a surprise to learn how different the original film could have turned out. Die Hard was based on a 1979 novel, Nothing Lasts Forever, by the American writer Roderick Thorp. Nothing Lasts Forever shared features with both State of Siege and The Third Generation and was a dark, convoluted story about a retired New York detective, Joe Leland, who flies to Los Angeles to reunite with his estranged, cocaine-addicted daughter. Shortly after Leland’s arrival, a group of German terrorists take over the skyscraper headquarters of his daughter’s employers, Klaxon Oil. The terrorists are determined to expose Klaxon publicly for illegally selling arms to the junta in Chile. Hidden inside the skyscraper, Leland kills the terrorists one by one in order to save the seventy-odd hostages, which include his daughter and grandchildren. At the end, however, Leland watches helplessly as the terrorists’ leader pulls his daughter through a window to her death. The novel leaves its readers with the uneasy impression that, for all Leland’s heroics, the terrorists might not have killed anyone if the detective had stayed in New York.7 Early Die Hard scripts penned in the summer of 1987 by the novice American screenwriter Jeb Stuart maintained the ambiguous, sober tone of Thorp’s book and its portrayal of the terrorists as anti-capitalists. In line with Nothing Lasts Forever, Kim Newman, ‘Die Hard 4.0’, Sight & Sound, 18, 8, August 2007, 59–60. Twentieth Century Fox press release, Die Hard Core Files, AMPAS; John Parker, Bruce Willis: The Unauthorised Biography (London: Virgin, 1997), 87; Robert Osborne, ‘Rambling Reporter’, Hollywood Reporter, 29 September 1987. The four ‘buddy-cop’ Lethal Weapon films, starring Mel Gibson as US detective Martin Riggs, were released between 1987 and 1998. The Matrix trilogy, a science-fiction series made between 1999 and 2003, starred Keanu Reeves as Neo, a former computer engineer leading a rebellion against sentient machines on Earth. 7 Roderick Thorp, Nothing Lasts Forever (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); ‘Books: Heart of Darkness: Rod Thorp Discusses His Journey Down a Terrifying River’, Los Angeles View, 13–19 October 1995. 5 6

165

Cinematic Terror

for instance, Stuart depicted the group throwing Klaxon’s dirty money out of the skyscraper’s windows to the public below, the point being, as one of the terrorists declares, ‘to show the world just what kind of greed your country thrives on’.8 By sticking so closely to the novel, Stuart might have meant to link the film to the IranContra scandal that had erupted in the United States in late 1986, which revealed that rogue elements within Ronald Reagan’s administration had been illegally selling arms to Iran to help fund anti-Communist rebels (some called them terrorists) in Nicaragua.9 Even if this was not his intention, Stuart’s scripts carried a distinctly subversive message in a period dominated by Reagan’s ‘war on terror’ rhetoric and harked back to the spate of liberal conspiracy, anti-corporate movies that Hollywood had produced in the post-Watergate era.10 Once Gordon and Silver had replaced Stuart with the more seasoned Steven de Souza, writer of the seventies hit television series The Six Million Dollar Man and eighties action-comedies like 48 Hours (Walter Hill, 1982), Die Hard began to take on its final, recognizable form. Working alongside McTiernan, de Souza refined key elements of the plot. Most importantly, he turned the villains into capitalist ‘yuppies’ who were masquerading as left-wing terrorists in order to deflect attention from an elaborate multimillion-dollar robbery. McTiernan believed this would render the film ‘more entertaining’, as would making the corporation Japanese rather than American and changing the villains’ leader, Hans Gruber, from a ‘downscale, airplane hijacker type’ to one that was more ‘upscale’. ‘I liked the idea of imagining what would happen when one of those Baader-Meinhof types got tired of fighting his and others’ political battles’, McTiernan explained after Die Hard’s release, ‘and decided to show them what a real criminal is and applied his expertise to this act.’11 De Souza next lightened Die Hard’s script, mainly by softening the image of the detective. De Souza did not want ‘John McClane’ to be just another ‘professional warrior’ in the mould of Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris. He wanted a ‘regular guy’ whose vulnerability would help make Die Hard appealing to people, like his wife, who usually found terrorism movies offputtingly macho.12 De Souza then added more humour, much of which fitted in with Bruce Willis’ brash television

Jeb Stuart, Die Hard first draft script, 24 June 1987, Scripts, AMPAS. Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 10 On this conspiracy cycle and its political significance, see Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 119–124; Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 95–98. 11 Tom Matthews, ‘Die Hard Last Forever’, Creative Screenwriting, 13, 6, November/December 2006, 71–75; Todd McCarthy, ‘Pictures: “Die Hard” Helmer’s Trick Was Finding Feeling Amid Hi-Tech’, Variety, 25 July 1988. 12 Matthews, ‘Die Hard Last Forever’; ‘Books: Heart of Darkness’, Los Angeles View, 13–19 October 1995; Robert Seidenberg, ‘ “Die Hard 2” Fights an Uphill Battle’, New York Times, 29 April 1990. 8 9

166

Serial Killers

persona. This included dialogue between Gruber and McClane and the latter’s soon-to-be legendary taunt to the German, ‘Yippee Ki-Yay, Motherfucker!’ Lastly, de Souza either simply deleted Stuart’s leftist lines or re-assigned them to highbrow ‘experts’ who thereby came across as the terrorists’ allies.13 Within a few years of Die Hard’s release, Steven de Souza’s final script for the film had gained iconic status within Hollywood, where it was ranked as the textbook screenplay for the action genre.14 It could also be argued that de Souza and McTiernan’s end product amounted to the model anti-terrorist film of the late 1980s and 1990s. This claim can be justified on a number of levels, some political, some aesthetic, some commercial. Like many major box-office hits, Die Hard is highly derivative. The film fuses James Bond’s action-and-irony with John Rambo’s testosterone-fuelled patriotism. It has the look and scale of a disaster film like John Guillermin’s 1974 hit The Towering Inferno (Roderick Thorp’s inspiration for Nothing Lasts Forever), while the clever use of confined spaces inside the tower block, Nakatomi Plaza, gives audiences the claustrophobic feel of a hijacking movie.15 Die Hard has the ‘will-they-get-awaywith-it?’ excitement of a crime caper, combined with a knowingness about the action movie’s rollercoaster-like conventions. These appeal as in-jokes to the initiated, as do Die Hard’s reflexive, tongue-in-cheek references to old Hollywood westerns and stars like Roy Rogers and John Wayne. Despite this hybridity, Die Hard is easy on the brain and eye. The film’s plot is as lucid as The Third Generation’s was unfathomable, not least because it is so actionpacked. This, along with the state-of-the-art special effects by Richard Edlund, whose impeccable résumé included Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981), made Die Hard simple to market globally.16 So did its $28 million budget, a figure that, even accounting for inflation, dwarfs any of the films we have looked at so far in our study. With its high production values, spectacular stunts and big explosions in what the New Yorker called ‘bowel-rumbling’ Dolby sound, Die Hard boasted the sort of sensory stimuli that allowed audiences to ‘experience’ a movie rather than merely watch it.17

Steven de Souza, Die Hard script, 2 Oct 1987, Scripts, AMPAS. William C. Martell, ‘Die Hard: An Action Writing Primer’, Creative Screenwriting, 2, 4, Winter 1995, 62–68. 15 Roderick Thorp, Letter (untitled), Creative Screenwriting, 3, 2, Fall 1996, 111–112. Nakatomi Plaza was in fact Fox Plaza, a brand new, partially unoccupied, ultramodern skyscraper in Los Angeles’ Century City that had just become Twentieth Century Fox’s headquarters. For more on the ‘hopped-up’, Bond-like design of the movie and what Joel Silver called the ‘exaggerated realism’ of the Nakatomi sets, see the Die Hard pressbook, Die Hard Core Files, AMPAS. 16 George Turner, ‘Sophisticated Visuals on Grand Scale for Die Hard’, American Cinematographer, 69, 12, December 1988, 60–66, 68, 70, 90–92. 17 Terrence Rafferty, ‘Current Cinema’, New Yorker, 8 August 1988, 79. $28 million in 1988 is equivalent to $54 million in 2012 dollars. Dollar equivalencies are taken from http://www.measuringworth.com/ ppowerus/ (10 June 2013). 13 14

167

Cinematic Terror

Figure 9.1  Die Hard: Where terrorists meet with disaster. Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest.

Die Hard might be a wonderful illustration of terrorism as pure entertainment but it also tells us in no uncertain terms that all terrorism is sadistic criminality. The smooth, elegantly dressed Hans Gruber (played by the British actor Alan Rickman) is a one-time Marxist terrorist from Germany. Gruber still spouts support for his fellow ‘freedom fighters’ around the globe and sneers at capitalists, but this is just for show as he now turns his gift for organized violence to carry out sophisticated armed robberies in order to line his own pockets. He is not the only terrorist to have forsaken radicalism for Mammon apparently; Gruber proudly tells everyone that he buys his suits at the same high-class London tailors used by his former associate, the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Terrorists are opportunistic hypocrites, the film is saying, ideologically vacuous, venally motivated and nothing better than crooks. 168

Serial Killers

But it is worse than that, for beneath Gruber’s calm, witty exterior, the German is a deranged, psychotic killer. He and his international gang of thieves execute anyone who gets in their way with a terrifying efficiency that can only come from paramilitary training. This even includes those who try to open up negotiations, like a weak-willed executive high on cocaine who is trying to impress McClane’s wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). Conventional armed robbers would not kill for fun. This twisted behaviour is linked to the fanaticism that drove them to political terrorism in the first place. Now that they have turned to murderous extortion to vent their psychological hang-ups, these madmen are just as dangerous as when they were assassinating heads of state. They plan to raze Nakatomi Plaza to the ground, innocent hostages and all, merely to cover their tracks once they have gotten their hands on the vault’s $640 million. It is not for nothing that virtually all critics described Gruber’s gang as terrorists, despite noting that they were just after the money. To most journalists, it would seem, thieving was either part-and-parcel of terrorism anyway or just a natural step for those on the terrorist-criminal spectrum.18 Gruber’s nemesis, John McClane, is no cool hero in the mould of, say, James Bond. In Die Hard it is the terrorists who are cold and calculating, faced by what the snobbish Gruber calls ‘a smart aleck prole fighting in an undershirt’. McClane is a muscular, blue-collar everyman, the epitome of the stereotypical American hero, an underdog who bleeds but who displays nerve and wit in the face of overwhelming odds. Like the United States generally, McClane is not quick to anger and only fights when he really has to, in this case to save the lives of his wife and her colleagues. In a perfect wish-fulfilment scenario, McClane for most of the film plays a deadly game of hide-and-seek, terrorizing the terrorists in the process. McClane acts out the role of Roy Rogers, Hollywood’s ‘singing cowboy’ from the 1940s and 1950s, and keeps up a self-mocking, running commentary as he gives the villains a taste of their own medicine by using anything he can lay his hands on, from a swivel chair to his trouser belt. Yet he is not a real terrorist of course: he does not kill innocents. Even when he dispatches Gruber towards the end – the German falls to his death in slow motion, staring into the camera in disbelief – McClane does not gloat.19 ‘Good guys still do win’, Bruce Willis felt was one of the main messages of this and the other Die Hard instalments.20 Like Rambo and Chuck Norris’s characters before him, McClane’s violent vigilantism was a clarion call to an America suffocated

See, for instance, Duane Byrge, ‘Die Hard’, Hollywood Reporter, 11 July 1988, 3, 24. Willis’ body was very much a part of all the Die Hards, a spectacle in itself and one that emphasized the macho qualities of the counterterrorist but was subverted to an extent by Willis’ wise-guy rather than tough-guy persona. On this see Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 58–63; Yvonne Tasker, ‘Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, The Body, and the Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds.), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 230–244. 20 Parker, Bruce Willis, 220–221. 18 19

169

Cinematic Terror

by what Ronald Reagan and others called the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. In Die Hard, McClane does get the help of a portly African-American policeman on the ground, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), who will ultimately overcome his own doubts about using force by shooting dead Gruber’s main henchman. Otherwise, any support McClane gets from officialdom is, like that which the honest soldiers in Vietnam or Iran received a decade or so earlier – useless. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, insists on conducting the siege of Nakatomi Plaza by the book and cuts all power to the skyscraper, which is exactly what the terrorists want because it opens the security locks on the vaults. Don’t trust the media to help the good guys combat terrorism either, the film says. One television reporter, Thornburg (William Atherton), will stop at nothing to get his terrorist scoop, even if it means endangering innocent lives. The sleazy Thornburg and his colleagues play into the villains’ hands by misrepresenting them as political radicals and giving air time to apologist intellectuals who profess that terrorism is the last resort of the downtrodden poor. As droll as Die Hard is, the film delivers a trenchant message about the changing nature of terrorism and its growing threat during the 1980s. It focuses on the ease with which international terrorist ‘super groups’ can create havoc not just in unstable, faraway regions like the Middle East – as shown by The Delta Force and other movies – but on home soil in the West. This was especially pertinent to the United States given how little international terrorism had actually crossed its borders up to this point. For American audiences of this era, Die Hard underscored the belief that terrorism was an alien, fundamentally ‘un-American’ activity.21 For us now, the film shows how terrorism had become something of a catch-all term, one that could be applied to criminal activities generally and that was increasingly ubiquitous – akin perhaps to the way many Americans first described Communism, as some sort of a disease. In Die Hard, the ‘good guys’ do get to win in the end but the film implies there are many more Grubers out there.22 Die Hard was greeted with mixed reviews on its release in the summer of 1988 but proved to be immensely successful at the box office and went on to become a classic of its genre. The $140 million the movie made worldwide astonished some of its hard-bitten financiers. At the US box office, it outpunched rival action-adventure releases like the Cold War-themed Rambo III and Red Heat, indicating that terrorism had superseded Communism as the prime public enemy of both the United States An argument can be made of course that the United States was founded on revolution and guerrilla warfare and that George Washington might be called America’s first terrorist – a point made by Gage in ‘American Experience’, 86. 22 The terrorist became something of a default villain in Hollywood movies during this era. Notable films that featured random terrorist sub-plots include the biggest box-office hit of 1985, Robert Zemeckis’ timetravel comedy Back to the Future. Christopher Justice, ‘Ronald Reagan and the Rhetoric of Traveling Back to the Future: The Zemeckis Aesthetic as Revisionist History and Conservative Fantasy’, in Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (ed.), Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 174–194; Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs (New York: Olive Branch, 2009), 91–92. 21

170

Serial Killers

and Hollywood by the late 1980s.23 Die Hard sold particularly well in Asia; in Japan, for instance, Die Hard was named best foreign picture of the year in a readers’ poll conducted by one of the country’s leading newspapers, Hochi Shimbun.24 It is unlikely that audiences would have come away from Die Hard thinking they had seen a piece of political propaganda. Die Hard’s marketing assiduously played down the terrorism theme in favour of spectacle, sensation and ‘experience’.25 New York’s liberal newspaper Village Voice, for one, bought into this, praising the film for an unprecedented ‘kinaesthetic exuberance’ that allowed viewers to feel that they were ‘right in the middle of the melee’.26 Vincent Canby of the New York Times, who had spoken so highly of The Third Generation a decade earlier, agreed, highlighting Die Hard’s remarkable cross-generational appeal and describing it as less a coherent film than an amusement park ride. For these and other reasons, Canby believed Die Hard to be ‘a nearly perfect movie for our time’.27 With each instalment of Die Hard that appeared after 1988, the threat posed by terrorist criminals would grow more outrageous and catastrophic. Die Hard 2: Die Harder, which appeared in July 1990, tied in with the ‘war’ that Washington and Hollywood were then waging against ‘narco-terrorists’ thought to be swamping the United States with heroin and cocaine from Central America and Asia.28 Die Harder saw John McClane battling terrorists and inept officials again, not in Los Angeles this time but in the US capital itself, Washington DC, where a squad of treacherous American soldiers have shut down the airport in order to free a Central American dictator being delivered to the United States for trial on drug trafficking charges. McClane’s wife is trapped in a plane that is desperately low on fuel, circling overhead. Unless he can ‘free’ the airport in time, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia again) and hundreds of other passengers will perish. Like its predecessor, Die Harder demonstrated Hollywood’s ability to both capture and influence the terrorist Zeitgeist. The source for the film, Walter Wager’s 1987 novel 58 Minutes, had focused on an attempt by a German-sounding Willi Staub to Charles Deemer, ‘The Rhetoric of Action: Five Classic Action Scenes’, Creative Screenwriting, 2, 4, Winter 1995, 95–105; Martin A. Grove, ‘Hollywood Report’, Hollywood Reporter, 11 July 1988; http:// www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=diehard.htm (18 July 2012). At the US box office, Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988) and Red Heat (Walter Hill, 1988) made $54 million and $35 million respectively, compared with Die Hard’s $83 million. 24 ‘Fox’s “Die Hard” Doing Big Business in Asia’, Variety, 28 December 1988; ‘Director John McTiernan is the Recipient of the Annual “Hocho Eiga Sho” ’, Variety, 12 December 1989. 25 ‘Le Piege De Cristal’, Cine Revue, 8 September 1988. 26 David Edelstein, ‘Dynamite Tonight’, Village Voice, 26 July 1988. 27 Vincent Canby, ‘Film View: “Die Hard” Calls to the Kidult’, New York Times, 31 July 1988. 28 Rachel Ehrenfeld, Narco-Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 1992). US films that fit into the ‘narcoterrorism’ category include Extreme Prejudice (Walter Hill, 1987), Toy Soldiers (Daniel Petrie, Jr., 1991), Clear and Present Danger (Philip Noyce, 1994) and Collateral Damage (Andrew Davis, 2002). Palmer, Films of the Eighties, 156–157; Tom Tunney, ‘Clear and Present Danger’, Sight & Sound, 4, 10, October 1994, 36–37; Cettl, American Cinema, 262, 74–77. 23

171

Cinematic Terror

blackmail the American authorities into releasing terrorists in US jails by creating mayhem at New York’s JFK Airport.29 Steven de Souza, this time in collaboration with another action movie writer, Doug Richardson, converted Staub into Stuart, a US Special Forces colonel who seizes control of Washington DC’s Dulles Airport with a bunch of mercenaries in order to rescue General Ramon Esperanza, a Central American drug lord being extradited to the United States. Many critics compared Stuart (who was played by William Sadler) with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a former member of the US National Security Council who had been at the heart of the Iran-Contra affair. Esperanza (Franco Nero) was widely interpreted as a stand-in for the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, one of North’s one-time anti-Communist clients in Latin America whom American forces had removed from power and flown to the United States in 1989 to stand trial on drug-running and racketeering charges.30 Die Harder boasted an enormous budget of $70 million, more than twice that of Die Hard. This paid for the requisite stars, scale and special effects. It also allowed for shooting at locales that could add greater verisimilitude, though this was not without its problems. Filming at Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado, for instance, was punctuated by complaints from the director of aviation there that Die Harder would make airport officials look stupid and incompetent (which it did), while lawyers for a number of America’s largest airlines like Continental and United threatened to sue if their logos appeared on screen. Officials at Dulles Airport refused to cooperate at all with the movie’s young Finnish director Renny Harlin, which meant switching to Los Angeles International Airport instead.31 This sensitivity on the part of US airports and airlines was perhaps only natural given the damage that both real and fictional terrorist attacks on airliners and airports were reckoned to have inflicted on the flying business over the years. It was heightened by two recent events in particular. In January 1990, an Avianca Boeing 707 en route from Bogota to New York’s JFK had crashed into the village of Cove Neck on Long Island after running out of fuel. A little over a year earlier, in December 1988, a Pan Am Boeing 747, also en route to New York’s JFK, had exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie with the loss of 270 lives. This bombing, thought to have been ordered by the Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, was the deadliest act of terrorism against the United States to date and led to an international furore over airport security.32

Walter Wager, 58 Minutes (New York: Tor, 1987). Malcolm L. Johnson, ‘Special Effects Overpower Performers in Big Budget “Die Hard” ’, Hartford Courant, 3 July 1990; Steve Mikulan, ‘Film: New Releases: Die Hard 2: Die Harder’, L. A. Weekly, 13–19 July 1990. 31 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=diehard.htm (18 July 2012); Die Hard 2 press release, June 1990, 3, Die Harder Core Files, AMPAS; Kathleen A Hughes, ‘What They Truly Fear Is the Scene Of the Actors Eating Airline Food’, Wall Street Journal, 15 January 1990; Jonathan Dahl, ‘ “Die Hard 2”: Aviation for Airheads’, Wall Street Journal, 5 September 1990. 32 David Leppard, On the Trail of Terror (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); Rodney Wallis, Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). 29 30

172

Serial Killers

Working on the basis that he needed to raise the stakes after Die Hard, Harlin’s depiction of the results of terrorism in Die Harder was even more graphic than those seen in the first movie. Indeed, several newspapers thought the runway-crashing of a passenger-laden aircraft (not Holly’s) was beyond the pale given the recent Avianca disaster and amounted to ‘one of the largest wholesale slaughters in cinematic history’. The crash was shown in slow-motion, giving the audience every opportunity to feast their eyes on the airliner’s disintegration. McClane’s gun-and-grenade battles with the terrorists were often given similar treatment, allowing viewers to delight in watching blood spurt from bullet holes and flames incinerate the mercenaries.33 Die Harder’s contempt for the media was also even more sharply drawn than in its parent film. Late on in the movie, Thornburg (William Atherton again), who happens to be on Holly’s aircraft, phones into his editors a sensational and exaggerated take on what is happening at Dulles, leading to panic in the airport and preventing the police from reaching the plane on which the terrorists are about to escape. In real life, one senior journalist, the Pentagon’s correspondent for NBC Television News, Fred Francis, was highly offended by this portrayal and wrote in the Los Angeles Times of how in 1986 he and NBC had kept quiet when they had learned of the imminent US attack on Moammar Gadhafi’s compound in Libya (an act of state-sponsored terrorism, according to many observers), thereby putting the lives of American airmen above a major scoop.34 Die Harder’s plot had more shades of grey than Die Hard. This helps to account for the array of motives that US critics ascribed to the ‘terrorists’. Some felt that Stuart’s mercenaries were straightforward soldiers of fortune, Esperanza’s hired guns. Others believed they were supporting Esperanza because he was an antiCommunist crusader. Others still claimed that Esperanza, replete with a beard and Monte Cruz cigar, was a dead ringer for Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro and that in one cosmetic stroke Harlin had equated drug-trafficking terrorism with Communism.35 Die Harder confusingly provided ammunition for parties on both sides of the political spectrum, Steve Mikulan argued in L. A. Weekly. On the one hand, it tacitly supported the US government’s strategy of military force-projection in Central America and Washington’s automatic right to extradite foreigners involved in drug-running. On the other hand, the film supported the leftist view that years of covert US support for anti-Communist Latin American generals had produced

Georgia Brown, ‘Die Hard 2: Die Harder’, Village Voice, 17 July 1990; ‘Die Hard 2: Die Harder’, Reader, 6 July 1990. Stephen Prince suggests that this sequence, in which Harlin takes time out to humanize the soon-to-be-dead passengers, took its cue from Hitchcock’s bus-bombing sequence in Sabotage. Prince, Firestorm, 36. 34 Fred Francis, ‘ “Die Hard 2”: It’s Hard to Find any Resemblance to a Real TV Reporter’, Los Angeles Times, 9 July 1990. 35 Rita Kempley, ‘ “Die Harder”: Rambunctiously Entertaining’, Washington Post, 3 July 1990; ‘Deuce for Bruce’, UCLA Summer Bruin, 2 July 1990; Mikulan, ‘Die Harder’. 36 Mikulan, ‘Die Harder’. 33

173

Cinematic Terror

Figure 9.2  Die Harder: America’s enemies from within and without: Major Grant (John Amos, left), Colonel Stuart (William Sadler) and Esperanza (Franco Nero) congratulate themselves on a job well done – just before John McClane kills them all.

a resilient narco-fascism in that region and had bred amoral terrorists-in-uniform like Stuart.36 If the uncertainty of Mikulan and others is anything to go by, it is likely the average viewer of Die Harder gave up trying to read the film’s politics and just sat back and enjoyed the mind-boggling spectacle. If they came away with any sort of political message, it was probably, again, that terrorism was a byword for violent criminality and that the world needed gun-toting, ‘freedom-loving’, individualistic heroes like John McClane to ‘rub it out’. Whether or not people agreed with this message, Die Harder did excellent business. Industry experts calculated that sequels would usually make about 65 per cent of an original film’s profits but Die Harder made a $100 million more than its predecessor. The film broke box-office records in such diverse locations as Britain, Taiwan, Puerto Rico and New Zealand and made a total of $240 million worldwide.37 Die Harder’s success helped usher in a revival of airline-themed disaster films in the 1990s, most of which – like Passenger 57 (Kevin Hooks, 1992) and the afore-mentioned Air Force One and Executive Decision – centred on terrorism.38 In the five years that elapsed between Die Harder and Die Hard With A Vengeance, released in May 1995, the spectre of terrorism had grown all the more real in the minds of many Americans. In 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed, thus ridding the United States of its chief ideological enemy but, according to many observers, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=diehard2.htm (18 July 2012);‘First International Openings Blowing Box Office Records Sky High!’, Variety, 22 August 1992. 38 On Passenger 57 see Ben Thompson, ‘Passenger 57’, Sight & Sound, 3, 6, June 1993, 62–63. 37

174

Serial Killers

creating a more disorderly and dangerous international system in the process. Hollywood soon identified the threat posed by terrorists emerging from the former Eastern bloc, often armed with stolen nuclear weapons.39 In February 1993, two Arabs linked to a little known group called al-Qaeda succeeding in bombing New York’s World Trade Centre, killing six people. In April 1995, an American militia movement sympathizer, Timothy McVeigh, bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, claiming 168 lives. This was the most deadly act of domestic terrorism in US history.40 Each of these acts of terrorism was carried out for a variety of political and personal reasons, but the Die Hard series would persist in telling its viewers that terrorists essentially were psychopathic criminals. The initial idea for the third Die Hard instalment imagined bomb-smuggling terrorists seizing a Caribbean cruise ship on which John McClane was vacationing with his wife. Loosely based on the Palestinian hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985, the idea was dropped after the runaway success of Andrew Davis’ action thriller about a hijacked US Navy battleship, Under Siege, starring Steven Segal, in 1992.41 The subsequent decision to set the next Die Hard in New York instead allowed viewers to see McClane at work in his own backyard and in an iconic city that had recently suffered a real-life terrorist atrocity. Having seen terrorism hit America’s West Coast and Washington DC in the first two Die Hard episodes, setting the third on the East Coast also spread the threat nationwide. Die Hard With A Vengeance again partnered Bruce Willis with John McTiernan, fresh from directing Arnold Schwarzenegger in the action-fantasy Last Action Hero (1993). Vengeance was co-produced by Twentieth Century Fox and Cinergi Pictures, a relatively new company whose founder, Andrew Vajna, funded some of the most successful action blockbusters of the era, including the Rambo trilogy. The budget for Vengeance’s was an enormous $90 million, $20 million more than Die Harder.42 This helped pay for a much stronger supporting cast than the first two movies. It also allowed the crew to make the terrorist attacks on New York look as spectacularly authentic as possible, attacks that were further enhanced by location deals with the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan and the New York State Armoury in Brooklyn. Through the 1990s, these films included Firehawk (Paul Levine, 1995), Air Force One (Wolfgang Petersen, 1997), Airboss (Christian Ingvordsen, 1997), The Jackal (Michael Caton-Jones, 1997), Counter Measures: Crash Dive 2 (Ed Raymond, 1997), Fallout (Rodney MacDonald, 1998), Diplomatic Siege (Gustavo GraefMarino, 1999) and Quarantine (Chuck Bowman, 1999). Cettl, American Cinema, 129, 18–19, 19–20, 162–163, 79, 123, 110–111, 218–219. 40 On the 1993 and 1995 bombings, see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006) and Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Harper, 2001). 41 Andy Marx and Claudia Eller, ‘Trio Drive “Die Hard 3” Bargain’, Variety, 17 September 1992, 1, 19; Jeffrey Wells, ‘Off-Centrepiece’, Los Angeles Times, 1 November 1992. The Achille Lauro hijacking was later turned into a telemovie, Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair (Alberto Negrin, 1990). Cettl, American Cinema, 280–281. 42 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=diehardwithavengeance.htm (18 July 2012). 39

175

Cinematic Terror

General Dynamics, one of the largest defence contractors in the United States, provided logistical help, the costs of which were offset by product placement deals with the likes of the Wall Street Journal. Not everyone in the Big Apple welcomed Vengeance, however. Bloomingdales considered McTiernan’s idea of shooting a bombing scene in its flagship store on Lexington Avenue positively reckless.43 Die Hard With A Vengeance was scripted by Jonathan Hensleigh, writer or producer of some of Hollywood’s biggest action-disaster movies of the 1990s. In 1992, Hensleigh had written a spec-script action-adventure story about a New York policeman ordered around Manhattan in a bizarre, deadly game of ‘Simon Says’ by a psychopathic criminal blowing up the city. After the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, Cinergi hired Hensleigh to turn his story into the basis of a Die Hard film. Hensleigh converted the madman into Simon Gruber, who singles out John McClane because he wants revenge for the death of his brother, Hans, in Los Angeles five years earlier. Simon’s desire for retribution is slowly shown to be a smokescreen for a heist of gold bullion held at the US Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street.44 Once again, in true movie formula fashion, Die Hard With A Vengeance upped the ante. In the first two Die Hard instalments, McClane had been forced to battle terrorists to save his wife. In Vengeance, however, he has to save his surrogate family, a whole city, which Simon Gruber is effectively holding hostage. Garish posters for the film showed McClane standing in front of a Manhattan in flames.45 Frighteningly authentic yet inventive bomb explosions rip through New York from the very first scene. As was the case with the original Die Hard, McClane’s sidekick is an AfricanAmerican – in this case a cool Harlem shopkeeper played by Samuel L. Jackson – thus allowing white and black to unite against the common terrorist enemy.46 Yet again, just like in the first Die Hard, we eventually see that the terrorists are using the public’s and authorities’ fear of terrorism for purely personal gain, as a distracting tactic to cover a robbery. Simon Gruber is not only played, like his brother Hans was, by a snobbish-sounding European (Jeremy Irons), but also issues the Crew and Location Files, undated, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Buzz Feitshans Collection, AMPAS; Pamela Thur to Bart Sotnick at the Federal Reserve Bank, 29 April 1994, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Robert Lerner Collection, AMPAS; George Manasse to Michael Tadross, Status Report, 1 September 1994, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Lerner Collection, AMPAS; Susan Sherman to Nancy Briggs at the Wall Street Journal, 14 September 1994, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Lerner Collection, AMPAS; Jack De Govia to Michael Tadross, ‘Jack-o-Gram’, 30 August 1994, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Lerner Collection, AMPAS; Jay L. Monitz to Pamela Thur, ‘Re: Bloomingdales’, 27 June 1994, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Lerner Collection, AMPAS. 44 Jonathan Hensleigh, Commentary, Die Hard With A Vengeance DVD (FG-OGB 3633801000, Fox Home Entertainment, 2006). 45 Advertisement for Die Hard With A Vengeance, Movieline, June 1995, unpaged. 46 ‘We should be more creative with our bombs – stay away from bombs in black boxes’, was the advice given to the scriptwriter and director by Cinergi Development early on in the production’s early stages. This advice and treatments by Hensleigh emphasized the need to make the film as spectacular as possible. See Die Hard III, Cinergi Development to Andy, ‘Rough notes on Simon Says’, 8 December 1993, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Feitshans Collection, AMPAS, and Jonathan Hensleigh, Die Hard 3 Treatment, 12 January 1994, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Feitshans Collection, AMPAS. 43

176

Serial Killers

Figure 9.3  Die Hard With A Vengeance: The counterterrorist dream team – Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) and John McClane take a call from Simon Gruber.

same pseudo-Marxist statements to the press. These, together with his having been a colonel in the East German Army and a target of the Israeli intelligence service, mark Gruber out as an enemy of Western democracy and, ipso facto, a terrorist.47 Ultimately Gruber and his terrorist associates are proven to be plain killers. They murder policeman dressed as policemen, create carnage in shopping precincts and derail a speeding subway train. The massive bomb they plant in a school turns out to be a fake but it still terrifies everyone. In contrast with Die Harder, few people seem to have come away from Die Hard With A Vengeance in any way puzzled by its message. What we got instead were conflicting views on that message and, more valuably for us, on the perceived relationship between real-life terrorism and that projected on screen. These views were heightened by the release of Vengeance within a month of the Oklahoma City bombing. One Californian college student had no time for those who argued Vengeance was cynically insensitive at a time of national grief. The film was not ‘upsetting’, she argued, ‘because everybody realises “Die Hard” is just Hollywood fantasy’. A software engineer who had watched the movie in the same theatre that night felt rather differently, however. To him, the shock of the recent terrorist attacks in the United States sharpened Vengeance’s warning. ‘I think the Oklahoma City and World Trade Centre bombings intensify a movie like “Die Hard” ’, he said. ‘They make it seem more realistic.’48

Early drafts contained a lot more political information, including about Gruber, than in the final film. See, for instance, Jonathan Hensleigh, ‘Die Hard/New York’, 2nd Yellow Revised Script, 7 October 1994, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Lerner Collection, AMPAS. 48 Gary Robbins, ‘Real Life Doesn’t Deter Die Hard Fans’, Orange County Register, 21 May 1995. 47

177

Cinematic Terror

On the other side of the United States, in New York City itself, came hints of exasperation with the whole Die Hard series’ take on terrorism. The leader of New York City’s Department of Education could not understand why the Mayor’s Office had permitted McTiernan’s crew to film inside one of the local schools. To him, a film that ‘glorified violence’ was the very last sort of thing with which schools and students should be associated. In a similar vein, one Manhattan resident expressed dismay at seeing audience members at a showing of Vengeance cheer as the bombs exploded on screen. ‘I prayed for a society gone mad’, his letter to the Village Voice concluded.49 Notwithstanding these condemnations, Vengeance made over $100 million in the United States alone and another $266 million overseas.50 This made it easily the most successful Die Hard so far commercially and helped encourage something of a trend in Hollywood terrorism films set in or around New York in the mid- to late 1990s.51 The most absorbing, and prescient, of these was Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1998), in which Bruce Willis played an over-zealous military chief who interns and tortures the city’s Muslims in response to a spate of Islamist suicide attacks. The Siege caused uproar in the United States and prompted one radical Islamist group to bomb a Planet Hollywood restaurant in South Africa owing to Willis’ investments in the company. For a brief period following al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 2001, The Siege became one of the most rented movies in the United States.52 In many respects, 9/11 ought to have made a relic of John McClane. His ability to survive the frightening arrival of real-life, religiously inspired, mass-casualty terrorism on US soil testifies not only to the malleability of the Die Hard franchise but also to the durability of the terrorist-as-criminal trope in American discourse. This was reflected in the very language that President George W. Bush used in the days after 9/11, when, reprising cinematic tough guys of yore, he compared al-Qaeda’s ringleaders to outlaws who were wanted ‘dead or alive’.53 McClane returned for the

‘Filming at School Displeases Cortines’, New York Times, 9 June 1995; Richard M. Morse, Letter to Editor, Village Voice, 6 June 1995. 50 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=diehardwithavengeance.htm (18 July 2012). The film even did well in Oklahoma City. Robert W. Welkos, ‘Latest “Die Hard” One-Ups “Die Hard 2” ’, Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1995. 51 See, for instance, Crash Dive (Andrew Stevens, 1996), Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997) and Crossfire (Gary Lipsky/Joe Zimmerman, 1998). Cettl, American Cinema, 81–82, 206, 83. 52 Karin Williams and John Downing, ‘Mediating Terrorism: Text and Protest in Interpretations of The Siege’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19, 4, December 2002, 419–437; Prince, Firestorm, 56–64; ‘Journalist Lawrence Wright’s “Trip to Al-Qaeda” ’, National Public Radio, 7 September 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=129697986 (18 July 2012); ‘Reporting the Bin Laden Beat’, CBS News, 10 September 2007, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-3244713. html (30 May 2013). 53 ‘Bush: Bin Laden Wanted “Dead or Alive” ’, CNN US, 17 September 2001, http://articles.cnn.com/2001 -09-17/us/bush.powell.terrorism_1_bin-qaeda-terrorist-attacks?_s=PM:US (18 July 2012). 49

178

Serial Killers

fourth time in 2007. Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard – a title that resonated with the Bush administration’s ‘global war on terror’ rhetoric – kept up with its mighty predecessors at the box office, making $383 million worldwide.54 Die Hard 4.0 has an intriguing back story. In 1997, the British journalist John Carlin wrote a speculative but influential article titled ‘A Farewell to Arms’ in the technology magazine Wired, which argued that cyber warfare was completely transforming the battlefield and making small guerrilla forces and terrorist groups as formidable as large conventional armies. Inspired by Carlin’s article, David Marconi, the writer of Tony Scott’s 1998 spy thriller hit Enemy of the State, penned a script titled ‘WW3.com’ about a cyber-terrorist attack on the United States. The attack depicted a three-stage ‘fire sale’: a coordinated assault on the country’s transportation, telecommunications, financial and utilities infrastructure systems which involved, of all things, flying a jumbo jet into Manhattan by remote control. ‘WW3.com’ initially attracted interest in Hollywood but soon disappeared, perhaps for obvious reasons, after 9/11. Several years later, ‘WW3.com’ was resurrected as the basis for Die Hard 4.0 by the writer Mark Bomback, director Len Wiseman and producer-actor Bruce Willis. Twentieth Century Fox, again, provided finance.55 The makers of Die Hard 4.0 had to confront the fact that much of the movie’s target audience was not even born when John McTiernan’s original hit appeared in 1988. Set against this was the knowledge that a new generation of fans had adopted the Die Hard franchise through home videos and video games.56 Some of these fans liked to compare John McClane with Jack Bauer, the ultra-violent counterterrorist hero played by Kiefer Sutherland in the long-running Fox Television series 24.57 Adverts for Die Hard 4.0 played strongly on the ‘mythical’ status the Die Hard series had achieved over the past two decades. This, plus the thirty-four-year-old Wiseman’s admission that he had been ‘obsessed’ with Die Hard in high school, suggested that the fourth instalment in the series would not differ significantly from the others despite the full twelve years that had passed since Die Hard With A Vengeance.58 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=diehard4.htm (18 July 2012). http://web.archive.org/web/20080605194811/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue175/news.html (18 July 2012); Kenneth Turan, ‘Willis Saves the Day’, Los Angeles Times, 27 June 2007, E1, E10; Scott Foundas, ‘Die Hardest’, LA Weekly, 29 June 2007; Michael Cieply, ‘Action Hero Breaks Summer’s Fantasy Spell’, The New York Times, 23 May 2007, E1, E6. 56 Pamela McClintock, ‘Fox Rolls “Die” into Summer Sked’, Variety, 3 August 2006, 3, 6. Activision released its first Die Hard video games for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Commodore 64 in 1990–1991. Later games included Die Hard Arcade (1996), Die Hard Trilogy (1996), Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas (2000), Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza (2002) and Die Hard: Vendetta (2002). See Geoff King, ‘Die Hard/ Try Harder: Narrative, Spectacle and Beyond, from Hollywood to Videogame’, in Geoff King and Tanya Kryzwinska (eds.), Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (London: Wallflower, 2002), 50–65. 57 Pat Brereton and Eileen Culloty, ‘Post-9/11 Counterterrorism in Popular Culture: The Spectacle and Reception of The Bourne Ultimatum and 24’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5, 3, December 2012, 492. 58 Die Hard 4.0 production notes and press kit, 2, 6, Die Hard 4.0 Core Files, AMPAS; Susan King, ‘From Fan Boy to Sequel Maker’, Los Angeles Times, 25 June 2007. 54 55

179

Cinematic Terror

In fact, Die Hard 4.0 returns to the theme of treachery that stood at the heart of Die Harder. This comes in the shape of the ice-cold Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Oliphant), an embittered and greedy former US Defence Department employee, who is aided by various foreigners ranging from a female Asian assassin (Hong Kong-based action star Maggie Q) to a European muscleman (French action star Cyril Raffaelli). Die Hard 4.0 takes the growing terrorist threat to the United States depicted in successive Die Hard movies to its logical conclusion. Gabriel’s ‘fire sale’ is not designed to rob a corporation or a city’s financial district. Fitting in with the post-9/11 climate of fear and conspiracy,59 it is aimed to bring down the entire country. Gabriel and his new breed of ‘virtual terrorists’ – or ‘computer creeps’ as McClane calls them – want to show the American people how dependent society has become on computers and yet how undervalued ‘geeks’ like them are. After 9/11, Gabriel was fired and his reputation ruined when he had tried to sound the alarm about America’s vulnerability to cyber-warfare. Gabriel now wants revenge and the option of either siphoning off billions of dollars for himself from the US economy or destroying that economy and sending the United States back to the Stone Age. To prevent McClane and a gifted young computer programmer, Matt (Justin Long), from ruining his plans, Gabriel kidnaps the detective’s estranged daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and hacks into the Pentagon’s mainframe to order a US Air Force pilot to attack McClane because he is a terrorist. By the end of this triedand-tested action-fest, which cost $110 million to make, all of the villains are dead and, much to McClane’s displeasure, Matt and Lucy are taking a romantic interest in each other. Some commentators accused Die Hard 4.0 of timidly avoiding the contemporary reality of terrorism and of acting almost as though 9/11 had not happened.60 This is true to an extent; it is noticeable, for example, that ‘WW3.com’s sequence depicting a jet crashing into Manhattan did not reach the screen. That said, Die Hard 4.0 is chock-full of the day-to-day anxieties and security procedures Americans had grown used to since September 2001 – Federal Aviation Authority alerts, anthrax alarms, Department of Homeland Security warnings, and so on. One scene, described as ‘truly chilling’ by one critic, surely evoked powerful memories of 9/11 in many viewers’ minds. This was a simulated explosion of the White House, broadcast by the terrorist hackers on every one of the nation’s television channels.61 Redolent of Karl In filmic terms, the most powerful illustration of the popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theory is Dylan Avery’s Loose Change. This was a series of films released between 2005 and 2009 on the Internet which argued that the 11 September 2001 attacks were planned and conducted by elements within the US government. Loose Change posited that the government’s master plan – rather like Hans Gruber’s in Die Hard – was to steal billions in gold from a repository located under the World Trade Centre, http://www.loosechange911.com/ (18 July 2012); Alex Cox, ‘D.I.Y. Debunkers’, Film Comment, 42, 6, November–December 2006, 9. 60 Todd McCarthy, ‘Live Free or Die Hard’, Variety, 26 June 2007, 4, 27; Stuart Klawans, ‘Boys (and Girls) of Summer’, Nation, 30 July 2007. 61 Caryn Jones, ‘An Old-Fashioned Movie About a New Form of Torture’, New York Times, 3 July 2007. 59

180

Serial Killers

Verloc’s Piccadilly Circus dream in Hitchcock’s Sabotage and a shocking sequence in Roland Emmerich’s 1996 alien invasion blockbuster Independence Day, this scene helps establish Die Hard 4.0’s firmly authoritarian stance, especially when the film is compared with others from this era that questioned the Bush administration’s war on terror, like Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) and Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007). For this and other reasons, many commentators classed Die Hard 4.0 as the most reactionary instalment of Die Hard to date.62

Figure 9.4  Die Hard 4.0: 9/11 meets Independence Day – Millions across America watch the White House seemingly getting blown to pieces.

On 31 January 2013, Twentieth Century Fox paid tribute to the 25th anniversary of the Die Hard franchise by unveiling a gigantic mural of a scene from the original 1988 movie on Soundstage 8 of the studio’s lot in Los Angeles. Immediately after these celebrations, guests were treated to the premiere of number five in the series, A Good Day to Die Hard. Work on A Good Day had started back in 2011, soon after the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The script was written by Skip Woods, who was best known for Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001), a crime thriller that endorsed US vengeance operations against foreign terrorists. The director was Irishman John Moore, whose four previous films for Fox included the noir actioner Max Payne (2009).63

Cettl, American Cinema, 109, 223–224, 252–254. On 9/11, many witnesses and commentators had invoked Independence Day, which also depicted Manhattan getting flattened. Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 2. 63 http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/awesome_of_the_day/2013/02/fox-unveils-gigantic-die-hardmural.html (13 May 2013); Chris Hewitt, ‘John Moore Talks A Good Day to Die Hard’, http://www. empireonline.com/interviews/interview.asp?IID=1638 (13 May 2013); Prince, Firestorm, 40–41. 62

181

Cinematic Terror

As its tagline ‘Yippee Ki-Yay, Mother Russia’ suggested, A Good Day stood out for being the first Die Hard to be set outside the United States. One of Woods’ original ideas had centred on John McClane travelling to Afghanistan to help his son, a US Special Forces soldier, destroy an Islamist terror plot. Presumably part of the reason why this was dropped was because of the growing opposition to the West’s increasingly strife-torn ten-year war in Afghanistan and Hollywood’s unwillingness, like with the Vietnam War in the 1960s, to scratch at an open wound.64 In A Good Day, McClane (Bruce Willis again) travels instead to Moscow, where he ends up helping his CIAagent son Jack prevent gangster-terrorists from pulling off a nuclear weapons heist. This was the first time in the series that McClane’s imperilled relative had doubled as his sidekick, thus giving viewers the added pleasure of comparing the fifty-sevenyear-old Willis’ brawn and ingenuity with that of the younger, hunky Australian actor Jai Courtney. McClane had never before teamed up with America’s security services either – a hint perhaps that lone heroes were increasingly obsolete in the global war on terror. Ever since the end of the Cold War, as we saw earlier, the former Soviet Union had been one of Hollywood’s favourite breeding grounds for nuclear terrorists. The threat envisioned in A Good Day would therefore have been instantly recognizable to many cinemagoers. For patriotic American viewers, it might have been especially pleasing to watch the McClanes defeat Russian terrorists in Russia itself and without any help from the Kremlin. A Good Day’s plot also had echoes of the ‘new Cold War’ between Washington and Moscow, one characterized by allegations of espionage and arguments over what to do about ‘rogue’ nuclear-cum-terrorist states like Iran. A Good Day paints a lurid picture of contemporary Russia, in which scheming oligarchs, corrupt politicians and terrorists are effectively all in bed together. The movie’s explosive denouement at Chernobyl in Ukraine, scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986, not only revives the spectre of bad old Cold War days but also tells us that Russia needs saving from its own worst enemies, lest they lay waste to that country and to the rest of the world. A Good Day to Die Hard illustrates nicely what so much of global, blockbusting cinematic terrorism amounted to in the second decade of the twenty first century. The $92-million movie was not shot in Hollywood but in Hungary, where Budapest could stand in for Moscow and Twentieth Century Fox could save money via cheaper labour and lower overheads. The film’s exotic, European locale and cast marked it out Chris Hewitt, ‘John Moore Talks A Good Day to Die Hard’, http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/ interview.asp?IID=1638 (13 May 2013). Among the few American-made films about the war in Afghanistan are Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, 2007), Brothers (Jim Sheridan, 2009), The Tillman Story (Amir Bar-Lev, 2010), Restrepo (Tim Hetherington/Sebastian Yunger, 2010) and Hell and Back Again (Danfung Dennis, 2011). See Cettl, American Cinema; Justin Chang, ‘Brothers’, Variety, 30 November 2009, 34; Harvey Dennis, ‘The Tillman Story’, Variety, 15 February 2010, 28–29; John Anderson, ‘Restrepo’, Variety, 8 February 2010, 44; Hannah McGill, ‘Hell and Back Again’, Sight & Sound, 21, 11, November 2011, 62. On the near invisibility of the Vietnam War on American screens in the 1960s see Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, Chapter 7. 64

182

Serial Killers

Figure 9.5  A Good Day to Die Hard: After preventing a nuclear disaster in Russia, the

veteran John McClane and his son Jack (Jai Courtney) return to the United States. John’s daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) welcomes the heroes home.

as a product that was aimed squarely at the international market, as did the fact that it opened in Asia before the United States. The movie’s long, spectacular, CGI-enhanced set-pieces underlined once again the importance attached to action more than plot. And politics ran alongside commerce – a new song by The Rolling Stones, ‘Doom and Gloom’, plays over the credits. In contrast with its predecessors, critics unanimously panned A Good Day. ‘For anyone who remembers the “Die Hard” adventures at their vital and exciting best’, wrote Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal, ‘this film feels like a near-death experience’. ‘The movie is constructed like a window some kid broke and then tried to glue back together’, opined Alan Scherstuhl in the Village Voice.65 Despite this, A Good Day still did excellent business. Within three months of its release, the film had made $67 million in the US and further $235 elsewhere.66 In the annals of cinematic terrorism, the 1980s and 1990s might be classed as the age of the American spectacular. This was the era in which Hollywood re-asserted its commercial pre-eminence and set the agenda of cinematic terrorism through blockbuster stories of freedom-loving heroes battling murderous ‘terr-extortionists’. In their repeated depictions of terrorist threats, predominantly set in the United States, the Die Hard films, together with their critical and popular reception, offer a valuable window into changing American perceptions of political violence over the past thirty years. As a franchise, the films display the nuts-and-bolts machinery For critics’ comments, see http://www.metacritic.com/movie/a-good-day-to-die-hard (13 May 2013). http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=diehard5.htm (13 May 2013).

