All courtroom trials are in some sense political. Certain ones, though, become explicitly politicized. From Antigone to Socrates, Martin Luther to Alfred Dreyfus, history is replete with defendants and their supporters turning the tables: accusing judicial processes of systematic distortion, politicizing what the law assumes to be incontestable: the rules of its own game. For such iconoclasts, true justice is presumed to lie outside the practice of established law and procedure. Radical critiques of ‘bourgeois justice’ since the nineteenth century fit this mold. Anarchists hauled before tribunals in the 1880s and 1890s, for instance, loudly condemned the class character of legal institutions. This form of what Otto Kirchheimer called ‘political justice’ – ‘the use of legal procedure for political ends’ – where the accused commandeers the capacity to accuse, judge and pass sentence is the subject of the latest film by the French director Cédric Kahn, Le Procès Goldman.
The accused is the real-life figure of Pierre Goldman, who was arrested in April 1970 for the murder of two pharmacists in Paris. Born in Lyon to Polish Jews in 1944, he had been a communist student leader, before dodging the draft and fleeing to Cuba. Scorning the événements of 1968 in France, he travelled to Venezuela to join the armed struggle, where he also participated in a bank heist. Returning to France, he skirted the line between miscalculating revolutionary and foppish gangster until his arrest. May ’68 had opened a period of sustained left-wing militancy, riot police were omnipresent on the streets and Pompidou’s government tilted towards excess in its judicial treatment of activists. In this context, Goldman became a left-bank cause célèbre. Notable intellectuals and the new daily Libération came to his defence. Goldman embodied the moment’s swirling ethos: itineracy, guerrilla street cred, politicized criminality, disgust at the carceral state, but also the foreboding sense of what his friend Marc Kravetz named life ‘after leftism’.
Goldman unapologetically admitted to a string of armed robberies, yet denied he had anything to do with the murders. He sat in prison for four years before his trial, and then received a life sentence. But the publication of Goldman’s memoirs, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France (1975), together with a sustained campaign on his behalf, raised sufficient questions about his conviction to warrant a new trial in 1976. Kahn’s dramatization, while compressing material from different phases of the Goldman affair, centres on this second trial. Beyond the classic battle between prosecution and defence, the film foregrounds tensions between the unruly Goldman and his exasperated lawyers, as well as between the steely judge and a parade of witnesses. In the French judicial system, judges are empowered to command the proceedings with their own inquisitorial examinations, thus acting as something of a second tier of prosecution, in this case, alongside the state’s attorney and the lawyer representing the victims’ families.
Even as they clash, the judge, prosecutors and defence attorneys all share a commitment to the rules of the judicial game. One of the most doggedly pursued – and least compelling – aspects of the film is the accumulating epistemological uncertainty that follows the lengthy procession of witnesses: psychiatrist, father, lover, police, passersby, friends. This testimony drags at points; of course, memories are incomplete, skewed and fragmentary. In their closing statements, Goldman’s lawyers decry the ‘religion of witnesses’ and how ‘the very mechanism of testimony is frightening’. Yet a more significant point is being made: the credibility of prosecution witnesses is largely assumed, whereas Goldman, not least because he has confessed to other robberies, enters the courtroom without any real ‘presumption of innocence’. The accused necessarily begins at a disadvantage; to protest is already to protest too much.
The drama of these proceedings propels the film along, though I wouldn’t quite describe it as ‘riveting’ or ‘electrifying’, as some have. That said, cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli’s washed-out palette gets the 1970s just right, and performances by Arieh Worthalter (Goldman), and especially Laetitia Masson (the psychiatrist) and Cholé Lecerf (Goldman’s Guadeloupean lover and future wife, Christiane Succa) achieve a grippingly restrained intensity. Succa, who is condescendingly interrupted and upbraided by the white judge, conveys an unflappable reserve that masks unnerving fervour. In such moments we glimpse the true interest of Le Procès Goldman, which lies not in the quibbling over facts but the overlapping eddies of politics, racism and anti-Semitism, Jewish identity, French integration, generational cleavage and the self-reinforcing logics of the criminal justice system. There is more at stake than Goldman’s guilt or innocence.
Kahn’s film shuttles back and forth between a confidence in facticity and the social forces that impose themselves regardless of legal attempts to exclude them from the courtroom. Goldman embodies such an oscillation, playing by the evidentiary rules one minute and denouncing the trial as systematically rigged the next. His eruptions from the dock and the jeers and cheers from his supporters hamper the proceedings; the other participants try to keep the show going. The judge insists on introducing Goldman’s biography into the deliberations. To contextualize? To establish his guilt? The prosecution follows suit. This gives Goldman his opening. If his past and his political views are relevant, he insists, then so too are those of the witnesses arrayed against him. The opening widens further as all describe the man they saw the night of the murders as dark-skinned, Mediterranean or having ‘a long nose and dark skin like an Arab’, in spite of the fact that he happened to speak decent French. It’s all code – ‘very deep-set eyes’ – for Jew.
