The State in Cinema
A series on what happens when brave individuals of conscience are confronted by government during tumultuous times.
There's a question that runs through some of the most compelling films ever made: what does a person owe the state, and what does the state owe the person? It sounds abstract until you watch Robespierre leave a pistol on a table for a man who served him faithfully, or see a Roman slave army broken on the Appian Way, or follow a bureaucrat in 1930s Italy as he quietly destroys his own conscience to stay on the right side of power.
This series builds a conversation across ten films, from Kubrick and Pontecorvo to Wajda and Bertolucci, tracing how cinema has staged that tension at moments of real historical pressure. The French Revolution. Colonial Algeria. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Terror in each case isn't only political; it's intimate. The state doesn't crush the individual from a distance. It works from the inside.
What makes these films worth watching together, rather than separately, is what accumulates. Patterns emerge. The revolution that devours its children. The loyal servant who becomes the necessary sacrifice. The person who conforms just enough, and then a little more. By the fourth session, the audience isn't just watching history. They're watching a logic.
Excerpts from our discussion group
Session 1: Battle for Algiers, Danton, Colonel Redl
We covered a lot of ground in Session One -- three films, several centuries, and at least one passionate case for the guillotine being a humane innovation.
Battle for Algiers dominated the first hour, and rightly so. Nearly everyone had seen it, and nearly everyone came back to the same observation: it doesn't feel like 1966. The press conference scene -- Colonel Mathieu calmly explaining to journalists that getting the answers you need sometimes requires asking questions in ways that aren't always comfortable -- landed for Teresa the way it probably lands for anyone paying attention in 2026. Abu Ghraib came up. So did the general theater of military press conferences. The film keeps insisting on its own relevance whether you want it to or not.
What struck the group most, beyond the politics, was the craft. Carol named it first: the film starts building from the opening frame and never lets up, without ever feeling oppressive. The Morricone score was almost universally praised, with one dissenting note -- Michael found the jaunty military theme slightly at odds with the rest of the film, and wondered if it was intentional. He said if it was, he still had notes on it. Fair enough.
The historical paradox at the center of the film generated the most discussion: France, which built an active resistance movement during the Nazi occupation, found itself, a decade later, on the other side of the exact same equation in Algeria. Ed drew the line clearly. The FLN was doing to the French what the French had done to the Germans. And yet the French, by 1962, still talked about the loss of the colonies as something terrible. Carol and Alan had been in France in 1968 and felt it firsthand.
Jerry added context that reframed the whole evening: the guillotine was used more by the Germans during World War II than by the French, and France kept it in operation until 1977. History has a way of outlasting the stories we tell about it.
Danton divided the room along different lines. Jerry and Ed found it too theatrical, too much like a play -- lacking what Jerry called "cinema." Michael, who had screened it in the 80s with his own film club, came to it differently this time. Danton, he argued, is actually a demagogue -- he created the Revolutionary Tribunal, he knows the rules because he wrote them. And Robespierre, by the end, isn't a villain so much as a broken man. There's a scene near the close where he listens to a child recite the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the camera just holds on his face. The air has gone out of everything.
The key context most of us didn't know going in: Mitterrand's government funded the film, and Wajda, a Polish director working during the Solidarity movement, used it to make an argument that had nothing to do with 1794. Danton becomes the individual against the totalitarian state. Robespierre becomes the Committee. By the time you understand what Wajda was actually doing, you realize the French got the opposite of what they paid for. Mitterrand, apparently, regretted it.
Michael also noted that Robespierre is written as an ascetic and asexual -- a deliberate contrast to Danton's full-blooded hedonism. In French society, he pointed out, being an ascetic is pretty much the worst thing you can be.
Colonel Redl was the most contested of the three. The central problem for Ed -- and it's not a small one -- is that the real Alfred Redl was a Russian spy from the beginning. He wasn't corrupted by rejection or class resentment or suppressed sexuality. He was just a traitor. Knowing that, Ed found it hard to accept the film's premise. Carol could watch it as a pure character study, and on those terms found it genuinely interesting: a man from the wrong background, in the wrong empire, managing the wrong secrets, dancing as fast as he could until he couldn't. The narrow streets, the high walls, the cramped doorways -- the cinematography gave her a physical sense of the oppression. Michael Black noted that Brandauer's performance was carrying a film that would have had almost nothing without him. The score, by general consensus, did not help.
The film raised something that stayed with the group past the credits: the Colonel Redl story is really about what we don't know about people in power -- what they hide, what they suppress, what they perform. That thread runs through all three films from Session One. The state demands a certain face. The individual behind that face is another matter entirely.
Session 3: A Man for All Seasons; Paths of Glory; Spartacus
A Man for All Seasons got a mixed reception. The acting and dialogue earned genuine praise: Paul Scofield's restraint, the Nigel Davenport scenes, Orson Welles making the most of limited screen time. But several people felt the film never fully escaped its theatrical origins. The palette is relentlessly gray, the compositions rarely move the way cinema can, and the contrast with Kubrick's work in the same series made that all the more apparent. The more interesting questions were about More himself: why would someone go to his death defending an institution he clearly saw as corrupt? And what does Bolt, an agnostic writing against the backdrop of his own brush with something like a blacklist, actually want us to take from that? No clean answers, but good questions. The Oscars that year came up too: A Man for All Seasons swept while Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf went home largely empty, which says something about the Academy's instincts that still holds today.
Paths of Glory was the clear favorite of the evening, and it wasn't particularly close. The Scorsese clip we opened with set the table well: his account of watching it as a kid and not being able to explain why the tracking shots stayed with him. We talked about Kubrick's geometric logic (the trenches as horizontal, the chateau as vertical), the tactility of the cinematography, and the way the film builds its case without ever softening it. The complexity of Menjou's character, charming enough that you almost fall for him, was a highlight of the discussion. And the three prisoners, particularly their scenes waiting out the night before the execution, were singled out as some of the most raw acting in any of the films we've seen. Ed's recommendation of They Shall Not Grow Old as companion viewing is well worth following up on.
Spartacus is the odd film out in Kubrick's career, and in this series. The spectacle is real, and several people were genuinely awed by the battle sequences knowing no studio would attempt them today. The Ustinov/Laughton scenes hold up beautifully, and the "I am Spartacus" moment, which Kubrick apparently wanted cut, landed with full force, especially in light of Trumbo getting his screen credit and what that meant for the blacklist. The Douglas/Jean Simmons scenes by the lake did not fare as well. Kubrick's ambivalence about the film seems earned, though it doesn't make the film less impressive as a feat.