65 66

183

Cinematic Terror

of a commercial industry that earned extraordinary profits from the spectacle of a kind of violence that was deplored in virtually every other sector of American public discourse. As the previous chapter focusing on Operation Thunderbolt showed, the form that terrorism takes in the spectacular action film is largely determined by the demands of the genre. This is not to deny that outside agencies and influences might at times also play their part. Unlike Operation Thunderbolt, however, there is no evidence that officialdom had any role in the making of the Die Hard series. Scriptwriters, directors and producers were of course influenced by the wider political climate but other than that they crafted the five films along purely commercial lines. The heavy or overtly political content of original source materials – books and spec-scripts – was changed or reduced not due to censors (like with Sabotage) or government (like with Exodus). That political content was modified because it was calculated that depicting terrorists as criminals instead would be more entertaining and in turn make more money. They were proved right. Yet even if it did put profit before propaganda, it would be wrong to dismiss the Die Hard series as merely – in John McTiernan’s own words – ‘escapist froth’.67 For, the bottom line is that not only were the movies first-class entertainment for the masses, they also provided a compellingly plausible guide to understanding contemporary terrorism. Each film depicted terrorism as evil, exotic criminality. Each suggested that all terrorist actions had venal motivations and that all of those actions had to be dealt with by force. This template looked to have great validity in the 1980s, when successive US governments were waging ‘wars’ on terrorism, crime and drugs. It was equally captivating in the 1990s, when international and home-grown terrorism appeared to thrive on post-Cold War instability. It was particularly intoxicating after September 2001, when the global war on terror often reduced the complexities of international politics to a conflict between good and evil.

John McTiernan, Commentary, Die Hard With A Vengeance DVD (FG-OGB 3633801000, Fox Home Entertainment, 2006). 67

184

CHAPTER 10 BOLLYWOOD’S COMMUNALISTS

It’s the music that first grabs your attention – a swirling, upbeat number called ‘Ruku Jaao’, Hindi for ‘Stop it!’ What we see on screen, however, utterly belies the bubbly soundtrack. Two groups of Hindu and Muslim men armed with machetes and knives first start hurling insults at one another across a street. We watch them from a veranda, standing alongside the frightened women and children. Seconds later, the men are hacking at one another, all part of a frenzied riot across Bombay that has turned the city’s streets into rivers of blood. A sudden change of perspective. Now we are at street level, looking at the riot through the eyes of two six-year-old twins, Kabir and Kamal, who have got separated from their parents in all the chaos. A different group of radical Hindus, some wearing bright orange scarves as masks, attack a car with Molotov cocktails. Cut to a Muslim stabbing a terrified Hindu in a nearby alley. ‘This is our city. Why are we fighting each other?’ the song intones, crosscutting to images of the leaders of Bombay’s Muslim and Hindu communities delivering hate speeches. Explosions. Fires. Hordes of young men are shot as they run towards the camera, as if we – the audience – are pulling the trigger. Another close-up of another horrified man – who knows what his religion is – being lynched by a mob. As the singing abates for a moment, we hear the screeching of tyres and follow the twin boys as they desperately try to escape the riot. They must hide again though when another set of masked men set light to a taxi. The music returns, this time louder and faster, reaching a crescendo. Cut to the inside of the taxi, as if the audience were its passengers. The orange and red flames lick at the windows as the screaming women in burqas inside try to smash themselves free. It’s obvious they have no chance, however. The men who have attacked them are dancing for joy. Moments later, the taxi explodes into a fireball. The twins are in hysterics. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ the lyrics plead one last time. The centenary of cinema in the mid-1990s saw the appearance of an unprecedented number of films about terrorism, films that cut across genres, styles and national boundaries. Many of these films, as we saw Chapter 9, told their viewers that terrorists were criminal extortionists. Others, however, transmitted a quite different message. With the end of the Cold War, many political scientists argued that terrorism had undergone a paradigm shift, driven principally by the rise of religious fundamentalism.

Cinematic Terror

A ‘new terrorism’ had emerged, the experts posited, one that was motivated by divine inspiration, that believed in the transformative power of violence, that sought to bring about mass destruction, and that consequently posed an even greater threat to world order than even ‘international terrorism’ had in the 1970s.1 Cinemas across the globe registered the confluence of terrorism and religious fundamentalism like never before in the 1990s. ‘New terrorism’, in other words, brought with it what we might call a ‘new cinematic terrorism.’ This phenomenon took a variety of forms. Reference has already been made to the Israeli Menahem Golan’s vilification of Islamic militancy in cheap martial arts movies like American Ninja 4 (1991). More pensive were French films like Killer Kid (1994), a thriller made by Gilles de Maistre which told the story of a Lebanese boy sent on a terrorist mission to Paris for ‘Allah’s Army’. Perhaps better known are the Hollywood actionadventures that depicted crazed Islamists carrying out ‘mega-terrorist’ attacks on the United States, like the afore-mentioned True Lies and Executive Decision.2 Indian cinema played a vital part in identifying the dangers of religiously-inspired terrorism during the 1990s (and beyond). However, it often did so from a very different perspective than the sorts of films mentioned above. This difference is worth examining at length, not just because it gives us an opportunity to examine terrorism in Asia but because of the power of ‘Bollywood’ during this era. By the later decades of the twentieth century, the Indian film industry had grown to be the world’s largest film producer and therefore the only industry to represent a serious challenge to the global hegemony of Hollywood. Moreover, Indian movies were exported throughout Southeast Asia and to Western countries such as Britain and the United States, where Indian expatriates provided a large diasporic audience. How Bollywood treated terrorism consequently had implications far beyond India itself.3 The one film-maker who devoted more attention than any other to the relationship between religion and terrorism in India during the 1990s was the celebrated Tamil director Mani Ratnam. Between 1992 and 1998, Ratnam produced a highly influential terrorism ‘trilogy’: Roja, Bombay and From the Heart. Each of these three films dealt explicitly and exactingly with the ‘threat’ terrorism posed in contemporary India. Each challenged political orthodoxy but by using mainstream Indian film conventions, including some, like song-and-dance routines, that to Western eyes had no place in Antony Field, ‘The “New Terrorism”: Revolution or Evolution?’, Political Studies Review, 7, 2, 2009, 195–207. 2 Denis Parent, ‘Killer Kid Gilles de Maistre’, Studio Magazine, 75, 1 June 1993, 76–79; Brian Lowry, ‘True Lies’, Variety, 355, 10, 11 July 1994; Tom Tunney, ‘Executive Decision’, Sight & Sound, 6, 6, June 1996, 38–39. 3 On how the Indian film industry became a major force on the global cinema scene, see Anandam O. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (eds.), Global Bollywood (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Film (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). The term ‘Bollywood’ is used here to refer informally to the Indian film industry as a whole, centred on its chief production base in Bombay. The industry’s other bases, especially that centred on Madras, are alluded to below. 1

186

Bollywood’s Communalists

serious terrorism cinema. Each film was also a box-office hit, garnered national and international awards, and attracted intense controversy. This chapter will concentrate on Ratnam’s second major terrorism feature, Bombay. Released in 1995, Bombay was the most commercially successful of Ratnam’s trilogy and was instantly recognized as a milestone in the history of modern Indian cinema. For us, Bombay’s importance lies chiefly in its portrayal of sectarian violence and politico-religious terrorism carried out by communal groups. This distinguishes the film from our other case studies which focus on individual or small bands of terrorists. Ratnam’s point was to make a film that, as he put it, ‘speaks of the futility of violence and rioting’.4 Bombay therefore carried a very different message to other Third World films like The Battle of Algiers. Ratnam’s Bombay utterly condemned collective political violence and encouraged people to think of the dangers of religious fundamentalists using terrorism on a mass scale. India, like many countries in Southeast Asia, has a long history of terrorism. Most terrorist acts in the country have arisen from a combination of religious divisions, ethnic tensions and campaigns for secession. India’s very birth as an independent nation-state in the late 1940s gave rise to full-scale political violence between Hindus and Muslims. This led to the appalling loss of up to a million lives, including that of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, shot at point-blank range by a Hindu extremist in January 1948. From the 1950s onwards, tens of thousands were killed in the various attempts by Kashmiri militants in the north of the country to gain independence or to become part of Pakistan. In 1984, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards after combating efforts to create a Sikh homeland in the northern state of Punjab. Seven years later, in 1991, her son Rajiv was killed by a Tamil Tigers suicide bomber in response to his dispatching Indian troops to Sri Lanka when prime minister in the late 1980s.5 In the decades following independence, few Indian film-makers dared tackle the issues of terrorism and religious violence head-on. As was the case in in many other countries, directors and producers in India treated terrorism instead mainly as a subject for escapist entertainment rather than serious enquiry. This was still largely the case even in the 1980s, despite the shockwaves felt across India following Indira Gandhi’s killing. Subhash Ghai’s Kharma (1986), for example, reduced the threat to India’s religious unity to the antics of the evil Dr Dang, a foreign super-terrorist whose scheme to destabilize the nation is ultimately foiled by a gallant prison wardenturned-vigilante (played by screen colossus Dilip Kumar). Shekhar Kapur’s Mr India, the second most popular Indian film of 1987, focused on the threat posed to India’s Tim McGirk, ‘Screen Affair Has Bombay Up in Arms’, Independent (London), 8 April 1995, 12–13. Kanti P. Bajpai, Roots of Terrorism (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002); Archana Upadhyay, India’s Fragile Borderlands: The Dynamics of Terrorism in North East India (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009); Asoka Bandarage, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, Ethnicity, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2009). 4 5

187

Cinematic Terror

very existence by the insane Dr Mogambo, a terrorist armed with missiles who seems to have been modelled after Ian Fleming’s Dr No. Mogambo’s plan is thwarted by a street-walking violinist equipped with an invisibility device.6 These sorts of images testified to the socially and politically conservative nature of Indian cinema and to the Indian authorities’ long-established powers of censorship. Ever since the Cinematograph Act of 1952, all Indian producers had been obliged to obtain state censors’ certificates of clearance before films were released for public exhibition. Failure to do so attracted penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment. The states’ regulation of cinema was strengthened by clauses in the Indian constitution that restricted the media’s coverage of, among other things, matters concerning religion, security and public order. The film certification rules were partially relaxed in the mid-1980s, coinciding with the setting up of a new regulatory body, the Central Board of Film Classification (CBFC). It was these changes, together with the liberalizing tendencies of transnational media like Rupert Murdoch’s STAR TV, which helped pave the way for a small number of films in the 1990s that took an unprecedentedly close look at Indian terrorism.7 The first of these films, Roja, appeared in 1992 and catapulted Mani Ratnam to national and international fame. Roja was a thriller that grappled with the complexities of Kashmiri separatism and wider notions of Indian nationalism through the story of a scientist kidnapped by Kashmiri militants. Without supporting his actions, the film humanized the principal terrorist and questioned the idea of loyalty to state and nation at all costs. It also suggested that religious activity had the potential for manipulation, of a violent and non-violent nature. Roja was one of the most popular films in India in 1992 and 1993 and before long became a regular television fixture on Indian Independence Day.8 Five years on, Santosh Sivan made The Terrorist. Based on events surrounding the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, The Terrorist was a forthright account of a teenage girl’s preparation for a suicide bombing mission in southern India. The film was made on a much smaller budget than Roja and was shot in little over two weeks yet nonetheless Sumita S. Chakravarty, ‘Fragmenting the Nation: Images of Terrorism in Indian Popular Cinema’, in J. David Slocum (ed.), Terrorism, Media, Liberation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 232–247; ‘Bollywood Bites the Bullet’, Times of India, 21 August 2010, http://articles.timesofindia. indiatimes.com/2010-08-21/news-interviews/28301627_1_hindi-films-kashmir-cinematic-imagination (22 September 2012). 7 Nandana Bose, ‘ “We Do Not Certify Backwards”: Film Censorship in Postcolonial India’, in Daniel Biltereyst and Roel Vande Winkel (eds.), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 191–206; Jonathan Green and Nicholas J. Karolides, Encyclopedia of Censorship (New York: Facts on File, 2005), 274–276; Nandana Bose, ‘The Hindu Right and the Politics of Censorship: Three Case Studies of Policing Hindi Cinema, 1992–2002’, Velvet Light Trap, 63, Spring 2009, 22–33. STAR TV was one of a number of foreign and private television channels established in India in the early 1990s that ended decades of monopoly by the state channel, Doordarshan. 8 Rachel Dwyer, 100 Bollywood Films (London: BFI, 2005), 51–52; Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘The Home and the Nation: Consuming Politics and Culture in Roja’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds.), The Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 161–185. 6

188

Bollywood’s Communalists

won several awards, principally for following the girl’s point of view throughout, for giving political and religious extremism a human face, and for refusing to cast judgement on the terrorist’s cause. Unlike most terrorism films, The Terrorist chose not to rely on action and showed very little violence. Like The Battle of Algiers, it used mostly non-actors and was acclaimed as both philosophically penetrating and visually breath-taking.9 A year later, in 1998, Ratnam’s From the Heart focused on a similar theme but this time relocated to India’s troubled North Eastern states. Via a love a story set during the fiftieth anniversary of India and Pakistan’s independence, Ratnam challenged prevailing views on terrorism by depicting atrocities carried out by India’s armed forces and highlighting the bravery of those willing to die for their militant cause. From the Heart shockingly climaxed with the suicide of the main protagonists and suggested that government indifference was contributing to the growth of terrorist activities on India’s periphery. From the Heart was exceptionally popular in Southeast Asia and broke Hindi movie box-office records in Britain.10 Produced amid these ground-breaking films, Bombay differs from them in two significant ways. The first is location. As the title suggests, Bombay focuses attention not on terrorism in India’s outlying regions but in its commercial capital. By the early 1990s, Bombay was fast emerging as the prime site of terrorist attacks in India, carried out mainly by Islamic militants looking to direct their campaigns closer to India’s centres of financial, cultural and political power. In one such attack on 12 March 1993, more than 250 people were killed when fifteen bombs exploded across the city. Black Saturday, as it became known, was followed by a string of terrorist outrages throughout the 1990s and on into the twenty-first century. This includes the killing of 165 people in November 2008 by Islamic militants belonging to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group. This attack began, and was captured on film, at one of the city’s most famous sites, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A relic of India’s colonial past, the railway station would also feature prominently in Ratnam’s Bombay.11 More importantly than this, however, Bombay looks at the nature of communal political violence and in so doing extends and challenges conventional definitions of terrorism. Ratnam wants to show us that when sectarianism combines with religious bigotry, the effect can be more deadly than orthodox, politically directed terrorism because it involves many more people. Terrorism is not the monopoly of small, dedicated groups of activists, in his view. It is also carried out by the mob, often at Mike Dillon, ‘ “Patriotism and Valour Are in Your Blood”: Necropolitical Subjectivities in The Terrorist (1999)’, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 1, 2, 2009, 209–226; Paramjit Rai, ‘The Terrorist’, Sight & Sound, 11, 5, May 2001, 58–59. 10 Gautam Padmanabhan, ‘Straight From the Heart’, Asian Age (Delhi), 3 October 1998, 23; Cary Rajinder Sawhney, ‘Dil Se/From the Heart’, Sight & Sound, 9, 1, 1998, 44. 11 S. Hussain Zaidi, Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002); Vir Sanghvi, 26/11: The Attack on Mumbai (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009); Andrew Buncombe and Hanna Ingber Win, ‘Terror Returns to Mumbai as Bomb Blasts Kill at Least 20 People’, Independent (London), 14 July 2011, 21. 9

189

Cinematic Terror

the behest of or in contrivance with community or religious leaders. Terrorism in this context is more than mere anarchy or blind, knee-jerk retaliatory violence; it is a policy or weapon designed to instil fear among the ‘other’ community as well as to kill and maim. Interpreting terrorism in this way – accusing whole religious communities of conducting it – helps explain why Bombay caused so much consternation both in India and elsewhere. One of the key themes to have emerged from our study thus far is the greater ability of industry outsiders to push back the boundaries of cinematic terrorism. Like Gillo Pontecorvo, Constantin Costa-Gavras and Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, Mani Ratnam was an unorthodox film industry figure. Ratnam’s base was not Bombay, the centre of Hindi cinema, but Madras, capital of the Tamil film industry. With a degree in commerce from Bombay, in the early 1980s Ratnam was destined for a career in management until his elder brother, the film producer G. Venkateshwaran, persuaded him to try his hand at film-making. After the remarkable success of Roja in 1992, which was partly bankrolled, like many of his projects, by Venkateshwaran, Ratnam launched Aalayam Productions with his friend, the producer S. Sriram. The establishment of Aalayam gave Ratnam greater autonomy and laid the foundations for him to become one of India’s most versatile directors over the next decade, renowned at home and abroad as a master of sweeping epics with political themes.12 Despite his nineties terrorism trilogy, it would be wrong to label Ratnam a political film-maker in the mould of a Pontecorvo or Costa-Gavras. Ratnam had no overarching ideological goals and was not the sort of film-maker who felt it necessary to put social and political messages before entertainment. Ratnam was nonetheless a patriot. Born and raised a Hindu, his main hope was for an increasingly secular and cosmopolitan India, one that would blend a healthy respect for tradition with a strong desire for modernization. By the early 1990s, the one city that Ratnam and many others believed was well on the road to realizing this hope was Bombay. However, this all changed with the tumultuous events that took place in that city in the winter of 1992–1993.13 The events in question were triggered a thousand miles away in the ancient city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh on 6 December 1992. Ever since its founding in 1980, the Hindu nationalist BJP party had been campaigning vociferously for a temple to be built at the God-king Rama’s purported birthplace in Ayodhya, despite the fact that the site had been occupied for over 400 years by one of India’s most venerated mosques, the Babri Masjid. This campaign came to a head in early December 1992, when a vast crowd of Hindus that had gathered for a religious ceremony on the sacred site destroyed the mosque. The attack provoked outrage among Indian Muslims (who constituted roughly 12 per cent of the country’s population) and weeks of C. Aravind, ‘Ratnam Has the Courage to Voice His Convictions’, Asian Age (Delhi), 8 April 1995, 14; Lalitha Gopalan, Bombay (London: BFI, 2005), 13–14. 13 Gopalan, Bombay, 15. 12

190

Bollywood’s Communalists

inter-communal rioting followed. The riots that took place in Bombay were by far the worst in the country, leaving up to 900 people dead and over $3 billion’s worth of damaged property. Never before had Bombay’s communities been so polarized. The subsequent blasts on Black Saturday – still today the most destructive bombings in Indian history – utterly shattered Bombay’s reputation as India’s beacon of secular, integrationist modernity.14 Although a small number of intrepid documentary makers had deployed their cameras to record the Bombay riots at first hand in December 1992 and January 1993, most Indian film-makers considered the events taboo soon afterwards. To rescreen the riots – either using real footage or fictionally – risked reigniting tensions and incurring the wrath of the authorities. Ratnam’s decision in late 1993 to write and direct a feature film about the riots was consequently bold in the extreme and a measure of how much they had shocked him personally. Equally bold was Ratnam’s decision to set the film around the love affair between a Hindu and a Muslim, another, long-time taboo subject in Indian cinema. These were decisions the director nearly paid for with his life.15 Most Indian films in the 1990s, like now, were produced in a matter of weeks rather than months. In contrast, Bombay was more than a year in the making, mainly due to Ratnam’s efforts to recreate actual riot episodes and to blend these into a romantic storyline with sumptuous song-and-dance numbers that would help the film appeal to mainstream audiences. In late 1993, Ratnam spent time in Bombay, soaking up the city’s febrile atmosphere and learning about the magnitude of the riots from those who had actually experienced them. These included film-maker and social activist Alyque Padamsee and residents of Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, which had seen some of the most extreme violence. Ratnam also met with Dileep Padgaonkar, a journalist whose detailed accounts of the riots informed the official inquiry into the riots and who served as a model for the character of Shekhar in Bombay.16 During the actual production of Bombay, Ratnam spent a week shooting in the city itself, capturing close-ups of famous sites and distance shots of the heaving, monsoon-swept metropolis. After this, however, the whole production shifted 800 miles south, to Madras. Working at a safer distance and on home territory enabled Ratnam to exercise greater control of the project. It also meant he could construct an elaborate set for the all-important riot scenes relatively cheaply, on the grounds of an old Campa Cola drinks factory in the seedy, rundown neighbourhood of Guindy. For many interior shots, Ratnam chose an abandoned apartment building in a more salubrious part of Madras, the Express Estates. The beautiful Indo-Sarcenic architecture in the Express Estates, with its tall columns and high ceilings, conflicted Meena Menon, Riots and After in Mumbai: Chronicles of Truth and Reconciliation (New Delhi: Sage, 2012). Gopalan, Bombay, 15, 24. 16 Gopalan, Bombay, 17; Clarence Fernandez, ‘Muslims to Protest Against Bombay on Opening Day’, Asian Age (Delhi), 6 April 1995, 5; Ishara Bhasi, ‘Terrorism From a Director’s Angle’, Asian Age (Delhi), 25 November 2000, 5. 14

15

191

Cinematic Terror

starkly with Guindy’s dingy dereliction. These contrasting images were a feast for the audiences’ eyes and alluded to the role that inequalities in wealth in India played in causing the riots of 1992–1993.17 As one of his country’s most respected directors, Ratnam had access to the cream of India’s cinematic talent. His name also helped overcome doubts the cast and crew had about participating in what would inevitably be a provocative, even dangerous production. Ratnam chose two Hindus, Arvind Swamy and Manisha Koirala, to play the lead roles, partly in order to offset inevitable criticisms of Bombay’s portrayal of a mixed Hindu-Muslim marriage. A. R. Rahman, a prolific composer and songwriter known in the West as ‘the Mozart of Madras’, wrote the score. The former television commercial maker Rajiv Menon was the cinematographer. Menon wanted to convey what he called ‘a heightened sense of reality’ of the Bombay riots, one in which the violence would be horrifying yet also ‘stunning and beautiful’. His model was – improbably perhaps – Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.18 Bombay was ready for release in December 1994 but its opening was delayed for several months due to a complicated series of toing-and-froing involving the CBFC, censors in Madras and Bombay, protests from communal group leaders, instructions from the police, and even advice from the Home Ministry in India’s capital New Delhi. Ratnam was told by the police that India was simply not ready for a Hindu-Muslim romance and indeed might not be for another ten years. He was also reminded of a recent declaration by the Indian Supreme Court that cinema had a ‘unique capacity to disturb and arouse feelings’, especially among the ill-educated masses. Many commentators argued that the CBFC’s decision to treat the police and politicians as proxy censors was pusillanimous and unconstitutional.19 While Ratnam was able to parry the police and others’ broad objections to his portrayal of a cross-denominational relationship, the director felt he had no choice but to edit several sections of Bombay. These included references to the disproportionately high number of Muslim deaths during the riots, images of paramilitaries shooting Muslims at prayer and documentary footage of the Babri Masjid mosque being demolished by Hindu militants. Ratnam also reduced the film’s violent scenes by 25 per cent and cut dialogues indicating that the regional head of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, Bal Thackeray, had either instigated the riots or apologized for them. Thackeray, a notorious rabble-rouser who had regularly called for the ‘extermination’ of Muslims, had warned that theatres showing Bombay would be burned to the ground if the film insulted him.20 Aravind, ‘Ratnam Has the Courage to Voice His Convictions’. Gopalan, Bombay, 21. The budget for Bombay is not known. 19 Bose, ‘Hindu Right’, 23, 27. 20 Bose, ‘The Hindu Right’, 26–28; Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Bombay and its Public’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 29, January 1996, 53–55; ‘Bombay or Mumbai: The Controversy Continues’, Asian Age (Delhi), 10 March 1995, 4; Christopher Thomas, ‘India Divided By Forbidden Love’, Times (London), 24 March 1995, 11; McGirk, ‘Screen Affair’, 12–13. 17 18

192

Bollywood’s Communalists

Bombay is 140 minutes long and primarily a story of forbidden love, akin to Romeo and Juliet. Its messages about terrorism, while ultimately strong and clear, do not make Bombay a political film with a capital ‘P’. The use of dates, newspaper headlines and place-names to situate the violence sometimes give it the whiff of a dramadocumentary but the film never comes close to resembling stylistically the likes of State of Siege or The Battle of Algiers. Bombay instead appeals unashamedly to the Indian masses through melodrama. Its song-and-dance routines set it apart entirely from our other case studies and illustrate how Asian cinema’s different conventions could be used to unorthodox political effect. Bombay starts out as a straightforward love story, albeit between two people from opposing communities. It next moves on to explore the impact that religious bigotry has on the two lovers and their families. The movie’s perspective then widens to reveal the full horror of bigotry’s corollary – communal terrorism. The film can be divided into three parts. In the first part we see Shekhar (Swamy) and Shaila Banu (Koirala) tenderly falling in love in a seaside village in Tamil Nadu, in India’s Southeast. Shekhar, a Hindu, is home after two years at college in Bombay and tells his family of his plans to take a job at a newspaper in the city. Before he returns to Bombay, Shekhar catches a glimpse of a young burqa-clad Muslim woman, Shaila Banu, when her veil flutters off her face in a breeze. Shekhar is instantly captivated; he sees her again at a village wedding and before long the two are secretly betrothed. Rebuffed and disowned by their furious fathers – his a respected orthodox Hindu pandit (Nazar), hers a devout Muslim brick maker (Kitty) – the couple elopes separately to Bombay. Part two begins with Shaila Banu’s arrival at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Initially, Shaila Banu is overwhelmed by the ‘loss’ of her family and by the switch from quiet, rural surroundings to bustling city life. With time, however, she begins to appreciate Bombay’s greater openness and tolerance. The couple get married in a civil ceremony at a municipal office and find an apartment. A year or so later, Shaila Banu gives birth to twins who are given their grandfathers’ names, Kabir Narayana (Master Hriday) and Kamal Basheer (Master Harsha). The boys are raised in both religions. Six years pass and the family builds a life of modest contentment, based on Shekhar’s job as a journalist. However, the family’s peace is then shattered irrevocably in part three, when riots erupt in Bombay, sparked by events in Ayodhya. All hell lets loose in the city, as mobs of Hindus and Muslims terrorize each other with swords, bayonets and firebombs. The family survives but only narrowly – the boys are nearly lynched by a group of radical Hindus. The city calms down for a while, giving Shekhar and Shaila Banu’s parents an opportunity to pay their first ever visit. But then violence erupts again, on even more frightening scale. This time there is no escape for the family. The grandparents are killed when the house is firebombed, and in the chaos that follows the twins get lost in the city. For days, Shekhar and Shaila Banu are almost driven insane with worry. While searching 193

Cinematic Terror

Figure 10.1  Bombay: Shekhar (Arvind Swamy) and Shaila Banu (Manisha Koirala) declare their love for each other early in the film.

frantically for the boys, Shekhar even offers to burn himself alive in exchange for the mob putting down its weapons. Moments later he and his wife find the boys safe and well. The riots and film then come to an end, with Hindus and Muslims joining hands on the bloody streets as a sign of peace and national unity. Bombay is such a powerful movie in large measure because its first two parts offer few hints of the terrorist slaughter that is depicted in the third. In the first hour of the film we do see the couple’s parents threatening one another and Shaila Banu getting unnerved when Hindu fundamentalists arrive at her front door asking for a donation to erect a temple in Ayodhya. Nevertheless, the shift from romance, gentle comedy and domestic bliss in the film’s first sections to urban nightmare in the final third is compellingly stark. Most people who saw the film would have known it was about the recent riots, yet few would have expected the viciousness or relentlessness of the violence depicted in Bombay. Indian film-makers were rarely so frank. If Ratnam’s visions of terrorism are not as graphic as those portrayed in The Battle of Algiers thirty years earlier, they are a whole less ‘cartoonish’ than those depicted in any of the contemporaneous Die Hard episodes. Menon gives us his ‘heightened sense of reality’ of the Bombay riots not via an excess of explosions and stunts but by juxtaposing images of wanton anarchy and personal anguish. In the aftermath of the first round of riots, we see a naked toddler on a deserted street crying in vain for his 194

Bollywood’s Communalists

mother. During the second round, slow motion images show Shekhar’s father being incinerated as he tries to save, of all things, his daughter-in-law’s prized copy of the Koran. Shaila Banu is utterly inconsolable when her sons go missing; in a terrible irony, she must search for their bodies in the very hospital ward in which they were born. During production, Ratnam and Menon vividly recalled news media images of the riots’ aftermath: roads littered with slippers, pools of blood on tarmac, charred corpses, and so on. Many of these images are recreated faithfully and movingly in Bombay, lending the movie a sense of reportage. Other scenes and sequences had to be made up but they are in equal measure authentic and exciting, giving viewers a sense of being an eye-witness to Bombay’s worst ever unrest. Menon’s lightning-quick use of a Steadicam was particularly striking here, enabling him to capture the frenzied nature of mob terrorism, as Hindu and Muslim men chase each other through Bombay’s labyrinthine backstreets, setting fire to passenger-filled cars and randomly slitting people’s throats. Other, frenetic tracking shots leave Bombay looking like a war zone – only worse, for it is ordinary civilians who are killing and dying on its streets, not soldiers.21

Figure 10.2  Bombay: An aerial shot of two dead bodies – their discovery sparks the second round of riots.

‘Mani Ratnam Justifies Bollywood’s Song-Dance Routines’, Asian Age (Delhi), 28 November 2000, 13.

21

195

Cinematic Terror

The shock of seeing whole communities turning on one another in Bombay, of people terrorizing each other en masse in the name of faith, is accentuated by the complicity of their religious leaders. When Shekhar interviews prominent Hindu and Muslim spokesmen for his newspaper in the middle of the riots, they refuse to lift a finger to quell them. The Bal Thackeray–lookalike (played by Tinnu Anand) is ‘proud’ of his ‘boys’ for having demolished the Babri Masjid mosque and tells Shekhar that those who don’t believe that India belongs to Hindus should leave. His Muslim counterpart (played by Akash Khurana) denies having started the riots and defends the Muslims’ right to defend themselves. Both men come across as fundamentalists who hope to gain politically from the death and destruction. Towards the end of the film, the Thackeray lookalike cannot believe his eyes when he is driven around Bombay to see at first hand just what the riots have done to the city. For his part, the city’s Muslim leader breaks down in tears and screams at one of his minions ‘Enough!’ These hints of remorse are not intended to let the men off the hook but the opposite, to emphasize their guilt. Critical pieces of dialogue towards the climax of Bombay underline this. When Kamal asks a kindly eunuch who has given him shelter why Hindus and Muslims are fighting one another, he replies, ‘It’s the politicians who light the fire of hatred and the common man who dies in the crossfire’. Minutes later, a distraught Shekhar shouts at the crowds: ‘You’re fools to be provoked into killing each other. Politicians are taking advantage of you for their seats of power’.

Figure 10.3  Bombay: Interviewed by Shekhar, the city’s Hindu leader (Tinnu Anand) fans the flames of sectarian hatred. 196

Bollywood’s Communalists

If Bombay depicts India’s religious leaders as abetters of terrorists, its portrayal of the authorities is far from resoundingly positive either. The film does not blame the police and army for the violence, but the city’s police chief responds extremely weakly to Shekhar’s questions about the official massaging of death figures and the police’s anti-Muslim bias. We also see the police firing into crowds indiscriminately and shooting innocent, burqa-clad women in the back. This is not state-sponsored terrorism comparable to that portrayed in State of Siege. At the same time, it is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the authorities’ ability or desire to act impartially when zealots clash. From a Westerner’s viewpoint, Bombay’s mixture of traumatic violence, upbeat music and dubbed song-and-dance interludes would have seemed highly incongruous. Yet, even before the film was released its soundtrack had shot to the top of the Indian music charts and it is fair to assume that the songs enhanced the political weight of certain scenes for many viewers. ‘Tu hi re/You are the one’, for instance, which we hear when the lovers first meet in secret, has been described by one historian as ‘one of the most haunting tunes in Indian film music’.22 When the riots are at their hysterical height, ‘Ruku Jaao/Stop It!’ begs the crowd to cease the bloody violence, with the beat of the song accentuating the commotion on screen. At the end of the film, ‘Malarodu Malar Ingu/A Garland of Flowers’ wrenchingly urges reconciliation. ‘Let’s usher in a new dawn’ the lyrics plead, as we see images of strangers holding each other’s hands in a human chain and Shekhar and Shaila Banu being tearfully reunited with their boys. Ratnam was well known for the prominence he attached to children in his films and his manipulation of Kamal and Kabir’s innocence in Bombay was therefore not surprising. When the riots break out, the religious divide in their family puts Shekhar and Shaila Banu at risk from extremists on both sides. However, it is their sons, without a fixed faith, who are in most danger. This is demonstrated most frighteningly during the riots’ first phase when the boys are grabbed by a group of masked Hindus who pour gasoline over them and demand to know whether they are Hindu or Muslim. Only wet matches and a volley of police gunfire save the boys from certain death. Later on, when the twins go missing for days, it is a miracle that they survive. Kabir is nearly trampled to death while Kamal has to rely for food and water on one of the few residents of Bombay who has not succumbed to the terrorist frenzy. That the young are terrorists’ biggest victims is brought home to the viewers in other ways too. The boys are inevitably traumatized by the gasoline episode and wake at night in tears. During the riots, the camera regularly focuses on burning dolls and anonymous screaming children. The scene in which Shaila Banu searches for her boys through dozens of dead and injured children in a stinking, fly-infested hospital is ‘Impasse over Film Continues, No Solution in Sight’, Asian Age (Delhi), 10 April 1995, 3; Dwyer, 100 Bollywood Films, 52–53. The song-and-dance numbers were often trimmed for showings in the West. David Rooney, ‘Bombay’, Variety, 19 June 1995, 79. 22

197

Cinematic Terror

Figure 10.4  Bombay: To the tune of ‘Ruku Jaao/Stop It!’, the mob drenches a military jeep in gasoline before setting it alight. The authorities have no control.

stomach-churning. ‘What fire of hatred is this that they don’t even spare innocent little children?’ she cries. Later, Shekhar has to go through the same emotional torture at the city morgue, sifting through scores of bodies piled on top of one another, including those of children. Of all scenes, this is the one that emphasizes the full horror of the terrorist savagery that has swept through Bombay and changed the city forever. So deep was the scar left on India in general and on the city of Bombay in particular by the riots of 1992–1993 that any feature film about them was bound to arouse criticism. Given its proximity to those events and the fact that it was a fully fledged blockbuster made by a household name meant Bombay was probably going to play an important role in shaping many Indians’ memories of those riots. An official inquiry into the riots had started by the time Bombay appeared but would not deliver its verdict until 1998.23 For the time being, therefore, Ratnam’s film amounted to the next best thing for many people and an opportunity to score points, salve consciences and draw an appropriate lesson about communal terrorism. Damning Verdict: Report of the Srikrishna Commission Appointed for Inquiry into the Riots at Mumbai during December 1992–January 1993, and The March 12, 1993 Bomb Blasts (Mumbai: Sabrang Communications, 1998). 23

198

Bollywood’s Communalists

Figure 10.5  Bombay: Communal terrorism knows no bounds – Kabir Narayana (Master Hriday) and Kamal (Master Harsha) are grabbed by the mob.

In some areas of India, that lesson was simple – let sleeping dogs lie. In March and April 1995, Bombay was banned outright in Hyderabad and in other towns with large Muslim populations, mainly in southern India, either for fear that it would incite fresh violence or because reports indicated it was pro-Hindu. Elsewhere, Muslim pressure groups ordered boycotts or picketed cinemas showing the film.24 In Bombay itself, the movie’s release was delayed by the authorities for over a week after threats of a large-scale Muslim protest march spread fears of more riots. Tight security, including the use of sniffer dogs, accompanied the film’s premieres virtually everywhere. In Bombay, the city’s police commissioner personally supervised the elaborate security arrangements following a bomb explosion outside one prominent theatre.25 After these false starts, Bombay was eventually shown across most parts of India, dubbed from Tamil into a variety of ethnic languages. Both Hindus and Muslims were offended by the film’s portrayal of a mixed marriage, which was foreseeable given how rare trans-sectarian relationships still were in India in the 1990s. Conservative ‘Hyderabad Divided on Bombay Film’, Asian Age (Delhi), 17 March 1995, 3; ‘Muslims to Ask Joshi to Ban Film in Bombay’, Asian Age (Delhi), 13 April 1995, 3; Thomas, ‘India Divided By Film of Forbidden Love’. 25 ‘Bombay Released Amid Tight Security’, Sunday Navhind Times (Goa), 16 April 1995, 1; ‘Bombay Stops Bombay For A Week’, Asian Age (Delhi), 8–9 April 1995, 1, 4. 24

199

Cinematic Terror

Muslims objected to the film for several reasons: for allowing the hero to lift the veil of a Muslim woman, for allowing the Muslim heroine to appear on screen without a burqa and for implying that Muslims had instigated the bloodshed. Liberal Muslims and secular critics objected to the film on the basis that it showed the Hindu, secular male as the modern citizen, while his Muslim wife was portrayed stereotypically as a religious, domestic figure.26 Inevitably, some Hindus also found Bombay wanting. This included its very title. Shortly before the film’s release, Hindu nationalists had defeated the ruling Congress Party in elections across Bombay and its state, Maharashtra. This political earthquake led to Bombay’s name being changed to Mumbai and subsequently to calls for Ratnam to change his film’s title, which he refused. Having already protested about Bombay’s alleged attacks on Hindus, Bal Thackeray and others now equated Ratnam and his film with treachery.27 In light of this increased friction, it is no surprise that minor riots erupted in Maharashtra when Bombay opened there, despite the police’s best efforts. Muslim teenagers in Thane, close to Mumbai, stoned cars in protest against the film. Bombay also provoked riots and attacks on cinemas in other Indian towns and cities, such as Nagpur, the winter capital of Maharashtra.28 Though no deaths were reported as a direct result of these disturbances, it is likely that, in the short term at least, Bombay probably did more harm than good for Hindu-Muslim relations in some areas. One journalist in Calcutta noted a ‘palpable air of tension’ in that city’s cinemas showing Ratnam’s film, where ‘one clever remark from the audience could have led to the communities coming to blows’.29 In due course, Bombay’s cast and crew were themselves targeted. Manisha Koirala received death threats, as did Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most famous actor whose company distributed the Hindi version of Bombay. Then, in July 1995, Ratnam himself was hospitalized after two men threw homemade firebombs at his house in Madras. The director suffered shrapnel injuries but these were not serious enough to keep him from his work for long or to deter him from future terrorism-related projects. The police held Al-Umma responsible for the attack, an extremist Muslim group recently credited with a parcel bomb blast which had killed a Hindu activist in Nagore, a small town close to Madras.30

Clarence Fernandez, ‘Muslims to Protest Against Bombay on Opening Day’, Asian Age (Delhi), 6 April 1995, 5; ‘Muslims Put Off Court Move on Film’, Asian Age (Delhi), 11 April 1995, 3; ‘Film Ban Provokes Backlash’, Observer (London), 9 April 1995. 27 ‘Bombay or Mumbai: The Controversy Continues’, Asian Age (Delhi), 10 March 1995, 4. 28 John-Thor Dahlburg and Amitabh Sharma, ‘Hindu-Muslim Love in Movie is Hot Topic’, Los Angeles Times, 14 April 1995. 29 ‘Cheers Divide Audiences in Calcutta’, Asian Age (Delhi), 8–9 April 1995, 1, 4. 30 ‘Bombay Banned’, Eastern Eye (London), 18 April 1995, 14; ‘Briefs:“Bombay Director Target of Terrorists” ’, Hollywood Reporter, 11 July 1995, X 1; R. Bhagwan Singh, ‘Mani Ratnam Injured in Bomb Attack’, Asian Age (Delhi), 11 July 1995, 4. 26

200

Bollywood’s Communalists

This violence seems, if anything, to have bolstered rather than harmed the commercial and critical appeal of Bombay in India. Although statistics of how many Muslims versus Hindus saw the film are lacking, it is clear that Indians went to cinemas in droves to see Bombay. In grossing 130 million rupees (roughly $4 million), Bombay broke box-office records in India. Its soundtrack became one of Indian cinema’s alltime best-sellers, thus extending the film’s influence far beyond the period it was playing in theatres. Several awards endorsed Bombay’s landmark status, including the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration.31 The controversy that surrounded Bombay in India also attracted attention abroad and boosted the film’s ability to reach an international audience. In the West, commentators made easy comparisons with the story of Romeo and Juliet and many praised Bombay to the heights. ‘With tremendous bravura, Ratnam makes a boldly effective condemnation of the senseless destruction and tragedy of religious fanaticism’, declared the Los Angeles Times. Altogether, Bombay was screened at over twenty international film festivals, including Cannes, and was granted awards in Britain, Norway and the United States. All of this was highly unusual for an Indian film. Bombay was banned in Singapore and Malaysia. Both of these countries had significant populations of ethnic Indians and a history of Hindu-Muslim tensions.32 As the years passed after the film’s release, Bombay gradually lost some of its critical sheen. Even when the film first appeared in 1995, one of India’s most prominent advocates for secularism, Praful Bidwai, had castigated Ratnam for issuing such a ‘sentimental’ plea for religious unity and for failing to tell everyone that the Bombay riots had been an anti-Muslim pogrom supported by the state.33 While the official findings into the Bombay riots did not go quite this far, they did cast much of the blame on Hindu fundamentalists and the police. Lalitha Gopalan was consequently on relatively firm ground when she concluded in her 2005 study of Bombay that the film expressed a ‘disingenuous even-handedness’ in locating responsibility for the violence of 1992–1993.34 However, this rather critical verdict underplays the Indian film censors’ powers. It also overlooks that India was in deep crisis when Bombay was made. For Ratnam, this ‘even-handedness’ was a price http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112553/business (22 September 2012); Gopalan, Bombay, 10. $4 million in 1995 is equivalent to $6 million in 2012 dollars, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue. php (10 June 2013). 32 M. D., ‘Bombay (India)’, LA Weekly, 24 May 1996; Kevin Thomas, ‘Asian Pacific Festival to Open with Three Gems’, Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1996, X 2; Gopalan, Bombay, 10. 33 Praful Bidwai, ‘Bombay: Fuss Over Mediocrity’, Navhind Times (Goa), 19 April 1995, 6. 34 Gopalan, Bombay, 35–36. By this time, other Indian films had dealt indirectly with the Bombay riots. These include Fiza (Khalid Mohammed, 2000) and Black Friday (Anurag Kashyap, 2004). Priya Kumar, ‘An Interview with Khalid Mohammed’, Framework, 47, 2, Fall 2006, 101–119; Anuj Bhuwania, ‘Black Friday, Mediation and the Impossibility of Justice’, Working Paper Series, Center for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, November 2012, CSLG/WP/17, http://www. jnu.ac.in/CSLG/workingPaper/17-Black%20(Anuj).pdf. One American commentator compared Black Friday’s ‘journalistic inquiry into social and political events’ with The Battle of Algiers. Kirk Honeycott, ‘Black Friday’, Hollywood Reporter, 5 May 2005. 31

201

Cinematic Terror

worth paying for a film that sought above all else to restore communal harmony in a way that had not been done before – by highlighting the true horrors of communal terrorism. Mani Ratnam’s Bombay illustrates the high profile afforded religious terrorism on global cinema screens in the 1990s. During that decade, film-makers across Europe, the Americas and Asia felt they could make money and deliver important political messages about the emergence or resurgence of religiously inspired violence. The result was an unparalleled glut of movies on the subject. Some, including many made in Hollywood, pandered to prevailing fears of ‘religious fundamentalism’ and were probably soon forgotten. Others, like Bombay, dared to trespass on forbidden territory and as a consequence seem to have lived long in the memory. Collectively, these films helped reinforce the claim that the world was now endangered by a ‘new terrorism’, one that knew no bounds because it was driven by fanatics. In fact, though it dwells on the issue of religious fanaticism, Bombay ought not to be pigeon-holed as just another movie about the ‘new terrorists’. For one thing, Bombay showed that religious terrorism was at its most dangerous when it involved uncontrollable mobs not methodical assassins. For another, it suggested that religious terrorism could have – indeed most often probably did have – entirely domestic causes. Bombay tells us that the riots that struck India in 1992–1993 had little or nothing to do either with religious terrorism outside of that country or with a ‘new terrorism’ that apparently posed a threat to the international community. Bombay was, above all, about how ordinary people could get caught up in acts of terrorism, not through sinister indoctrination but because of ingrained beliefs, communal ties and political manipulation. This is a theme few film-makers seem to have taken up since. 

