The Goldman Trial: A cinema summit by Cédric Kahn (review)
The filmmaker examines from the inside the trial of far-left activist Pierre Goldman, brilliantly played by Arieh Worthalter, and reveals himself to be a formidable portraitist.
Any trial film draws a large part of its strength from the way in which it manages, through staging, to restore speech. The word we give, confiscates, hides or on the contrary exhibits… A trial is a theater where everyone, in a predefined role, exists through what they communicate about themselves. In this process, words therefore have their importance. However, the greatest film in this area is silent, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). A strange object, because Drayer had initially thought of it as a talking film. And, a cinematic miracle, the word – in addition to through intertitles – managed to circulate thanks to the faces captured in delirious expressiveness. If we refer to this masterpiece to evoke this Goldman trial, is that Cédric Kahn, like Dreyer before him, takes the courageous step of not leaving – or very little – the courtroom. All that matters is the present of the story. The action finds itself, like the protagonists, under house arrest. Bodies in perpetual waiting, seek, without betraying themselves, to return a truth once “on the move”. Therefore, the viewer cannot rely on reconstructed images which would validate or invalidate the word given through illustrative flashbacks. The staging has a heavy burden, meaning that it dictates through its strict choices (framing, editing, interpretation, etc.) the progress of this world where the fate of a being claiming his innocence is decided.
On April 26, 1976, Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter, impressive), a 32-year-old far-left activist and intellectual, was presented before the Assize Court of Amiens in order to review a first judgment which sentenced him to the death penalty. perpetuity. Goldman is charged with four armed attacks, one of which left two people dead in a pharmacy. The young man formally contests the last and therefore the murders. If he is supported by his lawyers including Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari), the accused refuses the appearance of witnesses supposed to testify to his supposed righteousness “ I am innocent because I am innocent!” he proclaims with aplomb to the court: “ I intend to contribute to the best of my ability to strip this trial of any artifice that would obscure the essentials. » Thus posed, the filmmaker who renders – moreover through fiction – the reality of what happened owes a certain restraint. Kahn opts for a 4/3 image format which brings him closer to the cinema of the origins. The frame, thus stripped of “its generosity”, fixes in its center, the object of its attention. The Goldman Trial is the film of a portraitist. Depending on who is speaking or listening, the choice of compositions subtly reinforces the relentless narrative logic. Goldman in his box is thus most often apprehended sideways by judges who force him to turn to them. His body tense, his face closed, the man never shy away, and does not hesitate, with tremendous eloquence, to launch into diatribes.
Word is therefore action here. And since the witnesses are (almost) all against the prosecution, it is a contest between men or women, convinced that the words they send correctly dress the images they seek to convey (“ This is what I saw that day… “), and the opposing party who dismantles piece by piece, a succession of more or less voluntary approximations, guided by latent racism. Pierre Goldman is a Jew, “ a negro » he asserts, in the eyes of a French society which has not yet settled accounts with its recent past: traumas of the Second World War, decolonization… Goldman sees himself as a martyr. But where Joan of Arc, with her head tilted back, sought support from above, Pierre Goldman, with his gaze straight, expects nothing other than his word as a free man to be taken into account.
By Cedric Kahn. With Arieh Worthalter, Arthur Harari, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié… Duration 1h56. Released September 27, 2023