By this point Goldman has already declared, ‘I am also a black . . . Jewish and black are the same thing.’ He had wanted children with Christiane: ‘blacks with Jewish blood’. ‘All the police are racist and anti-Semitic!’ he now shouts. ‘The prosecutor and the witnesses are racist and anti-Semitic!’ The victims’ families’ lawyer confirms the bias by answering Goldman’s plaint with the absurdity that ‘even if a witness is proved to be racist or anti-Semitic, he or she would still be credible’. Goldman and his largely white supporters explode, the latter giving Nazi salutes and making Hitler moustaches with their fingers while chanting, Fascist police! Complicit justice! The courtroom is cleared. It is harder to cheer Kahn’s Goldman as a hero of the wretched of the earth than Sorkin’s Chicago Seven, Soderbergh’s Che Guevara or King’s Fred Hampton. Yet in foregrounding the law as an instrument of both power and contestation, Le Procès Goldman dramatizes not just ambiguities but contradictions.
This is especially true of the film’s tragic, timely reflection on postwar French Jews and radicalism. After Goldman is forcibly removed from the courtroom, he insists to one lawyer that his innocence is ‘ontological’. Such a notion points to a broader generational mindset. Goldman repeatedly insists that killing the two pharmacists would have contradicted his ‘principles’. And these principles have a precise origin: the moral example of his parents, a communist mother who maintained her commitment in the face of Stalinist debasement and a father who fought in the French resistance. ‘I was haunted by their story’, he explains, ‘I wanted to be like them’. But as his Venezuelan comrade Oswaldo Baretto who returned to Paris with him says, by the late 1960s ‘the revolution was over’. Goldman was born too late. The pain of not living up to his idealized parents wreaks havoc: the ego ideal turns into self-lacerating superego. As his lead attorney Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari) will say in his closing argument, we ‘never recover from our childhood’. Such melancholic neurosis shows in repeated references to Goldman being ‘suicidal’. He is perpetually hurtling toward self-destruction. Caught between revolution and lumpen petty crime, alcohol, prostitution and a taste for fine shirts, this rebel is hell-bent on pleading his essential innocence while undermining both the judicial process and his own lawyers’ efforts to exonerate him. Contradictions.
As Goldman’s lawyers prepare for their closing statements, one makes a pivotal intervention. In order ‘to leave the ghetto’, mid-century European Jews had faced a singular choice: ‘Zionism or communism’. Those who took the latter road built on a ‘fundamental aspect of Judaism’: its ‘link with universalism, with historicity’. Goldman is thereby an inheritor of a tradition of Jewish radicals fighting for emancipation, and not only for Jews. Back in court, politics flood in. The prosecutor evokes a dangerous nationalism that claims to speak ‘in the name of France, true France’. One of Goldman’s lawyers stumbles into a republican paradox, lauding this ‘exemplary family, the model of integration’ before insisting that he is defending ‘all Jews, all half-Jews, all quarter-Jews, gypsies, and wops’. Integration is the price of recognition, while the hyphens resemble Nazi classifications even if wielded in the name of anti-anti-Semitism. Finally, Kiejman, who up till now has resisted invoking Goldman’s Judaism, changes course. Goldman is ‘first and foremost the fruit of a real tragedy: the tragedy of Eastern European Jews’. Justice for the trial – in the sense of what has been endured and suffered – bind lawyer and defendant together. He and Goldman ‘belong to the same community, that of Polish Jews, which is integrated into French society but which has retained from this origin anxious trembling and deep wounds’.
The facts of the case are overdetermined by history. A jury, though, does not have the power to end the wounds of Jew hatred. Should Goldman be exonerated because of unassuageable pain? Is Jewish suffering an extenuating circumstance, even an alibi? Kahn seems mindful of the hazards of such an interpretation because he has Goldman aver in his final remarks to the court, ‘I don’t want anyone to say that I acted like a Jew who implied that a non-Jew has no right to think a Jew can kill, and that those who do are anti-Semitic.’ The qualification is weak, and so the suggestion lingers. The rebel is ultimately exonerated from a crime he claims not to have committed. Kahn’s provisional title was taken from one of Goldman’s lines, I Am Innocent Because I Am Innocent. As the judge reads the verdict, he is drowned out by boisterous celebration. The system on which Goldman has piled such contempt turns out to have worked . . . for him.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Damn! I thought they had finally caught up with Justice Jeremy Johnson.
Posted by Morrissey on December 20, 2024, 10:29 pm, in reply to "Justice on Trial"
on December 20, 2024, 9:04 pm