202

CHAPTER 11 BIOPICS FOR PEACE

Dublin, Ireland. Early 1922. The bloody War of Independence fought against the British is over. After long negotiations, the historic Anglo-Irish Treaty has just been signed in London. The treaty will create an Irish Free State in the Catholic-dominated south of the island but not one, as many wanted, that is a republic; the new state will still owe allegiance to the British crown. What is more, the treaty will allow the Protestant-dominated north of the island to remain part of the British Empire. In the Irish Parliament, or Dáil, a furious debate between the treaty’s supporters and opponents is reaching its climax. The supporters’ leader, Michael Collins (played by Liam Neeson), has just entered the chamber, determined to avert a civil war. CATHAL BRUGHA:  So Mr Collins is asking us to accept an oath of allegiance to a foreign king and the partition of the northern part of the country? ARTHUR GRIFFITH:  Mr Collins – the man who won the recent war – has himself described the treaty as a stepping-stone towards the ultimate freedom. BRUGHA [sarcastically]:  Mr Griffith has referred to Mr Collins as the man who won the war!  [There is uproar. Delegates point accusingly at one another across the chamber. Michael Collins himself rises to his feet and takes the floor for the first time.] MICHAEL COLLINS:  On a point of order, Mr Chairman, are we discussing the treaty or discussing myself? BRUGHA:  The minister does not like what I have to say. COLLINS:  Anything that can be said about me, say it …  BRUGHA [interrupting]:  Mr Collins, the position you had in the army was chief of one of the subsections. Nobody in the staff sought notoriety except you. COLLINS:  Come on, Cathal! BRUGHA:  One person was held up by the press and put in a position he never held. He was made a romantic figure, a mystical figure which he certainly is not. The person I refer to is Michael Collins.  [The Anti-Treaty delegates cheer and clap. The two sides are virtually at each other’s throats. Collins rises again and waits for silence.] COLLINS [slowly, solemnly]:  I would plead with every person here. Make me a scapegoat if you will. Call me a traitor if you will. But please, let’s save the country. The alternative to this treaty is a war which nobody in this gathering

Cinematic Terror

can even contemplate. If the price of freedom, the price of peace, is the blackening of my name, I’ll gladly pay it. Thank you. Cinematic terrorists don’t always create mayhem. Sometimes, having learned the error of their ways or realized the futility or limits of violence, they become peacemongers. In doing so, they usually pay the ultimate price. Such are the requirements of dramatic, big-screen entertainment: redemption then death is thought to attract a much bigger box office than negotiation and peaceful co-existence. Notwithstanding these dramatic confines, there is still scope for scriptwriters and directors to say something meaningful about the difficulties associated with taking the gun out of politics. In the 1990s, an unprecedented number of films sought to do this, more often than not by looking back in time. As films like Bombay highlighted the threat posed by ‘new terrorism’, therefore, others revisited instances of ‘old terrorism’ to explore the possibilities of bringing an end to present-day political violence. Such films often demonstrated the potency of historical terrorism projected on the big screen and can be seen as evidence of a greater maturity in certain film industries’ treatment of terrorism, linked to the scars left by particularly bloody and divisive terrorist campaigns.1 The history of terrorism in Northern Ireland was subjected to particularly intense cinematic scrutiny during the 1990s. Irish, British and American film-makers all took a close look at this highly sensitive issue, including the efforts made over the years to put an end to political violence in the province. Their output garnered numerous awards and, far more importantly, played an integral role in the ‘peace process’ that brought an end to ‘the Troubles’ that had blighted Northern Ireland since the 1960s. One movie made in Ireland that demands special attention both for its portrayal of a real-life terrorist-turned-peacemaker and for its record-breaking popularity is Neil Jordan’s 1996 release, Michael Collins. Ireland’s first national epic, Michael Collins explores the origins of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Spanning the years 1916–1922, the movie conveys – as its introductory titles state – all the ‘triumph, terror and tragedy’ of Ireland’s War of Independence and subsequent Civil War, as seen through the eyes of one of its leading See, for instance, Mimmo Calopresti’s The Second Time and Wilma Labate’s My Generation, both released in 1995, which were part of a cycle of Italian films that re-examined the so-called ‘years of lead’ during the 1970s. Pierre Falardeau’s October (1994) and Robert Lepage’s Nô (1998) re-visited the crisis caused in Canada by the Quebec Liberation Front’s infamous murder of government minister Pierre Laporte in 1970. A year after Mani Ratnam’s Bombay appeared, Indian director Gulzar reflected on the 1980s Sikh insurgency in Punjab in Machis (Matches). Gulzar’s thriller alluded to the combustibility of youth in those regions of India wracked by political tensions and corrupt policing. O’Leary, Tragedia all’italiana, Chapter 6; Yves Lever, ‘Critiques’, Cine-Bulles, 13, 4, 1 October 1994, 50–52; http://wayback. archive.org/web/jsp/Interstitial.jsp?seconds=5&date=1143385447000&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww. newyorkerfilms.com%2Fnyf%2Ft_elements%2Fno%2Fno_pk.PDF&target=http%3A%2F%2Fweb. archive.org%2Fweb%2F20060326150407%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorkerfilms.com%2Fnyf%2Ft_ elements%2Fno%2Fno_pk.PDF (8 November 2012); Deborah Young, ‘Maachis’, Variety, 9 June 1997, 76. 1

204

Biopics for Peace

participants. Michael Collins had directed the Irish Republican Army in the 1918– 1921 guerrilla war against British forces that eventually ended at the conference table in London. In December 1921, Collins came away from that table with a treaty that gave southern Ireland the freedom to govern itself but which failed to establish a republic and which accepted partition of the island. In August 1922, while trying to stop the resulting Civil War, Collins was assassinated by IRA hardliners who branded him a traitor for compromising nationalist principles and ‘selling out’ to the old enemy. Michael Collins sheds light on a film-maker’s efforts to help eliminate political violence in his homeland by actively engaging in an ongoing peace process – a step beyond that taken by Mani Ratnam with Bombay. It allows us to examine cinema’s treatment of terrorism through a genre we have not yet come across, the biopic, and it highlights once again the need to put films about terrorism in an international context. There is a long history of films dealing with Anglo-Irish tensions and terrorism in Northern Ireland. Among the most important surviving examples of Irish cinema from the silent era is an anti-British love story set against the War of Independence, George Dewhurst’s Irish Destiny (1926). Tom Cooper’s The Dawn (1936), which portrayed the War of Independence as a glorious moment in Irish history and saw veterans of the conflict acting out their roles on screen, was Ireland’s first indigenous feature-length sound film.2 Before and after the Second World War, as we saw in Chapter 4, British films took pleasure in defining any armed nationalists that threatened the integrity of the United Kingdom or the Empire as deviant extremists.3 Mindful of the large Irish-American community, Hollywood productions treated Irish nationalism more sympathetically but drew a line at actively supporting paramilitary groups such as the IRA. Films like Beloved Enemy (H. C. Potter, 1936) and Shake Hands with the Devil (Michael Anderson, 1959), both of which featured characters inspired by Michael Collins, would usually depict Irish militants as childlike, fanatical or simply mad.4 When the Troubles erupted between Republicans and Unionists in Northern Ireland in 1968–1969, bringing British Army units onto the streets of Belfast and other cities and sparking full-scale bombing campaigns by the IRA and Loyalist Michael Gray, ‘Irish Destiny’, Cineaste, 36, 1, Winter 2010, 64–65; Emilie Pine, ‘The Whole Picture – Dawn (1936) – Tom Cooper’, in Eóin Flannery and Michael J. Griffin (eds.), Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography and Popular Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 3–16. 3 Shaw, British Cinema, 50–56. For more on British cinema’s historic treatment of Ireland and the empire generally see Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 2–220. 4 Marcia Landy, ‘The International Cast of Irish Cinema: The Case of Michael Collins’, Boundary 2, 27, 2, Summer 2000, 21–44; Robert Cole, ‘1922 and All That: The Inner War in Feature Films of Independence’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 20, 3, 2000, 445–451. 2

205

Cinematic Terror

paramilitary organizations, film-makers initially stood back. Two decades and 3000 lives later, however, cinema bore witness to a complex, multifaceted propaganda war fought by the British, Irish and US governments, the paramilitaries and the mass media.5 The majority of British movies made about the Troubles in the 1980s, like John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980) or Peter Smith’s No Surrender (1985), presented Northern Ireland as a breeding ground for bigots, psychopaths and gangsters. American-financed thrillers like Mike Hodges’ A Prayer for the Dying (1987), often took a different tack by, say, focusing on ‘reformed’ IRA terrorists trying to escape their murderous past. Smaller-scale Irish dramas like Margo Harkin’s Hush-a-Bye Baby (1989) were usually different again, folding terrorism into other provocative issues such as abortion.6 The 1990s brought dynamic change to the political culture of the whole of Ireland. This change was inextricably related to the unparalleled efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland, which culminated in a new constitutional settlement, the so-called Good Friday Agreement, of April 1998.7 Cinema addressed the conflict, ceasefire and peacemaking episodes of Northern Ireland during the 1990s in a variety of new ways, led, for the first time, by Irish film-makers. Irish cinema itself effectively came of age during this decade. Film production in the country grew extremely buoyant, funded from state, private and European Union sources; cinema attendance rates grew to be among the highest in Europe; and a number of acclaimed productions about the Troubles significantly boosted the Irish film industry’s international reputation.8 Among the most prominent of these productions were Jim Sheridan and Terry George’s In the Name of the Father (1993), Some Mother’s Son (1996) and The Boxer (1997), each of which in different ways advocated an end to the Troubles by revisiting recent events.9 On this propaganda war see Liz Curtis, Ireland: The Propaganda War (London: Pluto, 1984); David Miller, Don’t Mention the War (London: Pluto, 1994); Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 153–162. 6 Richard Combs, ‘The Long Good Friday’, Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1981, 51; Paul Taylor, ‘No Surrender’, Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1986, 46–47; Tim Pulleine, ‘A Prayer for the Dying’, Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1988, 146–47; Brian McIlroy, Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (Richmond, BC: Steveston Press, 2001), 107–110. 7 David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles (London: Penguin, 2001), 184–229. The Good Friday Agreement had three strands. The first dealt with institutional arrangements in Northern Ireland; the second with the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; the third with the relationship between both parts of Ireland and rest of the UK. 8 Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 250. 9 Each of these three films centred on the IRA and drew partly on George’s imprisonment for Republican terrorist activities in the 1970s. In the Name of the Father was a ‘wrongly imprisoned’ genre film based on real-life cases and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Some Mother’s Son looked back at the early 1980s IRA hunger strikes from the viewpoint of two prisoners’ mothers. The Boxer focused on an ex-IRA man who emerges from prison and starts up a cross-community boxing gym in Belfast. Brian Neve, ‘Cinema, the Ceasefire and “The Troubles” ’, Irish Studies Review, 5, 20, 1997, 2–8; McIlroy, Shooting to Kill, 70–90. 5

206

Biopics for Peace

In making Michael Collins, Neil Jordan also sought to promote peace in Northern Ireland but by looking further back in time. In Jordan’s opinion, the root of the Troubles lay as much in the political differences between the Irish themselves as between the Irish and British. This was why it was important to look afresh at the period during which Ireland was divided in two, after the First World War, and for those now living in the Republic of Ireland to begin at last to face up to the horrors and consequences of the 1922–1923 Civil War. In Jordan’s view, the Civil War had poisoned Ireland for decades and produced a sustained and deeply harmful period of social and cultural conservatism under the tutelage of Eamon de Valera. Equally, Jordan wanted to show that 1921–1922 represented a missed opportunity to remove the gun from Anglo-Irish politics. All viewers – Irish, British, American and others – needed to recognize this, he believed, and to support Michael Collins’ present-day successors who were now advocating dialogue and compromise. Neil Jordan was the most successful Irish film-maker of his generation. Born in County Sligo in 1950, Jordan had studied literature and history at University College Dublin before becoming a novelist and screenwriter. Jordan’s debut as a feature film director came in 1982 with Angel, a brutal fact-based thriller about a rock musician caught up in the Troubles. After mainstream hits with the gothic fantasy The Company of Wolves (1984) and the crime drama Mona Lisa (1986), Jordan won an Academy Award in 1992 for The Crying Game, a genre-busting movie about the complex relationship between an IRA terrorist and a transgender woman in London. Jordan’s success with The Crying Game led to a three-film contract with Warner Bros. in Hollywood, the first outcome of which was the gothic horror Interview with the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, in 1994. After this, Jordan set about trying to persuade Warner Bros. to back a project with which he had become ‘obsessed’ for over a decade, on Michael Collins.10 The idea of making a film about Michael Collins was first put to Jordan in 1982, after Angel’s release, by one of Britain’s most powerful independent movie producers, David Puttnam, then famous for the Academy Award-winning hit about the 1924 Olympics, Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981). Initially, Jordan knew relatively little about Collins but after preliminary research saw the potential for a drama that was, as he later put it, ‘huge in its scale, sulphurous in its implications and yet intimate in scope’.11 Through Puttnam’s auspices, Jordan subsequently signed a contract with Warner Bros. to write a script on Collins. Several drafts emerged (titled ‘Evergreen’) between 1983 and 1986, none of which Puttnam felt were quite right. At one stage, Neil Jordan, Michael Collins: Film Diary and Screenplay (London: Vintage, 1996), 1–6; Geoffrey Macnab and Kevin Maher, ‘Such Sweet Sickness’, Sight & Sound, 16, 1, 2006, 20–23, 49; Emer Rockett and Kevin Rockett, Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003), 127–142; Leighton Grist, ‘ “It’s Only a Piece of Meat”: Gender Ambiguity, Sexuality, and Politics in “The Crying Game” and “M. Butterfly” ’, Cinema Journal, 42, 4, Summer 2003, 3–28. 11 Jordan, Michael Collins, 1–3. 10

207

Cinematic Terror

Puttnam’s script advisers suggested that Jordan introduce a character akin to Colonel Mathieu from The Battle of Algiers through which the audience could more fully understand the British side of things. Jordan disagreed.12 Soon afterwards, David Puttnam took over as head of Columbia Studios in Hollywood, where he put a different Michael Collins script into production, to be directed by Michael Cimino, best known for the 1978 Vietnam War drama The Deer Hunter. Several years went by, until Cimino’s project collapsed partly owing to the prohibitive costs of restaging the Irish War of Independence in Dublin. Columbia’s parent company, Coca-Cola, had also advised Puttnam that the British Army might switch its soft drink contract to rival Pepsi if the studio made a Collins film. The Hollywood actor and producer Kevin Costner then took up the reins in the early 1990s with another Collins project, provisionally titled ‘Mick’.13 All the while, in between making other films, Jordan plied Warner Bros. with updated versions of his Collins script – variously titled ‘The Troubles’, ‘The Big Fella’ and ‘Michael Collins’ – and hoped that his would be the first actually to make it onto screen.14 This long drawn-out struggle to make the first fully-fledged biopic of Collins on the one hand testified to his being something of a screenwriter’s dream.15 Collins was not only one of the founding fathers of the modern Irish state, he was also widely regarded as one of the chief architects of modern urban terrorism. An inspirational hero for many later guerrillas like Mao Tse Tung and the Irgun’s Yitzhak Shamir, Collins was also one of the first terrorists to be brought in from the cold by government, an act that turned him into a villain in many nationalists’ eyes and cost him his life. On top of this, Collins also had a reputation for being a gifted propagandist, especially in the new medium of film, and a womanizer. On the very day of his assassination, he was due to get married to the socialite Kitty Kiernan.16

Jordan, Michael Collins, 4; Memo from Susan Richards and Neil to David Puttnam, ‘Re Evergreen – Neil Jordan’, 5 November 1984, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12845, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 13 Jordan, Michael Collins, 5, 19; ‘The Lying Game’, Daily Telegraph (London), 16 October 1996; Thomas Myler, ‘Costner Among 3 Making Collins Bio’, Hollywood Reporter, 19 March 1991, 1, 57. Puttnam’s interest in Michael Collins was more than commercial. In 2007, at a gathering marking the 85th anniversary of Collins’ death, he compared him to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, ‘men who, having freed their own people from the shackles of oppression, became icons for peace and reconciliation everywhere’. Tom Peterkin, ‘Michael Collins Was a Peace Icon, Puttnam Says’, Daily Telegraph (London), 22 August 2007. 14 Draft scripts – titled Items ‘Evergreen’, ‘The Troubles’, ‘The Big Fella’ and ‘Michael Collins’ – Michael Collins Catalogue, Items 13303–13338, 13341–13343, 13348–13355 in Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 15 Michael Collins had intrigued film-makers for decades. At various times, the American directors John Ford, John Huston and Robert Redford had expressed interest in bringing his story to the screen. Kenneth Turan, ‘Michael Collins’, Los Angeles Times, 28 October 1996. 16 Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins (London: Arrow, 1991), xi; Peter Hart, Mick: The Real Michael Collins (New York: Penguin, 2005); Mark Connelly, The IRA on Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 40. Yitzhak Shamir had used the codename ‘Micail’ in the 1940s. He was Israeli prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s. 12

208

Biopics for Peace

At the same time, the difficulties these various film-makers had in bringing Collins to the screen – fully sixty years after his death – spoke of Hollywood’s reluctance to approve of a major production about such a notorious terrorist at any time but especially when the organization he had created, the IRA, was still killing people. Historically, biopics had a habit of treating their subjects kindly and few in Hollywood’s upper echelons wanted to take the risk of being branded an IRA sympathizer or being seen to give terrorists what the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had recently called their much-needed ‘oxygen of publicity’. All of this was indicative of the dubious ethical line taken by Hollywood producers who were attracted to the spectacle of terrorism yet were frightened of alienating politicians and audiences.17 Fortunes changed in 1994, however, when the guns fell silent in Northern Ireland for the first time in over a quarter of a century. In late 1993, John Major’s British government issued the historic Downing Street Declaration, stating, among other things, that the British no longer had any ‘selfish, strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’. In response to this political breakthrough, in August 1994 the IRA declared a ceasefire, and the Protestant paramilitaries followed suit in October. Suddenly, with a Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ now in full swing, strongly supported by the Clinton administration in Washington DC, Hollywood was apt to see Michael Collins as a more appropriate cinematic subject, if handled correctly.18 Accordingly, in late 1994, Jordan finally got the go-ahead to bring his Collins project to fruition, apparently from the head of Warner Bros. himself, Terry Semel. Almost immediately, the American ambassador to Dublin, Jean Kennedy Smith, asked Jordan for a part in the film.19 Neil Jordan approached Michael Collins with a studied, wary enthusiasm. Jordan’s diary and script iterations tell of a film-maker who felt the immense weight of history on his shoulders, particularly now that Anglo-Irish politics had reached a potential tipping point. They also show how acutely aware Jordan was of history’s subjectivity.

As noted in the Introduction, Mrs Thatcher’s much publicised phrase came in a speech in London in the summer of 1985, in reference to recent US television coverage of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in the Middle East. This was the hijacking that helped inspire Menahem Golan’s The Delta Force (1986), explored in Chapter 7. Thatcher’s phrase was accompanied by increased pressure on the British media to censor its treatment of the Northern Ireland Troubles and led to a wider, international debate about the relationship between terrorism and the media. Gary Edgerton, ‘Quelling the “Oxygen of Publicity”: British Broadcasting and “The Troubles” during the Thatcher Years’, Journal of Popular Culture, 30, 1, Summer 1996, 115–132; Miller, Don’t Mention the War, 35–66; Carruthers, Media at War, Chapter 4. 18 On how President Bill Clinton ‘revolutionised’ US policy towards Northern Ireland in the 1990s, see Timothy J. Lynch, Turf War: The Clinton Administration and Northern Ireland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). On the relationship between Clinton’s Northern Ireland policies and Hollywood’s representation of the Troubles in the 1990s see McIlroy, Shooting to Kill, 91–96. 19 Stuart Kemp, ‘Patriot Aims’, Screen International, 13 September 1996; Jordan, Michael Collins, 7. Kennedy Smith was the sister of Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the most powerful US critics of British policy in Northern Ireland. She was ultimately given an un-credited role in the film. 17

209

Cinematic Terror

Jordan knew that he could only offer a partial (in both senses of the word) account of a tumultuous period in Irish history and one that, like all biopics, would be picked over by critics and others. The least he could do was make his film look, sound and feel as authentic as possible.20 Jordan consequently read Collins’ letters and speeches, interviewed his few surviving acquaintances and sought the advice of one of Ireland’s most respected historians, Tim Pat Coogan.21 Jordan hired the English Academy Award-winning cinematographer Chris Menges to give the film a grittily realistic look, one that eschewed special effects, and cast his friend Liam Neeson for the role of Collins. A Catholic who had grown up in Protestant Ballymena in Northern Ireland, Neeson had recently played the heroic lead in Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993).22 Strikingly, Jordan was highly conscious of the inherent difficulties of depicting terrorism on screen and of cinema’s limited ability to capture its complex political, psychological, social and economic causes. He had little time for the previous films featuring characters based on Collins, such as H. C. Potter’s Beloved Enemy, nor for rival scripts like Irish writer Eoghan Harris’ ‘Mick’, which he derided as melodramatic, ahistorical nonsense.23 More surprisingly perhaps, Jordan didn’t think much either of that widely acknowledged benchmark of political cinema, The Battle of Algiers. Having re-watched it during the latter stages of scripting Michael Collins, Jordan felt that Pontecorvo had effectively told a ‘lie’ in making a film that showed, as the Irishman put it, ‘the unstoppable movement of a people towards concepts like “freedom” and “nationhood” ’. Jordan wanted his film to be ‘truer’ than Pontecorvo’s and to say something more radical about political activism – that is, to allow for the tragic, contradictory nature and consequences of political violence. Biopics were particularly good for this, Jordan believed. His would seek to capture the coexistence in Michael Collins’ character of warm, caring attributes with the capacity to be utterly ruthless in the pursuit of political goals.24 Jordan, Michael Collins, 18, 61–62. Jordan, Michael Collins, 15, 17; Michael Collins research notes, undated, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12843, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; transcripts of interviews with Michael Collins’ acquaintances, including his niece, undated, Item 13475, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 22 Jean Oppenheimer, ‘Revolutionary Images’, American Cinematographer, 77, 10, October 1996, 80–85; Brian McIlroy, ‘History Without Borders’, in James MacKillop (ed.), Contemporary Irish Cinema (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 22–28. McIlroy argues that casting Neeson as Collins linked the minority Catholic population of Northern Ireland with a form of liberation from Britain. McIlroy also points to the significance of Stephen Rea, an Ulster Protestant who was known for having no sympathies for the Unionist position, playing Ned Broy, a Dublin police detective who ends up siding with Collins after being persuaded by his Republican arguments. 23 Article by Neil Jordan on the veracity of previous filmic versions of the subject of Michael Collins, undated but probably 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 13376, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. ‘Mick’ did not make it onto screen. 24 Jordan, Michael Collins, 16, 30–31. Despite Jordan’s comments, some of Michael Collins’ scenes would be highly reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers, especially those showing the IRA shooting British officials in the street. 20 21

210

Biopics for Peace

As Jordan’s private papers demonstrate, Warner Bros. had few objections to the director’s train of thought. Despite press allegations to the contrary, the studio therefore asked for few changes to the Irishman’s screenplay, other than to provide more context to the story for those unfamiliar with Irish history. Jordan’s early drafts certainly contained more political exposition in the dialogue, included more scenes focused on the IRA hierarchy. They also focused less on the love triangle between Collins, his comrade Harry Boland and Kitty Kiernan. That said, Jordan’s alterations did not affect substantially either the basic structure of the film or its political messages. At later stages of the production, Warner Bros. did express concern about the number of violent scenes and the bleakness of the ending, but Jordan effectively ignored their requests for changes. The director told the studio that he hoped the conclusion of modern-day peace in Ireland would provide the film with a real-life happy ending.25 Part of the reason why Jordan was able to stand up to Warner Bros. was because of the remarkable level of support the production of Michael Collins enjoyed from virtually all spheres in Ireland when filming started on location in the summer of 1995. This support had parallels with the Israeli government’s backing for Operation Thunderbolt but was on a much larger scale and with the obvious difference that Jordan’s film sought to treat terrorists as potential peacemakers instead of international pariahs. At $28 million, a sum heavily subsidized by Irish tax breaks, Michael Collins was the most expensive production in Irish cinematic history. Michael Collins was a massive logistical undertaking, with the cast and crew working quickly in dozens of difficult locations. In order to facilitate matters, the Dublin authorities allowed Jordan the run of the city, closing off busy roads when necessary and giving the director permission to build the largest set ever seen in Ireland, on the site of a derelict hospital, in order to re-enact the infamous British shelling of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street during the 1916 Easter Rising. Trinity College Dublin, a traditional bastion of English Protestantism, was happy for Jordan to use its reading room for the famous 1921–1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty Debates. The Irish Department of Defence lent Jordan men and equipment for the movie’s numerous fighting scenes.26 The whole process of filming Michael Collins became a highly publicized national event in Ireland. Open calls for extras produced thousands eager to be involved in what Jordan and the Irish press called a piece of history in the making. The resultant

See, in particular, Michael Collins Catalogue, Items 13334–13338 and 13348–13355 (scripts) and Fax from Lucy Fisher of Warner Bros. to Neil Jordan, 13 June 1995, Item 12867, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; Jordan, Michael Collins, 64; Neil Jordan interview, Michael Collins documentary, South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1996, on Michael Collins DVD (Warner Bros., Z114205). 26 Jordan, Michael Collins, 37, 56–57; Michael Collins Production Material, BFIL; Pettitt, Screening Ireland, 258. $28 million in 1995 is equivalent to $41 million in 2012 dollars. Dollar equivalencies are taken from http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php (10 June 2013). 25

211

Cinematic Terror

crowds led to numerous dangerous incidents, including the injuring of Collins’ grand-niece during the re-enactment of the notorious Croke Park Massacre of 21 November 1920.27 Jordan’s diary records one ‘strangely affecting morning’ when filming at Dublin Castle coincided with a meeting there of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, an all-Ireland body established under the terms of the Downing Street Declaration. ‘The President of the country in session with the Forum in the morning, us blowing cars sky-high in the afternoon’, the director noted. ‘I can only hope the ironies remain fictional.’28 The O’Connell Street set was opened to the public for the weekend after the film shoot ended. Tens of thousands of people visited the set and newspapers received letters requesting that the Irish government buy it as a national monument.29 Once an imaginative score featuring the Irish pop singer Sinead O’Connor had been added and the editing had been completed, Michael Collins was then given a further boost. Ireland’s national censor Sheamus Smith issued the film with a PG (Parental Guidance) rating, thereby enabling younger schoolchildren to see

Figure 11.1  Michael Collins: Neil Jordan directs a scene in Dublin. Courtesy of Warner Bros./Geffen Pictures/Photofest.

Mary Holland, ‘Scene of an Irish Shooting’, Observer (London), 1 October 1995; Jordan, Michael Collins, 44, 56. 28 Holland, ‘Scene of an Irish Shooting’, 37, 51. 29 Michael Collins Production Material, BFIL; David Gritten, ‘A Heroic Effort’, Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1995, Calendar section, 1, 5, 90, 91. The set did not become a monument. 27

212

Biopics for Peace

Michael Collins, despite its graphic violence and obscene language. Smith also took the virtually unprecedented action of issuing a press statement, hailing the film as ‘a landmark in Irish cinema’ that he wished ‘to make available to the widest possible Irish cinema audience’. As if this were not enough, when Michael Collins premiered in Ireland, the country’s political elite, including Prime Minister John Bruton and leader of the Opposition Bertie Ahern, lined up to offer Jordan their congratulations. All told, the circumstances of Michael Collins’ production, release and reception could not have been more propitious. Many people saw the film as a fitting way to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Irish state. For this and other reasons, as we shall see, Michael Collins became a prism through which the political situation in Northern Ireland was discussed in Ireland and elsewhere.30 As a film about terrorism’s role in the birth of a new country, if not a unified nation state, Michael Collins thematically resembles both Exodus and The Battle of Algiers. Through its use of flashback, Jordan’s film also reminds us a little of State of Siege. Structurally, however, Michael Collins is a conventional biopic, one with an outstanding ensemble cast of A-list Irish, British and American actors, whose romantic sub-plot widens its appeal and whose depiction of violence stylistically borrows heavily from the gangster genre.31 Terrorism takes several forms in the film and is carried out by a range of paramilitary organizations, some run by government, others not. Its plot is easy to follow, while the occasional use of newsreel footage adds gravitas to a twohour-long film that some might have interpreted simply as a lavish costume drama and others as a semi-documentary. Michael Collins begins in Ireland in 1922, where Joe Reilly (Ian Hart) is trying to console Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts), who is mourning the death of her fiancé Michael Collins. The film then flashes back to 1916. British imperial forces are crushing the Easter Rising by shelling the rebels’ last stronghold in the centre of Dublin, the General Post Office. Michael Collins (Neeson), a young Irish Volunteer officer, is among those who survive. While Collins is interned in England, the leaders of the Rising are executed by firing squad. The exception is Eamon de Valera (Alan Rickman), who is saved by dint of being an American citizen. When Collins is released in 1918, he sets out with his friend Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn) to revive the resistance movement. To avoid another brave but doomed stand-up fight against British might, Collins organizes a guerrilla force, the Irish Republican Army, which arms itself with weapons captured from the police. Collins also campaigns for the separatist Sinn Fein party and is injured when the police break Pettitt, Screening Ireland, 257; Nicholas Watt, ‘Hundreds Turn Out for Collins Film’, Times (London), 7 November 1996. 31 On the connections that critics drew between Michael Collins and Hollywood gangster movies like Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather (1972), see Pettitt, Screening Ireland, 258. 30

213

Cinematic Terror

Figure 11.2  Michael Collins: Eamon de Valera (Alan Rickman), Michael Collins (Liam

Neeson) and Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn), arrested during the Easter Rising. Courtesy of Warner Bros./Geffen Pictures/Photofest.

up one of his meetings. ‘The Big Fella’, as his comrades now affectionately call him, watches ineffectually while the woman who nurses him, Kitty, begins a romance with Boland. Collins organizes de Valera’s escape from prison in England, after which the latter goes to the United States to lobby for American support. While Boland is away with de Valera, Kitty and Collins slowly fall in love. In Dublin, Collins constructs an intelligence organization with the help of a ‘turned’ member of the political unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Ned Broy (Stephen Rea). Collins then recruits an assassination squad from the IRA’s Dublin Brigade to eliminate the rest of Broy’s colleagues. The Twelve Apostles, as they are called, also use a car bomb to kill a detective sent from Belfast in the north. The British respond by bringing in an intelligence group from London, MI5’s notorious Cairo Gang, and creating a new paramilitary police, the Black and Tans. Collins identifies the new secret agents and has the Apostles kill all nineteen of them on 21 November 1920. The same day – soon known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ – the Black and Tans retaliate by machine-gunning the players and crowd from an armoured car at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park. Eventually de Valera returns from America and insists that Collins abandon his tactics in favour of large-scale battles. The Irish nationalists must behave as a ‘legitimate army’ and not allow the British press to depict them as ‘murderers’, demands de Valera; otherwise, the British government will never negotiate. After the 214

Biopics for Peace

IRA suffers heavy losses as a result of de Valera’s orders, Collins becomes dispirited, but the British accept a truce and negotiations for an Anglo-Irish treaty begin. The wily de Valera sends a protesting Collins to London to lead the negotiations, while he, despite being the more experienced diplomat, stays behind in order to preserve inviolate his Republican credentials. When the predictably compromised terms of the treaty are revealed, de Valera denounces them and withdraws from parliament. The IRA splits and a civil war begins. Collins, now head of the Irish Free State, strives in vain to halt the fratricidal conflict. His best friend, Boland, initially in two minds, opposes the treaty after Collins and Kitty get engaged. When Boland is killed in a gunfight, Collins travels to his home county, Cork, the centre of resistance to the Free State, to seek negotiations. There, in August 1922, he is killed in an IRA ambush. Kitty is informed of her fiancé’s death just after trying on her wedding gown. The film ends with newsreel footage from Collins’ funeral. A eulogy states that half a million people attended and that Collins died in a failed effort to remove the gun from Irish politics. So far, our study has focused on films that broadly speaking have either defended or demonized terrorism. Michael Collins does something different – it points to a potential way out of terrorism. This is not by purely military means, the film says, for that cannot bring a permanent settlement to a political problem. Instead, peace can come about by all parties recognizing the need to co-opt those terrorists willing to talk into unconditional, full-scale negotiations. In the case of present-day Northern Ireland, this meant pragmatists like the IRA’s chief spokesman, Gerry Adams, many of whose comrades and fellow countrymen were calling a turncoat. If the terroriststurned-peacemakers were not treated as legitimate politicians, Michael Collins suggests, the fanatics would win and violence would persist. There are four strands to this schema. Jordan’s film, firstly, shows us that terrorism is sometimes legitimate, can be necessary and might even be seen as noble. The violent and absolutist nature of British power in early twentieth-century Ireland is signalled at the very outset of the movie by the overwhelming force used to destroy the General Post Office and the summary execution of the Easter Rising’s leaders (one of whom is carried before the firing squad on a stretcher). It is underlined later by London’s deployment of the Cairo Gang, the elite of the British secret service, who have been ‘handpicked by Winston Churchill’ to eliminate Collins and ‘his boys’. The Black and Tans are the worst of all, however. Effectively a semi-official band of thugs-cum-terrorists, they are openly racist and kill at random, sparing neither women nor children. The Easter Rising has proved that the Irish rebels cannot defeat colonialism by the use of conventional force. Instead, logically, they must use highly efficient paramilitary methods, supported by intelligence, to amass weapons and to kill key targets of British authority as well as their Irish collaborators. To Collins, this is ‘war’ but of a new kind 215

Cinematic Terror

and one that we can see the British have given him no alternative but to wage. Unlike their enemy, Collins’ volunteers do not kill indiscriminately nor use torture methods. Nonetheless, they are ruthless and as time passes do more than merely retaliate. ‘The Big Fella’ himself is a brave, rambunctious character who not only rules with an iron hand but is also prepared to put his head above the parapet. Early on, he is even willing to enter Dublin Castle, the centre of British power in Ireland, in order to get vital information on the enemy’s network of spies and informers. Kitty, played, significantly, by one of America’s leading actresses, is Collins’ steadfast supporter throughout. Michael Collins shows that these terrorist tactics work. But, and this is the second strand of Jordan’s schema, the terrorists’ success comes at a heavy cost. The IRA’s actions, which are portrayed in an unflinchingly realistic way, are shown to take a heavy emotional and physical toll on the perpetrators. Collins’ men are maimed, tortured or killed; they lose their family and friends; and the gruesome violence they commit – in bedrooms, in bathrooms, on the street, often awkwardly, sometimes in front of their targets’ loved ones – is psychologically corrosive. Michael Collins never kills anyone himself and is not gratuitously violent or crazed. Nonetheless, he grows appalled by his gift for what Harry Boland calls ‘bloody mayhem’. Collins is chided by Kitty for the cold-blooded efficiency of his Apostles on Bloody Sunday and gradually descends into what he calls ‘hell’, losing control of the terrorism he has unleashed on the British. Ultimately, he is consumed by the very forces he created, something, the film suggests, Collins wishes on himself after the death of his one-time comrade and great friend Harry.

Figure 11.3  Michael Collins: A member of the Cairo Gang (Mal Whyte), about to be shot by one of Collins’ Apostles.

216

Biopics for Peace

Equally important, however, are the political limits of and complications brought by terrorism. These, the film’s third strand, are portrayed in the frightening pattern of tit-for-tat violence of the Anglo-Irish conflict, with one side’s attacks being met with continually escalating reprisals. The dreadful, unintended consequences of terrorism are brought out most clearly when, having secured independence from the British, Ireland erupts into civil war. Once guerrilla armies have been established, the film seems to say, it is extraordinarily difficult to decommission them. Worse, their very existence encourages factionalism. In turn, these factional differences – in this case between Michael Collins and the icily imperious Eamon de Valera – can all too easily lead to internecine murder. A vicious cycle of fratricidal terror is then virtually impossible to halt and anything positive to have come out of the use of revolutionary violence – against the dreaded British in this case – disappears. Finally, this is why, when the opportunity to negotiate with terrorists arises, it must be taken. Jordan’s film shows that, as ruthless a terrorist as he is, Michael Collins is also a brave pragmatist, not a psychopath but a man motivated by a political point of view that is amenable to change. Collins sits down at the table with the British and is willing to accept a compromise settlement that will provide, as Arthur Griffith puts it in the Dáil treaty debates, ‘a stepping-stone towards the ultimate freedom’ of Ireland. Collins knows this carries political and personal risks but feels it is necessary in order to begin state-building and to avoid yet further bloodshed. Collins’ hopes are ultimately dashed by the fanatics led by de Valera, a man who was initially squeamish about violence but is now willing to take Ireland into civil war in defence of his absolutist Republican ideology. Some in the audience

Figure 11.4  Michael Collins: The Big Fella lies dead. Joe Reilly (Ian Hart) is distraught.

217

Cinematic Terror

might have thought this looked like another victory for Britain’s traditional policy of divide-and-rule – until they realized perhaps that they were watching the roots of the modern-day Troubles. In February 1996, before Michael Collins had been released anywhere, the unstable political ground on which the film had been built shifted. Angered by the British government’s unwillingness to start all-party talks before the terrorists’ decommissioning of arms, the IRA announced the end of its ceasefire by exploding a huge bomb in London, causing immense damage to the new financial district and killing two people. It appeared the IRA’s hardliners had lost faith in a peace process in which they had never invested much hope anyway. In the following months, there was increasing talk about the leadership’s ‘treason’, symbolized by graffiti on Belfast walls proclaiming ‘Gerry Adams – Remember Michael Collins’.32 As a consequence of these events, suddenly, questions were asked about when or even if Michael Collins would see the light of day. Amid rumours that the Clinton administration was pressurizing the studio to delay its release, Warner Bros. sat on the film and waited. In September, after testing the political waters by previewing Michael Collins for British government officials and showing it at the Venice Film Festival (where the film won two major awards), and presumably calculating it needed a return on its heavy investment in the production, the studio pushed ahead.33 Michael Collins was distributed widely in Europe, North America and Australasia in the winter of 1996–1997. Accompanying publicity denied Collins had ever been ‘a proponent of terrorism’ and instead stressed his importance as ‘a soldier, statesman and ultimately a man of peace’. An early poster for the film depicting Liam Neeson holding a rifle was replaced with the image of Michael Collins giving an energetic but unarmed speech.34 Michael Collins appeared on cinema screens at an important crossroads in the Northern Ireland peace process, when the media were reporting that the situation in the province caused by the resumption of IRA violence was as perilous as it had been at any time since Michael Collins had agreed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty back in 1921.35 This rendered Jordan’s film all the more timely and potentially more influential

Gary Crowdus, ‘The Screenwriting of Irish History: Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins’, Cineaste, 22, 4, 1997, 18–19. 33 Adam Dawtrey, ‘ “Collins” Keeps Fall Rendezvous in UK’, Variety, 3 September 1996; Kemp, ‘Patriot Aims’; Steve Daly, ‘ “The Fighting Irish”: Liam Neeson and Director Neil Jordan Waged a 12-Year Battle of Their Own to Bring the Story of Controversial Irish Revolutionary Michael Collins to the Screen – and the Rest is History’, Entertainment Weekly, 18 October 1996. At Venice, Michael Collins won Best Film and Liam Neeson won Best Actor. 34 Fax from Charlotte Kandel at Warner Bros. to various regarding Neil Jordan’s statement for Michael Collins Press Kit, 14 July 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12882, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; Michael Collins Press Kit, Core Files, AMPAS; Daly, ‘ “The Fighting Irish” ’. 35 Charles P. Pierce, ‘The Man Who Made Ireland’, GQ, November 1996, 179–188. 32

218

Biopics for Peace

politically. Measuring that influence is of course extremely difficult, but we can get at least some hint of it by looking at the media reaction to the movie in several countries. The ease with which Michael Collins’ real life and the contemporary Troubles in Ireland were compared – and their differences elided – by the media also point to the volatility of allegations of terrorism and the term’s capacity to bind together different historical contexts. Critical reaction to Michael Collins in the south of Ireland was, as we might expect given the excitement over the production, overwhelmingly favourable. The film was commended for shedding light on a historical period considered too divisive to discuss by older generations and virtually unknown to younger people, for whom modern Irish history as taught in schools ended in 1916 with the patriotic martyrdom of the Easter Rising. The former prime minister and veteran peace campaigner Garrett Fitzgerald thought that Michael Collins was ‘a triumph’ and ‘a deeply moving experience’. Ireland’s most prominent film critic Michael Dwyer went so far as to call it ‘the most important film made in or about Ireland in the first century of film’. Book shops displaying new and old tomes about the ‘Big Fella’ himself in their front windows reinforced the film’s significance.36 The most vocal Irish attacks on Michael Collins came from writer Eoghan Harris and Kevin Myers, a columnist in the country’s most distinguished newspaper, the Irish Times, who argued that the film was neo-fascist in the tradition of Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl; Harris claimed the film’s depiction of the ‘Brits as bastards’ was ‘racist’.37 Prominent anti-nationalist historians also criticized the film for its inaccuracies and for clouding the peace process. One of them, Ruth Dudley Edwards, accused Jordan of ‘providing ammunition for IRA recruiting sergeants and fun-raisers’. Others stated correctly that the Black and Tans had not deployed an armoured car to massacre people on the pitch at Croke Park and that the IRA had not started using car bombs until the 1970s. Some people interpreted this particular use of artistic license on Jordan’s part as inexcusable. To them it appeared to legitimize the modern-day IRA by visually linking its tactics with the War of Independence.38 In Northern Ireland, opinion about Michael Collins was a lot more divided. Significantly, the voice of Gerry Adams’ Sinn Fein, the newspaper An Phoblacht, welcomed the film, while opponents of the peace process in the IRA accused Jordan of lionizing a man they still regarded as a traitor. On the other side of the province’s traditional sectarian divide, several Loyalist newspapers praised Michael Collins. So Letter from Yvonne Thunder, assistant to Neil Jordan, to Julian Senior at Warner Bros., 3 August 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12888, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; Nicholas Watt, ‘Irish Writer Says Republican Hero’s Heart was in the Wrong Country’, Times (London), 23 September 1996; Pettitt, Screening Ireland, 256; Michael Collins documentary, South Bank Show. 37 Gritten, ‘A Heroic Effort’. 38 Jordan, Michael Collins, 63; ‘Film Director Accused of Giving Boost to Provos’, Belfast Telegraph, 16 October 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12810, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 36

219

Cinematic Terror

Figure 11.5  Michael Collins: As Ned Broy (Stephen Rea) walks towards the camera, a bomb destroys the car carrying the police from the north of Ireland.

too did one of the most prominent Unionist politicians highly sceptical of the peace process, Ian Paisley, Jr., who admitted to finding it a ‘powerful’ piece of cinema.39 Other Loyalists condemned Michael Collins outright as ‘an IRA film’. David Trimble, leader of the most powerful party in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Unionists, who many blamed personally for the breakdown of the peace process due to his refusal to speak to Gerry Adams, argued that Jordan’s film would have a deleterious effect on the chances for peace in the province. ‘People have to live with the consequences of the rosy, romantic view of the IRA’, he told the press. ‘The facts are that Collins was a ruthless organiser of a terrorist campaign.’40 David Ervine, leader of the political arm of one of the IRA’s paramilitary foes, the banned Ulster Volunteer Force, urged Unionists not to see the film in light of the false legitimacy it gave Republican violence. An organization representing police officers injured in the Troubles described Michael Collins as ‘a big propaganda coup for Republicanism’ and demanded the car bomb scene be removed.41 During a showing of the film in the town of Banbridge in County Down, one woman

Rockett and Rockett, Neil Jordan174–175; Crowdus, ‘Screenwriting of Irish History’, 14–19; ‘Collins Movie “Just a Film” ’, Belfast News Letter, 9 November, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12810, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 40 Ciaran Byrne and Olga Craig, ‘Hollywood’s Re-write of Irish History Clouds Peace Process’, Sunday Times (London), 14 January 1996. 41 Donna Carton, ‘Unionists and RUC Urged to Boycott Collins Movie’, Belfast News Letter, 21 October 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12810, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; Martin Cowley, ‘Collins Conjures Up Irish Fears’, Entertainment Weekly, 8 November 1996. Jordan responded directly to these and other allegations that his film was historically inaccurate and that it served as IRA propaganda. See, for example, Neil Jordan, ‘I am Not an IRA Apologist’, Belfast Telegraph, 7 November 1996, 17. 39

220

Biopics for Peace

was so angered by the anachronistic Croke Park scene she shouted out for Michael Collins to be banned. In Derry, one resident was adamant the film had directly inspired a recent republican bombing close to one of the city’s cinemas.42 British newspapers had a long track record of censuring ‘controversial’ films about Northern Ireland during the Troubles.43 However, even before it was released Michael Collins attracted especially vituperative criticism from conservative newspapers alarmed by what they perceived as the film’s pro-IRA stance and biased account of Anglo-Irish history. ‘Terrorism has never looked like so much of a lark’, the Sunday Times claimed, while in an editorial the Telegraph called for the film to be banned lest it encouraged militant Republicans to murder British soldiers. The picture is ‘a glorification of “righteous” violence’, argued the Telegraph, and an ‘exercise in corporate irresponsibility’. Even the leftist magazine The New Statesman labelled Michael Collins ‘a deceitful piece of propaganda’.44 Comments like this help to explain why the British police showed Neil Jordan how to check for car bombs when he was in London to promote his film.45

Figure 11.6  Michael Collins: The armoured car opens fire in the middle of Croke Park. Players and spectators in the background have yet to work out what is happening.

‘Michael Collins’, Banbridge Chronicle, 14 November 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12810, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; Alan Haslett, ‘Collins Film Fails in Fairness Rating’, The Irish News (Belfast), 29 November 1996, Letters page, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12810, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 43 Roy Greenslade, ‘Editors as Censors: The British Press and Films about Ireland’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 3, March 2000, 77–92. 44 Crowdus, ‘Screenwriting of Irish History’, 14–19; Tom Shone, ‘Patriot Games’, Sunday Times (London), 10 November 1996; Stanley Kauffman, ‘Stanley Kauffman on Films: A Lost Leader’, New Republic, 25 November 1996, 30–31. 45 Macnab and Maher, ‘Such Sweet Sickness’ 42

221

Cinematic Terror

More considered British responses appeared upon the film’s release. The liberal Guardian praised Michael Collins for breaking ‘the biggest taboo of all – it tries to tell the truth’. In another liberal newspaper, the Observer, critic Philip French hailed Michael Collins as an ‘engrossing’ historical film, adding, ‘I understand how the French must have felt in the Sixties on seeing Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.’46 One noted historian of terrorism, Charles Townshend, would have none of this, especially regarding the use of an armoured car in the Croke Park scene. ‘Such grotesque hyperbole may be a concession to the dulled sensibilities of late twentieth-century audiences’, Townshend wrote. ‘But it seems rather a manifestation of the belief that the British were (and presumably still are) capable of any enormity.’47 In the United States, where the government and media continued to take a keen interest in the stalled Northern Ireland peace process, Michael Collins caused considerable consternation in certain circles. Friends and colleagues usually in agreement over Northern Ireland found themselves at loggerheads. Two journalists working for the country’s main Catholic magazine, America, for example, had very different opinions on the film. Terry Golway urged readers to heed Jordan’s lesson: ‘If the story of Michael Collins tells us anything, it is that today’s gunman may be tomorrow’s peacemaker, and that democratically elected leaders must do all they can to encourage such conversions’. By contrast, Richard A. Blake saw Neeson’s Michael Collins as a character who operated ‘in a moral vacuum’. As a result, in Blake’s judgement, the film ‘not only justified’ violence, it ‘glorified’ it.48 Overall, Warner Bros’. efforts to persuade the large Irish-American community in particular to go and watch Michael Collins – including inviting the IRA funding organization NORAID to premieres – seem to have fallen flat.49 Neil Jordan always feared that Americans might find Michael Collins hard going because of its failure to match up with Hollywood’s black-versus-white version of terrorism. He did at least get a message notifying him that Bill and Hillary Clinton had seen the film, however.50 To ease his disappointment further, Michael Collins also generated positive comment in the European continental press. ‘Jordan’s film makes you realise even more what

Crowdus, ‘Screenwriting of Irish History’, 14–19. Others that likened Michael Collins to The Battle of Algiers include the Northern Irish poet and critic Tom Paulin and critic Mike Clark in USA Today. Philip Dodd, ‘Ghosts from a Civil War’, Sight & Sound, 6, 12, 1996, 30–32; Mike Clark, ‘ “Collins” Nothing Revolutionary’, USA Today, 11 October 1996. 47 Charles Townshend, ‘Michael Collins’, Sight & Sound, 6, 11, 1996, 55–56. 48 Terry Golway, ‘Life in the 90s’, America, 26 October 1996, 6; Richard A. Blake, ‘Some Mother’s Son’, America, 15 February 1997, 26. 49 Fax sent by Stephen Woolley, producer of Michael Collins, to Rob Friedman, Scala (B. Monkey) Ltd, 15 November 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12861, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; Connelly, The IRA on Film and Television, 59. NORAID stood for the Irish North American Aid Committee. 50 Seamus McSwiney, ‘Trying to Take the Gun out of Irish Politics’, Cineaste, 22, 4, March 1997, 20–24; Warner Bros. inter-office memo from John Dartigue to Neil Jordan and David Geffen, 5 December 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12863, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 46

222

Biopics for Peace

the conflict in Northern Ireland is all about and why there are still bombs flying about today’, said the Berlin tabloid B. Z. ‘A fascinating political film of epic proportions’, proclaimed one of the most widely circulated newspapers in Greece, Eleftherotypia.51 On the whole, the box-office takings for Michael Collins did not live up to expectations. In the Irish Republic, the film was a phenomenal success, taking a recordbreaking $5.6 million from a population of only 3.5 million. In the United Kingdom, the film also did well, grossing approximately $8 million. In the United States, however, Michael Collins took only $11 million. Worldwide, the film grossed $27 million in total, a figure that barely covered its costs.52 Perhaps this did not matter too much in political terms. The debate surrounding Michael Collins ensured that, like many of the other films we have analyzed, its messages reached far beyond those who actually paid to see it. In this respect, Neil Jordan could count his film as a triumph. In July 1997, six months after Michael Collins appeared, the IRA issued a second, ‘unequivocal’ ceasefire. A year later, in May 1998, the people of both parts of Ireland voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Good Friday Agreement. The terrorists-turned-peacemakers had survived and won through, it seemed. As further years went by, the more it looked as though full-scale terrorism in Northern Ireland had passed into history.

