Notes on 'Z': Jorge Semprún and the political commitment in fiction film

Abstract

“Tout ressemblance avec des évènements réels, des personnes mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du hasard. Elle est VOLONTAIRE.” This caption, superimposed over a freeze-frame shot of a room full of military officers deciding Greece’s fate, is followed by the names of Jorge Semprún and Costa-Gavras, appearing immediately below it like signatures. Thus begins Z, the Greek filmmaker’s most accomplished political thriller, and the finest product of the partnership between the two. Semprún’s screenplay, adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’s novel based on the judicial investigation into the assassination of the professor and activist Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963, stands as a vibrant distillation of the Spanish screenwriter’s political commitment. The textual force of the fictional tale told in Z conveys a truth as unrelenting as the examining magistrate portrayed by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Its denunciation of democratic backsliding in its depiction of events that led to the annihilation of ideological opposition and the establishment of the Regime of the Colonels in Greece is constructed around an assassination that Semprún and Costa-Gavras analyse through the use of multiple points of view, a news reporting style and a reflection on the nature of testimony and its relationship to reality.