On October 21, 2020, Professor John Michalzcyk presented “Costa Gavras’s Controversial Film ‘Amen’: An Encounter with History,” a colloquium lecture hosted by the Art, Art History, & Film Department and the McMullen Museum. Michalczyk offered an introduction to the film Amen in the context of Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras’ opus and the influences, both historical and fictional, that he drew upon for its production.
Amen debuted in 2002, after filmmaker Costa-Gavras had gained renown for films about similarly controversial historical and contemporary subjects. The film is an adaptation of the 1963 play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, which portrays the efforts of a Nazi and a Jesuit to convince Pope Pius XII to speak out against the Holocaust. The Nazi portrayed in the film, Kurt Gerstein (1905-1945), was a Schutzstaffel officer in a hygiene unit who, after witnessing the murder of hundreds at a time with Zyklon B, decided to thwart the “Final Solution” from the inside by trying to raise the alarm in the international community. Fr. Ricardo Fontana is a fictional Jesuit priest whom Michalczyk said is a composite of several Jesuits who participated in the resistance and tried to get the Pope to condemn the Nazis. “The Deputy” was received with much controversy and condemnation from the Catholic Church; Michalczyk said of the play, “The Deputy is a very important work of drama, but at the same time it is very one-sided.”
Konstantino Gavras, or Costa-Gavras for short, was born in 1943 in Greece. His father’s involvement with the Communists prevented his pursuit of an education in Greece and the US, so his film studies and career took root in France in 1956. Michalczyk referred to him as the “father of the political thriller,” and the opening scene of Amen is characteristic of the genre, depicting Stefan Lux’s dramatic suicide in the League of Nations in 1936.
Costa-Gavras’ first adaptation of Hochhuths’ play is the addition of euthanasia of the disabled, according to Michalczyk. The film depicts the lines of disabled children being examined by doctors and led into chambers. In the fashion of a Greek drama, Costa-Gavras leaves the violence off-screen. The Hadamar euthanasia center was just one of six where disabled people were euthanized; in the film, this is where Gerstein first witnesses the use of Zyklon B for the “Final Solution.”
Costa-Gavras’ other novel addition to the original German drama was its depiction of the “ratlines” after the war. The film portrays Bishop Alois Hudal assisting a Nazi physician escape to Argentina; Michalczyk referred to evidence that pro-fascist Viennese Bishop Hudal did assist Nazis escaping after the war. He compared these efforts to the United States’ own “Operation Paper Clip”, which white-washed the Nazi affiliation of scientists brought to the US to work on government projects. It is contested whether the pope was aware of clergy involvement in the ratlines.
While the portrayal of Bishop Hudal is unfavorable, not every clergyman in Amen is an antagonist. The film also includes Monsignor Van Galen’s denunciation of euthanasia in a public sermon in 1941; he was spared Nazi suppression because of his popularity among the people. The film’s portrayal of Pope Pius XII was far from favorable. Michalczyk explained the pope’s silence as a “diplomatic” approach adopted after the increase in Dutch deportations when the Bishops of Holland protested the Holocaust. Instead of speaking out as the “moral voice” of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII let the priests and nuns whom Michalczyk called his “minions” do the work of resistance. He cited the Franciscans depicted in The Assisi Underground (1985) as an example of Catholic clergy who resisted by hiding Italian Jews. One of the protagonists of Amen, Fr. Ricardo Fontana, is an example of Jesuit resistance by advocacy.
Having compared fact and fiction in the production of Amen by Costa-Gavras, Michalczyk alluded to the possibility of opening the Vatican Archives and revealing Pope Pius XII’s attitudes toward the Holocaust and knowledge of the ratlines portrayed in the film. From his perspective as former clergy and scholar of Holocaust history, Michalczyk concluded that the film reveals to us “what we still have to do in understanding our own history.”
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