Warner Bros. inter-office memos of review of Michael Collins, dated 4 and 28 April 1997, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12870, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin. 52 Warner Bros. internal box-office reports dated 11 November 1996, Michael Collins Catalogue, Item 12861, Paper Collection, The Irish Film Archive, Dublin; Pettitt, Screening Ireland, 250, 279; http://www. boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=michaelcollins.htm (8 November 2012); http://www.the-numbers.com/ movies/1996/0MCOL.php (8 November 2012). 51

223

CHAPTER 12 NETWORKED JIHADISTS

It is a diabolical scenario, every government’s nightmare. Religious maniacs from Chechnya have seized control of a crowded circus arena in Moscow and packed it with explosives. Unless the Kremlin agrees to withdraw Russian forces from their homeland, the terrorists announce on television, everyone, including hundreds of children, will die. The resulting siege turns out to be merely a sideshow, however, a ploy designed to distract the authorities. The jihadists’ real intention is to hijack a plane from Moscow Airport and fly it to Italy, where an anti-terrorist summit is scheduled. Above Rome, the jihadists will detonate a dirty bomb that will kill hundreds of thousands and prove to the world the strength of their cause. Only a miracle, it seems, can prevent the greatest terrorist atrocity in history. Al-Qaeda’s globally-televised terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC on 11 September 2001 opened up yet another era in the history of cinematic terrorism. This was not just because those attacks looked ‘just like a movie’ and consequently further blurred the boundaries between fictional and real images of terrorism in the media. Nor was it merely because film-makers now had to dream up ever more fantastical plots to trump what the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen provocatively called al-Qaeda’s audacious ‘work of art’.1 It was also because every real and filmic act of terrorism for the foreseeable future would inevitably be viewed through the prism of 9/11. ‘New terrorism’, an emerging phenomenon in the 1990s, had now unequivocally ‘arrived’. A new, global war on terror, declared by US president George W. Bush only days later, had come with it. In the wake of 9/11, few film industries could avoid getting embroiled in one way or another in the battle of images that formed such a crucial part of the global war on terror. Hollywood inevitably took the lead in fighting that battle. Within days, the White House had set up a group of directors and producers christened Hollywood 9/11 that would take the fight to the Islamist enemy.2 Simultaneously, the US Army created a Hollywood think-tank, whose membership included Die Hard’s co-creator Terry Castle, ‘Stockhausen, Karlheinz: The Unsettling Question of the Sublime’, New York Magazine, 27 August 2011, http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/karlheinz-stockhausen/ (30 May 2013). 2 PR Week, 10 December 2001, 5; Los Angeles Times, 6 January 2002, Sunday Calendar, 22; interview with Jack Valenti, Harvard International Review, 24, 2, Summer 2002, 78–80; interviews with Jack Valenti and Ridley Scott, BBC Television, BBC2 Newsnight, 30 January 2002; http://www.dga.org/news/v26_5/news_ workmanspiritofamerica.php3 (4 May 2006). 1

Networked Jihadists

Steven de Souza, tasked with predicting future terrorist scenarios.3 Over the following months and years, the American film industry turned out an extraordinary range of material exploiting, explaining and interpreting the latest Age of Terror. Most early material, like Fox’s hit television series 24, reflected and projected an angry, frightened America seemingly on the brink of terrorist destruction. Later, especially after the US war in Iraq had turned sour, Hollywood’s documentary-makers began to tell a rather different story. Michael Moore’s record-breaking Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) depicted an America knee-deep in terrorist conspiracies and a nation at war with itself.4 If Hollywood expressed some misgivings about the global war on terror, one film industry that did not was Russia’s. A film industry not normally associated with the subject of terrorism, especially by Western observers, Russia’s was in fact at the forefront of the international campaign against New Age jihadism after 9/11. Indeed, Russia, home to the fifth largest film market in the world,5 blazed a feverishly anti-jihadist cinematic trail that was all of its own in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Within weeks of 9/11, Russian cinema and television were presenting highly politicized images of the ‘Islamic threat’ emanating from the country’s troubled southern border in the Caucasus. What might look superficially as a knee-jerk reaction to al-Qaeda’s shocking attacks in the United States was, on closer inspection, part of a systematic campaign rooted in events that had been taking place in Russia for the past decade. Here, in fact, was an illustration of filmic terrorism being used rather differently to what we have focused on so far in our study: first, to internationalize an ongoing civil war, one centred on Chechnya, and, secondly, to restore national self-confidence, in Russia’s case after the loss of the Cold War. In Yevgeny Lavrentiev’s 2004 action-adventure Countdown, we can see these two objectives working in perfect unison. At the same time, we can also discern the influence of Hollywood on Russian cinema. Thus, on the one hand, Lavrentiev’s movie provides us with a uniquely Russian slant on post-9/11 terrorism. Centred on a Moscow circus siege, it points to a terrorist network formed by Chechen rebels, al-Qaeda and exiled Russian oligarchs. On the other hand, Countdown’s highly

James Der Derian, ‘Imaging Terror: Logos, Pathos and Ethos’, Third World Quarterly, 26, 1, 2005, 22–37; Karen Brandon, ‘Army Enlists Hollywood in Anti-Terror War’, Chicago Tribune, 15 October 2001; Sean D. Naylor, ‘Hollywood Writers, Producers Join the War Effort’, Army Times, 15 September 2001, http://www. armytimes.com/legacy/new/0-ARMYPAPER-532428.php (18 July 2012). De Souza described the terrorist attacks on 9/11 as looking ‘like one of my movie posters’. Claire Kahane, ‘Uncanny Sights: The Anticipation of Abomination’, in Judith Greenberg (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 107–116. 4 Prince, Firestorm, especially 238–248, 151–158; Steven Peacock (ed.), Reading 24: TV Against the Clock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Robert Brent Toplin, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How One Film Divided A Nation (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 5 Beumers, Russian Cinema, 241. 3

225

Cinematic Terror

formulaic characterizations and plot, together with its use of post-9/11 tropes like dirty bombs, draw overtly on the American film industry’s style of cinematic terrorism. The overall result is a revealing picture of Russia being on the ‘frontline’ in civilization’s battle against Islamist holy warriors.6 A brief history of Russian screen terrorism will serve to put Countdown in context. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Russia boasted one of the most powerful and politically engaged film industries in the world. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin immediately identified cinema’s special powers of persuasion and the Communist Party’s investment in and tight control of film rarely wavered thereafter.7 Because of Communist regulation, Russian film-makers often defined terrorism quite differently from their counterparts elsewhere, particularly those in the West. As we saw in Chapter 1, among the first Bolshevik films made were those, like Lev Kuleshov’s The Project of Engineer Prite (1918), which classified terrorists as capitalist saboteurs. During Josef Stalin’s long reign, Soviet cinema would consistently portray Communism’s ‘class enemies’ – kulaks, priests, foreign spies and others – as terrorists whose nefarious activities, in turn, justified a campaign of state terror orchestrated by the secret police. This need to root out terrorists through terror reached its apogee during the Great Patriotic War, when, as noted in Chapter 3, Soviet films glorified the vicious guerrilla techniques employed by female anti-Nazi partisans.8 Soviet film-makers’ treatment of terrorism grew more complex once the cultural ‘thaw’ associated with Nikita Khrushchev started in the mid-1950s. Soviet films then began on the one hand to voice concerns about Stalin’s totalitarian excesses, especially his use of the secret police, and on the other to play around with the same sort of visually dramatic terrorist themes as Western movies. Grigori Nikulin’s Flight 713 Asks for Permission to Land, for example, which was released at the height of the cultural thaw in 1962, was one of the first plane hijacking films made anywhere in the world. Produced by one of the Soviet Union’s biggest studios, Lenfilm, Flight 713 centred on a group of passengers stranded aboard a transcontinental airliner after terrorists have drugged its crew.9 Under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet cinema endured a long period of stagnation. As industry bureaucrats sought to turn back the cultural clock, away from Khrushchev’s liberalization, film-makers were obliged to censure any sort Countdown also went by the title Personal Number (Lichnyy nomer in Russian). Beumers, Russian Cinema, 241. No scholar has yet written a sustained analysis of terrorism on the Russian and Soviet screen. The closest we have is Alexander Fedorov’s survey, available at http://web.ceu.hu/crc/ cdc/syllabi/Fedorov.html (23 January 2013). 8 Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 127–184. 9 Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000); www.filmofond. com/eng/catalog/Lenfilm%20ENG.pdf , 86 (21 January 2013). 6 7

226

Networked Jihadists

of violence against the state. Alex Mishurin’s sluggish 1974 drama Abiturientki, briefly mentioned in Chapter 7, is a good example of this reactionary trend. Like Flight 713, Abiturientki also focused on a Russian aircraft hijacking, this time based on a real-life incident over the Caucasus in 1970, in which a young stewardess was killed by terrorists who eventually escaped to the West. By the early 1980s, Soviet films were playing the terrorist card for Cold War purposes more explicitly. Such films could just as easily be set in the past as in the present. Anatoly Bobrovsky’s The Failure of Operation Terror (1980), for instance, was dedicated to the father of the USSR’s secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and depicted Western terrorist efforts to strangle the Soviet state at birth (blowing up bridges, murdering train drivers, and so on). Bobrovsky’s film, a joint Soviet-Polish production, was scripted by the Soviet Union’s bestselling spy writer Yulian Semyonov and celebrated Soviet-Polish cooperation against antiCommunists at a time when, in the early 1980s, Moscow’s hold over its western neighbour was threatened from both within and without.10 Shortly after the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Soviet cinema began to break free from official controls, thus giving film-makers an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on, among other things, the terrors of the Communist gulag system. Simultaneously, action movies like Georgy Natanson’s Mad Bus (1990), based on the recent hijacking of a bus full of school children in Ordzhonikidze in Ukraine, exalted the sort of heroic counterterrorist figures seen a decade or so later in Countdown.11 After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, censorship was practically abolished, leaving Russian film-makers greater license still to redefine the terrorism genre. More often than not, this took the form of violent, cheaply made Hollywood-style thrillers centred on gangsters and hitmen. By the end of the 1990s, dramatic events in Chechnya, on Russia’s southern border with Georgia and Azerbaijan, had provided film-makers with a new focal point.12 The two Russo-Chechen wars (1994–1996 and 1999–2009) are among the bloodiest confrontations in Europe since the Second World War. By the time Countdown appeared in 2004, the wars had cost as many as 200,000, mainly civilian, lives, or more than one-fifth of the entire Chechen population, as well as 25,000 Russian soldiers. The conflict dates back to events of 1989–1991, when in the midst of the Soviet Union’s dissolution the first post-Communist Chechen leader Djokhar Dudayev declared Chechnya’s independence. Though a Sunni Muslim, Dudayev’s objective http://www.kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/sov/100/annot/ (23 January 2013); http://kinomusorka.ru/en/ directors-director-anatoly-bobrovsky-films-film-the-collapse-of-the-terror-operation.html (23 May 2013). On the US government’s propaganda campaign to support Polish independence in the early 1980s, including via television films like Let Poland Be Poland (1982), see Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 410–411. 11 Beumers, Russian Cinema, 187–213; http://kinomusorka.ru/en/directors-director-georgy-natansonfilms-film-mad-bus.html (23 May 2013). 12 Beumers, Russian Cinema, 214–220. 10

227

Cinematic Terror

was a secular and democratic state that would develop a modern market economy. Russia did not recognize this claim and in December 1994, Russian president Boris Yeltsin sought to restore constitutional order in the province by force. Moscow hoped for a short, sharp victory but despite Russia’s overwhelming superiority in manpower and weaponry, the campaign was a military and political disaster. Chechen attacks on Russian cities soon followed and increased after the renewal of the conflict in 1999. The most notorious attack occurred in September that year (thereafter known as ‘Black September’), when a series of apartment bombings in Moscow killed over 200 people.13 Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in Russia – first as prime minister after the Chechen incursion into neighbouring Dagestan in 1999 and then as president in 2000 – was inextricably linked to his hardline approach to the renewed Chechen conflict. On taking office, Putin combined Russian military might with an enhanced role for the Federal Security Service (or FSB, which he ran from 1998–99) and a propaganda campaign that amplified the influence of radical Islam in Chechen policy.14 In a July 2000 interview with Paris Match, Putin became the first leader of a major state to publicly link Islamic insurgencies across the world. ‘We are witnessing today the formation of a fundamentalist international’, he argued, ‘a sort of arc of instability extending from the Philippines to Kosovo.’ Later that month, at a G8 summit in Japan, Putin said of Chechnya: ‘Europe should be grateful to us and offer its appreciation for our fight against terrorism even if we are, unfortunately, waging it on our own.’15 Looked at from this perspective, 9/11 was a stroke of luck for Vladimir Putin. Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington DC made it easier for his administration to take the original, separatist issues of the Russo-Chechen War off the political agenda and to present it as a clear-cut conflict of backward Islamic jihadists assaulting civilized Russia. Russian ministers were quick to draw the link between Chechen rebels and Osama bin Laden, aided by press revelations that some of the 9/11 pilots had either fought in Chechnya or watched Chechen battlefield videos. Despite denials by the Chechen side and doubts cast by journalists covering Chechnya as to the real number and influence of ‘Arab’ or ‘Islamist’ mercenaries there, the importance of this linkage was generally accepted both by the Russian public and Western leaders. In December 2001, for example, British prime minister Tony Blair drew parallels between the September 1999 bombings in Russia and the attacks on 9/11. A year later, the US State Department added Chechen groups to its official list

Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Same Way as the Soviet Union? (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2002); John Russell, ‘Terrorists, Bandits, Spooks and Thieves: Russian Demonization of the Chechens Before and Since 9/11’, Third World Quarterly, 26, 1, 2005, 101. 14 Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 171–172. 15 Russell, ‘Terrorists, Bandits’, 108–109. 13

228

Networked Jihadists

of terrorist organizations. Such actions encouraged Russian and international public opinion to see terrorism as a movement rather than a technique and to view Russia as part of the West, despite its democratic deficiencies and dubious human rights record.16 Though all of this was good news for Putin, Chechen terrorist attacks in Russia continued apparently unabated. Between 1999 and 2004 Moscow alone was targeted thirteen times, leaving some 350 people dead.17 The Chechens proved to be masters of the spectacular, media-friendly event, worthy successors to the ‘super entertainers’ of the 1970s like the RAF and PLO. In October 2002, their two-day siege of the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow, which ended with more than 100 hostages being killed by toxic gas pumped into the building by Russian special forces, captured headlines around the world. Tragic incidents like this did little to boost public confidence in the Kremlin’s counterterrorist strategy.18 Neither did widely distributed videos of Chechens torturing and beheading Russian and foreign hostages, used as propaganda by both sides.19 The Dubrovka debacle also came on top of powerful rumours that the FSB had secretly carried out the September 1999 apartment bombings to boost public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya and to help Putin win the presidency. Putin’s administration countered by claiming that such ‘conspiracy theories’ were being disseminated by prominent exiles led by Boris Berezovsky, a media and energy tycoon who had been calling publicly for Putin’s violent overthrow from his mansion in London since 2001. To what extent this war of words impacted on people’s attitudes towards the Russo-Chechen conflict is unclear. What is evident is that by mid-2004, just a few months before Countdown appeared, support for Putin’s war on terror was slipping. A July 2004 poll showed 63 per cent of Russians favouring peace talks with the Chechens, with only 24 per cent in favour of continuing military action.20 We have seen in previous chapters the lengths to which governments sometimes are prepared to go to help film-makers construct the right sort of cinematic images of terrorism. Yevgeny Lavrentiev’s Countdown testifies to the special relationship that developed between the film industry and security services in Russia after 9/11. Under Vladimir Putin, state regulation and control of Russia’s cultural sector increased Mary Ann Weaver, ‘The Indecisive Terrorist: The Career of Ziad al-Jarrah’, London Review of Books, 33, 17, 8 September 2011, 18–19; Russell, ‘Terrorists, Bandits’, 110–111. 17 Greg Simons, Mass Media and Modern Warfare: Reporting on the Russian War on Terrorism (London: Ashgate, 2010), 65. 18 Soldatov and Borogan, New Nobility, 135–154. 19 Jeffrey Taylor, ‘Russia on the Edge’, http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/1999/10/02/moscow.index.html (21 January 2013). 20 Soldatov and Borogan, New Nobility, 110–112; Russell, ‘Terrorists, Bandits’, 114. The official version of the Moscow apartment bombings was questioned in Disbelief, an award-winning documentary made largely in the United States by Russian director Andrei Nekrasov in 2004, http://www.disbelief-film.com/intro.htm (7 March 2013). 16

229

Cinematic Terror

significantly, reminding many people of the Soviet era. A five-year plan introduced by the Russian Ministry of Culture in 2000, for instance, called upon film-makers to ‘strengthen the social orientation’ of their output, that is to stimulate a new Russian national identity. Russia was in a state of crisis after years of economic and political ‘anarchy’, Putin and the Ministry argued, and everyone, especially those in positions of influence, should do their duty to aid the country’s renaissance.21 The FSB was assigned a key role both in this Russian ‘renaissance’ and in the war on terror. Effectively, the Security Service was to become the guardian of the state, one with expanded powers and a publicity programme to match. In early 2001, on Putin’s orders, the FSB took over control of the counterterrorist operation in Chechnya from the Ministry of Defence. Later that year, The Special Department appeared on screen, the first in a string of television series extolling the FSB’s virtues. Secret Watch, a series about the FSB’s surveillance service, began airing in 2005 and focused on secret agents tracking down terrorists. In 2007, Russian television broadcast Special Group, a sixteen-part series showing the Moscow FSB stamping out corruption and combating terrorist plots. The FSB assisted in the production of all of these series, evidence, some critics argued, of a return to the Soviet-style veneration of Russia’s secret police.22 The origins of the FSB’s first, and still biggest, cinematic blockbuster, Countdown, lie in the murky world where Russian intelligence, counterterrorism and journalism met. In September 2002, a few weeks before the Dubrovka Theatre siege, Roman Shleinov, editor of the investigations desk at the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, contacted Yuri Sagaidak. Shleinov asked Sagaidak, a former KGB agent turned journalist, whether he could verify a videotape his paper had received in Amsterdam, allegedly from someone in Boris Berezovsky’s circle. The tape showed a Russian military intelligence officer, Alexey Galkin, who had been captured by Chechen separatists, confessing his involvement in the Black September apartment bombings. Sagaidak believed that the tape formed part of the efforts to destabilize the Russian government by Berezovsky, whose known links to Chechen crime groups in Moscow dated back to the 1990s. When, a few weeks later, Sagaidak was informed by Kremlin insiders that Berezovsky had secretly offered to fly to Moscow from London to help resolve the Dubrovka crisis and thereby bolster his image as Russia’s would-be saviour, he was appalled. Sagaidak thought this whole episode would make an excellent television documentary, only to be told by friend and TV host Alexey Pimanov that a fictional movie would work better.23

Simons, Mass Media, 26; Jasmijn Van Gorp, ‘Inverting Film Policy: Film as Nation-Builder in Post-Soviet Russia, 1991–2005’, Media, Culture and Society, 33, 2, 2011, 252. 22 Russell, ‘Terrorists, Bandits’, 110; Soldatov and Borogan, New Nobility, 101–102. 23 Yuri Sagaidak and Yevgeny Lavrentiev, interviewed by Fabrizio Fenghi for author, Moscow, 22 June 2011 and 10 March 2011, respectively; Michael Gillard, ‘Obituaries – Boris Berezovsky’, Guardian (London), 25 March 2013, 34. 21

230

Networked Jihadists

Sagaidak had no film industry experience whatsoever, but before long the ex-spy had teamed up with the producer Sergey Gribkov and director Yevgeny Lavrentiev. Neither Gribkov nor Lavrentiev had much first-hand knowledge of the film industry either. Lavrentiev, who was in his early thirties, had only made one movie, a small-budget crime drama called The Scam (2001). Gribkov had spent most of his short career so far in television advertising. Lavrentiev and Gribkov’s background in television would be useful, especially given that medium’s greater emphasis on the need to work quickly, but the trio presumably would have difficulties in getting enough money for a big project.24 The key to this, they believed, was to deliver a script about Chechen terrorism that could shock, entertain and educate. A small number of Russian films had already focused on the Chechen conflict but, with the partial exception of Sergei Bodrov’s Academy Award-nominated Prisoner of the Mountains (1996) and Aleksey Balabanov’s War (2002), none had left much of a mark.25 What Sagaidak, Lavrentiev and Gribkov lacked in experience and film industry clout, however, they made up for in political assuredness. Each made it abundantly clear publicly what, as well as money, drove their involvement in this project. Sagaidak believed terrorism was an ‘international evil’ that could only be defeated by cooperation between the world’s security services. Lavrentiev strongly supported Putin’s muscular approach towards ‘global terrorism’ and his calls for the Russian media to support the Kremlin’s line.26 Gribkov had several motives: to prove to Russians that they could trust their security services; to show that the battle against the ‘international evil’ of terrorism effectively amounted to a ‘third world war’; and to bolster Russian pride by countering Hollywood’s depiction of Russians as ‘losers’. Here, Gribkov had in mind the plethora of Russian gangsters, hitmen and terrorists that had appeared in Hollywood films since the early 1990s, most recently in Paul Greengrass’s international hit The Bourne Supremacy (2004).27 It is striking that Sergey Gribkov felt that Russian and American film-makers were still fighting some sort of Cold War a decade after the collapse of Soviet Communism. It also helps to explain Countdown’s look and style. Gribkov and Lavrentiev wanted to beat the Americans at their own game by making post-Soviet Yevgeny Lavrentiev, interviewed by Fabrizio Fenghi for author, Moscow, 10 March 2011. Youngblood, Russian War Films, 209–218. Other Chechen War films from the Putin era include I Have the Honour! (Viktor Buturlin, 2004), Breakthrough (Vitaly Lukin, 2006), Alexandra (Alexander Sukorov, 2007) and 12 (Nikita Mikhalkov, 2007). 26 Oksana Naralenko and Darina Shevchenko, ‘Countdown: The First Domestic Film about Terrorism Prepares for Release’, Evening Moscow, 23 November 2004; Simons, Mass Media, 139; Yuri Sagaidak, interview, Moscow, 22 June 2011. 27 Olga Allenova, ‘Dream of a Resident’, Kommersant, 2 December 2004; Naralenko and Shevchenko, ‘First Domestic Film’; Yevgeny Lavrentiev, interview, Moscow, 10 March 2011; Peter Finn, ‘In Russia, A Pop Culture Coup for the KGB’, Washington Post, 22 February 2005, C01; David MacFadyen, ‘Evgenii Lavrentiev, Countdown [Lichnyy nomer’ (2004)’, Kinocultura, 10, October 2005, http://www.kinokultura. com/reviews/R10-05lichnyinomer.html (23 January 2013). 24 25

231

Cinematic Terror

Russia’s first fully fledged action blockbuster. Their role model was the Die Hard series, movies that in Lavrentiev’s view worked so well because they appeared ‘completely apolitical’.28 Countdown’s budget of $7 million was paltry by comparison with its Hollywood action counterparts but seven times larger than the average Russian production in this period. Financing was provided by the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography, the Italian production company Filmmaster, and the Russian oil company Sibneft, which was owned by one of Boris Berezovsky’s greatest rivals, Roman Abramovich. Location work in Rome lent Countdown more of an international, exotic feel than most Russian movies. So, too, did the hiring of heavyweight American actor John Amos (who had appeared in Die Harder) and the British actress Louise Lombard, who played a NATO admiral and an English television reporter, respectively.29 For contrast, Sergey Shnurov of the ska-punk band Leningrad provided a distinctly Russian soundtrack.30 As important as the exotic locations and recognizable faces undoubtedly were, it was the support given to Countdown by Russia’s security services that was critical in turning it into an authentic action blockbuster. The producers made no secret of the scripting advice they received from Vladimir Anisimov, deputy director of the FSB, and from officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Defence. The Air Force happily lent helicopters, bomber-fighters and even pilots for the obligatory spectacular stunts. FSB bomb technicians lent their expertise, and members of the crack anti-terrorist Vympel unit who had been involved in the Dubrovka siege played themselves on screen.31 Finally, in order to substantiate Countdown’s claim to be a truly international action picture and to strengthen the on-screen links between the Russian and American security services, the producers employed as a consultant a former CIA agent, Richard Stoltz, who happened to have been expelled from the Soviet Union for spying back in the 1960s.32 Countdown’s five-month shoot went ahead without hitches and was completed in May 2004. The Federal Agency on Culture and Cinematography then approved

Yevgeny Lavrentiev, interview, Moscow, 10 March 2011. Aleksei Khodorych, ‘Cinemalian’, Den’gi, 25–31 October 2004; Birgit Beumers, ‘Introduction’, in Birgit Beumers (ed.), Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 3; MacFadyen, ‘Evgenii Lavrentiev’. $7 million in 2004 is equivalent to $8.8 million in 2012 dollars. Dollar equivalences are taken from http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/ (10 June 2013). Abramovich and Berezovsky had been friends and business partners in the 1990s, when they both owned major stakes in Sibneft. Though not an exile, Abramovich also had a base in London, having bought a controlling share in Chelsea Football Club in 2003. Gillard, ‘Obituaries – Boris Berezovsky’. 30 ‘The Premiere of the Russian Thriller “Countdown” ’, Hello! (Moscow), 14 December 2004. 31 Countdown press release by Planet Inform, December 2004; Allenova, ‘Dream of a Resident’; Yuri Sagaidak, interview, Moscow, 22 June 2011. 32 Allenova, ‘Dream of a Resident’; Misha Gleny, ‘Spooks at the Helm’, Guardian (London), 25 September 2010, 9; Soldatov and Borogan, New Nobility, 91–100; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/16/us/richard-fstolz-dies-at-86-headed-cia-spy-operations-after-iran-contra.html (23 January 2013). 28 29

232

Networked Jihadists

its release, without any cuts.33 In early September, however, Russia was rocked by yet another siege by Chechen terrorists, this time at a school in Beslan in North Ossetia. Once again, when the security services tried to end the siege forcibly, disaster ensued, only this time on an even greater scale: 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children. When, a week later, the world marked the third anniversary of 9/11, Russian ministers increased their calls for coordinated action against global terrorism.34 In the wake of these events, Countdown’s producers quickly reshot all of the movie’s siege sequences in order to depict the Chechen terrorists yet more harshly. The film was then shown to a number of focus groups for possible negative feedback, before being released in December 2004.35 Countdown is no work of art and is unlikely to find a place in the canon of cinematic terrorism in the years to come. It is far from original. By combining a building siege with a plane hijacking, the film’s plot effectively fuses the first two Die Hards. By reshaping real-life events into a counterterrorism success story, Countdown is just like The Delta Force. And in showing an elite team of Russian soldiers defeating Arab-backed Chechens armed with a nuclear device, Countdown strongly resembles Andrei Maliukov’s 2002 Russian television series Spetsnaz.36 Despite being so imitative, Countdown still has a lot to tell us about cinema’s take on the concept of ‘new terrorism’ after September 2001. Terrorism now knows no boundaries, it says, geographically or morally. Terrorism is not a tactic but, as governments from East to West argued, a way of life for religious fanatics. Countdown is 106 minutes long and opens with a short clip from a grainy, blackand-white videotape. Looking straight at the video camera (and us, the audience), Alexei Smolin (Alexei Makarov), a ruggedly handsome major in the FSB, is confessing to having recently blown up an apartment block in Moscow. There is something odd about Smolin’s ‘performance’, as if he might be on drugs. Cut away from the video tape to aerial shots – in full colour – of the beautiful mountains dividing Russia and Chechnya. Smolin is a prisoner in the back of a car full of bearded Chechen separatists. Their boss, a Baltic mercenary called Boikis (Egor Pazenko), is smuggling Smolin out of the region. Suddenly, however, a patrolling Russian helicopter gunship attacks the motorcade. Boikis escapes with a copy of Smolin’s incriminating tape, while the major is taken into custody by the local Russian military who believe him to be a terrorist or traitor. Yuri Sagaidak, interview, Moscow, 22 June 2011. Soldatov and Borogan, New Nobility, 155–164; Simons, Mass Media, 67–68, 75. 35 Yuri Sagaidak, interview, Moscow, 22 June 2011; Alena Efremova, ‘A Counterterrorism Saga In Which Chechens Aren’t Animals But Just Bad Guys’, Premiere (Moscow), December 2004. 36 David Gillespie, ‘Defence of the Realm: The “New” Russian Patriotism on Screen’, Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Russia, 3, 2005, http://pipss.revues.org/369?lang=fr&&id=369&format= (13 January 2014); http://www.specnaztv.narod.ru/ (13 January 2014). 33 34

233

Cinematic Terror

We soon learn that Boikis works for Pokrovsky (Victor Verzhbitsky), an exiled Russian oligarch based in London. At his sumptuous villa in Gibraltar, the weasely Pokrovsky rebukes Boikis for failing to deliver Smolin, whom he intended to use as part of a plan to discredit the Russian security services and destabilize the federal government. Moments later, though, Pokrovsky receives an Arab guest, with whom he concocts a grander plot. Pokrovsky will provide the money for a joint Chechen-Arab terrorist attack on a Moscow circus, where hundreds of men, women and children will be taken hostage. During the siege, the terrorists will demand that Pokrovsky, the only man they believe can bring an end to the war in Chechnya, be allowed to return to Russia to mediate. Having saved everyone’s lives, Pokrovsky will then secretly release Smolin’s tape to the media, bringing down the Russian government and putting himself in a perfect position to take power.

Figure 12.1  Countdown: Pokrovsky (Victor Verzhbitsky, left) plots with his Arab guest. All is not what it seems, however. The Arabs plan to double-cross Pokrovsky. Their leader, who in jalabiya and combat jacket could easily double for Osama bin Laden, is the head of a powerful Islamist terrorist organization called Ansar Allah (Helpers of God). In a tent in the Middle Eastern desert, the leader tells one of his lieutenants, Khasan (Ramil Sabitov), that the real objective of the Moscow siege must be kept secret. ‘May the Eternal City become eternally dead’, he says enigmatically. ‘The day of victory is upon us!’ replies Khasan. Back on the Russian-Chechen border, Major Smolin escapes from the Russian military compound with a beautiful English journalist, Catherine Stone (Lombard), who has been reporting on the Chechen War for World Television News. Asleep one night while the pair are on the run, Smolin has nightmares that prove his innocence and which show his taped confession to be the result of Chechen drugs, threats and 234

Networked Jihadists

Figure 12.2  Countdown: The leader of Ansar Allah (Ioseb Djachvliany) in his Middle East hideout.

torture. Two months later, Stone has returned to her bureau in Moscow but Smolin is still in hiding. Russia’s public prosecutor wants him arrested on state criminal charges, while Pokrovsky wants him to ‘corroborate’ the tape. In order to flush Smolin out, Boikis arranges for the major’s ten-year-old daughter Ira to be invited to the targeted Moscow circus, along with her classmates. As planned, a few nights later, a group of forty Chechen and Arab terrorists led by Khasan takes control of Moscow’s grandest circus arena. They murder the security guards, rig up a massive bomb above the spectators’ heads and threaten to kill everyone unless the government permits Pokrovsky to mediate. The camera shows us close-ups of frightened children juxtaposed with images of female Black Widow terrorists armed with suicide belts. Journalists, including Catherine Stone, are allowed to film the proceedings in order to put even greater pressure on the authorities. Some in the Russian government want to storm the arena but the FSB’s director, General Karpov (Uri Tsurilo), who is coordinating the security services’ response, fears it will lead to a massacre. Smolin therefore acts by himself, enters the circus secretly via the sewer system, kills Boikis and rescues a small bunch of hostages that includes his daughter. It is at this point that we – and television audiences worldwide – grasp the magnitude of Allah Ansar’s mission. Khasan leaves the circus in an armoured car he has demanded from the authorities and takes possession of a plutonium capsule other Arab terrorists have stolen from a Moscow laboratory. His plan is to exchange some of the circus hostages for a plane, which he will fly to Rome. Once over the Eternal City, Khasan will use the plutonium as a radioactive dirty bomb, killing the leaders of the G8 countries that have assembled for an anti-terrorist summit and 235

Cinematic Terror

Figure 12.3  Countdown: Alexei Smolin (Alexei Makarov) gets a hug from his daughter. The danger is far from over, however.

rendering Rome ‘uninhabitable for 150 years’. What was a Russian terrorist crisis has now become one affecting the whole world. The West, headed by NATO’s chief of intelligence, the American Admiral Mallory (Amos), must work alongside their onetime enemies, Russia. Khasan and his crazed, psychotic Islamists look as though they will succeed. The FSB storm the circus and overcome the terrorists with the help of a ‘good’ Chechen, Omar (Vyacheslav Razbegaev). But by this point Khasan has crashed his way through police roadblocks and hijacked a cargo plane. It is left to Smolin, who has sneaked on board the plane after earlier jumping atop Khasan’s armoured car, to save the day. In mid-air, Smolin first kills the Arab, who was about to abandon his praying comrades by parachuting to safety before the plane got near Rome. Then, with the help of FSB and NATO cryptographers, Smolin deactivates the bomb’s altimeter, which allows him to take the plane below 3000 metres without it exploding. Finally, the FSB hero spectacularly lands the stricken aircraft without causing the bomb to detonate and lay waste to western Russia. All ends well. Moments later, Pokrovsky’s private jet turns back from Moscow to London and a joint Russian-NATO air raid destroys Allah Ansar’s base in Qatar. Just before the credits roll, however, we see that the bin Laden figure is still alive. He has found refuge, in what looks like the Pinkisi Gorge in Georgia, a region which in real life the Russian government had long said was a sanctuary for jihadists. Civilization’s fight against New Age Islamist terrorism must go on. Compared with many Western adventure films like Die Hard, Countdown might come across as grim and didactic. Major Smolin is no wise-cracking John McClane. 236

Networked Jihadists

The film’s villains are entirely one-dimensional: quick to anger, cowardly, often shown praying or being symbolically compared with snakes. The movie’s stunts are spectacular enough, especially the fight sequences aboard the cargo plane, but they lack the innovatively hyperrealist style of, say, Hollywood’s Jason Bourne films of this era.37 Countdown’s final textual statement, calling for unity in the war against terrorism, is, depending on one’s point of view, unashamedly direct or embarrassingly propagandistic. Years later, Yevgeny Lavrentiev regretted not having made Countdown with a lighter, more ironic touch, something he attributed to the constraints imposed by the conservative-minded security services.38 Despite this, Countdown is arguably near pitch-perfect for its target audience. The average Russian was not particularly well educated, had been fed for years on a regular diet of official news about Chechen terrorism and probably felt aggrieved at Russia’s apparently inexorable decline. Countdown’s plot was obviously an amalgam of the 1999 Black September bombings, the kidnapping of Alexey Galkin and the 2002 Dubrovka siege, which presumably made it seem more real for many viewers. For those with longer memories or a keen sense of history, Smolin’s forced confession might have been a reminder of the notorious show trials from the Communist era. These and other viewers would probably have seen little harm in putting a positive spin on the recent traumatic terrorist attacks on Russia, which are handled so well by the FSB this time around that not a single hostage dies. As Smolin’s Alexei Makarov argued when promoting the film, the time had come for Russians to put a stop to the criticism that had been levelled at their security services in the wake of the Cold War and to start being ‘proud’ of the role ‘our boys’ were playing in the new war being fought against terrorism.39 Such sentiments were of course not restricted entirely to Russia in the early years of the global war on terror. At the same time, they testify to what many saw as a powerful yearning in Russia for the kind of home-grown stories and heroes that predominated in the Soviet era, before Russia’s cinema and television screens had been filled in the 1990s by Hollywood material and Latin American soap operas.40 Unlike American hits like The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997),41 Countdown is not a film that focuses on Russians conducting or abetting terrorism. Instead, it centres on the Motherland being attacked by and vanquishing terrorism. Countdown shows

Klaus Dodds, ‘Jason Bourne: Gender, Geopolitics, and Contemporary Representations of National Security’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 38, 1, August 2010, 21–33; Steven Peacock, ‘The Collaborative Film Work of Greengrass and Damon: A Stylistic State of Exception’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 9, 2–3, November 2012, 147–160. 38 Yevgeny Lavrentiev, interview, Moscow, 10 March 2011. 39 Mark Franchetti, ‘James Bondski Turns Back Clock’, Sunday Times (London), 16 January 2005. 40 In 1997, about 70 per cent of Russian evening primetime television consisted of such US films and serials as Santa Barbara. Some commentators believed that they might be witnessing the death of Russian cinema during this era. Nancy Condee, ‘The Dream of Well-Being’, Sight & Sound, 7, 12, 1997, 18–21. 41 Bob Fisher, ‘Terror at Ground Zero’, American Cinematographer, 78, 9, 1997, 30–32, 34, 36. 37

237

Cinematic Terror

us that Russia can still produce heroes like Smolin: decent, incorruptible, brave men who put country and family first. As Lavrentiev intended, the film mimics Soviet Socialist Realism in its depiction of ‘the people’ and the ‘enemies of the people’. And the film’s final statement confidently predicts ultimate victory in positive language redolent of Soviet propaganda: ‘We will defeat terrorism’ (pobedim terrorizm).42 Countdown is not just a Russian story, however, for the terrorists that Major Smolin is fighting threaten the whole world. The movie spends remarkably little time exploring the terrorists’ motives – less even than its model, Die Hard. The Chechens do use the media to utter platitudes about national liberation but their Islamist rants make it clear that any talk of the war between Russia and Chechnya being a civil war is completely mistaken. These jihadists are, as senior Russian ministers had recently put it after Beslan, ‘new-generation terrorists’ – religious fanatics that want ‘to change the world according to their own pattern’.43 Khasan and his brethren don’t have normal, achievable political objectives but are instead driven by an irrational hatred of ‘freedom’. Because their extremism knows no bounds and permits no compromise, they must ultimately be killed. The jihadists have at least got one thing right: it is ‘them’ versus ‘us’, in a fight to the death.44

Figure 12.4  Countdown: Chechen terrorists in the heart of Moscow. Yevgeny Lavrentiev, interview, Moscow, 10 March 2011. Simons, Mass Media, 67–68, 72. 44 Putin had said publicly for several years that he saw no point in talking with jihadists. Ever since the killing of Djokhar Dudayev in 1996, Russia’s security services had been expanding their counter-terrorist offensive beyond national boundaries to carry out extrajudicial assassinations. Countdown’s linking Allah Ansar to Qatar hinted at the assassination of Chechen warlord Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Doha in February 2004. Yandarbiyev was widely suspected in Russia of having masterminded the Dubrovka siege. Simons, Mass Media, 72; Soldatov and Borogan, The New Nobility, 193–200. 42 43

238

Networked Jihadists

Another reason why these terrorists represent a new phenomenon is that they can wreak far greater havoc than any predecessors. They have a network of cells, stretching from Europe to the Middle East. Their leader (or CEO)45 can direct affairs via satellite phone. Their strategy calls for mass-casualty ‘events’ on an unparalleled scale, exploiting today’s 24/7 transnational news culture and the ‘oxygen’ provided by media organizations like Catherine Stone’s World Television News. Many of them are prepared to die when carrying out their attacks. And they can access or build portable, state-of-the-art weapons of mass destruction, like dirty bombs. After 9/11, the world’s media had become obsessed with such devices to the point where many ‘experts’ argued that their use by terrorists was inevitable. By appropriating one of the New Age of Terror’s motifs in this way, Countdown was helping to generate more ‘evidence’ that global terrorism had entered a new and more deadly era.46 This is why it is so important to see Russia in Countdown being portrayed as not just part of the war on terror but effectively leading it. Moscow is the terrorists’ initial target in the film, chosen because it is the Russians – as Putin claimed – who are

Figure 12.5  Countdown: Aboard the hijacked aircraft, Khasan (Ramil Sabitov) announces holy war via satellite telephone.

