Carlos (2010) [The Criterion Collection #582]

Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas, is an epic, intensely detailed account of the life of the infamous international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—also known as Carlos the Jackal. One of the twentieth century’s most wanted fugitives, Carlos was committed to violent left-wing activism throughout the seventies and eighties, orchestrating bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings in Europe and the Middle East.

Assayas portrays him not as a criminal mastermind but as a symbol of seismic political shifts around the world, while the magnetic Édgar Ramírez brilliantly embodies him as a swaggering global gangster. Criterion presents the complete, uncut, director-approved, five-and-a-half-hour version of Carlos.

Director: Olivier Assayas
Countries: France, Germany

Cast: Édgar Ramírez, Alexander Scheer, Alejandro Arroyo, Fadi Abi Samra, Ahmad Kaabour, Talal El-Jordi, Juana Acosta, Nora von Waldstätten, Christoph Bach, Rodney El Haddad, Julia Hummer, Antoine Balabane, Rami Farah, Aljoscha Stadelmann, Zeid Hamdan, Fadi Yanni Turk, Katharina Schüttler, Badih Abou Chakra, Basim Kahar, Cem Sultan Ungan, Susanne Wuest, Anna Thalbach, Salah El Din Abou Chanab, Johannes Richard Voelkel, Lamia Ahmed, Mounzer Baalbaki, Belkacem Djamel Barek, Samir Basha, Jef Bayonne, Alexander Beyer

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
- High-definition digital transfer, supervised by cinematographers Denis Lenoir and Yorick Le Saux
- New video interviews with director Olivier Assayas, actor Édgar Ramírez, and Lenoir
- Selected-scene commentary featuring Lenoir
- Carlos: Terrorist Without Borders, an hour-long documentary on the career of Carlos
- Archival interview with Carlos associate Hans-Joachim Klein, by Jean-Marcel Bougreau and Daniel Leconte
- Maison de France, a feature-length documentary on a Carlos bombing not included in the film
- Twenty-minute making-of documentary on the film’s OPEC raid scene
- Original theatrical trailer

IMDB
Criterion

Carlos: What the Film Wanted
written by Griel Marcus

“I remember one day, we were doing camera tests,” Édgar Ramírez said of Olivier Assayas’s five-and-a-half-hour Carlos, a political travelogue, an on-the-run biography of the terrorist—born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez in Venezuela in 1949, now serving life in Clairvaux Prison in France—who, from his murder of French police in Paris in 1975 to his kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers later that year in Vienna, from his hideouts in Syria, Yemen, and Hungary to his capture in Sudan in 1994, was a one-man specter haunting Europe. “And then we’re having lunch: Alexander Scheer,” the German actor who plays Carlos’s almost obscenely loyal terrorist comrade Weinrich, “and then Nora von Waldstätten,” the Austrian actress who plays Magdalena Kopp, Carlos’s wife, “Olivier, and myself. And suddenly, Alexander, who’s the most spontaneous one, he goes”—and Ramírez, participating in a public conversation with Assayas and myself at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2010, adopted a serious, considered, almost abstractly intellectual tone—“‘Like, guys, I’m not sure if you feel the same thing, but, really, I have no idea how to play this character.’ And then I froze, and then Nora goes, ‘Yes, quite honestly, I have no idea how to play this character.’ And then it’s me, and I say, ‘You know what, I have no idea how I’m going to play Carlos.’ And a pause, and Olivier: ‘Actually, I feel very relieved—because I have no idea how I’m going to shoot this movie.’ That set the tone for what was going to happen. Everybody just relaxed. We said, ‘We’re here, it’s just like soccer—it’s just, score.’”

With all of the movie’s blindingly fast action sequences, which capture the confusion and fright of an act of violence from a half dozen perspectives simultaneously—terrorists firing on an Israeli airplane at Orly and then fleeing police through crowds, in a panic belied only by their guns and grenades—with all of its flashes of instant murder and summary execution, with its dozens of moments during which, not after, the person watching says, “What? Did that happen? Is it over? So fast?” Ramírez’s story captures the heart of Carlos: its improvisational spirit, its openness to twists and turns occurring when it grasps the story it means to tell, and when the story pushes back.

“I had no preconception of Carlos,” Assayas said at Telluride. “I did not want to interpret Carlos. I did not want to try to figure out motives . . . I always thought the image of Carlos would come out of the accumulation of facts. He would take life in front of us.” He was presenting a view of personality and history: “I’ve always believed there are different chapters in lives, that people can be transformed as history is being transformed around them—and also that individuals are defined by the way that they adapt to changing times. In the case of Carlos, it’s particularly interesting in that we are talking about an individual who is caught up in history with a major H. He is within the fabric of the history of his times. So I thought, in the end, the facts speak much more precisely of who Carlos is than anything that would have to do with melodrama, with psychology, with some fake human texture. I think, in the end, Carlos has a lot of human believability. And it’s not brought by what I wrote in the screenplay. It’s simply brought by the presence of an actor, the physical presence of an actor.”

