He was the son of Pierre Goldman holocaustpolitical activist, gangster with a cause, literary icon, and corpse shrouded in mystery. He was the son of Polish Jews who fought in the French Resistance and was introduced to Marxism and radical militancy by his mother. He refused to participate in the May 68 uprisings, which he saw as his father’s son movement, and in return he went to Venezuela to join a guerrilla group. Let’s go back to Paris, He flirted with the criminal underworld and was tried for a series of armed robberies; He pleaded guilty to three of them and denied committing the other, in which he was accused of killing two pharmacists.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1969 and wrote a book from prison declaring his innocence: ‘Dark memories of a French-born Polish Jew‘; Intellectuals and celebrities of the period who were fascinated by its language, anger and debates Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Signoret defended the support groups around him. He was acquitted of the deaths for lack of evidence on appeal in 1976, and this second trial is what director Cédric Kahn methodically but thrillingly reconstructs in the film now premiering in Spain. ‘Goldman case.
a cinematic character
“I read his book about 20 years ago and it had a huge impact on me,” explains Kahn, who was himself born into a left-wing Jewish family. “He published this as a defense to condemn an unjust punishment, but what surprised me most about these pages was the charisma that that man conveyed through them. I was like clever, provocative, ambiguous, manipulative, galvanic, a punk ahead of his time and of course a truly cinematic character”. ‘The Goldman Affair’ does not try to find out whether the protagonist is guilty or innocent. “My opinion does not matter, and moreover, he played the game of confusion in the defendant’s chair, claiming that he did not commit these murders and sometimes giving signs that he did,” the director says. “I focused on recreating the atmosphere of the trial and placing the viewer in a position similar to that of the jury.”
Set in a period when crime was part of the tactics of radical left movements such as Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades, the film shows that this process quickly turned into a political issue. “A trial is, above all, a dialectical struggle, and Goldman was the artist of that phrase.. “He used this rhetoric to divert attention from the main issue, which was the bloody robbery, and to make himself a victim of oppression.”
Courage and radicalism
The ‘Goldman trial’ remains inside the court for almost all its footage, reflecting the incessant verbal attacks between lawyers, witnesses, jurors and the defendant himself;He gestures, shouts, and always exudes the charisma of a rock star.”, in Kahn’s words. “For the Parisian intelligentsia he represented the courage and radicalism that existed in the late 60s, long lost in a world that had turned its back on revolution to embrace capitalism and whose institutions were biased against the left.”
The film is set in a France burdened by racism, police brutality and anti-Semitism, which its director thinks is not much different from today. “Political positions in France have become so polarized that there seems to be almost no one left in the space between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The far right is on the rise everywhere, and there is also a rise in racism in all areas of society and across all ideological spectrums.”.
Pierre Goldman was murdered in 1979, at the age of 35, at the hands of a small “ultra” group close to the police. His widow Christiane Succab criticized the film because in her opinion, she makes mistakes and mistakes that will harm her husband’s memory. ‘I understand her, she has always maintained her husband’s innocence, and our re-enactment of the trial does not rule out the possibility that she is guilty,’ says Kahn, who based the script of ‘The Goldman Affair’ mostly on newspaper articles and other written documents, focusing on its protagonist. “In any case, I have never denied that I am making a work of fiction that offers a personal perspective on this process. It is not intended to be the official release in any way.”.