After 9/11, Bruce Hoffman was among many terrorism experts who described Osama bin Laden as a ‘terrorist CEO’, who ‘applied business administration and modern management techniques to the running of a transnational terrorist organization’. Bruce Hoffman, ‘Rethinking Terrorism and Counterterrorism Since 9/11’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 25, 5, 2002, 308–309. 46 Gilbert King, Dirty Bomb: Weapon of Mass Disruption (New York: Penguin, 2004); Robin M. Frost, Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11 (New York: Routledge 2005). American or British movies and television programmes that played with the fear of dirty bombs include Dirty War (BBC/HBO, 2004), Right at Your Door (Chris Gorak, 2006), The Dirty Bomb Diaries (DBD Productions, 2007), Naked Science: Dirty Bomb Attack (national Geographic, 2009) and Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011). 45

239

Cinematic Terror

principally holding back the Islamist tide. When the target switches to Rome, via a 9/11-type Kamikaze attack, NATO belatedly realizes that Russia’s battle is theirs too. With the crisis now at a heightened, international level, the Russian president first provides moral leadership, by announcing that he will refuse to let the plane leave Russian air space, even if that means sacrificing thousands of his fellow countrymen to save Rome. Then, the FSB’s technology wizards coordinate a joint effort with NATO’s computer experts to disable the dirty bomb. ‘Good job, Russians!’ an awestruck NATO pilot shouts at the end of the movie. The next time the West needs help in a terrorist crisis, Countdown is saying, it will know where to turn.47 As a measure of its importance to the war on terror, Countdown’s filming in 2004 had been shrouded in secrecy. Equally unusually, pirated videos of the film were not for sale on Russia’s thriving black market before its official release.48 The Russian government gave Countdown its full backing when the movie appeared on screens in December 2004. The film premiered at the prestigious Pushkin Movie Theatre in Moscow, where its soundtrack was enhanced, again highly unusually, by a military orchestra. Sergei Primakov, the former Russian prime minister and one-time head of foreign intelligence, was among the prominent politicians who attended the premiere. Also there were the military’s top brass and members of Russia’s business elite.49 The FSB’s director, Nikolai Patrushev, and Vladimir Putin himself had already approved the film, after watching it in closed screenings some days earlier. Putin might have compared it to the classic Soviet spy film that had inspired him to join the KGB back in the 1970s, Vladimir Basov’s The Shield and the Sword (1968).50 In what was almost a record for Russia, Countdown was shown on 340 screens scattered across the nation’s major cities in the winter of 2004–2005. One of its main advertising slogans, ‘Cooler than Night Watch’, sought to appeal to those who had recently flocked to the cinemas to see Russia’s first supernatural blockbuster.51 This strategy might have worked, but only to a degree. Reliable figures on Countdown’s box Making a G8 summit in Rome Allah Ansar’s target might have reminded some viewers of the warnings which President George W. Bush had received at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 – reported by the press at the time and after 9/11 – that al-Qaeda was planning to assassinate the eight leaders with an aircraft filled with explosives, http://rense.com/general51/ifo.htm (28 March 2013). 48 Anton Dolin, ‘Natural Born KGB Agents’, Gazeta, 7 December 2004; Roman Shirokov, ‘Countdown’, Dosug I Razvlechenie, 9–19 December 2004. Russia was at or close to the top of illegal video production during this era. Condee, ‘The Dream of Well-Being’. 49 ‘Russian Thriller “Countdown”, Hello! (Moscow); Nadezhda Pomerantseva, ‘A Special Showing From a Special Order’, Kommersant, 6 December 2004. 50 MacFadyen, ‘Evgenii Lavrentiev’; Finn, ‘In Russia, A Pop Culture Coup for the KGB’; Franchetti, ‘James Bondski’. 51 Elena Egereva, ‘Two Weeks in the City’, Afisha, 6–19 December 2004; Viktoriia Dunaeva, ITAR-TASS News Agency, 4 December 2004; Efremova, ‘A Counterterrorism Saga in which Chechens aren’t Animals but just Bad Guys’. Countdown’s budget was twice that of Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch. Night Watch grossed US$16 million at the Russian box office after its release, representing, at the time, the largest profit ever made by a Russian film. Beumers, A Russian Cinema, 256. 47

240

Networked Jihadists

office are hard to come by but it appears the movie only just about broke even. Still, few other Russian films in this era could boast US$7 million dollars in takings, which indicates Countdown had at least got some things right.52 Press opinion on Countdown was, to put it mildly, mixed. Any hopes its makers may have had that the Russian media would patriotically cheer it to the rooftops were dashed as soon as the first reviews appeared. Indeed, the criticism Countdown received significantly undermines the claims many Russian liberals and outsiders made during this period that Putin had turned the Russian media into little more than a government megaphone. These claims reached a crescendo in 2006, when one of the most prominent critics of Putin’s war on terror, the Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered by assailants widely thought to have links to the FSB.53 A number of film critics took against Countdown on aesthetic grounds, for being so derivative and for aping Hollywood’s formulaic action-adventures. It was ‘a run-ofthe-mill B-movie’, declared Denis Danilov on one of Russia’s most prominent Internet film sites, a ‘bare-faced clone of Die Hard and Under Siege’.54 Other critics objected to the movie’s stance on terrorism and its makers’ proximity to the security services. In this vein, the glossy entertainment magazine Afisha labelled Countdown ‘dreary agitprop’ and thought it was even worse than the execrable pro-KGB films from the Soviet era.55 The human rights activist and former Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalyov angrily agreed. ‘Imagine a German film casting a former Stasi officer as a hero who saves the world. It would be a scandal.’56 Though less appalled than Kovalyov, the men’s magazine Penthouse disparaged Countdown (and the Russian media generally) for inflaming public fears of terrorism. It argued that the chances of a Russian person actually suffering a terrorist attack was somewhere around a million to one.57 Olga Allenova, a journalist who had been reporting from Chechnya for years for Boris Berezovsky’s daily broadsheet Kommersant, described Countdown as absolute fantasy from beginning to end.58 Alexander Cherkasov, a leading member of the Memorial Association, which had been documenting the Russian government’s abuse of human rights in Chechnya since 1994, went several steps further. To him, Countdown was designed to justify all of the past and future crimes perpetrated by the state.59 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0415940/business (22 January 2013); ‘Rezo Takes “Emmenez-Moi” to Mart’, Hollywood Reporter, 13 May 2005. 53 Anna Politkovskaya, ‘Her Own Death Foretold’, Washington Post, 15 October 2006; David Finkelstein, ‘Investigative Journalism: Elena Poniatowska (1932–) and Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006)’, Journalism Practice, 2, 1, 2008, 130–134. 54 Denis Danilov, ‘Countdown’, www.filmz.ru, 9 December 2004. 55 P. V., ‘Countdown’, Afisha, 16–19 December 2004. 56 Franchetti, ‘James Bondski’. 57 ‘Countdown’, Penthouse (Moscow), December 2004. 58 Allenova, ‘Dream of a Resident’. 59 Alexander Cherkasov, ‘All That Is Real is Rational’, Ezhednevnyi zhurnal, 21 December 2005. 52

241

Cinematic Terror

Others came to quite different conclusions about Countdown, however. Arbat Prestige, a free newspaper published by Russia’s leading cosmetics firm, found Countdown’s siege scenes shockingly life-like. The arts magazine, Time Out, concurred, calling the film’s image of a bomb being raised over children’s heads in the circus ‘wicked and misguided’ in light of recent events in Beslan. Sergey Gribkov responded to these criticisms by saying that people needed to know what could happen to them.60 Other newspapers, like Tribuna, which was part of Russia’s largest, state-owned media holding, Gazprom-Media, thought Alexei Smolin was ‘cooler than James Bond’. Rolan praised Countdown for coming up with an authentically Russian hero, not an American-style ‘superhero’ played by Arnold Schwarzenegger but a free-thinking professional with ‘a slightly awkward charm’.61 The FSB clearly liked Smolin, too. In 2006, shortly after Countdown had made its television debut, the service awarded the film first prize in a competition for the best artistic works about Russia’s state security operatives.62 By this point, the ‘real’ Smolin, Alexey Galkin, who was still in hiding, had reportedly sued the producers for publicizing his Chechen ordeal and thereby exposing him to further terrorist attempts on his life.63 Countdown was overwhelmingly aimed at Russian audiences, but there are some indications that the film fared well in other countries too. Yuri Sagaidak later claimed that a lucrative deal on the foreign distribution of Countdown was wrecked by Boris Berezovsky’s allies in the international media.64 Despite this, the film still managed to be distributed in over fifty countries, including in China where it earned a prize at Beijing’s annual film festival. Curiously, like Die Hard two decades earlier, Countdown seems to have carved a niche for itself particularly in Japan. There, one newspaper, Japan Times, pronounced the film entertaining fun despite its heavyhanded patriotism. The reviewer, Kaori Shoji, especially liked the Russian machismo on display and pointed out that Stalin would have turned in his grave at a Russian movie modelled on Die Hard. (Shoji appears not to have known that the Great Leader was secretly an avid Hollywood fan.)65 Alena Efremova, ‘Will “Countdown” Become # 1?’, Arbat Prestige, 20–26 December 2004; Kirill Alekhin, ‘Countdown’, Time Out, 2–9 December 2004; MacFadyen, ‘Evgenii Lavrentiev’. 61 Anzhelika Zaozerskaia, ‘Major Smolin is Cooler than James Bond’, Tribuna, 4 December 2004; Anastasiia Primachenko, ‘Your Personal Number’, Rolan, November 2004. 62 Soldatov and Borogan, New Nobility, 103. 63 N. Kozlova and S. Ptichkin, ‘Countdown Betrayed Its Protagonist: The Producers Put at Risk the Life of the Real Secret Agent’, Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 22 December 2005. 64 Yuri Sagaidak, interview, Moscow, 22 June 2011. By this point, Berezovsky was on the Kremlin’s mostwanted list on charges of fraud, money-laundering and attempted interference in the Russian political process. He died in London in March 2013, apparently of suicide. David Randall and Shaun Walker, ‘Boris Berezovsky Found Dead at 67’, Independent on Sunday (London), 24 March 2013, 7; Gillard, ‘Obituaries – Boris Berezovsky’. 65 Kaori Shoji, ‘You Can’t Really Go Wrong With the Army on Your Side’ and ‘Dying Hard for the Motherland’, Japan Times, 17 March 2006. On Stalin’s penchant for Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan pictures and other Hollywood movies, which he would often watch in the Kremlin’s private cinema, see, for instance, Caute, Dancer Defects, 117–118 and Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘Why Stalin Loved Stalin and Wanted John Wayne Shot’, The Telegraph (London), 4 June 2004. 60

242

Networked Jihadists

‘Acts of terrorism, as has come to be widely accepted in the twenty-first century, are acts of violence threatened or carried out against Western civilization by Evildoers – Arab/Muslim barbarians who are fanatical in their belief in Islam and hatred of liberal norms’, argues one scholar of media and terrorism, Azra Naseem. ‘The degree of truth that this knowledge of terrorism has attained in the first decade of the twenty-first century’, Naseem posits, ‘is such that it has become nigh on impossible for Western societies to think otherwise: not only is the terrorist nothing but an Evildoer, but also only an Evildoer can be a terrorist.’66 It is difficult to argue with this assertion or with those who contend that the mass media has played a critical role in constructing this ‘knowledge’ of modernday terrorism over the past decade. Yevgeny Lavrentiev’s Countdown is just one small cinematic piece in that jigsaw of knowledge but by no means an atypical one. The film paints a seductively black-versus-white picture of the West’s new, terrorist ‘other’. It does not ask viewers to ‘think’ about terrorism’s roots or causes but prefers instead, like so many other films in our study, to ‘show’ them terrorists’ ‘evil’ actions instead. Countdown seamlessly conflates Arab, Muslim and terrorist, just like many of Menahem Golan’s productions had done in the 1980s and 1990s. The key difference is that now the stakes are far higher. In Countdown and films like it, we can ‘see’ what the future has in store for us unless jihadi terrorism is defeated – ritual slaughter on an epic scale never seen before. Judging from its critical and commercial reception, it is probably safe to say that Countdown was not the most effective of films to emerge after September 2001 that called for an all-out global war on terror. For one thing, Russian cinema just did not have the worldwide pulling power of some of its American, Western European and Asian counterparts. However, Countdown clearly demonstrates how easily film industries slipped into treating terrorism as an enemy rather than a tactic after September 2001, thus endorsing the very phrase ‘war on terror’. It also proves that Hollywood was by no means the only film industry to preach the ‘new terrorism’ mantra after 9/11. Conversely, via its conscious mimicking of Die Hard, Countdown underlined the supremacy of the Hollywood model of terrorism in the early twentyfirst century.67

Azra Naseem, ‘The Literal Truth about Terrorism: An Analysis of Post-9/11 Popular US Non-Fiction Books on Terrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5, 3, December 2012, 455. Italics in original. 67 For criticism of the concepts of ‘new terrorism’ and the ‘war on terror’, see Ersun N. Kurtulus, ‘The “New Terrorism” and its Critics’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 34, 6, 2011, 476–500 and Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terror: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 66

243

CHAPTER 13 SUICIDE VICTIMS IN CLOSE-UP

Though it is as old as cinema itself, cinematic terrorism effectively came of age in the 1930s courtesy, as we saw in Chapter 2, of Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage. That film’s pivotal sequence, we might recall, centred on the horrifying death of a boy, Stevie, when a time bomb he is carrying explodes on board a London bus. The final scene in our penultimate movie also focuses on a harrowing bus bombing – but one with a crucial, profound difference. This time, the bomb-carrier, a Palestinian called Saïd, does not die by accident like Stevie, but via a desperate act of murderous defiance aimed at the Israeli state. Saïd is on a suicide mission and the cameras will follow his journey of self-destruction to the very point of detonation. Suicide terrorism did not appear out of a clear blue sky on the morning of 11 September 2001, despite what many people thought. History is replete with political and religious activists willing to die for their cause, from the Assassins of twelfthcentury Persia to the Kamikaze pilots of Second World War Japan.1 In the last two decades of the twentieth century, suicide bombings accounted for a quarter of all casualties attributed to international terrorism, with more than half carried out by Islamist groups as far afield as Sri Lanka and Turkey. Interest in and the practice of suicide terrorism then surged after the shock of the 9/11 attacks, a transnational act involving an unprecedented number of both perpetrators and casualties.2 During the subsequent US-led war in Iraq, suicide bombing became a routine phenomenon, one that was made all the more appalling by video excerpts of terrorists’ acts posted on the Internet.3 Suicide terrorists had appeared on cinema screens before September 2001. However, with one or two exceptions, like the Indian-made The Terrorist (1997) mentioned in Chapter 10, few movies had dealt with the subject of suicide terrorism in any depth. After 9/11, a number of film-makers across the globe felt it was their duty to ‘get inside the mind’ of the seemingly endless procession of men and women prepared to blow themselves up in order to kill their enemies. This important Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 2 Carr, Infernal Machine, 267; Shireen Khan Burki, ‘Haram or Halal? Islamists’ Use of Suicide Attacks as “Jihad” ’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 23, 4, 2011, 582–601. 3 Martha Crenshaw, ‘Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay’, Security Studies, 16, 1, January–March 2007, 133–162; Mohammed M. Hafez, ‘Martyrdom Mythology in Iraq: How Jihadists Frame Suicide Terrorism in Videos and Biographies’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 19, 1, 2007, 95–115. 1

Suicide Victims in Close-up

development formed part of a wider effort on the part of the mass media, as well as academia, to look at terrorism from the perspective of the terrorists themselves. ‘New terrorism’ seemed to be accompanied, in other words, with a new sub-genre of cinematic terrorism. In contrast with films like Yevgeny Lavrentiev’s Countdown, this sub-genre would not simply condemn extreme acts of jihadi violence. Instead, it would look to explain acts of political violence by getting closer than ever to those who were actually committing them.4 This important change in at least some film-makers’ approach towards terrorism is explored below through a close analysis of Hany Abu-Assad’s 2005 drama Paradise Now. The most critically acclaimed and culturally influential of all suicide terrorism features to date, Paradise Now traces forty-eight hours in the lives of two young Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank who have volunteered to carry out a suicide attack in Tel Aviv. Paradise Now has a fascinating production and reception history. Directed by a Palestinian based in the Netherlands, funded by Europeans, co-produced by an Israeli and written with the help of some of Hollywood’s biggest names, Paradise Now epitomizes the increasing internationalization of cinematic terrorism in the early twenty-first century. During filming on the West Bank, the cast and crew had to contend with armed militants haggling over the script, kidnappings and threats from Israeli helicopter gunships. After its release, Paradise Now made history by becoming the first Palestinian film to be nominated for an Academy Award, thereby provoking a row over the very existence of ‘Palestine’. For us, Paradise Now’s greatest significance lies in its rational delineation of the process of becoming a terrorist and in its daring depiction of terrorists as not just flesh and blood human beings but as victims. As we already know, Paradise Now was by no means the first film to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, as our earlier analysis of Exodus and Operation Thunderbolt indicated, probably more terrorism films have revolved around that conflict over the last six decades than any other single dispute.5 Paradise Now stands out though for being the first feature film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to focus entirely on the phenomenon of suicide bombing. It was prompted, like most of the films in our study, by contemporary events. Films that can be included in this sub-genre include Good Morning, Night (Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 2003), The War Within (Joseph Castelo, USA, 2005), Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev, USA/Germany/Germany/ France, 2007), My Daughter The Terrorist (Beate Arnestad, Norway/Sri Lanka, 2007), Promised Paradise (Leonard Retel Helmrich, Indonesia/Netherlands, 2007), For My Father (Dror Zahavi, Germany/Israel, 2008), Traitor (Jeffrey Nachmanoff, USA, 2008), American Jihadist (Mark Claywell, USA, 2009), Four Lions (Chris Morris, UK, 2010) and Prison and Paradise (Daniel Rudi Haryanto, Indonesia, 2010). 5 On this, see Shohat, Israeli Cinema; Loshitzky, Identity Politics; Lina Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006); Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs (2009); Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Cettl, American Cinema. 4

245

Cinematic Terror

Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, often targeting crowded bars or buses, had caused headlines around the world in the 1990s. With the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising (or Intifada) in 2000, sparked by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to sacred Muslim sites in Jerusalem in September that year, these attacks swelled. Between 2000 and 2003, 103 incidents took place, resulting in 440 deaths and 3076 injuries. ‘Not since the Battle of Algiers’, writes one historian, ‘had a civilian population been subjected to such a systematic and bloody bombing campaign.’6 In 2002, the Israeli government began construction of a barrier that would separate most of the West Bank from areas inside Israel, claiming that this was the only way to stem the plague of suicide bombings. Palestinians and others countered by arguing that the barrier was an illegal attempt to annex Palestinian land under the guise of security.7 Given the moral, political and territorial ramifications of Palestinian suicide bombing, the fact that it took until 2005 for a film like Paradise Now to appear points to the difficulties many film-makers had in dealing explicitly with such a provocative subject. Paradise Now itself was six years in the making, an abnormally long time for a relatively small-budget production. Part of the reason for this was the parlous, unstable state of the Palestinian film industry. Dormant for decades after the establishment of Israel in 1948, Palestinian cinema had established a voice in the 1980s but few Palestinian films had left much of an international imprint. A notable exception to this was Elia Suleiman’s 2002 black comedy about life under Israeli occupation, Divine Intervention. Yet even globally acclaimed films like Divine Intervention were only made possible by support from outside countries, since the Palestinian territories themselves still had no film schools, no studios and virtually no film-industry infrastructure.8 Hany Abu-Assad, director and co-writer of Paradise Now, was a prominent member of the Palestinian filmic diaspora. Born in Nazareth in 1961, Abu-Assad had migrated to the Netherlands at nineteen to study aircraft engineering. In the 1990s, without any formal film training, he had started making short documentaries and tiny-budget features in the Palestinian territories, focusing on what he saw as the daily humiliations of life under Israeli occupation. These were not overtly propagandistic films but gentle stories set on the border, as one critic put it, ‘between fact and fiction, between comedy and tragedy, between Israel and Palestine, between the ghosts of the past and the burden of the present’.9 Carr, Infernal Machine, 260. The first uprising had taken place between 1987 and 1993. For a flavour of the ways in which Israeli and Palestinian film-makers reacted to the second Intifada, especially its impact on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, see Rebecca Romani, ‘The Hazards of Occupation’, Cineaste, 34, 3, 2009, 25–30. 8 Hamid Dabashi (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London: Verso, 2006); Nana Asfour, ‘Reclaiming Palestine: One Film at a Time’, Cineaste, 34, 3, Summer 2009, 18–24; Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema, 171–189. 9 ‘Filmographies’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam; B. Ruby Rich, ‘Bomb Culture’, Sight & Sound, 16, 4, 2006, 28–30. 6 7

246

Suicide Victims in Close-up

By the end of the 1990s, Abu-Assad’s attention had turned to the issue of Palestinian suicide terrorism. At first, like many people in Israel and elsewhere, the film-maker thought of suicide terrorists as little more than brainwashed religious fanatics. However, after months spent talking to sociologists and security experts, studying interrogation transcripts of suicide bombers who either had been captured or had changed their minds, and meeting the relatives of dead suicide bombers, AbuAssad gradually reached a quite different conclusion. His research had shown him that those people who were willing to kill themselves along with innocent civilians were driven by a complex range of emotions and reasons – so complex, in fact, that the medium of film could not hope to depict it truthfully.10 Nonetheless, just like Neil Jordan with Michael Collins a decade or so earlier, Abu-Assad had now become obsessed with his subject. After completing a few other, smaller projects,11 he therefore set about finding, as he put it, ‘the cinematic means of dealing with something that, in principle, was beyond cinema’.12 His answer to this conundrum would eventually come in two parts. The first related to form. Abu-Assad wanted to distinguish his film from television coverage of suicide terrorism, most of which in his view came in the shape of fragmented news footage of shock, carnage and grief rather than considered analysis. By bridging the ‘old frontier’ between documentary-making and fiction, Abu-Assad not only hoped to fill the gap left by the craving of news channels for titbits of daily information. He also sought to bring ‘fiction closer to reality’ and ‘guide the audience into understanding what seems totally incomprehensible’. To Abu-Assad, models of this form of film-making included Margarethe von Trotta’s 1981 treatise on the Red Army Faction, Marianne and Juliane, and Danis Tanovic’s 2001 Academy Award-winning Bosnian War drama No Man’s Land.13 The second part of Abu-Assad’s answer related to style and content. His movie would focus not on filming the act of suicide terrorism itself, nor on its immediate gory aftermath, in which he felt television revelled. Instead, it would concentrate on capturing what drove Palestinians to suicide terrorism and on destroying the prevailing twin perceptions of suicide bombers as either deranged criminals or super-heroes. Central to the bombers’ motivation, in Abu-Assad’s opinion, was the ‘absurdity’ and ‘boredom’ of life under Israeli military occupation. Moreover, AbuAssad intended not to present the Israelis as cruel one-dimensional oppressors, which ‘Director’s Comments’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. These included the award-winning Rana’s Wedding (2002) and Ford Transit (2003). The former was a feature film about a Palestinian woman in Jerusalem getting married and was funded by the Palestinian Film Foundation. The latter was a documentary about a Palestinian taxi driver. ‘Filmographies’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 12 ‘Director’s Comments’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 13 ‘Director’s Comments’ and ‘Producer’s Comments’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam; Stefanie Hofer, ‘ “Memory Talk”: Terrorism, Trauma and Generational Struggle in Petzold’s The State I Am In and Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane’, Film Criticism, 34, 1, Fall 2009, 36–57; Andrew Horton, ‘No Man’s Land’, Cineaste, 27, 2, Spring 2002, 38–39. 10 11

247

Cinematic Terror

countless other Arab-made films had done already.14 Rather, his film would focus on the ‘ordinary despair’ and ‘enforced inferiority’ felt by Palestinians, heightened by their proximity to Israeli cities teeming with material abundance. His film would also need to bring out the tragicomic aspects of life in the Palestinian territories – ‘the very stuff of cinema’ as he called it – thus humanizing the terrorists, lightening the audience’s load and making the production less propagandistic.15 In theory, Abu-Assad’s ideas sounded relatively straightforward, but in practice they were not. Scripting what would eventually turn into Paradise Now was a slow and arduous process, as Abu-Assad and his co-writers mulled over their terrorism research and changed aspects accordingly. Having started his deliberations in 1999, prior to the second Intifada, Abu-Assad’s first complete script emerged in early 2001. Titled ‘In Between Two Days’, it was written by Abu-Assad, the Palestinian novelist Adana Shibli and the Dutch producer Bero Beyer, with whom Abu-Assad had set up Augustus Film in Amsterdam in 2000. In outline form, ‘In Between Two Days’ is very similar in form, tone and plot to the final version of Paradise Now. The script centres on the friendship between two Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, Saïd and Khaled. It shows the two men being willingly recruited as suicide bombers and preparing for their mission. It depicts Saïd falling in love with a peacenik, Suha, and everything climaxing tragically in Tel Aviv. At the same time, there are many small but significant differences between the 2001 script and the finished film that, when put together, cast suicide terrorism in a quite different light, one more in line with the Western media’s prevailing views. These suggest that Abu-Assad’s research was still to be completed. The first notable difference is that ‘In Between Two Days’ paints the Israelis in much darker colours than Paradise Now. The Israelis are seen treating the Palestinians as ‘cattle’, and the Israeli soldiers’ brutality at border checkpoints and other places at times bears comparison with the French military in The Battle of Algiers. Second, Saïd and Khaled are not grown men but impressionable teenagers, who appear to have been groomed since childhood for their suicide mission by sinister resistance leaders. Third, all of the Palestinian militants are far more religiously motivated in ‘In Between Two Days’ than in Paradise Now. This is brought out most clearly in Khaled’s Koran-inflected martyrdom video. Fourth, Suha’s opposition to suicide terrorism is given less space, in favour of, among other things, more knockabout humour and Saïd’s dreamy visions of being trapped in a coffin. Finally, whereas Paradise Now ends with Khaled backing out of the suicide mission at the last moment, ‘In Between Two Days’ finishes with the two friends exploding off-screen.16 On the representation of Israelis in Palestinian and Arab film, see Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema and Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East. 15 ‘Director’s Comments’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 16 ‘In Between Two Days’, 2001, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 14

248

Suicide Victims in Close-up

By early 2002, the Israeli producer Amir Harel had agreed to support Abu-Assad’s project, thus lending it a more bi-partisan flavour. Harel then submitted ‘In Between Two Days’ to the Sundance Lab in the United States, an annual writers’ workshop organized by the Hollywood star Robert Redford that gave independent screenwriters the opportunity to work intensively on their feature film scripts with established film industry artists. Hollywood actor-director Ed Harris, plus screenwriter Zachary Sklar (best known for Oliver Stone’s 1991 political drama JFK), among others, subsequently helped Abu-Assad to critique his script and to add telling details to the characters. The result was a second script, titled ‘Two Days’, written by Abu-Assad and Beyer later that year.17 ‘Two Days’ is a more Hollywood-esque treatment of suicide terrorism than ‘In Between Two Days’ or Paradise Now. Far greater emphasis is placed on the militants’ religious beliefs. These beliefs provoke chants of ‘Kill the Jews’ during a martyrs’ march and a set-piece argument between Suha and the terrorist group’s leader (known only as The Architect) about the latter’s quest to turn Palestine into an Islamist theocracy. ‘Two Days’ also makes far more of Saïd and Khaled’s ‘radicalization’ at the hands of an older, controlling terrorist generation. In a flashback at the start, for instance, they are mere boys playing football on the beach, being watched over by their future adult handler; later, when Saïd and Khaled are being fitted with their suicide vests, they come across, as the script puts it, ‘like two kids being dressed by their mothers’.18 In ‘Two Days’, Saïd is an even more sympathetic character than in the final film and driven to terrorism above everything else by the shame of his late father’s collaboration with the Israelis. The prankster Khaled, on the other hand, seems driven mainly by the desire to impress his friends and relatives. In contrast with Paradise Now, which had no music whatsoever, ‘Two Days’ had a full score and theme song. Finally, ‘Two Days’ concluded in a spectacular scene of high drama. On the packed streets of Tel Aviv, Khaled would die first, loudly exploding off camera. This would cause Saïd to panic and to have last-minute second thoughts about his mission. He would then be shot dead by the police just moments before his bomb was about to go off.19 Despite the Sundance Lab’s seal of approval, another three years would pass before a version of Abu-Assad’s script appeared on screen. This cannot be put down to any form of direct censorship by government or film regulatory bodies. It is more the ‘Augustus Film’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam; Anne Thompson, ‘Risky Business: WIP Taking Chance on Palestinian “Paradise” ’, Hollywood Reporter, 30 September 2005, 6, 32. 18 ‘Two Days’, 2002, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. The flashback introduction seems to have been jettisoned only during the filming of Paradise Now, as it was in the final shooting script: ‘Paradise Now’ shooting script, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 19 ‘Two Days’, 2002, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 17

249

Cinematic Terror

case that Abu-Assad had yet to make a major feature and consequently lacked the experience and pulling power required to find easy access to funding. In addition to this, his project was, to put it mildly, hardly likely to become a major mainstream hit. In the immediate wake of 9/11, more than a few film producers baulked at making the sort of terrorism movies – about suicide bombing, for example – that might upset audiences and either cast doubt on film-makers’ patriotism or leave them open to accusations of tasteless exploitation.20 Abu-Assad’s fortunes changed in late 2003, after the shock of 9/11 had dissipated, thanks to a complicated international financing package. Paradise Now, as his film was now titled, was one of the first recipients of support from the Berlin-based World Cinema Fund, a body that sought to develop cinema in regions with a weak film infrastructure. The WCF’s backing raised Paradise Now’s profile, after which coproduction deals were secured with a number of firms in Western Europe. As a result of this, production of Paradise Now could now go ahead, on a shoestring budget of $2 million.21 Abu-Assad and Beyer promoted Paradise Now as a model film for the twenty-first century, one that drew on an array of international talent in order to make a political statement of global significance. Though this might have been overcooking things a little, Paradise Now could justifiably lay claim to being a hybrid film production par excellence. The full-time film crew of seventy people included individuals from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium and Britain. Numerous Palestinians made up the local crew and ten Israelis were hired for a footage shoot in Tel Aviv. The majority of the cast were Palestinians, including the lead actors Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman, both of whom normally lived in Israel. Filming was entirely on location and took three months to complete, twice as long as expected, for reasons that will become clear. Abu-Assad insisted on shooting everything on widescreen 35 mm film so audiences might distinguish Paradise Now from the sort of digital television news footage of terrorism he so despised because of its superficial, manufactured realism.22 Paradise Now is the only one of our case-study films to be made on land under military occupation. As a result of this, the filming was fraught with tension and violence. Neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian authorities demanded Abu-Assad obtain permission to film on land under their jurisdiction but this failed to stop the film-makers getting into trouble from the very outset. In early 2004, Abu-Assad carried On the time it took the Hollywood mainstream to engage directly with the events of 11 September 2001 through such films as World Trade Center (Oliver Stone) and United 93 (Paul Greengrass), both of which were released in 2006, see Prince, Firestorm, Chapter 2. 21 Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, and WCF booklet, 2009, in Paradise Now Press material: Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. $2 million in 2005 is equivalent to $2.3 million in 2012 dollars. Paradise Now’s budget is the lowest of all of the case-study films in our study. Dollar equivalencies are taken from http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/ (10 June 2013). 22 ‘Q & A With Director Hany Abu-Assad’, Paradise Now Production material, AMPAS. 20

250

Suicide Victims in Close-up

out several weeks’ pre-production work in the densely populated Gaza Strip. The director had always intended to base his film in Gaza, partly because it was an Islamist stronghold from which most Palestinian suicide bombers hailed but mainly because he considered it the epicentre of Palestinian provincial decay. However, when the Israelis assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of the founders of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, in Gaza in March that year, Abu-Assad decided that filming there would be too dangerous and so shifted location to Nablus in the West Bank.23 Nablus, approximately thirty miles north of Jerusalem, was a central flashpoint between Palestinian militant groups and the Israeli Defence Force during the second Intifada. The town had achieved notoriety in September 2002, when Islamist students at al–Jah University commemorated the suicide bombing of a pizzeria in Jerusalem, in which fifteen Israeli teenagers died, with a public exhibition in which photographs of the carnage were accompanied by papier-mâché body parts and fake blood. AbuAssad was less interested in events like this, which Western and Israeli commentators cited as evidence of a debased Palestinian ‘culture of death’, than in Nablus’ political geography. ‘Lying stretched out in a long but narrow valley, tightly closed off by checkpoints fore and aft, with army watchtowers looking down from both mountain sides, Nablus has a very claustrophobic feel to it’, the director wrote in a letter to his investors. ‘It is this feeling that transcends into the social fabric of the city and must find its way onto the screen.’24 Paradise Now would indeed skilfully capture Nablus’s oppressive qualities, not least because filming in the city was like working in a virtual war zone (or, as AbuAssad later put it when promoting his movie, ‘the Wild West’).25 Hardly a day went by without filming having to be put on hold due to gunfire nearby. Sometimes the cast and crew found themselves caught up in running street battles or, in the case of Lubna Azabal (who played Suha), being traumatized by explosions close to the set. The daily curfew imposed on Nablus by the Israeli authorities not only adversely affected the filming schedule, it also encouraged some of the international crew to liken its citizens to ‘trapped laboratory rats’. Living in such conditions had a radicalizing effect on actors like Kais Nashef, who joined protest marches against what he deemed Israeli atrocities.26 This was only half the story, however. Some Israelis and Palestinians were happy to support Abu-Assad’s project. A number of Israelis helped him with production logistics, while several Nablus residents, including known terrorists, shared information, allowed the crew to use their homes, shops and hideouts and even acted in the film. Hany Abu-Assad, ‘Events in Gaza’, 23 March 2004, ‘Production’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 24 Carr, Infernal Machine, 262; Hany Abu-Assad, ‘Events in Gaza’, 23 March 2004, ‘Production’, Paradise Now Project Presentation, 2004, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 25 ‘Q & A With Director Hany Abu-Assad’, Paradise Now Production material, AMPAS. 26 Stephen Galloway, ‘Conflict and Resolve’, Hollywood Reporter, 3–9 January 2006, F1, F2; Kais Nashef, ‘West Bank, Bearing Witness’, Los Angeles Times, 26 February 2006. 23

251

Cinematic Terror

Working this closely with the locals could not but add to the authenticity of Paradise Now, by which Abu-Assad (and audiences presumably) set so much store. The director was particularly proud of the film’s dialogue and that the striking figure with prosthetic hands that played the bomb-maker was, as he put it, ‘the real deal’.27 At the same time, many other Palestinians on the West Bank were deeply suspicious of Paradise Now. Having read the script, the most powerful of the nationalist militias, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, embraced the film but a number of smaller Palestinian militias remained hostile to the project. Several weeks into filming, rumours spread – via Israeli intelligence officials hoping to sow divisions within the local community, Abu-Assad suspected – that the movie was about a Palestinian driven to suicide bombing after a forbidden love affair with a Jewish woman. As a consequence, one of the militias kidnapped location manager Hassan Titi and demanded that the project be shelved. When an Israeli missile hit a car near to the set on the same day, gunmen feared the Israelis were playing cat-andmouse with the residents and film-makers and therefore ordered the crew to leave; six German technicians complied.28 Thinking that his project was about to founder, Abu-Assad felt he had no choice but to go the very top. The director contacted Prime Minister Yasser Arafat’s office, which was able to negotiate Titi’s release and temporarily calm the situation. Nevertheless, when filming soon stopped once more following the killing of three men by a landmine close to the set, Abu-Assad decided to relocate again, this time to Nazareth, forty miles to the north and inside Israel proper. As hoped, things proved to be a lot calmer in his birthplace. Paradise Now was therefore completed relatively quickly, partly by filming as many scenes as possible indoors, away from prying eyes. Abu-Assad would later express relief that none of his cast or crew had been maimed or killed. His decision to have made Paradise Now on location was, in retrospect, ‘insane’.29 On screen, Paradise Now betrays few if any of the strains felt during film-making. It also demonstrates how far Abu-Assad’s thinking on suicide terrorism had shifted since penning the early scripts. For this and other reasons, Paradise Now differs markedly from all of our other case studies. Despite sharing a bus-bombing scene with Sabotage, for instance, Abu-Assad tells us far more than that film about what can motivate terrorism. Though, like Exodus, it blends drama and romance to comment on the use of terrorism by nationalists resisting military occupation in the Middle East, Paradise Now shares none of Otto Preminger’s epic, celebratory qualities. Paradise Now’s cool, understated rigour is a reminder of Costa-Gavras’ State of Siege but Abu-Assad does not burden the script with the same painstaking dialogue. And ‘Q & A With Director Hany Abu-Assad’, Paradise Now Production material, AMPAS. Howard Feinstein, ‘Voiceover: Occupational Hazards’, Village Voice, 26 October 2005. 29 ‘Ewen MacAskill and Hany Abu-Assad in Conversation’, Paradise Now Press material, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 27 28

252

Suicide Victims in Close-up

while The Battle of Algiers also captures the desperation that can breed terrorism, Paradise Now is much more of an accessible human interest story than Pontecorvo’s political polemic. Paradise Now is ninety minutes long and commences on a typical day in the West Bank city of Nablus, where daily life grinds on amid crushing poverty and the occasional rocket blast. We meet two childhood best friends, Saïd (Nashef) and Khaled (Suliman), who are passing an uneventful day together drinking tea, smoking a hookah and working dead-end menial jobs in a mechanic’s yard surrounded by nearby Israeli fences. The more skilled mechanic of the two, Saïd’s day takes a turn for the better when a beautiful young woman called Suha (Azabal) drops by to pick up her car. Their coy, stuttering conversation makes it obvious they have met before and are attracted to one another. All that began as normal or mundane changes utterly however when, as he walks home that evening, Saïd is approached by Jamal (Amer Hlehel), a point man for a radical but unnamed Palestinian organization. Jamal informs Saïd that he and Khaled have been chosen to carry out a suicide bombing strike in Tel Aviv, as a response to the Israelis’ recent killing of two Arabs. Proud to be selected and clearly prepared for this moment for years, Saïd and Khaled are permitted to spend a last night at home – although they must keep their impending death secret even from their families. During the night, Saïd sneaks off to see Suha for what will be the last time. Suha’s pacifism and Saïd’s burgeoning conflicted conscience about the suicide mission cause the young man to stop short of explaining that he has come to say good-bye forever. The following day, at the organization’s secret base in Nablus, Saïd and Khaled are ritually bathed, strapped with explosives, dressed identically in black suits as if

Figure 13.1  Paradise Now: Khaled (Ali Suliman, left) and Saïd (Kais Nashef) – a picture of friendship and frustration.

253

Cinematic Terror

going to a wedding and fed something akin to a ‘last supper’. After videotaping last statements, they are then led by Jamal to a hole in the security fence that marks the border with Israel, where they are to meet an Israeli hireling who will drive them to Tel Aviv. The plan goes awry though when an Israeli patrol car suddenly arrives on the horizon, and Saïd and Khaled are separated from their handlers and subsequently from each other. Saïd flees deeper into Israel, now a human bomb left to his own devices, while Khaled returns to the organization’s base in Nablus. The guerrillas decide to flee. Their leader, Abu Karem (Ashraf Barhoum), suspects Saïd might have tipped off the Israelis about the mission, in which case an air strike on the organization’s base could be imminent. Thinking that Saïd will have returned to Nablus, Khaled searches in vain for his friend through their childhood haunts and finally seeks out Suha as a last resort. Suha quickly works out what has happened and lashes out furiously against Khaled for what she sees as the men’s immoral and self-defeating plan. Nevertheless, spurred by her feelings for Saïd, she joins Khaled in the search. Still in Israel and having increasing doubts about his mission, Saïd passes up an opportunity to destroy a rural bus, perhaps because there are children aboard. Later that day, he returns to Nablus. Time is now running out for Saïd, as his bomb vest, which will automatically explode if he tries to remove it, is about to blow up.30 At the

Figure 13.2  Paradise Now: Khaled and his suicide vest. Jamal (Amer Hlehel) is in the background.

Abu-Assad was quite open about the elements he had to invent for cinematic drama. These included the suicide-bomb vest that could not be removed without blowing up the person wearing it and the idea that each would-be bomber had to be accompanied home for his or her last night by a minder (which would never happen since it would result in the identification of the masterminds). Rich, ‘Bomb Culture’, 28–30. 30

254

Suicide Victims in Close-up

last moment, Khaled and Suha find Saïd asleep on his father’s grave. Despite Suha’s protestations, Saïd and Khaled go to the guerrillas’ safe house, where Saïd’s bomb is defused. Thanks partly to his arguments with Suha, it is now Khaled who has serious doubts about the suicide pact. Not so Saïd, however. Nearly dismissed from the mission because of his earlier disappearance, Saïd opens up to Abu Karem and begs to be allowed to return to Israel to complete the operation. Saïd reveals the depth of his suicidal convictions and recounts the litany of lifelong hatred and family shame that has left him with nothing but a dark desire to seek out death and destruction. The next morning, Saïd and Khaled are returned without incident to Israel and taken into the heart of modern Tel Aviv. There, surrounded by sun-kissed beaches and gleaming high-rises, they are faced with their final, baffling and irrevocably tragic decision. Echoing Suha, Khaled tells his friend their suicide would serve no purpose, either for their families or their people. But Saïd is determined to go through with it alone and tricks his distraught friend into leaving the city. The final scene shows Saïd riding a packed city bus. As we are shown crosscutting images of Saïd’s loved ones and handlers thinking of him, the camera slowly pans in on the bomber’s eyes and the passengers he is about obliterate. The screen then goes to white. Paradise Now challenges conventional wisdom about suicide terrorism specifically and contemporary terrorism generally in several ways. In contrast with Lavrentiev’s Countdown, Abu-Assad’s drama does not portray twenty-first-century terrorism as a networked, transnational conspiracy. It shows instead that terrorism has local roots and causes that are specific to a particular political situation. Paradise Now is not saying that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not have an international dimension

Figure 13.3  Paradise Now: Saïd among his victims. 255

Cinematic Terror

(privately Abu-Assad, like many others, believed US military and diplomatic support for Israel exacerbated tensions between the two sides).31 What the film is saying is that terrorism can often be attributed to everyday inequalities and grievances rather than to international criminal ‘masterminds’. What drives the suicide terrorists in Paradise Now is foreign occupation – of their land and, most importantly, of their minds. Israeli beatings and murders are in the background to Paradise Now. In the foreground is Saïd and Khaled’s daily drudgery, lack of ambition and sense of humiliation, caused by the economic and political stranglehold the Israelis have on the West Bank. ‘A life without dignity is worthless’, Saïd flatly says, after telling Abu Karem about his father having been executed as an Israeli collaborator when he was ten years old. Paradise Now’s point about the frustration and hatred aroused by military occupation was well made. A number of academic studies during this era found that a significant proportion of suicide bombers were ‘normal people’, for whom a glorious act of martyrdom offered a means of escape from an unbearable existence and a means of striking back at their powerful foreign occupiers.32 Despite its title, Paradise Now is not a film primarily about Islamist terrorism, let alone what many Western politicians and ‘terrorologists’ called al-Qaeda style ‘Islamist fascism’. To be sure, Saïd and Khaled are no atheists and they take solace in the knowledge that they will be remembered as martyrs, but the film goes out of its way to avoid presenting them or their handlers as fundamentalist zealots. In contrast with earlier scripts, their martyr videos rail against the Israelis’ military might and refusal to accept a two-state solution to their conflict with the Palestinians rather than them as ‘infidels’, and there are no marches calling for the destruction of the Jews. Jamal does promise Saïd and Khaled that angels will carry them to heaven after they have killed themselves but none of the three men seem to take this seriously. In the film, we see little to no praying, no mosques, and the word ‘jihad’ is not uttered once. This said, Abu-Assad is not prepared to let religion off the hook completely. At first, Khaled says he cannot wait to be sitting at the right hand of God and he pounces on Saïd’s doubts about suicide bombings with pseudo-Islamic homilies. Jamal is clearly not a true believer in the relationship between suicide, God and terrorism but he is nonetheless a devout Muslim. His words of religious comfort often come across as selfserving, even hypocritical, especially when he tells the men to ‘read the Koran’ if they have second thoughts after crossing over into Israel. The appeal of fundamentalism is understandable for many people ‘living’ in a town like Nablus though, Paradise Now Rich, ‘Bomb Culture’, 28–30. Probably the most influential of these studies was Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005). On this contested territory see also Assaf Moghadam, ‘Palestinian Suicide Terrorism in the Second Intifada: Motivations and Organizational Aspects’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26, 2, March–April 2003, 65–92; Ami Pedahzur (ed.), Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalisation of Martyrdom (London: Routledge, 2006); Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 31 32

256

Suicide Victims in Close-up

says. In a life as devoid of agency and possibility as Saïd and Khaled’s, we can see how radical Islam creates a narrative that has urgency and import, a narrative that, as one British reviewer wrote, ‘goes off with a bang’.33 In some respects, it would have been easy for Abu-Assad – as the early scripts suggest – to have presented Saïd and Khaled as out-and-out victims, including at the hands of archetypal insidious terrorist leaders. This would have elicited greater audience sympathy towards the film’s two main protagonists and balanced up its criticism of Israel. However, Paradise Now eschews this approach. Jamal and the organization’s leader, Abu Karem, are not evil villains, deviously manipulating the vulnerable and innocent. Khaled certainly idolizes Abu Karem but the latter appears a dedicated, weary and rather modest freedom fighter rather than a fanatical mastermind or Mafia-style godfather. Jamal, for his part, is a schoolteacher and therefore obviously someone in a dubiously influential position with the local youngsters. Yet he never coerces Saïd and Khaled or tries to ‘brainwash’ them into carrying out their suicide mission. In one early script, it was Jamal who activated the non-stop timers on Saïd and Khaled’s explosive vests, but on screen the men do this themselves, thereby indicating greater autonomy. Men like Saïd and Khaled are not crazed automatons, the film is saying, but suicide bombers with a free will.34 Jamal and Abu-Karem’s Palestinian adversary – enemy would be putting it too strongly – is Suha. Again, had Paradise Now been a more conventional film, Suha would either have successfully persuaded Saïd and Khaled to abort their suicide mission or she would have at least won the argument between them over whether suicide terrorism was morally and politically defensible. But Abu-Assad leaves the viewers to make up their own minds on this matter. True, Suha is a kind, articulate and sympathetic character, whose argument that a Palestinian state needs to be achieved through peaceful means and that suicide terrorism is counterproductive because it gives the Israeli military an excuse for more violence against Palestinians makes logical sense. It is made all the more powerful by us knowing that her own father was a resistance leader who years earlier had been murdered by the Israelis. Yet Suha is an outsider, someone who cannot really comprehend Saïd and Khaled’s frustration and sadness because she has spent years in Europe and is wealthy enough not to have to live in Nablus’ poverty-stricken refugee camp, where the two men have been virtually imprisoned all their lives. This critical divide is brought out early on, when Saïd visits Suha the night before his mission. Obviously angling for a date, Suha asks Saïd whether he likes going to the cinema; she is a cinephile and wants to know Saïd’s taste in films. Saïd says softly that the only time he ever went to the local cinema was with friends to burn it down as a protest against the Israeli occupation. Suha is Rich, ‘Bomb Culture’, 28–30; ‘Q & A With Director Hany Abu-Assad’, Paradise Now Production material, AMPAS. 34 ‘In Between Two Days’, 2001, Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam. 33

257

Cinematic Terror

nonplussed. Though tinged with romance and comedy, this is a depressing scene – one that casts the Palestinians not only as the victims of Israeli oppression but also of their own anger. Saïd and Khaled might be ill-educated but this does make them unthinking or stupid. ‘I’d rather have paradise in my head than live in this hell’, Khaled tells Suha after she has ridiculed his belief in a post-suicidal after-life. Unconsciously paraphrasing Ben M’hidi’s line from The Battle of Algiers, Khaled then tells her that there wouldn’t be any need for martyrs if the Palestinians had aircraft like the Israelis – suggesting, in other words, that suicide bombings owed more to the strategic requirements of asymmetrical warfare than they did to religion. It is left to the stoical Saïd to deliver perhaps the most poignant, articulate defence of suicide terrorism towards the end of the film when he bares his soul to Abu Karem. ‘The Israelis have convinced the world and themselves that they are the victims’, he says quietly, as the camera closes in on his face. ‘If they take on the role of oppressor and victim, then I have no other choice but also to be a victim and a murderer as well.’ Paradise Now abounds with close-ups of faces turned to the camera like in this scene. Many of them are silent, encouraging further projection on the part of the spectator.35 This technique not only serves to show us that terrorists are human beings; it also encourages the viewer to see the world from the terrorists’ standpoint. Indeed, Paradise Now’s whole narrative perspective is that of the terrorists’, in contrast with most other terrorism films, which further challenges the usual ‘us’ versus ‘them’ on-screen dichotomy. ‘Us’ in this case is primarily Saïd, the very antithesis of the archetypal Arab fanatic. Saïd is attractive, waiflike and wistful; he never loses his temper; and he cares for his mother and siblings. For his part, Khaled may be a loudmouth joker but he too is kind and warm-hearted. Neither he nor Saïd is in any way deranged. Not once do we see the friends involved in any form of violence – until very end of the film, that is. For all the gravity of the dramatic situation depicted in Paradise Now, Abu-Assad still allows himself moments of unexpected humour. These bring out the tragicomic aspects of life under occupation and the banality of suicide terrorism. At the start of the film, the mild-mannered Saïd gets into a dispute with a bullying customer about whether he has fitted a car bumper crookedly. When the customer accuses Saïd of being as dishonest as his father, Khaled, defending his friend, nonchalantly whacks the bumper off with a giant wrench. ‘You’re right, Sir, it is crooked’, he exclaims. Later, a taxi driver accuses Israeli settlers of poisoning Nablus’ water supplies in order to reduce the Palestinians’ sperm count. When, in another scene, Khaled records his last will and testament – AK 47 and chequered keffiyeh held aloft in iconic revolutionary mode – the solemnity of the moment is repeatedly interrupted by a malfunctioning video camera and assembled militants noisily eating sandwiches in the background. Raya Morag, ‘The Living Body and the Corpse – Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah ’, Journal of Film and Video, 60, 3–4, Fall 2008, 15. 35

258

Suicide Victims in Close-up

Khaled ends his farewell speech not by shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ but by giving his mother a tip about where to buy cheap water filters.

Figure 13.4  Paradise Now: Khaled says goodbye to his loved ones, watched by his handlers. This scene – shot, incidentally, where real-life farewell recordings had been made – simultaneously breaks down the martyrdom-heroism stereotype and makes the terrorists appear even more human.36 It also shows that even martyrdom is a performance. In another, equally bold scene, Saïd and Suha go to a shop and notice a video playing on a tiny television screen behind the counter: it is much the same as Khaled’s, a stand-up performance of martyr testimony but this time recorded by someone who has since died. Suha brings all the outrage of a sophisticated European to the situation, confronting the shopkeeper and asking whether he really sells these. Oh yes, he tells her, and those by collaborators confessing their sins before they are shot fetch higher prices. Paradise Now was never going to be a catalyst for change in the Middle East, despite what some of those involved in its making hoped. The most a film of its size could really expect would be to register a protest against the Israeli-Palestinian status quo and to help change some people’s minds about the meaning and use of the word terrorism. In order for this to be achieved, Paradise Now needed a springboard, clever marketing and good fortune. The springboard arrived at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2005, where, after its world premiere, Paradise Now was showered with accolades, ‘Q & A With Director Hany Abu-Assad’, Paradise Now Production material, AMPAS.