Édgar Ramírez’s presence is so strong that the other actors revolve around him as if he were a star and they planets helpless in the face of his gravity—especially Scheer as the finally apostate Weinrich, von Waldstätten as the inexorably emptying Kopp, Julia Hummer as the bloodthirsty Nada, Katharina Schüttler as the terrorist Brigitte Kuhlmann, who takes more pride in following orders than she ever could in giving them. And the same process—the same shared spirit—took countless other forms as well.

“We didn’t rehearse at all,” Olivier said. “We didn’t rehearse for the camera, we didn’t rehearse for the sound. What I was telling my cameraman was, ‘I think he’s going to do this, but he may also do that. If he does this, do that; if he does this other thing, try this other thing—but in any case, try to end up where he does this other thing, and then there’s this other guy who will be coming, and he has a grenade, so try to get the grenade when he throws it and it rolls on the ground. And okay, we’re shooting.’” You can see this on the screen: it’s a lot of the reason the viewer is caught up, suspended in the action, in the historical moment it defines, with past and future sucked into the immediacy of what’s-happening-now.

Visually, perhaps the most striking instance of the shuffling of perspectives inherent in this kind of process, where discovery trumps intent, comes with the transfer of the OPEC ministers from their meeting place in Vienna to a bus that will take them to the airport from which they’ll fly to an unknown fate. The viewer knows this happened. The viewer probably knows what happened next—how, for the terrorists, the whole spectacular enterprise, capturing the attention of the world, came to nothing. That is not how it plays. It starts with 16 mm black-and-white documentary footage of a press conference given by the Austrian chancellor, Bruno Kreisky—but Assayas inserts the actor who plays Kreisky into the footage. He then cuts to his own footage of the bus coming to receive the hostages, but still in black and white, as if the documentary footage is continuing. As the bus arrives, the film gradually shifts from black and white to color, from apparent history into its artistic reconstruction—and the result is that the modified or corrupted documentary footage dissolves the sense of artifice in the fictionalized film we’re actually watching, and the presence of the actors dissolves the in-the-past nature of the documentary footage, so that, regardless of what we may know of the actual events being portrayed, we don’t know what is going to happen.
There is a sense of the filmmaker’s humility before his subject here—and nothing more completely asserts Assayas’s confidence that the subject was itself a kind of collaborator in the infinitely complex enterprise of filmmaking than the approach he took to scoring the movie, though scoring is not the right word.

From scene to scene—Carlos preening naked in front of a mirror, the takeover of the OPEC conference, the shooting of a military policeman at a Swiss checkpoint, a weapons delivery, a breakdown in communications—the movie is less scored to than invaded by postpunk songs so romantic and tough they create empathy for situations even as the film withholds it from its characters. We hear, almost see, numbers by the Feelies and New Order, the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer,” and, most viscerally, Wire’s “Dot Dash,” a song that seems to terrorize itself. Not in any way keyed to the scenes with chronological, soundtrack-of-our-lives banality, the songs raise the question of whether the best and most adventurous music of the late 1970s and early 1980s was itself as animated by international terrorism, by the specter of a world where, at times, it could seem that only a few armed gnostics were in control, as by anything else.

The use of this music is an interesting choice, but even more interesting is what Assayas didn’t use—what didn’t work, and why. “I had absolutely no notion when I was making this film of the kind of music I would be using,” he said. “I never use scores; I use songs that I like. In the case of Carlos, I didn’t have a clue. I tried a lot of stuff, and the film did not want it. I thought that this movie needed classic movie music, which is something I never do, I never use—still, maybe the length of the film, the epic pace, maybe I could use some kind of orchestral movie music. The film laughed in my face when I tried it. It rejected a lot of stuff. At one point, I was just desperate. I thought, Maybe no music at all—why not? I started trying stuff—I was just shooting in the dark. And then—I had this Feelies track. It was perfect. All of a sudden, it gave me the right note.” Then, he said, “I knew what the film wanted.”

What Assayas is talking about is the imperative, the momentum, of a film itself thinking. If you are open to the world you are attempting to depict and the means by which you might do so, once you begin the enterprise of filmmaking, the thing you are making will tell you what is and what is not possible, what will violate its personality and what will light it up. Over its great length, crisscrossing the map like a tribe lost in the desert, Carlos retains that spirit of a movie making its own choices.

Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Shape of Things to Come, and The Manchurian Candidate in the BFI Film Classics series. With Werner Sollors, he is the editor of A New Literary History of America (Harvard, 2009). He currently teaches at the New School in New York and lives in Oakland, California.

Carlos: Sudden Death
written by Colin MacCabe

Toward the end of Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, a young French diplomat’s wife goes to answer the door of their flat in Beirut and is greeted by a huge bunch of flowers—which immediately disappears to reveal a gun that shoots her in the middle of the forehead. This is the signature shot, in both senses of the word, of the best movie about terrorism ever made. We are in the world of sudden death from the film’s opening, in which a Palestinian in Paris dies when a car bomb goes off, until the flurry of activity just before its final stage, after the Berlin Wall falls and Carlos is dropped by his Syrian allies. Above all, we are in the world of guns—guns are caressed, loaded, transported, and then used. Of course, as Godard famously said, all a film needs is a girl and a gun, but there is no question which comes first for Carlos. There are girls aplenty—revolutionary groupies, hookers, even two wives—but the only real turn-on for Carlos is the possibility of sudden death.

Carlos (2010) is an astonishing film—not least because of its five-and-a-half-hour length. There are parallels in the history of the cinema, of course: both Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) run over five hours in their original form, their lengths related to their attempts to portray long stretches of history. But there are very few, and Carlos is further distinguished by functioning uncommonly well as a hybrid, both television miniseries and theatrically exhibited film. It is no surprise that it comes out of Canal Plus, the media company that has thought most seriously about how to combine cinema and television. And there is no doubt that Carlos is cinema of the highest order, from its CinemaScope frame to its extraordinarily fluid camera work to its astonishing performances.

At its center is Édgar Ramírez’s Carlos, whom we see thicken and coarsen over twenty years of a life lived in the world of faked passports, bought sex, and the constant threat of violence. Assayas eschews all of the psychologizing and moralizing that would mar a typical American treatment of this topic. We are never privy to Carlos’s thoughts, and there is no overt condemnation of his politics or way of life. At the same time, this is a terrifying portrait of a monster. Two scenes can be taken as examples: The first occurs at the beginning of the movie, when, having carried out his first hit, a naked Carlos narcissistically preens in front of a mirror. The second comes toward the end, as the ever more seedy and violent terrorist forces a hooker, who unbeknownst to him is in the secret police, to give him a particularly humiliating blow job. The horror with which the woman spits out the sperm at the end of the encounter emphasizes how, for Carlos, sex and violence have become one and the same.

In a way, however, Carlos, although present in almost every scene of the film, is merely a device for conveying the film’s real subject, the wave of violent terror that grew out of the sixties and the links among the variety of Palestinian terror groups, their backing by rival Arab states, and their connections with Eastern European security apparatuses. Here, perhaps, the greatest praise should be reserved not for Assayas’s brilliant direction but for his narrative skill as a cowriter. Weaving his way from airport to airport, from smoke-filled room to smoke-filled room, he conducts an exemplary history lesson, one that, as the opening credits announce, is based on sustained and thorough research. And yet the film is a work of fiction. This paradox can be seen in one of its climaxes, when the Syrian Mukhabarat (military intelligence) dumps Carlos in 1990, after more than a decade of support. Assayas presents the moment as entirely determined by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Communist regimes whose secret police have been integral to Carlos’s Arab links. In fact, the Syrian decision was partly the product of other developments in the Arab world, particularly the first Gulf War, but to introduce this further thread would have damaged the complex but unified narrative that Assayas was constructing. Had Assayas been true to history by including these facts, he would have been untrue to history in not giving enough emphasis to the connections that bound student terrorism to Arab dictatorships and Stalinist Eastern European regimes.

The scope of Assayas’s narrative mirrors the modern world in a way that very few films attempt. It is the most evident of truths that we live in an ever more connected world, and one feature of this is that we encounter ever more languages and cultures. Terrified of audience resistance to subtitles, most films simply duck this reality. Not Carlos. The protagonist himself speaks five languages: Spanish, English, French, German, and Arabic, and we hear Hungarian, Russian, and Japanese as well. From this description, you might expect the film to be merely an earnest history lesson or a study in the degradations of terrorism. But that would be to miss the fact that this is above all a genre film—Assayas set out to make a thriller, and he succeeds so brilliantly that you can watch all five and a half hours in a sitting, constantly gripped by the twists and turns of a plot that is faithful to history but just as faithful to suspense. It is this that allows Assayas and Ramírez to keep us with the film. We register both the general history and the individual portrait, but we are constantly waiting for the next shot, for the angle and perspective from which the next bullet will come. 

Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh. He recently coedited the collection True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (Oxford University Press).

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