36

259

Cinematic Terror

Figure 13.5  Paradise Now: Suha (Lubna Azabal) discusses the price of farewell videos with the shopkeeper.

including the prestigious Amnesty International Film Award. Canadian, Dutch and South African prizes soon followed. International distribution deals were subsequently arranged, including with Warner Independent Pictures in the United States. These deals gave Paradise Now access to almost sixty countries.37 In the months ahead, Paradise Now’s marketing was tailored to suit different, often conflicting national views on terrorism and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the United States, for example, long known for its pro-Israeli majority, Warners’ tagline was ‘Here Comes a Bold New Call for Peace.’ In parts of Western Europe, on the other hand, where the public’s attitudes towards Middle Eastern politics were generally more mixed, Paradise Now was sold more as a film that lifted the lid on suicide terrorism. Wherever the film played, publicity stressed its balanced approach towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and emphasized that Paradise Now did not condone the taking of life.38 Because Paradise Now portrayed suicide terrorists in such an unusually sympathetic light compared with other films, this claim was bound to be disputed. Indeed, it acted like a red rag to a bull in some quarters, generating another intense controversy over a movie that many seem to have mistaken for a slice of real life. Paradise Now prompted a substantial outcry and an avalanche of hate mail, in print and online, that often had more to do with the idea of the film than the film itself. Nicole Sperling, ‘WIP Brings “Paradise” to U.S’, Hollywood Reporter, 23 February 2005, 8, 26; Goel Pinto, ‘Make Films, Not War’, Haaretz, 10 November 2005, 9. 38 ‘Q & A With Director Hany Abu-Assad’, Paradise Now Production material, AMPAS; Robert Blokland, ‘Paradise Now’, Screen International, 10 February 2006; Emanual Levy, ‘An Extreme Act of Filmmaking’, Jerusalem Post, 27 September 2005. 37

260

Suicide Victims in Close-up

Across the Middle East, Paradise Now infuriated, delighted, surprised and puzzled people. In the Palestinian territories, reaction to the film seems to have been favourable, though not unanimously. After a private showing, community leaders in Nablus advised against Paradise Now’s release on the grounds that the depicted bombers were not given sufficiently religious and ideological motives. By humanizing Saïd and Khaled, Nablus’ leaders were effectively saying, there was nothing holy about them. After public screenings in Ramallah and Bethlehem on the West Bank, some Palestinians criticized Abu-Assad for not portraying the brutality of the Israeli army. Given that approximately 2400 Palestinians had been killed in the first three years of the second Intifada compared with 700 Israelis, this criticism was perhaps understandable. One student in East Jerusalem emerged ‘confused’, as she put it, by the equally compelling characters of Saïd and Suha. Paradise Now was not exhibited at all in the Gaza Strip because the movie theatres there had been closed for years, due to a combination of Islamic conservatism and Israeli bombs.39 In Israel, the official censor approved Paradise Now’s release, without any cuts. The Israeli Film Fund, a publicly-funded arts body set up after Operation Thunderbolt’s success in the late 1970s, supported the distribution of Abu-Assad’s film, having been unwilling to back its production on political grounds in 2002.40 Despite this, only a tiny minority of Israelis went to see Paradise Now (20,000 out of a population of seven million over the winter of 2005–2006, was one estimate). Major cinema chains shunned the film, for commercial and political reasons, which restricted it to art houses normally frequented by liberals and others already likely to sympathize with the Palestinians’ plight. At one of these, the Tel Aviv Cinemateque, some viewers reportedly empathized with the two West Bank mechanics trying to bomb their city. Other cinemagoers in Jerusalem said that Paradise Now helped them to ‘identify with the other side’ and to realize the ‘contrast between living in a “prison” in the West Bank and relatively normal life in Israel’.41 A number of Israeli commentators rebuked Paradise Now – justifiably perhaps – for the absence of Israeli characters and for not showing the bus-bombing’s gruesome impact. The author and satirist Irit Linur denounced it as ‘a moving and high-brow Nazi film’.42 Given 9/11 and the United States’ traditional support for Israel, we might expect American commentators to have denounced Paradise Now in equally strong or

Donald Macintyre, ‘Paradise Now’, Independent, 4 March 2006, 27; James Poniewozik, ‘Terrorists Get Their Close-Up’, Time, 21 November 2005; Ali Jaafar, ‘Bomber Pic Plays Israel’, Variety, 10 November 2005; Carr, Infernal Machine, 260–261; Edna Fainaru, ‘In The Director’s Chair’, Screen International, 11 November 2005; http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/02/cinema-gaza-demise.html (30 May 2013). 40 Levy, ‘An Extreme Act’, Jerusalem Post; Paul Arendt, ‘Israel Back Suicide-Bomber Film’, Guardian, 24 February 2005, 2, 16; Nick Vivarelli, ‘Blessing For Paradise’, Variety, 21 February 2005. 41 Laurie Copans, ‘Film Playing in Israel Gives a Point of View of Palestinian Suicide Bombers’, Los Angeles Times, 16 November 2005; Macintyre, ‘Paradise Now’. 42 Asfour, ‘Reclaiming Palestine: One Film at a Time’, 23. 39

261

Cinematic Terror

derisory terms and consequently for the film to have died a quick death. In the event, Paradise Now attracted plaudits in many US newspapers for offering a profound insight into suicide terrorism.43 Prominent political columnists like Joe Klein, best known for his book-turned-film about the 1990s Clinton administration, Primary Colours, reproached those who called Paradise Now ‘propaganda for terrorism’. Many critics praised the film’s aesthetics; a few, significantly for us, placed Paradise Now in historical context. Though the film took ‘a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending’, wrote J. Hoberman in the New York Village Voice, ‘the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock’s Sabotage’.44 In Europe, reaction to Paradise Now seems to have been more diverse. In Germany, newspapers like Die Welt, owned by the conservative Axel Springer group, categorized it as pro-Palestinian propaganda. Others labelled it anti-Semitic. In Britain, Paradise Now’s distributor felt obliged to cancel its premiere as a result of the Islamist suicide attacks on London in July 2005, which involved a bus-bombing and killed over fifty people. When the movie was released there several months later, one journalist called it ‘compassionate’ and praised it for avoiding ‘didactic moralising’. Another took a quite different line, one that, like the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman, approached Abu-Assad’s film from a historical, comparative perspective. ‘The fact that Paradise Now is propaganda does not make it a bad film, any more than Exodus was undone by its pro-Israel bias or Schindler’s List by its avowedly Zionist ending’, opined Norman Lebrecht in the London Evening Standard. ‘The problem arises when the one-sidedness becomes so distortive that it undermines our trust in the story.’45 As vehement as these reactions were, relatively few average cinemagoers had probably heard of Paradise Now, still less seen it, when the film was touring in 2005. Things changed somewhat in early 2006, however, when, following its receipt of the US Golden Globe award for best foreign language picture, a row erupted over Paradise Now’s nomination for an Academy Award in the same category. The row, which came about more by luck than design, took Paradise Now from the arts to the news pages across many countries. The rules for the Academy Awards stated that foreign language entries needed to be sponsored by their country of origin. When Paradise Now was listed as coming from ‘Palestine’ on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ website, Israeli diplomats and Jewish groups in the United States protested that no one, not even the Palestinians themselves, had yet declared the formal creation of ‘Palestine’. In Kenneth Turan. ‘A Walk in the Steps of Suicide Bombers’, Los Angeles Times, 28 October 2005; Stephen Holden, ‘Terrorists Facing their Moment of Truth’, New York Times, 28 October 2005. 44 Joe Klein, ‘When Hollywood Gets Terrorism Right’, Time, 9 January 2006; J. Hoberman, ‘Apocalypse Later’, Village Voice, 26–1 November 2005. 45 http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/paradise_now/ (5 March 2013); Sheila Johnston, ‘I Risked My Life To Make A Movie’, Daily Telegraph, 7 April 2006, 30; Derek Malcolm, ‘Mission Almost Impossible That Almost Succeeds’, Evening Standard, 13 April 2006, 44; Norman Lebrecht, ‘Explosive Viewing’, Evening Standard, 30 March 2006, 34–35. 43

262

Suicide Victims in Close-up

the run up to Oscar Night itself, in March, pro-Israel groups lobbied assiduously for Paradise Now’s complete disqualification on legal, political and moral grounds. This encompassed Internet and email petitions and full-page advertisements in the press describing an ‘unseen’ ending to Paradise Now, in which Saïd’s bomb kills seventeen passengers, including an Israeli teenager called Azaf Zur, who had been the real-life victim of a Hamas bus bomber in Haifa in March 2003. Groups representing Israeli victims of suicide bombings, led by Zur’s father, threw all they could at Paradise Now, denouncing it as ‘artistic terror’ that would contribute directly to the terrorists’ ‘death industry’. At the same time, the Israeli press reported efforts by ‘powerful Israelis’ and others aimed at dissuading Academy members from casting their votes for Paradise Now.46 Paradise Now remained on the nominations’ shortlist but during the Academy Awards ceremony was described as coming from the ‘Palestinian Authority’, the term that applied to the formal Palestinian government structure in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, rather than ‘Palestine’. The award for best foreign language film then went to Gavin Hood’s redemptive South African tale, Tsotsi. Disappointing though this was for Abu-Assad, the Academy Awards debacle undoubtedly increased sales and awareness of Paradise Now. Some commentators argued that the film’s Oscar nomination helped put Palestine itself, not just Palestinian film-makers, on the map; another claimed that it ‘marked a seismic shift in official US acknowledgement of the Palestinian fate’.47 True or not, Paradise Now made a respectable $3.5 million at the box office worldwide, roughly twice its cost. In light of the international newsprint the film generated, we can safely say that, like Michael Collins and some of our other movies, Paradise Now’s impact was felt far beyond those who went to watch it.48 Paradise Now highlights the distance cinematic terrorism has travelled since its very earliest days, when films like The Voice of the Violin and The Anarchist and His Dog depicted terrorists as crazed maniacs. As radical as Sabotage was back in the 1930s, we need to bear in mind that Hitchcock had for moral and political reasons airbrushed all of The Secret Agent’s references to suicide terrorism. By 2005, some directors, ‘Oscar Group Denies Pressure on Film’, Aljazeera.net, Reuters, 15 February 2006; ‘An Unseen End to Paradise Now?’, Variety, 3 March 2006; Macintyre, ‘Paradise Now’; ‘New Trouble for Paradise Now’, Aljazeera.net, Reuters, 12 February 2006; Timothy M. Gray, ‘Acad Denies “Now” Rumors’, Variety, 15 February 2006; Ken Ellingwood, ‘Now Playing in Israel’, Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2006, E1, E4. The controversy around Paradise Now compounded an already fraught Academy Awards for Israel, thanks to several nominations garnered by Steven Spielberg’s Munich. A thriller about the reprisals Israel launched after eleven of its athletes died in a Palestinian raid on the 1972 Olympic Games, Munich was accused by pro-Israel groups of skewing history and criticizing Israeli security policies. Spielberg called the film his ‘prayer for peace’. ‘To date’, wrote Stephen Prince in Firestorm (2009, 95), ‘Munich remains the most sophisticated moral examination of terrorism and the response of a democratic society to it that Hollywood has produced’. 47 Anonymous, ‘Quick Takes’, Los Angeles Times, 7 March 2006; Rich, ‘Bomb Culture’, 28–30. 48 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=paradisenow.htm (5 March 2013). 46

263

Cinematic Terror

like Hany Abu-Assad, not only deemed suicide terrorism a legitimate subject for a feature film, they also depicted its practitioners as victims. Similarly, when writing Die Hard in the 1980s, we might recall that Steven de Souza had derided the notion, then promulgated by some on the political left, that terrorism was the poor man’s form of warfare. Twenty years later, however, Paradise Now was defending suicide bombing as exactly that, or what scholars like Robert Pape called a ‘strategy for weak actors’. Of course, movies like Paradise Now were still in the minority. Nonetheless, they represent a shift in cinema’s outlook on terrorism that few could have foreseen a generation earlier.49 As always, that outlook was also determined by real-life events. When viewing or reading about Paradise Now, many people inevitably would have connected the film to 9/11 and the recent upsurge in suicide terrorism in the Middle East. Whether this made Paradise Now more or less influential is open to debate. Abu Assad, for one, believed that ‘every human should be shocked by a movie that lights dark places’.50 The chances are though that many people were suffering from visual combat fatigue during this period, especially given the extended television coverage afforded suicide terrorism in the Iraq War. As a consequence, Paradise Now probably got lost in the shadows. The film did not recede from view entirely, however. Indeed, as a mark of Paradise Now’s originality and influence, the film continued to anger people long after it had disappeared from the cinema circuit. Evidence of this surfaced in 2012, when an Israeli documentary advocating negotiations with Palestinian terrorists, Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, was nominated for an Academy Award. Groups representing Israeli victims of terrorist attacks expressed outrage at this ‘betrayal’ by Hollywood and immediately reminded everyone of Paradise Now’s ‘disgraceful’ Oscar-nomination back in 2006. Like Paradise Now, The Gatekeepers ultimately lost out on Oscar Night but a year later Hany Abu-Assad was nominated again, for another drama about Israeli-Palestinian terrorism, Omar. A cross between Paradise Now and The Battle of Algiers, Omar was acclaimed for powerfully showing that Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories was intolerable for both sides of the political divide.51

Pape, Dying to Win, Chapter 3. Dan Georgakas and Barbara Saltz, ‘This Is a Film You Should See Twice: An Interview with Hany AbuAssad’, Cineaste, 31, 1, Winter 2005, 16–19 (17). 51 Georgakas and Saltz, ‘This Is a Film You Should See Twice’; http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/ Article.aspx/12729 (5 March 2013); Justin Chang, ‘The Gatekeepers’, Variety, 428, 5, 10 September 2012, 46; Richard Falk, ‘ “Omar’’: Uncovering Occupied Palestine’, Aljazeera, 24 February 2014, http://www.aljazeera. com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/uncovering-occupied-palestine-20142136833212442.html (17 June 2014). The Gatekeepers aroused such ire because it centred on interviews with six former heads of Israel’s security service, Shin Bet. Winner of the Academy Award for best documentary feature in February 2013 was the Swedish-British production Searching for Sugar Man. 49 50

264

CHAPTER 14 YOUTUBE MONSTERS

Coming at us through the semi-darkness, flashing through the air at break-neck speed as it ricochets off the sides of the skyscrapers, the mysterious object looks a bit like a spinning truck. Before we have time to jump out of the way, the object whooshes past and lands just behind us in the middle of the street. The scraping, screeching sound of metal on concrete is deafening and made all the more frightening by the loud, animal-like cries simultaneously echoing around the skyscrapers. What the hell is that sound? And why is everyone running away from it, screaming in horror? Within seconds, our fear and confusion change to terror, for what has crashed on to the street turns out not to be a truck at all but the huge, severed head of the Statue of Liberty. As we look at it in close up, the famous landmark’s silvery green crown glistens in the bright city lights. It’s beautiful but completely out of place. ‘Oh my God!’ people cry. ‘Are you alright?’ Some bystanders are stunned into silence. Others, as if by reflex, take photographs of the severed head on their cellular phones. Car and store alarms are blaring; helicopter rotor blades whirr overhead. It’s 2009 and we are in the heart of Manhattan, New York City. A few minutes earlier, when buildings started to shake, it seemed like there had been an earthquake – at least that’s what the TV reporters had said. Now, it’s clear that something very, very different is happening. Once again, New York and the United States are under attack. But from what? As the outline of a giant creature looms into view, we begin to get the picture. Up to this point, our study has focused on films that have dealt with terrorism directly. This, our final chapter works differently in order to chart a subtle yet important shift that has recently taken place in cinema’s treatment of terrorism. Today, terrorists play a more prominent and profitable role on the big screen than ever before but they more often as not appear allegorically. Hollywood movies especially abound with aliens, super-villains and monsters, many of which can be linked to the perceived global threat of terrorism. Related to the shocking, visual power of 9/11, to technological changes across the mass media, and to the ‘toxicity’ of overt cinematic terrorism, many of these symbolic terrorists bring about death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. They suggest that contemporary terrorism is both extraordinarily entertaining and, because it comes in various often hidden guises, uniquely menacing. Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield, released in 2008, offers us one of the best routes into understanding symbolic cinematic terrorism today. It also, appropriately, takes us

Cinematic Terror

right back to our Introduction, when we considered the cinematic qualities of 9/11. Cloverfield combines elements of horror, science fiction and disaster to depict in gruesome detail the complete devastation of New York by a huge reptilian monster. The first Hollywood movie to truly revel in the destruction wrought by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Cloverfield takes its aesthetic cue from YouTube clips of that famous day and is cleverly shot in the fashionable form of ‘found footage’ from a home movie. Whether, as the film’s makers argue, Cloverfield is the sort of movie that helps contemporary cinemagoers to cope with the trauma caused by terrorism, or, as others suggest, its monster represents the quintessential post-9/11 beast, one thing at least is clear. In the age of the Internet, cinematic terrorism is still a force to be reckoned with. Indeed, Cloverfield indicates that, in today’s increasingly interactive and converging media environment, films can influence people’s perceptions of terrorism in more ways than ever before. Foreboding, violent monsters (in human, animal or alien form) that wreak havoc on an innocent American public have been drawing audiences to cinemas since the silent era, offering catharsis from personal anxiety and serving as metaphors for the general fears plaguing culture during a particular era. Iconic American monsters of the 1920s and 1930s, in movies like Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933), appeared as exotic foreign demons during an era of pronounced xenophobia and isolationism in the United States. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood’s monsters often expressed the paranoia and sense of impending doom that characterized the early Cold War. During the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of God turning away from society surfaced in movies, introducing the scariest monster of all, Satan, in, for instance, Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). If the devil himself could appear in the most unlikely of places, inhabiting the body of a child, then clearly no one was safe – not even 1980s suburbanites in movies like Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982). With the end of the Cold War, the monsters of the 1990s turned out to be the seemingly normal next-door neighbour who turned out to be a crazed fan, like Annie Wilkes in Robb Reiner’s Misery (1990), or a cannibalistic mass murderer, like Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991).1 Just as the new millennium began, however, incomprehensible real-life horror overshadowed anything that was being shown at the cinema. Not only was the United States’ always-fragile sense of vulnerability challenged for the first time since Pearl Harbour, but it seemed like a prelude to the end of days. Everywhere people turned there was another potential devastation – Ebola, SARS, bird flu, anthrax and global warming – to which movies like Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007) spoke. Xenophobia resurfaced in a more diabolical manner in Eli Roth’s Hostel David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold, 2002); Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). 1

266

YouTube Monsters

(2005) and James Wan’s Saw (2004) – ‘torture fests’ that eerily coincided with heated debate over the use of torture in wartime. In Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), aliens, without provocation, lay waste to the earth – and only the planet’s atmosphere, replete with bacteria and viruses, finally destroys them. In Roland Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow (2004), far from coming to humanity’s rescue, Mother Nature renders most of North America uninhabitable by covering it with a blanket of ice. New, previously unforeseen threats to everyone’s way of life, in other words, had led to a new breed of monster/disaster movie, one that reflected not only the uncertainty of the era but America’s sense of powerlessness in the face of such daunting obstacles.2 Uncertainty, combined with mystery and concealment, is the hallmark of Cloverfield’s chief creator, J. J. Abrams. Born in 1966, Abrams’ career in entertainment began in the 1990s when he co-scripted films like Armageddon, Michael Bay’s sci-fi blockbuster which saw Bruce Willis save the world from a gigantic asteroid. In the 2000s, Abrams made a name for himself as an innovative and highly successful television producer whose series like Lost were characterized by their stylish, convoluted narratives. By the time he began work on Cloverfield, Abrams had become a major player in Hollywood. Through his production company, Bad Robot, he could draw on substantial financial resources and a rich array of artistic talent. Abrams had previously collaborated with all of the key members of Cloverfield’s crew, including director Matt Reeves, scriptwriter Drew Goddard and director of photography Michael Bonvillain. Goddard was best known for the hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Reeves, whose first film had been the 1995 terrorist actioner Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, had worked on the television series Felicity, Alias and Lost.3 The seed for Cloverfield was planted in 2006 while Abrams was in Japan to publicize his first directorial feature film, the spy thriller Mission: Impossible III. Visiting a local toy store, Abrams was struck by the amount of merchandise about Godzilla, the classic movie monster from the 1950s that embodied Japan’s fears of atomic destruction. Shortly afterwards, Abrams conceived the idea of constructing America’s own, twenty-first-century monster via a ‘found footage’ handheld camera movie akin to Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick’s trailblazing horror flick The Blair Witch Project (1999). ‘I began thinking, what if you were to see a monster the size of a skyscraper, but through the point of view of someone, relatively speaking, the size

On the remarkable rise in popularity of Hollywood disaster and horror in the first decade of the twentyfirst century, see Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller (eds.), Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), Tom Pollard, Hollywood’s 9/11: Superheroes, Supervillains, and Super Disasters (London: Paradigm, 2011), and Kevin J. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2012). 3 Patricia Brace and Robert Arp (eds.), The Philosophy of J. J. Abrams (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2014); ‘The Filmmakers’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. Reeves co-wrote Under Siege 2: Dark Territory with Richard Hatem and J. F. Lawton; the film was directed by Geoff Murphy. 2

267

Cinematic Terror

of a grain of sand?’4 New York, Hollywood’s favourite centre of devastation through the ages,5 seemed the obvious location for the movie. The Big Apple would not only allow Abrams to evoke memories of 9/11, it would also give him the opportunity to pay homage to one of his favourite film images, the poster for John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape from New York, which had a picture of the Statue of Liberty’s head sitting in the middle of a Manhattan street.6 Our study has shown that most films about terrorism are designed – for commercial as well as political reasons – to accentuate its threat. Cloverfield claimed to be different, to channel the anxieties caused by present-day terrorism positively. ‘We live in a time of great fear’, Abrams told the press while promoting his film. ‘Having a movie that is about something as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe.’7 Naturally, such statements were partly intended to offset allegations that, unlike Oliver Stone’s deeply respectful re-enactment of 9/11, World Trade Center (2006), Cloverfield amounted to tasteless exploitation. Yet Abrams genuinely seems to have believed in the therapeutic qualities of Cloverfield, a movie that, to him, offered those who had been traumatized by 9/11 and more recent terrorist attacks some sort of cathartic ‘release’.8 At the same time, Cloverfield’s creators also felt it was important to find a way to approach Americans’ fears of terrorism without diminishing or belittling them. Firstly, they decided, this meant connecting with the radically different media environment in which most citizens now operated. To depict the real-life confusion caused by a mysterious attack on New York, their film needed to have an enigmatic plotline, one that, like Abrams’ television series Lost, built up a dense network of narrative clues while holding the complete picture out of reach. This opacity would not only be dramatically entertaining, it would also have the virtue of tapping into the real-life confusion caused by the excess of information proffered by digital media. This helps to explain Cloverfield’s often-unsettling camcorder style, its unwillingness Abrams cited in ‘Making “Cloverfield” ’, ‘The Filmmakers’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. Godzilla (Gojira in Japanese) was directed by Ishiro Honda in 1954. On the Godzilla/Gojira phenomenon see William Tsutsui, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 5 Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Lori Maguire, ‘The Destruction of New York City: A Recurrent Nightmare of American Cold War Cinema’, Cold War History, 9, 4, 2009, 513–524. For a video montage of New York’s recent filmic destruction, see ‘Hollywood vs. New York’, http://www.slashfilm.com/ hollywood-vs-new-york-four-decades-of-destruction/#more-51909 (29 November 2013). 6 ‘Crushing the Big Apple’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. Escape from New York was an actionscience fiction movie set in 1997 that depicted Manhattan Island as a heavily guarded maximum security prison. Philip Strick, ‘Escape from New York’, Films and Filming, October 1981, 37–38. 7 Abrams cited in ‘Making “Cloverfield” ’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. 8 Abrams cited in ‘Crushing the Big Apple’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS; Rebecca Winters Keegan, ‘Cloverfield: Godzilla Goes 9/11’, Time, 16 January 2008, http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/ 0,8599,1704356,00.html (30 November 2013). On World Trade Center see Prince, Firestorm, 100–107. 4

268

YouTube Monsters

to explain why the monster is attacking New York and the movie’s open-ended denouement.9 The second way the film-makers believed they could reflect and project Americans’ fears of terrorism was to mimic the media’s haphazard coverage of 9/11, much of it based on amateur footage, by presenting the monster’s attack on New York in YouTube format. During preparation for Cloverfield, the film-makers studied a number of feature films, including The Blair Witch Project and Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian sci-fi drama Children of Men (2006).10 However, it was from watching many hours’ worth of YouTube video footage of 9/11 and the ongoing war in Iraq that they learned most. While analysing the latter two sources, Reeves and Bonvillain were struck by the powerful effect of limiting what the viewer sees. ‘We felt that would add a level of reality to our project’, said Reeves. ‘When there’s a lot you can’t see, your imagination starts to fill in the horror of what’s going on.’ The more spontaneous and home-made Cloverfield looked, the film-makers thought, the more authentic it would seem. One trick that was used to convey amateurism – and which added terror and tension to many scenes – was having the camera operator ‘just miss’ much of the action, including sightings of the monster, or having the frightened operator sometimes forget or even drop the camera, allowing the audience to catch glimpses of the monster or explosions as if by accident.11 So skilfully is Cloverfield’s enigmatic amateurism put together, and so improvised the whole film looks, it might come as a surprise to learn how tightly the project was scripted. The truth is of course that without a firm script such an unorthodox film risked spiralling out of control. What had started out as a five-page treatment by Abrams in mid-2006 ended up being turned into a formal script over 120 pages long by Goddard a year later. Early iterations had characters make many more explicit references to 9/11 and terrorism than in the final film. ‘How could terrorists rip the head off the Statue of Liberty?’ shouts a woman at one stage, for example.12 Presumably, these references were dropped lest they made Cloverfield J. J. Abrams, ‘J. J. Abrams on the Magic of Mystery’, Wired, 20 April 2009, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/ people/magazine/17-05/mf_jjessay?currentPage=all (19 November 2013); ‘A Hud’s Eye View of the Monster’ and ‘Crushing the Big Apple’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. 10 Jon D. Witner, ‘Some Kind of Monster’, American Cinematographer, 89, 3, 2008, 36–37. ‘A stunningly convincing realisation of a Beirut-ised London in the year 2027, in which terrorist bombs have become as dreary and commonplace as cancer’, is how British critic Peter Bradshaw described Children of Men. Bradshaw, ‘Children of Men’, Guardian, 22 September 2006, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/ sep/22/juliannemoore.thriller (3 December 2013). 11 Witner, ‘Some Kind of Monster’, 36–40; Matt Reeves, ‘Commentary’, Cloverfield DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008); ‘A Hud’s Eye View of the Monster’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. On American soldiers’ YouTube styles of representation during the Iraq War, and the effect this had on Hollywood’s depiction of the conflict, see Martin Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (London: Pluto, 2011). 12 Drew Goddard, ‘Cloverfield’, script dated 8 June 2007, 11, 34, 37, http://api.ning.com/files/9ga7x3kX AErCYXKPzKzsb-8ViZ*SFMcRpYm8Qq6jI0rAp2TjJiyuNSm-WzLweVR3RazpAB c1cAxDygVoxv1HlS9Dh2JHpP/Cloverfield.pdf (29 November 2013). 9

269

Cinematic Terror

look clumsily political and thereby damaged its box-office appeal. The same goes for the movie’s title, which was originally marketed as 1-18-08 and so drew obvious parallels with 9/11. Goddard talked publicly of the lengths his script went to avoid replicating the events of that fateful day by, for instance, making sure the collapsing New York buildings in the film were older-looking structures than the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers.13 Being a Hollywood production, distributed by one of the oldest and biggest studios of the United States, Paramount, Cloverfield was never going to put message before spectacle. The film was actually shot, in New York and Los Angeles, in only thirty-five days and on a budget of approximately $25 million, a small sum compared with the most Hollywood sci-fi and disaster movies of the era. Costs were kept down by hiring relatively unknown actors, by having some of them operate the cameras and by having no score – all decisions which also served to enhance Cloverfield’s home-movie effect.14 There was no skimping on the special effects, however. Abrams hired one of the best known concept designers in the world, Neville Page, to create Cloverfield’s monster. For Cloverfield’s dramatic helicopter crash sequence, Adams recruited the visual effects specialists who had worked on the climactic scene of Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006). Meanwhile, Reeves’ visual team simulated the dust bowls triggered by destroyed buildings in painstaking detail.15 The combination of handheld, lowlight, long-take camerawork and computer-generated imagery was described by one critic as ‘a peculiarly austere marvel’. Cloverfield could even boast the involvement of one of the godfathers of Hollywood sci-fi, Steven Spielberg, who helped finesse the movie’s ending.16 With its shaky, camcorder-point-of-view, Cloverfield looks and feels like no other film we have analysed in our study. It never strays from its central characters to see what is happening elsewhere and has no music, slow motion, changes in shots, transitions and other techniques common to most major features. Cloverfield’s fusion of several ‘Crushing the Big Apple’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. Reeves was drawing a fine architectural distinction here and it is unlikely many viewers saw the destruction of the Woolworth Building (completed in 1913), for example, as less frightening than the more modern structures that survive around it. In any case, elsewhere in Manhattan, at Columbus Circle, Cloverfield also showed the partial collapse of one of the twin towers of the Time Warner Centre, a structure built between 2000 and 2003. 14 http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2008/11808.php (29 November 2013); Witner, ‘Some Kind of Monster’, 36–40; Matt Reeves, ‘Commentary’, Cloverfield DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008). 15 ‘Building a Better Monster’ and ‘Crushing the Big Apple’, Cloverfield Production Notes, AMPAS. Matt Reeves, ‘Commentary’, Cloverfield DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008). United 93 ends with the fourth aircraft hijacked on 9/11 flying into the Pennsylvania countryside as the passengers and pilots fight for control in the cabin. See Prince, Firestorm, 106–114. 16 Henry K. Miller, ‘Cloverfield’, Sight & Sound, 16, 4, 2008, 51–52; Matt Reeves, ‘Commentary’, Cloverfield DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008). According to Reeves, after viewing a cut of the film, Spielberg suggested giving the audience a hint at the fate of the monster during the climax, which resulted in the addition of a countdown overheard on the helicopter’s radio and the sounding of air raid sirens to signal the imminent Hammer Down bombing. 13

270

YouTube Monsters

genres – sci-fi, horror, disaster and romance – also sets it apart. Superficially, it is the least political of all our movies. With its cast of glamorous twenty-somethings and a PG-13 certificate, the film seems to have been aimed mainly at the fifteen to thirty-five age bracket. Publicity for the film suggested the same. A highly innovative Internet viral marketing campaign that layered clues, hints and fragments of meta-narrative information across a variety of blogs and websites treated the audience not as passive consumers awaiting the movie’s release but as participants in a search for the information necessary to pre-imagine it and then unravel its mysteries.17 Cloverfield is presented as digital hand-held camera footage recovered by the United States Department of Defense. The footage lasts seventy-four minutes, purportedly the exact length of a digital video tape. At the start of the film, text states that the footage is of a case designated ‘Cloverfield’ and that it was found in the area ‘formerly known as “Central Park” ’. The film mainly comprises segments taped the terrible night of 22–23 May 2009. From time to time, flashbacks are shown from a video shot a month earlier – showing two characters in happier times – that has been mostly recorded over. On the morning of 27 April 2009, Rob (Michael Stahl-David) wakes up after sleeping with longtime platonic friend Beth (Odette Yustman) in her father’s plush apartment in Manhattan. Rob tenderly trains his camcorder on Beth. Rob and Beth look in love and make plans to spend the day at the nearby fun park on Coney Island. Suddenly, without warning, the footage cuts to a month later, on the evening of 22 May. Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) are readying their Manhattan apartment for a farewell party for Rob, who has accepted a job in Japan. Rob’s best friend, Hud (T. J. Miller), is given a camera by Jason to record final goodbyes from family and friends. Hud and his camera will be our eyes and ears for the rest of the movie. Close to midnight, Beth arrives at the party but with a date. Rob clearly feels strongly for Beth but out of nervousness hasn’t spoken to her since their night together several weeks back. He and Beth have a row, prompting her to leave. Just as the party is getting into full swing (we are now twenty minutes into the movie), the apartment building shakes and a brief blackout occurs. When the power returns, a television anchor explains that there has been an earthquake and an oil tanker has capsized in the bay off Lower Manhattan. The partygoers go up to the roof to spot the disaster, where they witness an explosion in Lower Manhattan. ‘Do you think it’s another terrorist attack?’ somebody says. As fire and debris begin to rain down, the partygoers flee to the street below, at which point the head of the Statue of Liberty, damaged and charred, comes crashing down beside them. Hud is able to record a glimpse of what seems to be a giant monster moving through the city. The Woolworth Building collapses in its wake, causing Rob, Jason, Hud, Lily and another http://whatculture.com/film/1-18-08-a-look-back-at-cloverfield-five-years-later.php (29 November 2013); Daniel North, ‘Evidence of Things Not Quite Seen: Cloverfield’s Obstructed Spectacle’, Film & History, 40, 1, 2010, 75–76. 17

271

Cinematic Terror

partygoer, Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), to try to escape Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge. Half way across, however, Jason is killed along with many other people by the rampaging monster’s gigantic tail. The bridge collapses and the surviving friends run back to Manhattan.

Figure 14.1  Cloverfield: Liberty crash-lands in Manhattan. On the television news in an electronics store, Hud watches the military engaging a reptilian monster that is taller than the skyscrapers. The soldiers are attacked by parasitic spider-like creatures that fall off it. Rob listens to a voicemail message from Beth saying she’s trapped in her apartment, and the remaining four friends venture to midtown Manhattan to rescue her. Going against the evacuating crowd, they are caught in spectacular crossfire between the monster and the military. This forces them to seek refuge in the subway tunnels, where they are attacked in the dark by several parasites, one of which gores and bites Marlena. The group escapes the tunnels into an abandoned department store, where an infantry squad has set up a field hospital. There, Marlena dies horrifically from her ‘infection’. Determined still to rescue Beth, Rob and the others go back up to the streets but are warned to report to a military evacuation site before 6 am, which is when the last helicopter evacuates and the military will enact its Hammer Down protocol, destroying the monster and the whole of Manhattan. The group frees Beth from her teetering apartment block in the Time Warner Centre. After making it to the aerial evacuation site, they and the military encounter the monster once more. Lily is raced into a departing helicopter. A few moments later, Rob, Beth and Hud are taken away in a second helicopter and from above the city they see the monster apparently being incinerated by a stealth bomber. Just as Hud begins hailing victory over the monster, it reaches up and lashes at the helicopter, causing it 272

YouTube Monsters

to crash into a grassy clearing in Central Park. The three friends survive the crash but hear a voice on the helicopter’s radio warning that the Hammer Down protocol will begin in fifteen minutes. Hud and Beth pull an injured Rob clear of the wreckage, but when Hud returns to recover the camera, the monster kills him by biting him in two. Rob and Beth grab the still-filming camera and take shelter under a bridge in Central Park as air raid sirens begin to blare in the distance. Resigned to their fate, Rob and Beth speak their last words to the camera, as if writing their own epitaphs. Numerous explosions occur outside and the monster can be heard shrieking. The bridge collapses and, as debris covers the camera, Rob and Beth can be heard professing their love for one another before another explosion occurs, at which point they scream and the camera freezes. The film then flashes back to Rob and Beth’s Coney Island date back on 27 April, during which a mysterious object can be seen falling from the sky into the ocean. ‘I had a good day’, Beth says tenderly to Rob. The footage then freezes and everything goes to black.

Figure 14.2  Cloverfield: Beth (Odette Yustman) and Rob (Michael Stahl-David) in happier times at Coney Island.

Often, to some people, a movie is, as the old saying goes, ‘just a movie’. This rule applies across our whole study but seems particularly pertinent when discussing certain genres like horror and creature features. We can be pretty sure – judging from online reviews – that Cloverfield had little or no political impact on many people simply because they saw it as a monster movie, plain and simple.18 Indeed, the only See, for instance, many of the user reviews posted on the IMDb website: http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt1060277/reviews (29 November 2013). 18

273

Cinematic Terror

noticeable long-term effect the film apparently had on some viewers was to put them off watching shaky-cam movies for good, due to the nausea and migraines Cloverfield reportedly triggered.19 At the same time, it is apparent from a host of other reviews, both online and elsewhere, that if viewers thought Cloverfield was ‘about’ anything, it was terrorism. Cloverfield attracted numerous plaudits and brickbats for capturing the horrible ‘reality’ of a terrorist attack. Many who had experienced 9/11 at first hand were especially keen to pass judgment on the film. ‘Cloverfield nails what that morning [11 September 2001] felt like’, Jessica Wakeman, who had been in Manhattan on 9/11, wrote in the Huffington Post. ‘The confusion at first, and then fear overwhelms and all you can think about is the possibility of dying and needing to escape by getting out-out-out but where can you go because the subways and trains aren’t running?’ The Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Rechtshaffen agreed, calling Cloverfield ‘chillingly effective’ and praising the film for its ‘claustrophobic intensity’.20 The Fox Television News correspondent Roger Friedman, on the other hand, rebuked Cloverfield for evoking awful memories of what had happened to some of his friends in New York on 9/11. Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek was harsher still, calling the film ‘emotionally sadistic’ for repackaging 11 September 2001 as ‘an amusement park ride’.21 Cloverfield achieves a level of authenticity principally through the form in which it is shot and acted. Its faux-amateur footage – complete with clumsy jump cuts, poor focus, hurried but tantalizing glimpses, and noises off – gives the film a ‘raw’, visceral, live quality. The acting style invokes the casual, ‘unscripted’ feel of reality television. Its visual perspective is fixed and constant, with a restricted vantage point that solicits paranoia regarding off-screen space, as if Hud (and the audience) could be attacked or die at any moment. Cloverfield’s structure alternates between lull and chaos, with quiet valleys of fear and mourning regularly interrupted by peaks of sheer monsterterror. Manipulative but nerve-jangling, it is a design strengthened by Reeves’ shaky camerawork, which not only immerses the audience in the encompassing bedlam, but – because it teases viewers with quick sightings of the creature – heightens their absorbed attentiveness.22 Michael W. Smith, ‘What’s Behind “Cloverfield” Illness?’, 24 January 2008, http://www.webmd.com/ brain/news/20080122/whats-behind-cloverfield-illness?ecd=wnl_emw_020608 (29 November 2013); CBS News, ‘Monster Movie Making People Sick’, 25 January 2008, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/monstermovie-making-people-sick/ (29 November 2013). 20 Jessica Wakeman, ‘On Cloverfield and 9/11’, Huffington Post, 21 January 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/jessica-wakeman/on-cloverfield-and-911_b_82518.html (30 November 2013); Michael Rechtshaffen, ‘Bottom Line: It’s “The Blair Godzilla Project” – and That’s a Compliment’, Hollywood Reporter, 17 January 2008. 21 Roger Friedman, ‘ “Cloverfield”: Horror Film Not Sensitive About 9/11’, FoxNews.com, 16 January 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/01/16/cloverfield-horror-film-not-sensitive-about-11/ (30 November 2013); Stephanie Zacharek, ‘Cloverfield: Do We Really Need the Horror of 9/11 to be Repackaged and Presented to Us as an Amusement-Park Ride?’, Salon.com, 17 January 2008. 22 Nick Schager, ‘Cloverfield’, Slant, 17 January 2008, http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/cloverfield (30 November 2013). 19

274

YouTube Monsters

Figure 14.3  Cloverfield: Hud’s sneaker is in the foreground as Rob runs to help him off the floor of the subway station. Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) is in trouble too.

That attentiveness is heightened further by Cloverfield’s abundant use of 9/11 iconography. Many sequences and shots in the movie appear as if lifted directly from television or YouTube footage of the terrorist attacks on New York on 11 September 2001. As fireballs engulf Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the air fills with millions of pieces of drifting paper. Bewildered New Yorkers stagger through the streets, some screaming in panic, others stopping to film what is going on around and above them. Hud and his friends take shelter in a grocery store as a rapidly advancing cloud of dust envelops the street outside. One of the twin towers of the Time Warner Centre collapses against the other, as brave rescuers race up the building’s stairwell in an effort to save a trapped survivor, Beth. In the subway, Rob tearfully has to tell his mom on his cell phone that his brother is dead and he might never see her again. Sounding like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Hud wonders whether the monster has been created by his own government. Cloverfield contains other sequences and images that are not borrowed from 11 September 2001 but capture equally if not more powerfully the fear Americans associated with terrorism. That the monster is not just rampaging through New York but attacking America’s entire body-politic or way of life comes across in the symbolic damage it inflicts on the nation’s largest city. Historic landmarks are destroyed, like the Woolworth Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. The Statue of Liberty is first clawed and then decapitated, as if it were victim of a surreal jihadi-terrorist beheading video. Seeing Liberty’s massive head bouncing down the street in the sequence that announces the monster’s arrival comes as an almighty shock to the senses. Little

275

Cinematic Terror

Figure 14.4  Cloverfield: A plume of dust and smoke comes towards the camera. Manhattan residents run for their lives.

wonder this sequence was chosen as the trailer for the film, nor that the reverse image of Liberty’s headless body overlooking a smoking Manhattan skyline adorned Cloverfield posters.23 Some viewers, including many who had been traumatized by 9/11, may well have found Cloverfield therapeutic, as J. J. Abrams hoped. After September 2001, Hollywood had conspicuously avoided even showing the New York skyline lest it evoked bad memories. Movies revelling in attacks on the city – other than by natural catastrophes in features like The Day After Tomorrow – were considered off limits.24 Cloverfield breaks this taboo and in so doing gives people another chance to come to terms with 9/11 and with their general anxieties about terrorism. Moreover, the movie restages 9/11 in a fictional genre, one that draws explicitly on excitement, special effects and incredulity. On one level, Cloverfield is an undeniably pleasurable experience, one that allows people to be frightened in a safe, controlled environment, unlike, say, coming across images of terrorism on the nightly television news. Expressing a view held by

Ben Walters, ‘Two-Point-Zero’, Film Quarterly, 61, 2, 2008, 66–67; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277/ (30 November 2013). 24 Steven Jay Schneider, ‘Architectural Nostalgia and the New York City Skyline on Film’, in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 29–41; Page, The City’s End, Ch. 6. The repression of images of the New York skyline did not meet with unanimous approval. Some audiences went so far as to boo scenes of the skyline absent the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers in the 2001 Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander, whereas shots that included the towers in Vondie Curtis-Hall’s comedy musical Glitter (2001) elicited spontaneous applause. Schneider, ‘Architectural Nostalgia’, 39. 23

276

YouTube Monsters

many amateur critics and bloggers, Chuck Koplinski called Cloverfield a ‘cinematic exorcism for Americans still reeling from the 9/11 disaster’.25 And yet Cloverfield is far from being a conventional creature feature. Most monster or disaster movies end happily, with the threat being eliminated. As Daniel North argues, this, together with the movies’ often sublime images of catastrophe, immaculately composed for maximum spectacle from a safe distance, tends to produce comforting pictures of resilience and indestructibility.26 Cloverfield subverts these generic principles. Though it does have the obligatory elements of bravery (Beth’s rescue) and humour (Hud is a social misfit), Cloverfield is overall extremely pessimistic. The US military is unable to stop the monster and its offspring even for a moment. At the end of the film, the US authorities have to incinerate New York in the hope that this will kill the creatures and thereby save the rest of the country, but we are not even sure whether this has worked. More importantly, by this stage all of the film’s characters, except Lily, are dead. Terrorism is, in other words, at least in this guise, a greater threat than ever before. It is capable of truly mass destruction and is seemingly invincible. What makes this form of contemporary terrorism even more frightening, Cloverfield implies, is its inexplicable otherness. Unlike Abrams’ inspiration, Godzilla, a prehistoric monster brought back to life by nuclear tests, or King Kong, a giant gorilla brought to New York for cruel display by its human captors, Cloverfield’s monster has no history. It apparently has no mission or purpose either. Like the majority of Hollywood’s terrorists down the years, the huge reptile attacks without warning, exists simply to destroy, cannot be reasoned with and therefore can only be dealt with by force. The fact that we only get partial sightings of the monster – highly unusual for a genre predicated on spectacle – not only makes it more disturbing, it also chimes with an age in which America’s enemies are more dispersed and often barely visible. The threat posed by invisibility is brought out in another important way, too. As if it were a modern-day bioterrorist, the monster spreads disease via the parasites that fall from its skin. This enables it to spawn yet more enemies but from within, namely those people it infects and who therefore need to be killed lest the ‘virus’ takes over the whole country. This is revealed to us by Marlena’s fate in a disorientating, terrifying sequence in the field hospital. When Marlena announces she does not feel well, the camera pans to show her bleeding out of her eyes. ‘Bite!’ screams a medic, whereupon Marlena is seized by soldiers, hustled to a lit quarantine tent, where her silhouette expands and explodes, spattering blood on the plastic. Some critics

Chuck Koplinski, ‘Cloverfield – A 21st Century Disaster Movie Catharsis’, Smile Politely, 21 January 2008, http://www.smilepolitely.com/arts/Cloverfield_A_2lst_Century_Disaster_Movie_Catharsis/ (30 November 2013); J. D. Lafrance, ‘DVD of the Week: Cloverfield’, Radiator Heaven, 30 October 2009, http:// rheaven.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/dvd-of-week-cloverfield.html (30 November 2013). 26 North, ‘Evidence of Things Not Quite Seen’, 84–88. 25

277

Cinematic Terror

suggested this scene rendered Marlena a monstrous suicide bomber, exploding open to generate more terror among the doctors and soldiers. Others viewers might have been reminded of the warnings issued by America’s leaders, especially after 9/11, that terrorism was contagious. What the scene suggests most, though, especially in the way it is twitchily shot through the thick, semi-transparent plastic, is uncertainty – of what has just happened and of what sort of world we now live in.27 Perhaps what Cloverfield unwittingly illuminates more than anything else is the continuing hold that 9/11 and terrorism generally had on the US public imagination – together with cinema’s desire to feed it. As traumatic as it was, 9/11 was also, though few Americans admitted it openly, a thrilling spectacle. Cloverfield in many ways delights in this spectacle and offers an intensified version of what happened on 11 September 2001, providing a greater degree of destruction and violence than even the famous video images of those terrorist attacks. Cloverfield does this by removing us just far enough from reality that we do not have to confront our fascination with the death and destruction wrought on 9/11. By reconfiguring the event as a sci-fi monster movie, it allows us to experience the terrorist attacks as an exciting spectacle without any attendant feelings of guilt.28

Figure 14.5  Cloverfield: ‘I don’t feel well, Hud’, says Marlena, moments before exploding behind the plastic screen.

Amid feverish expectation prompted by teaser trailers and intense speculation about its plot among the online community, Cloverfield appeared at the beginning of 2008. The movie took $41 million at the US box office over its first weekend alone, an all-time record for a January release. Cloverfield went on to take a total of $170 Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror, 52; Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 5. James Stone, ‘Enjoying 9/11: The Pleasures of Cloverfield’, Radical History Review, 111, Fall 2011, 167–174.

27 28

278

YouTube Monsters

million at cinemas worldwide and another $29 million in domestic DVD sales, thus making it one of the most profitable films in our study.29 Various awards and spin-offs soon followed, increasing the movie’s profile in the US and elsewhere across several media platforms. A prequel manga series was published in Japan and toy figures of the monster went on sale in the US. It wasn’t long before Cloverfield’s cultural imprint warranted it being spoofed in several US television shows, including the cult animation series South Park, and, appropriately, in numerous short films posted on YouTube.30 Videos imitating Cloverfield in different, more significant ways also proliferated on YouTube in the wake of the film’s release. Rather than falling into obsolescence, over the past decade so-called ‘old media’ like cinema have adapted to the digital age by embracing new media forms, such as online blogs and interactive campaigns, to extend the scope and reach of their products. Cloverfield illustrates perfectly how many films are now effectively trans-media events that consist of, to use one scholar’s terminology, ‘a story that unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinct and valuable contribution to the whole’.31 Cloverfield’s ‘story’ had begun in the middle of 2007 with an online whispering campaign that included the ‘leaking’ of scenes on to entertainment news websites even before the film had been completed. It then progressed via the creation of an auxiliary website, 1-18-08.com, on which the film’s makers could road-test ideas. After release, Cloverfield’s ‘brand’ was strengthened through commercial tie-ins, including Nokia cell phone ring tones featuring the roar of the movie’s monster.32 Increasing the reach of a film’s brand in this way makes good business sense, but in Cloverfield’s case these techniques also had the effect of simultaneously broadening the film’s narrative and articulating it with larger discourses of terrorism and national security. In March 2008, for instance, Paramount announced the ‘When Cloverfield Hit’ online contest, asking participants to upload on to YouTube home-made, five-minute video clips responding to the prompt ‘Where were you when the monster hit?’ Hundreds of fans across the United States responded

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=cloverfield.htm (30 November 2013); http://www.thenumbers.com/movies/2008/11808.php (29 November 2013). 30 ‘Shonen Ace Posts Cloverfield Movie Tie-In Manga Online’, Anime News Network, 16 January 2008; Marc Graser, ‘Hasbro Toys with Cloverfield Monster’, Variety, 21 January 2008; http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AAnUsBshU08 (1 December 2013); ‘ “Cloverfield” Spoof on “South Park” 12.10: Pandemic and 12.11: Im So Startled’, Aceshowbiz, 28 October 2008, http://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00019412. html#ixzz2mJ3iA0Bl (1 December 2013). 31 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 95. 32 http://whatculture.com/film/1-18-08-a-look-back-at-cloverfield-five-years-later.php (30 November 2013); Emanuelle Wessels, ‘ “Where Were You When the Monster Hit?” Media Convergence, Branded Security Citizenship, and the Trans-Media Phenomenon of Cloverfield’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17, 1, 2011, 78. 29

279

Cinematic Terror

to this announcement not by making mini-monster movies but documentaries about how they would deal with a terrorist strike in their area. The videos showed hundreds of people who were on high alert for the next big attack, hiding under their beds, surveilling their neighbours and ready to act effectively as twenty-firstcentury ‘security-citizens’. Here, it would seem Cloverfield had morphed into some sort of pedagogical, interactive anti-terrorist tool, one that encouraged more than spectatorship but patriotic ‘actor-vism’.33 Cloverfield’s commercial success is indicative of the growing popularity during this era of allegorical takes on terrorism. Scores of Hollywood movies dealing explicitly with the global war on terror were made after 9/11 and there still is a market for them today. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty,34 Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen35 and, as we saw in an earlier chapter, John Moore’s A Good Day to Die Hard, are just three examples of full-frontal terrorism thrillers that have recently done well at the box office. However, by the time that Cloverfield appeared, many producers had stopped exploiting terrorism in this way. The war on terror had turned politically rancid, rendering many sorts of films once regarded as sure-fire winners box-office poison. Particularly ‘toxic’ were the movies centred on the Iraq War, which, with the partial exception of Kathryn Bigelow’s Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker (2009), lost Hollywood a lot of money.36 There is still an appetite for terrorism on the big screen today but it tends to be sated through fantasy, science fiction and other genres in which politics is filtered through formulas of pop entertainment. Movies focusing on superheroes, supervillains and super-disasters have spiked in popularity in the past decade and have become a crucial element in what some commentators refer to as Hollywood’s ‘post-9/11 movement’.37 In the year that Cloverfield was released, for instance, the two biggest hits at the US box office were Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. Ostensibly, these movies were high-tech fantasies based on iconic comic-book figures but each had plenty to say about to terrorism, not least the

Wessels, ‘ “Where Were You When the Monster Hit?” ’, 78–81. Susan L. Carruthers, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, Cineaste, 32, 8, Spring 2013, 50–52; http://www.boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=binladen.htm (2 December 2103). On the controversy surrounding the assistance Zero Dark Thirty received from the CIA see ‘JW Disclosures of Zero Dark Thirty Leaks Spur Criminal Referral’, http:// www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/weekly-updates/weekly-update-bin-laden-leaks-criminal/ (1 December 2013); Ben Child, ‘CIA Requested Zero Dark Thirty Rewrites, Memo Reveals’, Guardian, 7 May 2013, http:// www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/07/zero-dark-thirty-cia-memo (1 December 2013). 35 Henry K. Miller, ‘Olympus Has Fallen’, Sight & Sound, 23, 6, June 2013, 105; http://www.boxofficemojo. com/movies/?id=olympushasfallen.htm (2 December 2013). 36 On the toxic label given to the Iraq War films by Variety, see Barker, ‘Toxic Genre’. The Hurt Locker cost $15 million and made $49 million worldwide, http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=hurtlocker.htm (2 December 2013). 37 Pollard, Hollywood’s 9/11. 33 34

280

YouTube Monsters

perceived need for extraordinary beings to serve as stand-ins for military power.38 The same can be said for similar franchises over the past decade, including X-Men, Spider Man, Watchmen and Superman. Each of these serials – the modern-day successors to Die Hard in a way – have attracted A-list talent, broken box-office records and been turned into multi-media events. Their messages about terrorism might not always be the same, and some of those messages are more oblique than others, but the overall effect is to heighten the threat of terrorism among millions.39 Despite the online clamour for a sequel, Cloverfield did not become a franchise. Its creator, J. J. Abrams, turned his attention instead to rebooting one of the biggest science fiction franchises of all time, Star Trek. His first attempt, Star Trek, appeared in 2009, won an Academy Award and grossed over $385 million worldwide. His second, Star Trek: Into Darkness, was released in 2013 and took more than $467 million, making it the highest-grossing Star Trek film ever.40 Although it was made a dozen years after September 2001, Star Trek: Into Darkness proved that Hollywood was far from moving beyond the war on terror. Indeed, with a story that centred on the violence on Earth caused by a twenty-third-century intergalactic superbeing, a plot that alluded to the immorality of drone warfare, and awesome set-piece sequences that included a massive space ship crashing into downtown San Francisco, Into Darkness indicated that allegorical screen terrorism will continue to adapt and be around for a good while yet.41

Pollard, Hollywood’s 9/11, 87–89, 90–92, 98–99, 102–103; Michael Karounos, ‘The Dark Knight: An Essay on Justice in the Age of Terror’, undated, ChristianCinema.Com, http://www.christiancinema.com/catalog/ article_info.php?articles_id=5936# (3 December 2103); Nick Turse, ‘Hollywood Is Becoming the Pentagon’s Mouthpiece for Propaganda’, AlterNet, 21 May 2008, http://www.alternet.org/story/86093/hollywood_is_ becoming_the_pentagon%27s_mouthpiece_for_propaganda (3 December 2013). Worldwide, The Dark Knight and Iron Man made $1 billion and $585 million respectively, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=darkknight.htm (2 December 2013); http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=ironman. htm (2 December 2013). 39 Pollard, Hollywood’s 9/11, Ch. 5. 40 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=startrek11.htm (2 December 2013); http://boxofficemojo. com/movies/?id=startrek12.htm (2 December 2013). 41 Forrest Wickman, ‘Star Trek Into Due Process: The Sequel’s Message About Drones, Militarization, and Blowback’, Slate, 17 May 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/17/star_trek_into_ darkness_political_allegory_latest_movie_takes_on_terrorism.html (3 December 2013); Noah Gittell, ‘George W. Bush Might Approve of Star Trek Into Darkness’, The Atlantic, 22 May 2013, http://www. theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/george-w-bush-might-approve-of-i-star-trek-intodarkness-i/276087/ (3 December 2013). 38

281

CONCLUSION

Of the hundreds of films that have been made about terrorism over the past century, only a few have focused explicitly on the interaction between the medium and the activity. Perhaps the most absorbing of these films is Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a little known documentary about skyjacking made in 1997 by the Belgian Johan Grimonprez. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y’s eccentric, commentary-free montage of news and fiction footage dating from the silent era to the 1980s makes a compelling case for film having made terrorists into celebrities. Excerpts show real-life skyjackers performing like movie stars, aircraft passengers telling journalists of the ‘fun’ they had being hijacked, cameramen risking their lives to get close-ups of terrorist incidents, pools of blood being swept from airport terminal floors, and fully laden airliners crashing onto runways in slow motion. These images are made all the more disturbing by a surreal disco soundtrack that mocks the audience’s voyeuristic impulses and draws attention to people’s seemingly insatiable appetite for mediated destruction and death.1 Is Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y right? Has this study shown that there is indeed some sort of symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the cinema, just as many claim there is between terrorism and the news media? Has it demonstrated that film-makers and terrorists are loving bedfellows, each profiting from the glamour associated with violence? Has the study indicated that the public has had an unhealthy fascination with screen terrorism reaching back over decades? This conclusion will provide final thoughts on these and other related questions through an overall assessment of the three processes that have been at the heart of our historical and empirical examination of cinematic terrorism – production, representation and reception. If this book has demonstrated anything, it is that filmic terrorism, as Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y suggests, has a very long and rich history. That history stretches back to the rudimentary shorts of the early silent era, takes us through the two world wars, grows more complex with the appearance of ‘international terrorism’ in the 1970s and 1980s, and culminates in cinema’s contribution to the debate surrounding today’s global war on terror. Crucially, it is also an international history, one that goes far beyond Hollywood’s viewfinder. What started out as a largely Euro-American preserve in the early decades of the twentieth century developed later into a multinational phenomenon, one that saw film industries in countries as far afield as India and Israel responding to political violence at home and competing with Hollywood for a share

John Downie, ‘Damage, Devotion and the Discriminating Eye’, Illusions, 27, Winter 1998, 20–22. Watch Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y at http://www.ubu.com/film/grimonprez_dial.html (21 January 2014). 1

Conclusion

in an increasingly worldwide market for stories about terrorism. The more mature cinematic terrorism grew, the more layers it developed; the more genres it permeated, the more visible and simultaneously obscured it became. A detailed look at the production of filmic terrorism over time and space shows that, as might be expected of any industry, cinema has predominantly looked at terrorism through a commercial lens. To most film-makers, terrorism has been about profit not propaganda. Like sex, crime and war, terrorism both excites and appals many people and for directors, producers and actors it therefore qualifies as a legitimate source of entertainment. This exploitative frame of mind is not restricted to Hollywood, as some might think, but has been the rule among film industries worldwide. We have seen, moreover, that terrorism has proven to be infinitely adaptable and capable of being assimilated into numerous film genres. Indeed, the subject has, at various points over the last century, been a key ingredient of genres like action-adventures, has constantly breathed new life into others such as espionage, and has cropped up in genres not normally associated with politics such as science fiction and horror. For every film-maker like Theo van Gogh, a brutal victim of terrorism, there are dozens of other film artists whose careers have soared because of it. Some, like Steven de Souza, scriptwriter of the early Die Hard instalments, can thank terrorism for making them millionaires; others, such as Constantin Costa-Gavras and Hany Abu-Assad, the directors of Missing and Paradise Now respectively, earned international acclaim on the back of terrorism. Making films about terrorism has not just been about big businesses cynically cashing in on violent ‘celebrities’, however. This book shows that cinematic terrorism has consistently been highly contested political territory, for directors, studios, scriptwriters, governments and violent militants. Over the decades, a variety of individuals and organizations have helped determine why and how terrorists appear on screen. Some of these agents-of-influence have come from within the film community, others from outside; some have exerted influence openly, others more discreetly. The world’s first fully-fledged terrorist film, Sabotage, for instance, took the form it did through the combination of a dead novelist, a distinguished director and subtle yet intrusive censors. By contrast, The Battle of Algiers and State of Siege were the products of political auteurs and either former or active terrorists. Exodus, Operation Thunderbolt and Countdown could not have been made in the way they were without the support of the Israeli and Russian security services, while the Die Hard series had the backing of one of the world’s most powerful film studios and companies that saw the movies as opportunities for product placement. What this tells us is that the power to define who or what a ‘terrorist’ was (and is) at the cinema needs, as elsewhere, careful historical, geographical, political and economic contextualization. In other words, films about terrorism did not (and do not) just appear; their origins can be convoluted, their construction multi-layered, their screening and distribution sponsored, challenged and circumscribed.

283

Cinematic Terror

If paying close attention to the production of cinematic terrorism over decades suggests we need to think more about why and how films about terrorism get made, looking in depth at the representation of terrorism on the big screen over the past century reveals how surprisingly vibrant cinema has been as a forum for debate about what terrorism is, who uses it, why and to what effect. Films have almost inevitably simplified terrorism, though not necessarily more than, say, television. A movie lasting two hours, or in Exodus’ case nearly four hours, cannot hope to fully explain as complex a phenomenon as terrorism. Even the press has had difficulty in achieving this, many experts argue, despite the greater space afforded for hard analysis in newspapers.2 There is little doubt, too, that the majority of films over time and space have presented perspectives of terrorism that are aligned with the interests and priorities of the prevailing state, social and economic orders in which they are institutionally and ideologically located. Most films, in other words, have presented terrorists as non-state actors that threaten the political and social equilibrium via unwarranted, extremist and criminal behaviour. By and large, cinema has not glorified or given succour to terrorists, therefore, but has condemned them. That said, one of the key themes that hopefully emerges from this book is that the history of cinematic terrorism is about much more than images of disgruntled bombers or psychopathic skyjackers. True, these stereotypes have appeared in countless films, like Sabotage and Operation Thunderbolt. Across the decades, however, films have portrayed and defined terrorists in a multitude of ways that cut across the political spectrum, including as anarchists (The Voice of the Violin), resistance heroes (Ashes and Diamonds), freedom fighters (Exodus), secret policemen (State of Siege), religious zealots (Bombay) and victims of state oppression (Paradise Now). This range of cinematic definitions tells us that across time and space cinema has depicted an assortment of reasons for terrorism, including extremist ideologies (The Delta Force), historical grievances (Michael Collins), financial greed (Die Hard), ethnic hatred (Bombay), inequalities in power (The Battle of Algiers) and narcissism (The Third Generation). This shows us that cinema has been far less one-dimensional ideologically and thematically than many might think. At the same time, it also tells us that terrorism is historically and geographically contingent, and that film industries in different parts of the world have defined and projected terrorism differently according to their own political concerns, cultural mores, systems of censorship and style. Notwithstanding cinema’s unexpectedly expansive exploration of the motives for terrorism, it cannot be emphasized enough that filmic terrorism is principally For critiques of the coverage of terrorism by television and the press, see, for instance, Schlesinger, Murdock and Elliott, Televising Terrorism; Paletz and Schmid (eds.), Terrorism and the Media; Norris, Kern and Just (eds.), Framing Terrorism; Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism; Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin, Terror and Television: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Des Freedman and Daya Kishan Thussu (eds.), Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives (London: Sage, 2012). 2

284

Conclusion

about action. Whatever the genre, most films have focused on what terrorists are doing rather than thinking. Sabotage, a movie that converts a novel about the forces behind and nature of terrorism into a shocking example of its practice, is one of the earliest, clearest demonstrations of this. Cloverfield, a hyper-kinetic film in which terrorism comes in the form of a mindless monster, perhaps shows this convention at its most extreme. More often than not, this focus on action has served to depoliticize terrorism while emphasizing its threat via images of destruction. As film technology has advanced, so these images have grown more spectacular, visceral and, far-fetched plotlines aside, apparently more lifelike. Terrorism has been further depoliticized by the convention almost all films adhere to – of focusing on human interest narratives set around a small number of characters. Though this makes sense in entertainment terms, the corollary is that terrorism is invariably looked at episodically and from the perspective of individuals rather than wider societal and political conditions. The result is that the complexities of terrorism are reduced to simple, often psychological causes which, in turn, lend themselves to apparently easy (and mostly violent) solutions. With the partial exception of The Battle of Algiers – a movie that focuses on the power of collective action and uses amateur actors rather than recognized stars in the lead roles – all of our case-study films looked at terrorism from the viewpoints of one or two characters. It is of course cinema’s tendency to shine the spotlight so narrowly that, paradoxically perhaps, has helped turn terrorists into the sorts of pin-ups identified in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Exodus’ Ari Ben Canaan, Ashes and Diamonds’ Maciek Chelmicki and Die Hard’s Hans Gruber are just three of the stylish, charismatic terrorists to feature in this book. Equally, cinema has abounded with magnetic counterterrorists, like Operation Thunderbolt’s Yonni Netanyahu, Countdown’s Alexei Smolin and Die Hard’s John McClane. Terrorists haven’t had it all their own way on the big screen, in other words; arguably, the real ‘super entertainers’ (to use Walter Laqueur’s phrase from the 1970s) have been their brave, virtuous and square-jawed adversaries. Just as the representation of terrorism at the cinema has been less straightforward than many might imagine, so has its reception. On a general level, our study has demonstrated that for generations many people have taken cinema’s impact on public attitudes towards terrorism very seriously indeed. Critics, commentators, politicians and militants have all seen cinema as a space where, to paraphrase the international relations scholar Mark Lacy, ‘common sense’ ideas about terrorism are (re)produced and where stories about what is acceptable behaviour from states and individuals are naturalized and legitimated.3 This anxiety can be linked to cinema’s power to spell out what literature, say, can only suggest. Cinema can show the threat of terrorism visually and aurally and thereby give ‘real’ meaning to an activity-cum-phenomenon that most people experience solely on an imaginary level. This helps explain why so many of the films we have looked at over the past century caused such controversy. Mark Lacy, ‘War, Cinema and Moral Anxiety’, Alternatives, 28, 5, 2003, 614.

3

285

Cinematic Terror

Of course, just because politicians worry about cinema’s influence or because a particular film about terrorism becomes notorious does not necessarily mean that it affects wider opinion or actually changes people’s minds about political violence. The theory that films or propaganda act as some sort of ‘magic bullet’ was rejected long ago in favour of another which holds that the most effective tools of persuasion are those that seek to reinforce or recalibrate opinion rather than convert it.4 The fact that, each in their own way, movies like Ashes and Diamonds, Exodus, Die Hard and Michael Collins were swimming with the tide of opinion regarding terrorism when they were released surely underpinned their popularity. This is not to say these and other films didn’t also influence, rather than merely reflect, the Zeitgeist, however. There seems little doubt that Michael Collins played at least a small role in the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ of the 1990s, while the long term effect Exodus had on American attitudes towards the Arab-Israeli dispute is widely recognized. Cinema has not therefore just tapped into political debates about terrorism; films have helped shape the discourse and agendas about it. Can we point to any link between cinematic terrorism and the actual spread of political violence? Both undoubtedly share an interest in the spectacular and dramatic, but cinema has never existed in a vacuum. Indeed, as film has grown older, other equally if not more powerful media such as television have also presented rival views of and on terrorism; today, cinematic output relating to terrorism is almost inseparable from that which appears online, as Cloverfield’s afterlife indicates. There is certainly strong evidence to suggest that The Battle of Algiers inspired acts of leftwing terrorism in Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Bombay, The Third Generation and The Siege all show that individual films could exacerbate political tensions and prompt violent reactions definable as terrorism, including attacks on the directors and stars. The Battle of Algiers was also appropriated as a counterterrorism manual in places like Argentina and Israel, while Operation Thunderbolt, combined with the real-life Israeli Entebbe raid, seems to have provided a generic template for some of the hostage-rescue missions that took place in the Middle East and Europe in the 1980s. Whether or not cinema as a whole, by advertising or exploiting terrorism’s dramatic qualities, has encouraged more political activists to use violence, or has given terrorists their much-needed ‘oxygen of publicity’ and thereby furthered their cause, is debatable however. Judging from the reaction to movies like Die Hard and Countdown, down the years many people have certainly loved watching terrorists causing mayhem on their cities’ streets or plotting the stuff of nightmares with a mixture of fascination and dread. And yet, as noted earlier, these and most other For a brief overview of these theoretical developments, see David Welch, ‘Introduction: Propaganda in Historical Perspective’, in Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert and David Welch (eds.), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), xv–xxi; Oliver Thomson, Easily Led: A History of Propaganda (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999). 4

286

Conclusion

films devote little space to considering terrorists’ causes or goals. They also end up showing terrorists dead and defeated. Complicating matters further is the knowledge that audiences have often been active makers of their own meanings of what they see about terrorism rather than passive consumers. We might recall that The Third Generation, for example, was attacked by both the extreme right and the extreme left in West Germany. Ordinary cinemagoers read Michael Collins as both a glorification of terrorism and a moving call for peace. Bloggers, journalists and amateur filmmakers saw Cloverfield as, among other things, a gratuitous evocation of 9/11, a patriotic call to arms in the global war on terror, and a thrilling monster movie. For the last word on our history of cinematic terrorism, perhaps we should return to Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Ten minutes into the movie is a television news excerpt from 1970 that captures wonderfully the essence and attraction of filmic terrorism. In it, Herbert Brill, a middle-aged Pepsi-Cola executive, describes to a throng of journalists his recent experience of being hijacked in South Korea by Japanese revolutionaries armed with pistols and Samurai swords. ‘It was a gamut of very many emotions’, the American says at a chaotic press conference in Tokyo, ‘from surprise to shock to fear, to joy, to laughter, then fear again and almost tragedy at the end.’ Brill is remarkably composed for the cameras, unlike his young son sitting alongside who, caught in the glare of publicity, gets a fit of the giggles. Despite the boy’s inappropriate behaviour, even forty years later the excerpt remains a touching scene of a heart-warming family reunion; Brill’s wife cries tears of elation and relief. Brill’s phlegmatic ‘performance’ earned him minor celebrity status, including television spots, when he returned home to the United States.5 Though cinema has not been alone in projecting the drama of terrorism over the past century, few of its competitors have proven to be as adept at taking people on that rollercoaster of emotions that Herbert Brill talked of in the early 1970s. Few other organs have given people such captivating, persuasive visions of terrorism, visions that can put viewers in the passenger seat, so to speak, alongside the real victims and perpetrators of terrorism. Certainly, few other media have catered to the public’s obvious taste for images of terrorism so creatively and for so long. To describe filmmakers and terrorists as blood brothers would be going too far, but the two of them have undoubtedly enjoyed a close rapport. That bond looks set to continue, however terrorism is defined in the future. Brill and his fellow passengers had been held for three days and were ultimately fortunate to escape from the Japanese Air Lines Boeing 727 alive, as his reference to tragedy implies. Attempts by the South Korean authorities to trick the ultra-leftists into thinking the plane had flown to their requested destination, Pyongyang in North Korea, went awry. When, soon after touching down near the South Korean capital Seoul, the terrorists heard Western Jazz music on the radio and threatened to kill everyone immediately. Eventually, the terrorists released all the passengers in exchange for a Japanese government official and safe passage out of South Korea. For American press reports of the hostage crisis and for reference to Brill’s appearance on the Canadian television panel game show Front Page Challenge, see ‘Hijacked Plane On Way To N. Korea With New Hostage’, Kokomo Tribune, 3 April 1970, http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/44728539/ (22 January 2014) and http://www.tvarchive.ca/database/17076/front_page_challenge/episode_guide/ (22 January 2014). 5

287

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Unpublished material Augustus Film Archive, Amsterdam, Netherlands Paradise Now files British Film Institute Library (BFIL), London, UK Miscellaneous scripts, Press Books and marketing files British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) papers Irish Film Archive, Dublin, Ireland Neil Jordan Collection Jerusalem Cinemateque, Jerusalem, Israel Exodus and Operation Thunderbolt files Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), Los Angeles, California, USA Miscellaneous Press Books, scripts, clippings files, production files and marketing files Production Code Administration/Motion Picture Files Buzz Feitshans Collection Robert Lerner Collection Eva Marie Saint Collection The National Archives, London, UK Colonial Office files Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin, Germany The Third Generation files University of California (UCLA), Los Angeles, California, USA Motion Picture Scripts Collection Twentieth Century-Fox Legal Files and Script Collection University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California, USA The Delta Force Press Kit, Production Notes, Cannon publicity

Published documentary sources Damning Verdict: Report of the Srikrishna Commission Appointed for Inquiry into the Riots at Mumbai during December 1992–January 1993, and The March 12, 1993, Bomb Blasts (Mumbai: Sabrang Communications, 1998) United States Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Committee on Government Reform, Statement by Christopher Harmon, 20 September 2001 ‘Preparing for the War on Terrorism’, 107th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2001)

Bibliography United States Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on The Near East and South Asia of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974) United States Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders, 91st Congress, 2nd Session, 22 July 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1970–1971)

Newspapers and periodicals Sources of reviews and contemporary articles can be traced through the footnotes. Where film reviews or newspaper articles are cited without an author, title or page reference, the sources are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles) clippings files or the British Film Institute Library (London) microfiche collection. France: Cine-Bulles, Cine Revue, Le Figaro, Studio Magazine Germany: Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Spiegel, Süddeutche Zeitung, Tag, Tip India: Asian Age, Navhind Times, Sunday Navhind Times, Times of India Israel: Haaretz, Jerusalem Post Japan: Japan Times Poland: Krakow Post Russia: Afisha, Arbat Prestige, Den’gi, Dosug I Razvlechenie, Ezhednevnyi zhurnal, Evening Moscow, Gazeta, Hello!, Kommersant, Penthouse, Premiere, Rolan, Rossiiskaia Gazeta, Tribuna United Kingdom: Banbridge Chronicle, Belfast News Letter, Belfast Telegraph, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Eastern Eye, Empire News, Evening Standard, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Listener, London Review of Books, New Statesman, News of the World, Observer, Spectator, Sunday Referee, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Time Out, Tribune, The Times, Times Educational Supplement United States: America, American Prospect, Army Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Chicago SunTimes, Chicago Daily Herald, Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Democracy Now!, Forward, GQ, Hartford Courant, Huffington Post, L. A. Weekly, Los Angeles Examiner, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Los Angeles Mirror, Los Angeles Mirror News, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles View, Nation, New Republic, New York, New Yorker, New York Post, New York Times, Newsweek, Orange County Register, Playboy, PR Week, San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Wall Street Journal, Wired, USA Today, Village Voice, Vogue, Washington Post

Film journals and trade papers France: Cahiers du Cinéma, Image et Son, Positif United Kingdom: Films and Filming, Jump Cut, Monthly Film Bulletin, Picturegoer Weekly, Senses of Cinema, Sight & Sound, Velvet Light Trap United States: American Cinematographer, American Film, Bioscope, Box Office, Cineaste, Creative Screenwriting, Empire Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Filmfacts, Film Comment, Film International, Hollywood Reporter, Independent Film Journal, Millimeter, Motion Picture Herald, Motion Picture News, Movieline, Moving Picture World, Photoplay, Screen International, Slant, Slate, Variety

289

Bibliography

Books and articles Abrash, Merritt, ‘Hitchcock’s Terrorists: Sources and Significance’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 39, 3, 2011, 165–173 Alexander, Yonah and Richard Latter (eds), Terrorism and the Media: Dilemmas for Government, Journalists and the Public (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1990) Amrane-Minne, Danièle Djamila, ‘Women at War: The Representation of Women in The Battle of Algiers’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 340–349 Andrew, Christopher, The Defence of the Realm (London: Allen Lane, 2009) ——— and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (London: HarperCollins, 1990) Andrzejewski, Jerzy, Ashes and Diamonds translated by D. J. Welsh; intro. Heinrich Böll (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) Anker, Elisabeth, ‘Villains, Victims, and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11’, Journal of Communication, 55, 1, 2005, 22–37 Asprey, Robert B., War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History – Volume 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1975) Auiler, Dan, Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks (London: Bloomsbury, 1999) Aumont, Jacques, ‘This is Not a Textual Analysis (Godard’s La Chinoise)’, Camera Obscura, 8–10, Fall 1982, 130–161 Aust, Stefan, The Baader Meinhof Complex (London: Bodley Head, 2008) ——— and Anthea Bell, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the RAF (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) Avner, Yehuda, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (London: Toby Press, 2010) Awan, Akil N., ‘Radicalization on the Internet? The Virtual Propagation of the Jihadist Media and Its Effects’, The RUSI Journal, 152, 3, 2007, 76–81 Ayres, Bill, Fugitive Days (New York: Penguin, 2003) Bajpai, Kanti P., Roots of Terrorism (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002) Bandarage, Asoka, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, Ethnicity, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2009) Barker, Martin, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (London: Pluto, 2011) Barr, Charles, English Hitchcock (London: Cameron and Hollis, Moffat, 1999) Barry, Iris and Eileen Bowser, D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965) Bartov, Omer, The ‘Jew’ in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005) Berendse, Gerrit-Jan and Ingo Cornils (eds), Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (New York: Rodophi, 2008) Betser, Moshe and Robert Rosenberg, Secret Soldier (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996) Beumers, Birgit (ed.), Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999) ———, A History of Russian Cinema (London: Berg, 2009) Biltereyst, Daniel and Roel Vande Winkel (eds), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Biskind, Peter, ‘State of Siege’, Film Quarterly, 27, 1, 1973, 51–54 Bloom, Mia, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) Blum, William, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (New York: Zed Books, 2003) 290

Bibliography Blumenthal-Barby, Martin, ‘Germany in Autumn: The Return of the Human’, Discourse, 29, 1, 1 January 2007, 140–168 Boggs, Carl and Tom Pollard, ‘Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism’, New Political Science, 28, 3, September 2006, 335–351 Booth, Alan R., ‘The Development of the Espionage Film’, Intelligence and National Security, 5, 4, October 1990, 136–160 Boyd-Barrett, Oliver, David Herrera and Jim Baumann, Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense, and Subversion (London: Routledge, 2011) Brace, Patricia and Robert Arp (eds), The Philosophy of J. J. Abrams (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2014) Briefel, Aviva and Sam J. Miller (eds), Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011) Broderick, Mick, Nuclear Movies (London: McFarland, 1991) Brownlow, Kevin, Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime – Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) Burki, Shireen Khan, ‘Haram or Halal? Islamists’ Use of Suicide Attacks as “Jihad” ’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 23, 4, 2011, 582–601 Buruma, Ian, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (London: Penguin, 2006) Caillé, Patricia, ‘The Illegitimate Legitimacy of The Battle of Algiers in French Film Culture’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 371–388 Carr, Matthew, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2006) Carruthers, Susan L., Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995) ———, ‘Two Faces of 1950s Terrorism: The Film Presentation of Mau Mau and the Malayan Emergency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 6, 1, Spring 1995, 17–43 ———, The Media at War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan, Screen Cinema: Impure Adaptation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Caute, David, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Celli, Carlo, Gillo Pontecorvo (Oxford: Scarecrow, 2005) Ceplair, Larry and Stevan Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) Cettl, Robert, Terrorism in American Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009) Chaliand, Gérard, Terrorism: From Popular Struggle to Media Spectacle (London: Saqi Books, 1987) ——— and Arnaud Blin (eds), The History of Terrorism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) Chanan, Michael, Cuban Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) Chapman, James, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998) ———, Cinemas of the World (London: Reaktion, 2003) ———, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) ———, War and Film (London: Reaktion, 2008) Chomsky, Noam, The Culture of Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1988) Cilano, Cara (ed.), From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009)

291

Bibliography Coates, Paul, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower, 2005) Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993) Cohen, Paula Marantz, ‘The Ideological Transformation of Conrad’s The Secret Agent into Hitchcock’s Sabotage’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 22, 3, July 1994, 199–120 Cohen, William B., ‘The Algerian War and the Revision of France’s Overseas Mission’, French Colonial History, 4, 1, 2003, 227–239 Cole, Benjamin (ed.), Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia (New York: Routledge, 2006) Cole, Robert, ‘1922 and All That: The Inner War in Feature Films of Independence’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 20, 3, 2000, 445–451 Comentale, Edward P., Stephen Watt and Skip Willman (eds), Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (Bloomington: IN: Indiana University Press, 2005) Connelly, Mark, The IRA on Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012) Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent (Fairfield, IA: First World Library, 2007) Conrad, Peter, The Hitchcock Murders (London: Faber, 2001) Coogan, Tim Pat, Michael Collins (London: Arrow, 1991) Cook, David A., A History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004) Cooke, Paul, ‘The Long Shadow of the New German Cinema: Deutschland 09, Deutschland im Herbst and National Film Culture’, Screen, 52, 3, Autumn 2011, 327–341 Costa-Gavras, Constantin and Franco Solinas, State of Siege (London: Plexus, 1973) Crenshaw, Martha, ‘Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay’, Security Studies, 16, 1, January–March 2007, 133–162 Crowdus, Gary (ed.), A Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, IL: Lake View, 1994) Cull, Nicholas J., The Cold War and the United States Information Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) ———, David Culbert & David Welch, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003) Curtis, Liz, Ireland: The Propaganda War (London: Pluto, 1984) Dabashi, Hamid (ed.), Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London: Verso, 2006) Davies, Norman, Rising’44: The Battle for Warsaw (London: Penguin, 2005) Derian, James Der, ‘Imaging Terror: Logos, Pathos and Ethos’, Third World Quarterly, 26, 1, 2005, 22–37 Deutelbaum, Marshall, ‘Seeing in Saboteur’, Literature/ Film Quarterly, 12, 1, 1984, 58–64 Devine, Jeremy M., Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Over 400 Films about the Vietnam War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995) Dick, Bernard F., The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996) Diffrient, David Scott, ‘Shiri’, Film Quarterly, 59, 3, Spring 2001, 40–46 Dillon, Mike, ‘ “Patriotism and Valour Are in Your Blood”: Necropolitical Subjectivities in The Terrorist (1999)’, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 1, 2, 2009, 209–226 Dine, Philip, Images of the Algerian War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) Dingeman, Jim, ‘ “You Cannot Continually Inflict”: An Interview with Saadi Yacef ’, Framework, 49, 2, Fall 2008, 48–64 Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004) Dodds, Klaus, ‘Jason Bourne: Gender, Geopolitics, and Contemporary Representations of National Security’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 38, 1, August 2010, 21–33

292

Bibliography ———, ‘Popular Geopolitics and Audience Dispositions: James Bond and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31, 2, June 2006, 116–130 ———, ‘Screening Terror: Hollywood, the United States and the Construction of Danger’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1, 2, August 2008, 227–243 Downie, John, ‘Damage, Devotion and the Discriminating Eye’, Illusions, 27, Winter 1998, 20–22 Drew, William M., ‘D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm: A Re-evaluation’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 18, 2, April 1990, 76–86 Druks, Herbert, The Uncertain Alliance: The United States and Israel from Kennedy to the Peace Process (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001) Dunstan, Simon, Israel’s Lightning Strike – The Raid on Entebbe 1976 (London: Osprey, 2009) Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock or The Plain Man’s Hitchcock (London: Faber, 1974) Dwyer, Rachel, 100 Bollywood Films (London: BFI, 2005) ——— and Christopher Pinney, The Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Dyer MacCann, Richard, The Silent Comedians (London: Scarecrow, 1993) Eberwein, Robert (ed.), The War Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005) Edgerton, Gary, ‘Quelling the“Oxygen of Publicity”: British Broadcasting and “The Troubles” during the Thatcher Years’, Journal of Popular Culture, 30, 1, Summer 1996, 115–132 Ehrenfeld, Rachel, Narco-Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 1992) Elsaesser, Thomas, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996) ——— and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) English, Richard, Terrorism: How to Respond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Evangelista, Matthew, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Same Way as the Soviet Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002) Evans, Alun, Brassey’s Guide to War Films (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2000) Falkowska, Janina, The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda: Dialogism in Man of Marble, Man of Iron, and Danton (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996) ———, Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007) Feil, Ken, Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press, 2001) Fhlainn, Sorcha Ní (ed.), Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010) Field, Antony, ‘The “New Terrorism”: Revolution or Evolution?’ Political Studies Review, 7, 2, 2009, 195–207 Fielding, Raymond, The American Newsreel 1911–1967 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972) Finkelstein, David, ‘Investigative Journalism: Elena Poniatowska (1932-) and Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006)’, Journalism Practice, 2, 1, 2008, 130–134 Flannery, Eóin and Michael J. Griffin (eds), Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography and Popular Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009) Foot, M. R. D., S. O. E.: An Outline History of the Special Operations Executive 1940–1946 (London: Pimlico, 1999) Forgacs, David, ‘Italians in Algiers’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 350–364

293

Bibliography Freedman, Des and Daya Kishan Thussu (eds), Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives (London: Sage, 2012) Friedman, Lester D., ‘Cinematic Techniques in “Lost Honour of Katharina Blum” ’, Literature/ Film Quarterly, 7, 3, July 1979, 244–252 Frost, Robin M., Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11 (New York: Routledge, 2005) Fujiwara, Chris, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (London: Faber, 2009) Gage, Beverly, ‘Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field’, Journal of American History, 98, 1, June 2011, 73–94 Garton Ash, Timothy, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002) Gearty, Conor, Terrorism (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996) Geifman, Anna, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) Geműnden, Gerd, ‘Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA “Indianerfilme” (1965– 1985)’, Film History, 10, 3, 1988, 399–407 Genovese, Michael A., and Iwan W. Morgan (eds), Watergate Remembered: The Legacy for American Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Gero, David, Flights of Terror: Aerial Hijack and Sabotage since 1930 (London: Patrick Stephens, 1997) Gertz, Nurith & Khleifi, George, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) Giddings, Robert and Erica Sheen (eds), From Page to Screen: Adaptations of the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Gillespie, David, Russian Cinema (London: Longman, 2003) ———, ‘Defence of the Realm: The “New” Russian Patriotism on Screen’, Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Russia, 3, 2005 Goffman, Ken, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (New York: Villard, 2004) Gopalan, Lalitha, Bombay (London: BFI, 2005) Green, Jonathan and Nicholas J. Karolides, Encyclopedia of Censorship (New York: Facts on File, 2005) Greenberg, Judith (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003) Greenslade, Roy, ‘Editors as Censors: The British Press and Films about Ireland’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 3, March 2000, 77–92 Grist, Leighton, ‘ “It’s Only a Piece of Meat”: Gender Ambiguity, Sexuality, and Politics in “The Crying Game” and “M. Butterfly” ’, Cinema Journal, 42, 4, Summer 2003, 3–28 Gross, Larry, ‘A Blast from the Past that Continues to Resonate’, Film Comment, 40, 1, January/February 2004, 22–23 Hafez, Mohammed M., ‘Martyrdom Mythology in Iraq: How Jihadists Frame Suicide Terrorism in Videos and Biographies’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 19, 1, 2007, 95–115 Haltof, Marek, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012) Hanshew, Karin, ‘ “Sympathy for the Devil?” The West German Left and the Challenge of Terrorism’, Contemporary European History, 21, 4, 2012, 511–532 Harrison, Nicholas, ‘An Interview with Saadi Yacef ’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 405–413 Hart, Peter, Mick: The Real Michael Collins (New York: Penguin, 2005) Haspel, Paul, ‘Algeria Revisited: Opposing Commanders as Warring Doubles in The Battle of Algiers’, Journal of Film and Video, 58, 3, Fall 2006, 33–42

294

Bibliography Hastings, Max, Yoni – Hero of Entebbe (New York: Dial Press, 1979) Hillier, Jim, New Hollywood (New York: Continuum, 1994) Hirsch, Foster, Otto Preminger (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007) Hofer, Stefanie, ‘ “Memory Talk”: Terrorism, Trauma and Generational Struggle in Petzold’s The State I Am In and Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane’, Film Criticism, 34, 1, Fall 2009, 36–57 Hoffman, Bruce, ‘Rethinking Terrorism and Counterterrorism Since 9/11’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 25, 5, 2002, 303–316 Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin, Terror and Television: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Houen, Alex, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Immerman, Richard H., The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982) Innes, Hammond, Sabotage Broadcast (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1938) Izvolov, Nikolai and Natascha Drubek-Meyer, ‘Annotations for the Hyperkino Edition of Lev Kuleshov’s Engineer Prite’s Project (1918), Academia Series, Ruscico, 2010, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 4, 1, 2010, 65–93 Jackson, Richard, Writing the War on Terror: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) Jeffords, Susan, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) Jenkins, Brian M., International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1974) Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006) Jenkins, Philip, Images of Terror: What We Can and Can’t Know about Terrorism (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2003) Johnson, William, ‘Revisiting the Past’, Film Quarterly, 62, 4, Summer 2009, 10–13 Jones, Darryl, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold, 2002) Jordan, Neil, Michael Collins: Film Diary and Screenplay (London: Vintage, 1996) Kael, Pauline, Going Steady: Film Writings 1968–1969 (New York: Little, Brown, 1970) Katz, Robert and Peter Berling, Love is Colder than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (London: Cape, 1987) Kavoori, Anandam O. and Punathambekar Aswin (eds), Global Bollywood (New York: New York University Press, 2008) Keane, Stephen, Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower, 2001) Keeton, Patricia, ‘Re-evaluating the “Old” Cold War: A Dialectical Reading of Two 9/11 Narratives’, Cinema Journal, 43, 4, Summer 2004, 114–121 Kellner, Douglas, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) Kenez, Peter, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001) Khatib, Lina, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006) King, Geoff, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000) King, Gilbert, Dirty Bomb: Weapon of Mass Disruption (New York: Penguin, 2004)

295

Bibliography King, Rob, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Los Angeles: California University Press, 2008) King, Geoff and Tanya Kryzwinska (eds), Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (London: Wallflower, 2002) Kochanski, Halik, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (London: Penguin, 2012) Kronish, Amy, World Cinema: 6: Israel (London: Flicks, 1996) ——— and Costel Safriman, Israeli Film: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003) Kubiak, Anthony, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) Kumar, Priya, ‘An Interview with Khalid Mohammed’, Framework, 47, 2, Fall 2006, 101–119 Kurtulus, Ersun N., ‘The “New Terrorism” and Its Critics’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 34, 6, 2011, 476–500 Lacy, Mark, ‘War, Cinema and Moral Anxiety’, Alternatives, 28, 5, 2003, 611–636 Landy, Marcia, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) ———, ‘The International Cast of Irish Cinema: The Case of Michael Collins’, Boundary, 2, 27, 2, Summer 2000, 21–44 Laqueur, Walter, Terrorism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977) Lashmar, Paul and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War (Stroud: Sutton, 1998) Lee, Hyangjin, ‘History and Story in Division Drama: What Makes a Korean Blockbuster?’, Nosferatu, 55–56, June 2007, 14–24, 214–128 Leitch, Thomas, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the Christ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) Lentini, Pete and Muhammad Bakashmar,‘Jihadist Beheading: A Convergence of Technology, Theology, and Teleology’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 30, 4, 2007, 303–325 Leppard, David, On the Trail of Terror (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) Lev, Peter, American Films of the 1970s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000) Levy, Shawn, Paul Newman (London: Aurum, 2008) Lewis, Clifford, ‘Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy: A Retrospective’, Film Criticism, 10, 3, Spring 1986, 22–35 Lewis, Cliff and Carroll Britch,‘Light Out of Poland: Wajda’s Man of Marble and Man of Iron’, Film and History, 12, 4, December 1982, 82–89 Leyda, Jay, Kino (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960) Lichtenfeld, Eric, Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle and the American Action Movie (Westport, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007) Lindner, Christoph, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) Livingston, Steven, The Terrorism Spectacle (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994) Lodge, Jack, ‘Herbert Brenon – Filmography’, Griffithiana, 57–58, October 1996, 122–133, 151 Loshitzky, Yosefa, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001) Low, Rachael, The History of British Film: Volume II – 1906–1914 (London: Routledge, 1997) Lynch, Timothy J., Turf War: The Clinton Administration and Northern Ireland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) MacCabe, Colin, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner (eds), True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

296

Bibliography MacKillop, James (ed), Contemporary Irish Cinema (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999) Maguire, Lori, ‘The Destruction of New York City: A Recurrent Nightmare of American Cold War Cinema’, Cold War History, 9, 4, 2009, 513–524 Malcolm, Derek, A Century of Films: Derek Malcolm’s Personal Best (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000) Malo, Jean-Jacques and Tony Williams, Vietnam War Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994) Maltby, Sarah and Richard Keeble, Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Bury St. Edmunds: Abramis, 2007) Mariner, Rosemary B. and G. Kurt Piehler (eds), The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2009) Mart, Michelle, Eye on Israel (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006) Martin, Andrew and Patrice Petro, Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture and the War on Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006) Mazierska, Ewa, Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Black Peters and Men of Marble (New York: Berghahn, 2010) McAlister, Melani, Epic Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) McIlroy, Brian, Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (Richmond, BC: Steveston Press, 2001) McKittrick, David and McVea David, Making Sense of the Troubles (London: Penguin, 2001) Mearsheimer, John J. and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2007) Mellen, Joan, Filmguide to The Battle of Algiers (London: Indiana University Press, 1973) Menon, Meena, Riots and After in Mumbai: Chronicles of Truth and Reconciliation (New Delhi: Sage, 2012) Mes, Tom and Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Cinema (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge, 2005) Michalczyk, John J., Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film (Philadelphia, PA: Associated University Presses, 1984) ———, The Italian Political Filmmakers (London: Associated University Presses, 1986) Michatek, Boleslaw, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda (London: Tantivy, 1973) Michel, Lou and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Harper, 2001) Miczka, Tadeusz, ‘Cinema under Political Pressure: A Brief Outline of Authorial Roles in Polish Post-War Feature Film 1945–1995’, Kinema, 4, Fall 1995 ———, ‘Andrzej Wajda’s Duties to the Audience (Oscar 2000)’, Kinema, 13, Spring 2000, 28–29 Miller, David, Don’t Mention the War (London: Pluto, 1994) Miller, Scott, The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Random House, 2011) Misiak, Anna, ‘Politically Involved Filmmaker: Aleksander Ford and Film Censorship in Poland after 1945’, Kinema, 20, Fall 2003 Moghadam, Assaf, ‘Palestinian Suicide Terrorism in the Second Intifada: Motivations and Organizational Aspects’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26, 2, March–April 2003, 65–92 Monahan, Brian A, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2010) Moore, L. C., ‘The Veil of Nationalism: Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers’, Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, 25, 2, 2003 56–73

297

Bibliography Morag, Raya, ‘The Living Body and the Corpse – Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah’, Journal of Film and Video, 60, 3–4, Fall 2008, 3–24 Morris, Benny, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (London: John Murray, 2000) ———, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Murphy, Robert, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992) ——— (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2005) Musser, Charles, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1991) Nacos, Brigitte L., Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) Naseem, Azra, ‘The Literal Truth about Terrorism: An Analysis of Post-9/11 Popular US Non-Fiction Books on Terrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5, 3, December 2012, 455–467 Neupert, Richard, A History of the French New Wave (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007) Neve, Brian, ‘Cinema, the Ceasefire and “The Troubles” ’, Irish Studies Review, 5, 20, 1997, 2–8 Newman, Kim, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011) Norris, Chuck and Joe Hyams, The Secret of Inner Strength (New York: Little, Brown, 1988) Norris, Pippa, Montague Kern and Marion Just (eds), Framing Terrorism: The News Media, Government and the Public (New York: Routledge, 2003) North, Daniel, ‘Evidence of Things Not Quite Seen: Cloverfield’s Obstructed Spectacle’, Film & History, 40, 1, 2010, 75–92 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) ———, Making Waves: New Wave, Neorealism, and the New Cinemas of the 1960s (New York: Continuum, 2008) O’Brien, G., ‘Fritz Lang’s Spies: Now and Forever’, Film Comment, 31, 4, 1995, 66–69 O’Brien, Dan, Paul Newman (London: Faber, 2004) O’Leary, Alan, Tragedia all’italiana: Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970–2010 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011) Orlando, Valerie, ‘Historiographic Metafiction in Gillo Pontecorvo’s La bataille d’Alger: Remembering the Forgotten War’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 17, 3, 2000, 261–271 Orr, John, Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2005) ——— and Dragan Klaic (eds), Terrorism and Modern Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990) Orr, Leonard and Ted Billy (eds), A Joseph Conrad Companion (New Haven, CT: Greenwood, 1999) Osteen, Mark, ‘ “It Doesn’t Pay to Antagonize the Public”: Sabotage and Hitchcock’s Audience’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 28, 4, October 2000, 259–268 Page, Max, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) Paletz, David L. and Alex Schmid (eds), Terrorism and the Media (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992) Palmer, William J., The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993)

298

Bibliography Pape, Robert, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005) Paris, Michael, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000) Parker, John, Bruce Willis: The Unauthorised Biography (London: Virgin, 1997) Parkinson, David, History of Film (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995) Peacock, Steven (ed.), Reading 24: TV Against the Clock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007) ———, ‘The Collaborative Film Work of Greengrass and Damon: A Stylistic State of Exception’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 9, 2–3, November 2012, 147–160 Pedahzur, Ami (ed.), Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalisation of Martyrdom (London: Routledge, 2006) Pettitt, Lance, Screening Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Polakow-Suransky, Sasha, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Vintage, 2010) Pollard, Tom, Hollywood’s 9/11: Superheroes, Supervillains, and Super Disasters (London: Paradigm, 2011) Pomerance, Murray and R. Barton Palmer (eds), A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011) Porton, Richard, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (London: Verso, 1999) ——— and Ella Shohat, ‘The Trouble with Hanna’, Film Quarterly, 38, 2, Winter 1984–1985, 50–55 Preminger, Otto, Preminger, An Autobiography (New York: Garden City, 1977) Prince, Stephen, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) Pronay, Nicholas and D. W. Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1982) Ramsden, John, ‘Refocusing the “People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33, 1, January 1998, 35–64 Rapoport, David C., ‘Reflections on “Terrorism and the American Experience” ’, Journal of American History, 98, 1, June 2011, 115–120 Reeves, Nicholas, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999) Reid, Donald, ‘Re-viewing The Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion’, History Workshop Journal, 60, 1, October 2005, 93–115 Reuter, Christoph, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) Reynolds, Siân, ‘The Sorrow and the Pity Revisited, or Be Careful, One Train Can Hide Another’, French Cultural Studies, 1, 2, June 1990, 149–159 Rhode, Eric, A History of the Cinema: From Its Origins to 1970 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976) Richards, Jeffrey, Visions of Yesterday (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) ———, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) Riegler, Thomas, ‘Gillo Pontecorvo’s Dictatorship of the Truth’ – A Legacy’, Studies in European Cinema, 6, 1, 2009, 44–62 Rockett, Emer and Kevin Rockett, Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003) Ross, Steven J. (ed.), Movies and American Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) ———, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

299

Bibliography Rubenberg, Cheryl, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986) Russell, John, ‘Terrorists, Bandits, Spooks and Thieves: Russian Demonization of the Chechens Before and Since 9/11’, Third World Quarterly, 26, 1, 2005, 101–116 Ryall, Tom, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (New York: Continuum, 1996) Ryan, Tom, Otto Preminger Films Exodus (New York: Random House, 1960) Ryan, Michael and Kellner, Douglas, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988) Sanghvi, Vir, 26/11: The Attack on Mumbai (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009) Saul, Ben, ‘The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 4, 1, March 2006, 78–102 Sayre, Nora, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1982) Schebera, Jürgen, ‘Hangmen Also Die (1943): Hollywood’s Brecht-Eisler Collaboration’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 18, 4, October 1998, 567–573 Schlesinger, Philip, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott, Televising Terrorism: Political Violence in Popular Culture (London: Comedia, 1983) Schmid, Alex and Albert Jongman, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988) Scott, Ian, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000) Seed, David, ‘Seven Days to Noon: Containing the Atomic Threat’, British Journal for the History of Science, 45, 4, December 2012, 641–652 Seib, Philip and Dana M. Janbek, Global Terrorism and the New Media: The Post-Al Qaeda Generation (London: Routledge, 2010) Shaheen, Jack, Reel Bad Arabs (New York: Olive Branch, 2001) ———, Reel Bad Arabs (New York: Olive Branch, 2009) Shattuc, Jane, ‘R. W. Fassbinder as a Popular Auteur: The Making of an Authorial Legend’, Journal of Film and Video, 45, 1, 1993, 40–57 Shaw, Tony, British Cinema and the Cold War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001) ———, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) ——— and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010) Sheeran, Patrick F., The Informer (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002) Shlaim, Avi, Iron Wall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001) Shohat, Ella, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989) Simmons, Allan H. and J. H. Stape (eds), The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007) Simons, Greg, Mass Media and Modern Warfare: Reporting on the Russian War on Terrorism (London: Ashgate, 2010) Skal, David J., The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993) Sloan, Kay, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988) Slocum, J. David (ed.), Terrorism, Media, Liberation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005) ———, ‘9/11 Film and Media Scholarship’, Cinema Journal, 51, 1, Fall 2011, 181–193 Sluka, Jeffrey A. (ed.), Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)

300

Bibliography Smith, Susan, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor and Tone (London: BFI, 2000) Soldatov, Andrei and Irina Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (New York: Public Affairs, 2010) Solinas, PierNico, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (New York: Scribner’s, 1973) Spoto, Donald, The Dark Side of Genius (London: Plexus, 1999) Srivastava, Neelam, ‘Anti-Colonial Violence and the ‘Dictatorship of Truth’ in the Films of Gillo Pontecorvo’, Interventions, 7, 1, 2005, 97–106 Standish, Isolde, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Continuum, 2011) Sterling, Eric, ‘All Rules Barred: A Defence of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List’, Film and History, 32, 2, 2002, 62–71 Stern, Klaus and Jörg Herrmann, Andreas Baader: Das leben eines Staatsfeindes (Munich: DTV Premium, 2007) Stokes, Melvyn and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999) Stone, James, ‘Enjoying 9/11: The Pleasures of Cloverfield’, Radical History Review, 111, Fall 2011, 167–174 Stora, Benjamin, ‘Still Fighting: The Battle of Algiers, Censorship and the ‘Memory Wars’, Interventions, 9, 3, 2007, 365–370 Suid, Lawrence, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002) Tasker, Yvonne (ed.), The Action and Adventure Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004) Taylor, A. J. P., English History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) Taylor, Philip M., Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) Taylor, Stan, ‘Introduction: Spying in Film and Fiction’, Intelligence and National Security, 23, 1, 2008, 1–4 Taylor, Richard, Nancy Wood, Julian Graffy and Dina Iordanova (eds), The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema (London: BFI, 2000) Thomson, Oliver, Easily Led: A History of Propaganda (Stroud: Sutton, 1999) Thorp, Roderick, Nothing Lasts Forever (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) Thorsen, Isak, ‘ “We Had to Be Careful”: The Self-Imposed Regulations, Alterations and Censorship Strategies of Nordisk Films Kompagni 1911–1928’, Scandinavian – Canadian Studies, 19, 2010, 112–126 Toplin, Robert Brent, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996) ———, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How One Film Divided a Nation (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006) Töteberg, Michael and Leo A. Lensing (eds), Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Anarchy of the Imagination (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) Townshend, Charles, A Very Short History of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Tsutsui, William, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Tucker, Spencer C. and Priscilla Mary Roberts (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Volume 1 – A-H (New York: ABC-CLIO, 2008) Ullmann, Linn, Profession: Director Arne Skouen and His Films (Oslo: Norsk Filminstitutt, 2001) Upadhyay, Archana, India’s Fragile Borderlands: The Dynamics of Terrorism in North East India (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009)

301

Bibliography Usai, Paolo Cherchi (ed.), The Griffith Project, Vol. 2 (London: British Film Institute, 1999) Van Gorp, Jasmijn, ‘Inverting Film Policy: Film as Nation-Builder in Post-Soviet Russia, 1991-2005’, Media, Culture and Society, 33, 2, 2011, 243–258 Vanhala, Helena, The Depiction of Terrorists in Hollywood Blockbuster Films, 1980–2001: An Analytical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010) Variety Film Reviews, 1907–1920, Volume One (New York: Garland, 1983) Varon, Jeremy, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004) Vasudevan, Ravi S., ‘Bombay and Its Public’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 29, January 1996, 45–65 Viett, Inge, Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg: Nautilus, 1997) Virdi, Jyotika, The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003) Wager, Walter, 58 Minutes (New York: Tor, 1987) Wajda, Andrzej, The Wajda Trilogy: Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal, A Generation, intro. Boleslaw Sulik (London: Lorrimer, 1973) ———, Double Vision: My Life in Film (London: Faber, 1989) Wakeman, John (ed.), World Film Directors: Volume I – 1890–1945 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987) Wallis, Rodney, Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001) Walsh, Lawrence E, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998) Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1992) Wark, Wesley K. (ed.), Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 1991) Wayne, Mike, Political Film (London: Pluto, 2001) Weimann, Gabriel and Conrad Winn, The Theatre of Terrorism: Mass Media and International Terror (New York: Longman, 1994) Weisgal, Meyer, Meyer Weisgal … So Far (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971) Weissbrod, Rachel, ‘Exodus as a Zionist Melodrama’, Israel Studies, 4, 1, 1999, 129–152 Wessels, Emanuelle, ‘ “Where Were You When the Monster Hit?” Media Convergence, Branded Security Citizenship, and the Trans-Media Phenomenon of Cloverfield’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17, 1, 2011, 69–83 Wetmore, Kevin J, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2012) Williams, Karin and John Downing,‘Mediating Terrorism: Text and Protest in Interpretations of The Siege’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19, 4, December 2002, 419–437 Wills, David C., The First War on Terror: Counter-Terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) Woll, Josephine, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000) Wollaeger, Mark A. ‘Killing Stevie: Modernity, Modernism, and Mastery in Conrad and Hitchcock’, Modern Language Quarterly, 58, 3, September 1997, 323–350 Wright, Basil, The Long View: An International History of Cinema (London: Paladin, 1976) Wright, Joanne, Terrorist Propaganda: The Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, 1968–86 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006) Xiao, Zhiwei and Yingjin Zhang, Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (London: Routledge, 1998)

302

Bibliography Youngblood, Denise J, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007) Yule, Andrew, Hollywood A Go-Go: The True Story of the Cannon Film Empire (London: Sphere, 1987) Zaidi, S. Hussain, Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002) Zulaika, Joseba and William Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996)

Unpublished PhDs Beat Brupbacher, ‘Unmasking Alfred Hitchcock: A Study of Selected Films in their Context from Murder! (1930) to Marnie (1964)’, unpublished D. Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1992 Grant McKahan, Jason, ‘Hollywood Counter-terrorism; Violence, Protest and the MiddleEast in U. S. Action Feature Films’, unpublished PhD thesis, Florida State University, 2009

Websites http://www.archive.org http://www.boxofficemojo.com http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/ http://www.imdb.com http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/index.jsp http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/ http://www.wajda.pl/en/filmy/film03.html

DVDs A Good Day to Die Hard (2013). 20th Century Fox, F1SGB5513001000, 2013 Ashes and Diamonds (1958). Criterion Collection, 285, 2005 Bombay (1995). Eros International, E038, VFCO1113, 2005 Cloverfield (2008). Paramount Home Entertainment, PHE 9435, 2008 Countdown (2004). Remstar, 22089, 2006 Die Hard Quadrilogy. Fox Home Entertainment, FG-OGB 3633801000, 2006 Exodus (1960). MGM, 10001022, 2004 Michael Collins (1996). Warner Bros., Z114205, 1998 Operation Thunderbolt (1977). Noah Communications, POB20405, 2004 Paradise Now (2005). Warner Independent Pictures, 73679, 2006 Sabotage (1936). Network, 7952922, 2008 State of Siege (1973). Tristar, 2004 The Battle of Algiers (1966). Criterion Collection, 249, 2004 The Third Generation (1979). Artificial Eye, Art 363, 2005 303

SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

This filmography is arranged chronologically Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison, 1901; USA, Edison Studios; dir: Edwin S. Porter; cast: unknown; lang: silent; dur: 4 minutes; black and white. The Voice of the Violin, 1909; USA, Biograph Company; dir: D. W. Griffith; cast: Arthur Johnson, Marion Leonard, David Miles, Mack Sennett; cinematography: G. W. Bitzer, Arthur Marvin; lang: silent; dur: 16 minutes; black and white. The Anarchist’s Doom, 1913; UK, Barker Motion Photography/Exclusive; dir: Alexander Butler; prod: William Barker; scr: Rowland Talbot; cast: Fred Paul, Blanche Forsythe, Rolf Leslie; lang: silent; dur: 26 minutes; black and white. The Project of Engineer Prite (Proekt inzhenera Prayta), 1918; USSR, Khanzhonkov; dir: Lev Kuleshov; prod: Aleksandr Khanzhonkov; scr: Boris Kuleshov; cast: Boris Kuleshov, Ernest Kulganek, Yelena Komarova, N. Gardy, L. Polevoy; cinematography: Mark Naletni; editing: Lev Kuleshov, Vera Popova-Khanshokova; lang: silent; dur: 30 minutes; black and white. Orphans of the Storm, 1921; USA, D. W. Griffith, Inc./United Artists; dir: D. W. Griffith; prod: D. W. Griffith; scr: D. W. Griffith, from the play Les Deux Orphalines by Adolphe d’Ennery and Eugène Cormon; cast: Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Joseph Schildkraut, Monte Blue, Sidney Herbert; cinematography: Billy Bitzer, Hendrik Sartov, Paul Allen, Herbert Sutch; editing: James Smith, Rose Smith; music: Louis F. Gottschalk; lang: silent; dur: 150 minutes; black and white. Sabotage, 1936; Britain, Gaumont British Picture Corporation; dir: Alfred Hitchcock; prod: Michael Balcon, Ivor Montagu; scr: Charles Bennett, from the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad; cast: Oskar Homolka, Sylvia Sidney, John Loder, Desmond Tester, Matthew Boulton, Stanley Warmington, William Dewhurst, Austin Trevor; cinematography: Bernard Knowles; editing: Charles Frend; music: Louis Levy; lang: English; dur: 74 minutes; black and white. Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament), 1958; Poland, Zespól Filmowy ‘Kadr’; dir: Andrzej Wajda; prod: Stanislaw Adler; scr: Jerzy Andrzejewski, Andrzej Wajda, from the novel by Andrzejewski; cast: Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Waclaw Zastrzezynski, Adam Pawlikowski, Bogumil Kobiela, Ignacy Machowski, Aleksander Sewruk; cinematography: Jerzy Wojcik; editing: Halina Nawrocka; music: Filip Nowak; lang: Polish; dur: 110 minutes; black and white. Exodus, 1960; USA, United Artists; dir: Otto Preminger; prod: Otto Preminger; scr: Dalton Trumbo, from the novel by Leon Uris; cast: Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson, Peter Lawford, Hugh Griffith, David Opatoshu, Sal Mineo, Jill Haworth, Lee J. Cobb, John Derek, Michael Wager, Martin Miller, Gregory Ratoff, Marius Goring; cinematography: Sam Leavitt; editing: Louis R. Loeffler; music: Ernest Gold; lang: English; dur: 220 minutes; colour. The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri), 1966; Italy/Algeria, Igor Film/Casbah Film; dir: Gillo Pontecorvo; prod: Antonio Musu, Saadi Yacef; scr: Gillo Pontecorvo, Franco Solinas,

Select Filmography Saadi Yacef; cast: Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef, Mohamed Ben Kassen, Samia Kerbash, Ugo Paletti, Fusia El Kader, Michele Kerbash, Franco Morici Tommaso Neri; cinematography: Marcello Gati; editing: Mario Morra, Mario Serandrei; music: Ennio Morricone, Gillo Pontecorvo; lang: Arabic/French; dur: 123 minutes; black and white. State of Siege (État de siège), 1973; France/Italy/West Germany, Reggane Films/Unidis/Euro International Films/Dieter Geissler Filmproduktion; dir: Constantin Costa-Gavras; prod: Jacques Henri Barratier, Léon Sanz; scr: Franco Solinas, Constantin Costa-Gavras; cast: Yves Montand, Renato Salvatori, O. E. Hasse, Jacques Weber, Rafael Benavente, Maurice Teynac, Yvette Etiévant; cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn; editing: Francoise Bonnot; music: Mikis Theodorakis; lang: French; dur: 120 minutes; colour. Operation Thunderbolt (Mivtsa Yonatan), 1977; Israel, G. S. Films; dir: Menahem Golan; prod: Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus, Rony Yakov; scr: Ken Globus, Menahem Golan, Clarke Reynolds; cast: Yehoram Gaon, Gila Almagor, Assi Dayan, Sybil Danning, Klaus Kinski, Arik Lavie, Rachel Marcus, Mark Heath, Henry Czarniak; cinematography: Adam Greenberg; editing: Dov Hoenig; music: Dov Seltzer; lang: Hebrew/English/Arabic/ German/French; dur: 124 minutes; colour. The Third Generation (Die dritte Generation), 1979; West Germany, Filmverlag der Autoren; dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; prod: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; scr: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; cast: Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Eddie Constantine, Bulle Ogier, Hark Bohm, Harry Baer, Volker Spengler, Raúl Gimenez, Günther Kaufmann; cinematography: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; editing: Juliane Lorenz; music: Peer Raben; lang: German; dur: 105 minutes; colour. Die Hard, 1988; USA, Twentieth Century Fox; dir: John McTiernan; prod: Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver; scr: Steven E. de Souza, Jeb Stuart, from the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp; cast: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Alexander Godunov, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald VelJohnson; cinematography: Jan de Bont; editing: John F. Luik, Frank J. Urioste; music: Michael Kamen; lang: English; dur: 132 minutes; colour. Die Harder (AKA Die Hard 2), 1990; USA, Twentieth Century Fox; dir: Renny Harlin; prod: Charles Gordon, Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver; scr: Steven E. de Souza, Doug Richardson, from the novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager; cast: Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, William Sadler, John Amos, Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, Franco Nero; cinematography: Oliver Wood; editing: Stuart Baird, Robert A. Ferretti; music: Michael Kamen; lang: English; dur: 124 minutes; colour. Bombay, 1995; India, Aalayam Productions; dir: Mani Ratnam; prod: S. Sriram; scr: Mani Ratnam; cast: Swamy Arvind, Manisha Koirala, Nassar, Kitty, Tinnu Anand, Akash Khurana, Master Hriday, Master Harsha; cinematography: Rajiv Menon; editing: Suresh Urs; music: A. R. Rahman; lang: Tamil; dur: 140 minutes; colour. Michael Collins, 1996; Ireland/USA, Warner Bros./Geffen Pictures; dir: Neil Jordan; prod: Stephen Woolley; scr: Neil Jordan; cast: Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, Julia Roberts, Ian Hart, Gerard McSorley, Owen Roe; cinematography: Chris Menges; editing: J. Patrick Duffner, Tony Lawson; music: Elliot Goldenthal; lang: English dur: 133 minutes; colour. Die Hard With A Vengeance, 1995; USA, Twentieth Century Fox; dir: John McTiernan; prod: John McTiernan, Michael Tadross; scr: Jonathan Hensleigh; cast: Bruce Willis, Jeremy Irons, Samuel L. Jackson, Larry Bryggman, Graham Greene, Colleen Camp; cinematography: Peter Menzies, Jr.; editing: John Wright; music: Michael Kamen; lang: English; dur: 131 minutes; colour.

305

Select Filmography Countdown (Lichnyy nomer), 2004; Russia, Filmmaster/Top Line Production; dir: Yevgeny Lavrentiev; prod: Sergey Gribkov, Yuri Sagaidak,; scr: Yevgeny Lavrentiev, Yuri Sagaidak,; cast: Alexei Makarov, Louise Lombard, Uri Tsurilo, Vyacheslav Razbegaev, Egor Pazenko, Yuriy Tsurilo, Victor Verzhbitsky, Ramil Sabitov, John Amos, Mariya Golubkina; cinematography: Stanislav Radvansky; editing: Dmitri Slobtsov; music: Oleg Onoprienko, Sergey Shnurov; lang: Russian/English; dur: 106 minutes; colour. Paradise Now, 2005; Palestinian territories/Netherlands/Israel/Germany/France, Augustus Film; dir: Hany Abu-Assad; prod: Bero Beyer; scr: Hany Abu-Assad, Bero Beyer; cast: Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel, Hiam Abbass, Ashraf Barhoum; cinematography: Antoine Héberlé; editing: Sandor Vas; music: Jina Sumedi; lang: Arabic; dur: 90 minutes; colour. Die Hard 4.0 (AKA Live Free and Die Hard), 2007; USA, Twentieth Century Fox; dir: Len Wiseman; prod: Michael Fottrell; scr: Mark Bomback, David Marconi, from the Wired magazine article ‘A Farewell to Arms’ by John Carlin; cast: Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Cliff Curtis, Maggie Q, Mary Elizabeth Winstead; cinematography: Simon Duggan; editing: Nicholas De Toth; music: Marco Beltrami; lang: English; dur: 129 minutes; colour. Cloverfield, 2008; USA, Bad Robot/Paramount; dir: Matt Reeves; prod: J. J. Abrams, Bryan Burk; scr: Drew Goddard; cast: T. J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David, Odette Yustman, Mike Vogel, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas; cinematography: Michaek Bonvillain; editing: Kevin Stitt; lang: English; dur: 84 minutes; colour. A Good Day to Die Hard, 2013; USA, Twentieth Century Fox; dir: John Moore; prod: Alex Young, Wyck Godfrey; scr: Skip Woods; cast: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Yuliya Snigir, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Radivoje Bukvić, Cole Hauser, cinematography: Jonathan Sela; editing: Dan Zimmerman; music: Marco Beltrami; lang: English; dur: 97 minutes; colour.

306

FILM INDEX

Abiturientki (1974), 125, 227 Aerial Anarchists (1911), 18 Air Force One (1997), 142, 174 Aladdin (1986), 138 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), 126 The Ambassador (1984), 138 Amen (2002), 121–2 American Ninja 4: The Annihilation (1991), 138–9, 186 The Anarchist (1913), 17 The Anarchist and His Dog (1907), 17–18, 263 The Anarchist’s Doom (1913), 18–19 The Anarchist’s Mother-in-Law (1906), 17 Angel (1982), 207 Appointment with Death (1988), 138 Armageddon (1998), 267 Ashes and Diamonds (1958), 43–61, 81, 113, 284, 285, 286 The BaaderMeinhof Complex (2008), 144 Bananas (1971), 113 The Battle of Algiers (1966), 5, 38, 82–101, 109, 114, 210, 283, 284, 285, 286 The Battle of the Rails (1946), 47 Behind the Screen (1916), 17 Beloved Enemy (1936), 205, 210 Betrayed (1954), 47 Betrayed (1988), 121 The Birth of a Nation (1915), 21–2 Black Legion (1937), 26 Black Sunday (1977), 80, 98 Blackmail (1929), 27 The Blair Witch Project (1999), 267, 269 Bombay (1995), 186, 189–202, 205, 284, 286 The Boxer (1997), 206 The Carabineers (1964), 60 Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), 80 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), 66 Chain of Command (1993), 139 Chariots of Fire (1981), 207 Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas (1943), 46 Cloverfield (2008), 265–81, 285, 286, 287 Codename Courage (1987), 142

Collateral Damage (2002), 98 The Company of Wolves (1984), 207 The Confession (1971), 105 Countdown (2004), 225, 229–43, 283, 285, 286 The Crying Game (1992), 207 The Dancer Upstairs (2002), 122 Dangerous Hours (1920), 20–1 Danton (1983), 61 The Dark Knight (2008), 280–1 The Dawn (1936), 205 The Dawn of the Russian Revolution (1914), 16 The Day after Tomorrow (2004), 267 Deadly Heroes (1993), 139 Death Flight (1911), 17 The Delta Force (1986), 139–42 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), 282 Die Hard (1988), 96, 163–71, 283, 284, 285, 286 Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990), 38, 171–4 Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard (2007), 178–81 Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995), 174–6 Divine Intervention (2002), 246 Dr Strangelove (1964), 161 Dracula (1931), 266 Eagles Attack at Dawn (1970), 128 11’ 9’’ 01 September 11 (2002), 121 Escape from New York (1981), 267 Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901), 9, 12, 14, 26, 115, 163 Executive Decision (1996), 142, 174, 186 Exodus (1960), 62–81, 83, 114, 163, 252, 283 Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), 225 The Failure of Operation Terror (1980), 227 Flight 713 Asks for Permission to Land (1962), 226, 227 Forbidden Songs (1948), 48 Foreign Correspondent (1940), 27 48 Hours (1982), 166 Four Lions (2010), 162 From the Heart (1998), 186, 189

Film Index The Gatekeepers (2012), 264 George Robey Turns Anarchist (1914), 17 A Generation (1954), 49 Germany in Autumn (1978), 147–8 Gone With the Wind (1939), 67 A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), 181–3, 280 The Great Train Robbery (1903), 11 Hangmen Also Die! (1943), 46 Hanna K (1983), 121 Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), 162 Hell Squad (1984), 138 Hostel (2005), 266–7 The Hunt for Red October (1990), 165 The Hurt Locker (2009), 280 Hush-a-Bye Baby (1989), 206 In the Loop (2009), 162 In the Name of the Father (1993), 206 Innocence of Muslims (2012), 2 Interview with the Vampire (1994), 207 Invasion USA (1985), 139 The Invisible Man (1933), 266 Irish Destiny (1926), 205 Iron Man (2008), 280–1 The Jazz Singer (1927), 25 Judith (1966), 80 Kanal (1956), 49 Kapo (1959), 86 Kharma (1986), 187 Killer Kid (1994), 186 Knife in the Head (1979), 147 La Chinoise (1968), 151 The Lady Vanishes (1938), 27, 104 Lethal Weapon (series), 165 The Long Good Friday (1980), 206 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), 119, 147 Lüger (1982), 1 Mad Bus (1990), 227 Man of Iron (1981), 61 Man of Marble (1978), 61 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), 28 The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979), 160–1 Marianne and Juliane (1981), 247 The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), 149 The Matrix (series), 165 Max Payne (2009), 181 May 6th (2004), 1

308

Michael Collins (1996), 204–23, 263 Misery (1990), 266 Missing (1982), 120 Mission: Impossible III (2006), 267 Mona Lisa (1986), 207 Mother (1926), 16 Mr India (1987), 187–8 My Official Wife (1914), 15 The Nihilists (1905), 15 Nine Lives (1957), 47 No Man’s Land (2001), 247 No Surrender (1985), 206 North By Northwest (1959), 27, 42, 66 Nothing Personal (1995), 98 Notorious (1946), 27 O. H. M. S. (1913), 19 Odette (1950), 47 Olympus Has Fallen (2013), 280 Omar (2013), 264 The Omen (1976), 266 Operation Thunderbolt (1977), 123–43, 163, 283, 284, 285, 286 Orders (1974), 119 Orphans of the Storm (1921), 21–2, 54 The Others Will Follow (1949), 48 Paradise Now (2005), 7, 244–64, 283, 284 The Parallax View (1974), 120 The Peacemaker (1997), 237 Poltergeist (1982), 266 A Prayer for the Dying (1987), 206 Predator (1987), 165 The Prisoner in the Middle (1974), 127 Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), 231 The Project of Engineer Prite (1918), 20, 226 Psycho (1960), 42 Raid on Entebbe (1977), 126–7 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), 167 Rendition (2007), 181 The Return (1992), 161–2 Roja (1992), 186, 188 Rosebud (1975), 127 A Russian Heroine (1910), 16 Sabotage (1936), 24–42, 45, 50, 63, 145, 158, 252, 283, 284, 285 Salvador (1987), 121 Sambizanga (1972), 97 Saw (2004), 266–7 The Scam (2001), 231 Schindler’s List (1993), 80, 210

Film Index The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1977), 147 The Secret Agent (1996), 42 Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), 205 She Defends the Motherland (1943), 46 The Siege (1998), 142–3, 178 The Silence of the Lambs (1991), 266 The Silent Village (1943), 46 Skyjacked (1972), 125 The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), 104 Some Mother’s Son (1996), 206 Special Section (1975), 120 Spies (1928), 27 The Spring River Flows East (1947), 47 Star Trek (2009), 281 Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), 281 Star Wars (1977), 167 State of Siege (1973), 61, 72, 87, 102–22, 156, 163, 252, 283, 284 Strong Man Ferdinand (1976), 147 Submission (2004), 1 Swordfish (2001), 181 Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), 181 Team America:World Police (2004), 162 The Terminator (1984), 129 Terrorism and Kebab (1993), 162 The Terrorist (1997), 188–9, 244 The Third Generation (1979), 144–62, 163

The 39 Steps (1935), 27, 30 Three Days of the Condor (1975), 120 To Be Twenty in the Aures (1971), 97 Top Gun (1986), 82 Torn Curtain (1966), 27 The Towering Inferno (1974), 167 The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002), 121 True Lies (1994), 80, 186 Trunk to Cairo (1966), 128 Under Fire (1983), 121 Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), 267 Undercover (1943), 46 Unvanquished City (1950), 48 Victory at Entebbe (1976), 126–7 The Voice of the Violin (1909), 13–15, 17, 37, 74, 145, 263, 284 War (2002), 231 War of the Worlds (2005), 267 Without You Laden (2010), 162 World Trade Center (2006), 268 Wrong Is Right (1982), 161 Z (1969), 105 Zero Dark Thirty (2012), 280 Zoya (1944), 46

309

GENERAL INDEX

Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes Aalayam Productions, 190 Abramovich, Roman, 232 Abrams, J. J., 267–70, 276–7, 281 Abu-Assad, Hany, 245–52, 254–64, 283 action movies, see blockbusters Adams, Gerry, 215, 218, 219, 220 Agency for International Development (AID), 103, 106, 109 aircraft hijacking, 124–42 Alexander I of Yugoslavia, 26 Algeria, National Liberation Front, 82–101 Allen, Woody, 113 Almagor, Gila, 129 al-Qaeda, 2, 42, 100, 121, 142, 175, 178, 225, 256 Altman, Robert, 3, 8 Amin, Idi, 125 anarchism, 9–19, 22, 28–31, 37–8, 98, 149, 151, 284 Anderson, Michael, 205 Andrzejewski, Jerzy, 50 Anisimov, Vladimir, 232 Arabs, 2, 40, 63–7, 69, 71–3, 75, 80, 84, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 123, 127–8, 135–6, 138–9, 142, 175, 228, 233–6, 243, 248, 253, 258 Arafa, Sherif, 162 Arafat, Yasser, 134, 168, 252 Arnshtam, Lev, 46 Associated British Picture Corporation, 27 Baader, Andreas, 83, 98, 145 Baader-Meinhof gang, see Red Army Faction Baazi, Salah, 86 Bad Robot, 267 Balabanov, Aleksey, 231 Balcon, Michael, 27, 46 Baranovskaya, Vera, 16 Basov, Vladimir, 240 Bay, Michael, 267 beheading, 2, 90, 229, 275 Ben Gurion, David, 65, 78, 88 Bennett, Charles, 30 Berezovsky, Boris, 229, 230, 232, 242 Beyer, Bero, 248, 249, 250 Bidwai, Praful, 201

Bigelow, Kathryn, 280 bin Laden, Osama, 3, 143, 228, 234, 236 Biograph Company, 13 Black and Tans, 214, 215, 219 Black Panthers, 83, 96, 98 Black Saturday (India, 1993), 189 Black September group, 105, 228, 232, 237 Blair, Tony, 228 Blake, Richard, A., 222 blockbusters, 21, 96, 164–84 Bloody Sunday (Ireland, 1920), 214 Bobrovsky, Anatoly, 227 Bodrov, Sergei, 231 Bogart, Humphrey, 26 Bohdziewicz, Antoni, 48 Boisset, Yves, 97 Bollywood, 185–202 Bolshevik Revolution, 20, 226 Bomback, Mark, 179 Bonvillain, Michael, 267 books, adapted for screen, 28–31, 38, 64–5, 165–6, 171–2, 263 Booth, Walter, 18 Bouyeri, Mohammed, 1 Brault, Michel, 119 Brezhnev, Leonid, 226 Britain, 3, 8, 17–19, 24–42, 45, 46, 59, 63, 71, 72, 78, 159, 162, 186, 189, 207, 218, 262 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), 29, 31, 32 Brooks, Richard, 161 Browning, Tod, 266 Buczkowski, Leonard, 48 Burns Film Company, 17 bus-bombing, 24–5, 37, 41–2, 244 Bush, George W., 82 Butler, Alexander, 18, 19 Cameron, James, 80, 129 Cannon, 138–43 Carlin, John, 179 Carlos the Jackal, 123, 124, 134 Carpenter, John, 268 Casbah Films, 86

General Index censorship, 11, 16, 23, 29–30, 32, 40, 59, 104, 108, 146–7, 160, 188, 192, 227, 249, 284 Central Board of Film Classification (India), 188 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, USA), 106, 110, 113, 117, 120 Chaplin, Charlie, 17 Chechnya, see Russo-Chechen conflict Cherkasov, Alexander, 241 Chomsky, Noam, 120 Churchill, Winston, 45 Chusheng, Cai, 47 Cimino, Michael, 208 Cinergi Pictures, 175, 176 Clair, René, 104 Clarke, Richard, 82, 100 Clément, René, 47 Cold War, 20, 22, 44, 47, 59, 61, 66, 82, 103, 106, 120, 138, 160, 165, 170, 182, 184–5, 225, 226, 227, 231, 237, 266 Collins, Michael, 205, 208 colonialism, 81, 87, 90–2, 100, 105, 113, 215 Columbia Studios, 208 comedy, about terrorism, 17, 151–62 communal terrorism, 185–202 Communism, 20, 22, 28, 30, 31, 40, 47–52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 86, 104, 105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 120, 135, 142, 149, 164, 166, 170, 172, 173, 226, 227, 231, 237 Connery, Sean, 161 Conrad, Joseph, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 42, 50, 158 Conrad, Peter, 33n. 22, 39 Coogan, Tim Pat, 210 Cooper, Tom, 205 Coppola, Francis Ford, 192 Corbucci, Bruno, 138 Costa-Gavras, Constantin, 61, 97, 102–22, 123, 143, 145, 149, 190, 252, 283 Costner, Kevin, 208 Cristaldi, Franco, 86 Cruise, Tom, 82, 207 Cuarón, Alfonso, 269 cyber-warfare, 178–80 Cybulski, Zbigniew, 43, 50–61 Czechoslovakia, 45 Czolgosz, Leon, 9, 12, 13, 14, 26, 115, 163 Dabrowska, Maria, 58 Dalton, Hugh, 45 Danilov, Denis, 241 Danning, Sybil, 129 Davis, Andrew, 98, 175 Dayan, Assi, 129 Dayan, Moshe, 66, 129 de Maistre, Gilles, 186

de Souza, Steven, 166, 167, 172, 225, 264, 283 Demme, Jonathan, 266 Denmark, 16–17 Der Derian, James, 2 Dewhurst, George, 205 dirty bombs, 224, 226, 235, 239, 240 disaster movies, 125 docu-drama, 5, 12, 26, 46, 61, 96, 119 documentaries, 21, 30, 89, 96, 102–22, 246, 280 Donner, Richard, 165, 266 Downing Street Declaration (1993), 209 ‘Dreierschlag’, 98 Dubrovka siege (Russia, 2002), 229–30, 232, 237 Durgnat, Raymond, 41 Dwyer, Michael, 219 Ealing Studios, 34, 46 Easter Rising (Ireland, 1916), 211, 213, 214, 215, 219 Edel, Uli, 144 Edlund, Richard, 167 Eichmann, Adolf, 78–9 Eisenstein, Sergei, 87 Emmerich, Roland, 181, 267 Entebbe crisis (1976), 123–43 EOKA terrorism, 67 Ermler, Freidrich, 46 Ervine, David, 220 Eshkol, Levi, 65 Exodus (book), 64–5, 72, 76, 79 Fanon, Frantz, 87 fascism, 26, 46, 105, 122, 159, 256 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 8, 144–62, 190 Favreau, Jon, 280–1 Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography (Russia), 232–3 Federal Security Service (FSB, Russia), 228–33 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz, 19 58 Minutes (book), 171–2 Filmmaster (Italy), 232 First World War, 10, 13, 15, 19, 22, 26–7, 29, 126, 151, 207 FLN, see National Liberation Front (Algerian) Ford, Aleksander, 49, 51 Ford, Gerald, 126 Fortuyn, Pim, 1 Frankenheimer, John, 80, 98 French Revolution, 10, 21, 22n. 33, 54, 61, 103 Frend, Charles, 32 Friedman, Roger, 274 Fuqua, Antoine, 280 Gaddafi, Moammar, 172 Gandhi, Indira, 187

311

General Index Gandhi, Mahatma, 187 Gandhi, Rajiv, 187, 188 Gaon, Yehoram, 129, 133 Gaumont, 16 Gaumont-British, 27, 29–31 Gaza, 251 George, Terry, 206 ‘German Autumn’, 145–6 Germany, 14, 25, 27, 29, 42, 46, 48, 51, 68, 104, 117, 127, 144–62, 250, 262 Ghai, Subhash, 187 Gibney, Alex, 181 Gilliatt, Penelope, 41, 78 Globus, Yoram, 128 Godard, Jean-Luc, 60, 151 Goddard, Drew, 267 Golan, Menahem, 79, 102, 124, 127–44, 186, 243 Golway, Terry, 222 Good Friday Agreement (1998), 206n. 7, 223 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 227 Gordon, Lawrence, 165–6 Gourevitch, Philip, 82 governments as terrorists, 102–22 Greenberg, Adam, 129 Greene, Graham, 41 Greengrass, Paul, 231, 270 Gribkov, Sergey, 231, 242 Griffith, D. W., 13, 21, 145 Grimonprez, Johan, 282, 287 guerrilla warfare, 82–101, 105–6, 170n. 21, 226 Guevara, Che, 40, 113, 144, 162 Guillermin, John, 125, 167 Haddad, Wadie, 134 Haganah, 66, 68–72 Hamas, 251, 263 Hampton, Christopher, 42 Harel, Amir, 249 Harkin, Margo, 206 Harlin, Renny, 172 Harris, Ed, 249 Harris, Eoghan, 210, 219 Hartford, Kenneth, 138 Hartuv, Ilan, 65 Hasegawa, Kazuhiko, 160–1 Hauff, Reinhard, 147 Hay, Ian, 30 Hensleigh, Jonathan, 176 Heydrich, Reinhard, 45, 46 Hill, Walter, 166 Hitchcock, Alfred, 8, 24–42, 47, 50, 54, 63, 66, 78, 90, 104, 118, 158, 181, 262, 263 Hodges, Mike, 206 Hoffman, Bruce, 99, 100, 124

312

Holocaust, 1, 74, 79, 83 Homolka, Oskar, 31–8, 116 Hood, Gavin, 181 Hooks, Kevin, 174 Hooper, Tobe, 266 Hudson, Hugh, 207 Hurwitz, Jon, 162 Iannucci, Armando, 162 Ignatieff, Michael, 90 imperialism, 84, 101, 103, 145, 160 India, 185–202 international terrorism, 4, 118, 121–4, 137, 139, 142, 170, 186, 282 Internet, 2, 244, 266–9 Intifada, 246, 251, 261 Iran-Contra scandal, 166, 172 Iraq, US-led war in, 2, 82, 100–1, 225, 280 Irgun, 63, 66, 69, 71–7 Irish Civil War, 204, 207, 215, 217 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 41, 45, 83, 98, 100, 205–7, 209, 211, 213–16, 218–23 see also Northern Ireland Islamist terrorism, 2, 139, 228, 256–7 see also religious fundamentalism Israel, 3, 62–81, 83, 100, 105, 121, 123–43, 244–64 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 63, 76, 80–1, 244–64 Japanese Red Army, 123 Jarecki, Eugene, 121 Jennings, Humphrey, 46 Jews, filmic representation of, 62 jihadi terrorism, 224–43 Jordan, Neil, 203–23, 247 Junli, Zheng, 47 Kaczynski, Ted, 42 Kael, Pauline, 96 Kapur, Shekhar, 187–8 Kaufman, Michael T., 82 Khrushchev, Nikita, 226 Kieślowski, Krzysztof, 47 Kimball Young, Clara, 15–16 King, Louis, 46 Kinski, Klaus, 129 Klein, Joe, 262 Kluge, Alexander, 147 Koirala, Manisha, 192 Krim, Arthur, 64 Ku Klux Klan, 26 Kubrick, Stanley, 161 Kuleshov, Lev, 20, 226

General Index La Bruce, Bruce, 162 Lang, Fritz, 27, 46 Laqueur, Walter, 123, 285 Larsen, Viggo, 17 Lavrentiev, Yevgeny, 224–43, 245 Lashkar-e-Taiba group, 189 League of Nations, 26 Lebrecht, Norman, 262 Leder, Mimi, 237 Lee, Spike, 98 Lenfilm, 226 Lenin, Vladimir, 226 Levin, Irving, 129, 135 Lidice, 45, 46 Lucas, George, 167 Lumière Brothers, 10 Mackenzie, John, 206 Maldoror, Sarah, 97 Maliukov, Andrei, 233 Malkovich, John, 122 Mann, Daniel, 80 Marconi, David, 179 Marcus, Rachel, 129 Martin, Jean, 84, 88 Mayo, Archie, 26 McKinley, William, 9, 11–12 McTiernan, John, 165, 166, 175 Meinhof, Ulrike, 145 Menon, Rajiv, 192, 194–5 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 64 Mishurin, Alex, 125, 227 Mitchum, Robert, 138 Mitrione, Dan, 103, 106 Montagu, Ivor, 30, 32 Moore, John, 181, 280 Moore, Michael, 225 Moreh, Dror, 264 Morgenstern, Joe, 183 Moro, Aldo, 124 Morricone, Ennio, 83, 89 Morris, Chris, 162 Mossad, 134 Munich Olympics of 1972, 105 Murdoch, Rupert, 165, 188 Murphy, Audie, 128 Myers, Kevin, 219 Myrick, Daniel, 267 Nablus, 251–2 Nair, Mira, 98 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 78 Natanson, Georgy, 227 National Liberation Front (Algerian), 82–101

Nazism, 25, 30, 31, 45, 46, 47, 48, 54, 58, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 91, 135, 145, 146, 149, 159, 219, 226, 261 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 137 Netanyahu, Yonatan, 129, 132–3 New German Cinema movement, 144, 147 ‘new terrorism’, 185–6, 202, 204, 224, 233, 243, 245 see also religious fundamentalism Newman, Paul, 62–81, 85–6 Niblo, Fred, 20 Nicaragua, 166 nihilism, 10, 15–17, 31, 149 Nikulin, Grigori, 226 9/11 attacks, 2–3, 121, 142, 178–81, 224, 225, 228–9, 265–6, 268, 269–70, 274–6, 278 Noah Films, 128 Nolan, Christopher, 280–1 Nordisk Film, 16–17 Norris, Chuck, 139–42, 166, 169 North, Oliver, 172 Northern Ireland, 98, 203–10, 213, 215, 218–23, 286 see also Irish Republican Army (IRA) Nothing Lasts Forever (book), 165, 167 nuclear terrorism, 160–1 O’Connor, John, 127 Oklahoma City bombing, 177 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 82 Ophűls, Marcel, 104 Organisation armée secrète (OAS), 86 ‘oxygen of publicity’, 4, 209n. 17, 286 Padgaonkar, Dileep, 191 Paisley, Jr., Ian, 220 Page, Neville, 270 Pakistan, 187 Pakula, Alan J., 120 Palestine, 40, 69n. 15, 246–7 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 81, 83, 229 Pape, Robert, 264 Paramount, 270 Parker, Trey, 162 Pathé, 16 Poland, 43–61 Polanski, Roman, 47 Politkovskaya, Anna, 241 Pollack, Sydney, 120 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 5, 82–101, 190, 210, 222, 253 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 124–5, 130, 134, 139

313

General Index Porter, Edwin S., 9, 11–12 Potter, H. C., 205, 210 Prabhakaran, Velupillai, 83, 99 Preminger, Otto, 62–81, 83, 127, 163, 252 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 16 Putin, Vladimir, 228–31, 240–1 Puttnam, David, 207, 208 Quebec Liberation Front, 119 Raben, Peer, 157 Rabin, Yitzhak, 80–1 Rahman, A. R., 192 Ratnam, Mani, 8, 186–202, 205 Ray, Nicholas, 59 Reagan, Ronald, 139, 166, 170 Red Army (Bolshevik), 16, 48, 49 Red Army Faction (West Germany), 83, 98, 144–9, 154, 158, 160, 229, 247 Red Brigades (Italy), 124 Reeves, Matt, 265, 267, 269, 270, 274 Reiner, Robb, 266 Reinhardt, Gottfried, 47 religious fundamentalism, 189–202, 254–64 see also Islamist terrorism resistance-terrorism, 43–65, 80, 90–6, 248, 251, 284 revolutionary terrorism, 10–11, 17, 22–3, 40, 82–101, 114–15, 144–6, 217 Reynolds, Clarke, 129 Richardson, Doug, 172 Rickman, Alan, 166, 168–9 Riefenstahl, Leni, 219 Roth, Eli, 266–7 Rudd, Mark, 96 Russia, 15–16, 21–2, 28–9, 31, 182–3, 224–43 see also Soviet Union Russo-Chechen conflict, 225, 227–9, 230, 232–3, 237 Sagaidak, Yuri, 230–1, 242 Said, Edward, 93, 121 Saint, Eva Marie, 66, 80 Sanchez, Eduardo, 267 Sapir, Pinhas, 65 satire, 161–2 see also comedy Schleyer, Hanns Martin, 146 Schlöndorff, Volker, 119, 147 Schlossberg, Hayden, 162 Schnedler-Sorenson, Eduard, 17 Schulman, Sam, 129 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 98, 165 Scott, Tony, 179

314

Second World War, 25, 27, 30, 32, 36, 41, 43–61, 62–3, 72, 75, 81, 83, 87, 96, 120, 121, 128, 148–9, 153, 205, 227, 244 The Secret Agent (book), 28–31 Semel, Terry, 209 Semprún, Jorge, 104–5 Semyonov, Yulian, 227 Sena, Dominic, 181 Sharma, Abhishek, 162 Sharon, Ariel, 246 Shavelson, Melville, 80 Sheridan, Jim, 206 Shibli, Adana, 248 Shnurov, Sergey, 232 Sibneft, 232 Sidney, Sylvia, 31, 32, 33, 37 silent movies, 9–25, 115 Silver, Joel, 165–6 Simpson, Helen, 30 Sinn Fein, 213, 219 Sivan, Santosh, 188–9 skyjacking, 124–42, 282, 284 Sklar, Zachary, 249 Skouen, Arne, 47 Smith, Peter, 206 Smith, Sheamus, 212 Soderbergh, Steven, 98 Solinas, Franco, 86–8, 98, 104, 106 Soto, Helvio, 108 Soviet Union, 20, 22, 25, 30, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 87, 125, 134, 135, 138, 139, 164, 174, 182, 226–7 see also Russia Spanish Civil War, 54 Spielberg, Steven, 61, 80, 167, 210, 267, 270 Spottiswoode, Roger, 121 Springer, Axel, 146 Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, 83, 187, 244 Sriram, S., 190 Stalin, Josef, 48–9, 58, 61, 105, 226, 242 state-sanctioned terrorism, 55, 87, 102–22, 115–16, 122–3 Stoltz, Richard, 232 Stone, Oliver, 98, 121 Stuart, Jeb, 165–6 suicide terrorism, 42, 49, 63, 178, 187, 188, 235, 244, 247–8, 255–8 Suleiman, Elia, 246 Sundstrom, Cedric, 139 Swamy, Arvind, 192 Tanovic, Danis, 247 Thackeray, Bal, 192, 196, 200

General Index Thatcher, Margaret, 4, 209 Third Cinema, 108 Thompson, J. Lee, 138 Thorp, Roderick, 165, 167 Thorsen, Jens Jorgen, 161–2 torture, 76, 91, 94, 96, 101, 115–16, 266–7 Trimble, David, 220 Trotsky, Leon, 16 Trumbo, Dalton, 64 Tsarism, 15–16 Tupamaro guerrillas, 103, 107, 114–15 Twentieth Century Fox, 165, 175, 179, 181–2 Uganda, Entebbe Raid, 123–6 Ulster Volunteer Force, 220 Uris, Leon, 64, 65, 72, 76, 79 Uruguay, 102–22 Vajna, Andrew, 175 Van Doren, Mark, 41 van Gogh, Theo, 1, 283 Vautier, René, 97 Venkateshwaran, G., 190 Vietnam War, 96, 104, 141, 145, 169–70, 182, 192, 208 Viett, Inge, 98 von Trotta, Margarethe, 119, 147, 247 Wachowski, Andy, 165 Wachowski, Larry, 165 Wager, Walter, 171 Wajda, Andrzej, 43–61

Walturdaw, 17 Walzer, Michael, 81 Wan, James, 266–7 War of Independence (Ireland), 204–5 ‘War on Terror’, 1, 5, 8, 113, 131, 139, 165, 166, 179–81, 184, 224, 243, 280 Warner Bros., 25, 207 Warner Independent Pictures, 260 Warsaw Uprising, 49, 54, 57 Washington, George, 16 Weather Underground, 83, 96 Weisgal, Meyer, 65, 66 Whale, James, 266 Wilcox, Herbert, 47 Willis, Bruce, 163–82, 267 Winner, Michael, 138 Wiseman, Len, 179 Woods, Skip, 181 Worth, David, 139 xenophobia, 13, 19, 266 Yacef, Saadi, 86–7, 90 Yassin, Sheikh Ahmed, 251 Yeltsin, Boris, 228 Yom Kippur War, 135 Zarzycki, Jerzy, 48 Zeltser, Dov, 129 Zimmer, George, 21 Zionism, 63–5, 72–3, 76–80, 127, 136, 262 Zwick, Edward, 178

315