Wounded Knee Hostages Have Seen Their Story Whitewashed from History

This is Part Three of a weekly blog that will take a look at several aspects of the Wounded Knee Occupation as the 40^th anniversary of the controversial 71-day event continues from Feb. 27 to May 5. Next week: Are there unmarked Graves at Wounded Knee?

Former South Dakota Sen. James Abourezk, taking questions at the Dakota Conference at Augustana College last year, was taken aback when Adrienne Fritze stood up to correct him.

Just a few minutes earlier, Abourezk had cracked wise about the day he went to the occupied village of Wounded Knee two days after the American Indian Movement had taken over.

He suggested that they were all in on some kind of joke with their AIM captors. He had come to negotiate their release. Having failed to do so, he decided that they weren’t captives at all.

Wounded Knee, 1940. Photo by John Vachon. Library of Congress

The former South Dakota lawmaker didn’t count on another non-AIM witness being in the crowd that day.

Fritze, who was 12 years old at the time, was the niece of Clive and Agnes Gildersleeve, the long-time owners of the trading post.

She had read and heard for almost 40 years the misrepresentations of her family in history books, along with AIM’s twisted rationalization for destroying a community, and taking away all their possessions. She was standing right in front of Abourezk, Sen. George McGovern and the TV crew when they came in for the photo op on March 1, 1973.

She did not find Abourezk’s lighthearted anecdote amusing.

I won’t go into the exchange between the two that followed other than to say that Fritze said her and her family were under duress every minute of the almost nine days they were there. They were threatened with knives and guns, and held against their will. The occupiers stole any possession of any value in front of their noses, and they were powerless to stop them.

In short, those fighting for their liberty, did so, by taking others’ liberty away.

Abourezk’s attempt to recover after Fritze confronted him with these uncomfortable facts was quite sad, and one of the low points of a conference that had many low points.

It’s all in the new book, Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding.

The “Still Bleeding” secondary title refers to many who are suffering as a result of the occupation. The Fritzes, Adrienne and her mother Jeanne, the last two living hostages, are among them.

Tim Giago, founder of several Native American newspapers including The Native Sun News, and a former Wounded Knee resident, has written eloquently over the years about the Gildersleeves.

I did not know them personally as he did. All I can say is that since I first began doing research at Pine Ridge almost 10 years ago, I have never met anyone who had a bad word to say against them.

If there is one thing Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding contributes to the historical record, I hope it’s a more balanced description of the hostages, and their predicament.

AIM leaders, and sympathetic historians, have put forth two assertions. One, that they were happy and willing hostages. And two, as Russell Means suggested minutes after Abourezk and Fritze’s exchange, that they basically deserved it.

I’m not trying to brag when I say I am the first journalist or historian to interview Adrienne and Jeanne. I just want to point out that I was the first to even bother asking them for 39 years.

That is telling. Writers have accepted the simplistic “crooked white trader” and “willing hostages” narrative for four decades.

The happy and willing hostages idea has its roots in quotes that Agnes Gildersleeve and her brother Wilbur Riegert — both mixed-blood Ojibwes — gave to the press.

Agnes, in front of cameras and in private conversations, said she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave. Certainly, she had ambivalent feelings. The stated reason for not wanting to leave was because she feared what would happen to her home of 40 years after she left.

Well guess what happened to her home of 40 years after she left? It was burned to the ground.

Riegert, an elderly wheel-chair bound hostage, I believe has been particularly aggrieved by historians. This was a man who loved Lakota culture and religion and spent his life collecting art and artifacts, and writing unpublished histories about the people he had lived among his entire adult life.

In the book, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, authors Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior quote him as telling a print reporter that he sympathized with AIM’s demands.

First of all, interviews given with armed AIM leaders standing a few feet away are done so under duress (You would think a smart guy like Abourezk would know that).

In any case, this is undoubtedly true. Riegert was well aware of all the injustices perpetrated against the Oglala Lakotas, would have loved to have seen the Black Hills returned to them, as well as many of the other demands fulfilled.

Like a Hurricane isn’t a completely bad book. But Smith and Warrior cherry picked facts to make Riegert and the Gildersleeves look like villains. It is an influential book, and used as textbook n college classes, so the misconception continues.

The other assertion is that they were corrupt, so they got what was coming to them.

I hope my readers know by now that I don’t back away from uncomfortable facts. And the fact is that the white trader system on Pine Ridge in the first half of the 20^th century on Pine Ridge was tremendously corrupt.

AIM leaders asserted that the Wounded Knee Trading Post engaged in shady business practices, and Riegert’s museum was exploiting the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. 

I have come across no evidence that the Gildersleeves engaged in such practices. I believe that Riegert was sincere in wanting to share his love and knowledge of the local culture with any tourist who came to see his museum.

I duly note in the book that Jim Czywczynski invoked the Fifth Amendment 95 times in order not to incriminate himself at a Wounded Knee trial when asked about his business practices. (Yes, the same man who tried to sell the Oglala Sioux Tribe the land at Wounded Knee at a huge mark-up last month). He bought the trading post for the Gildersleeves and ran it during its final years.

At the end of the day, the occupiers had no right to take hostages, steal, loot and destroy lives under any circumstances.

There were many other Wounded Knee residents besides the 11 hostages. Their untold stories will have to wait for another column.

Stew Magnuson is the author of Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding, published by the Now & Then Reader. It is available as an eBook on Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iTunes.

The Battle of Algiers

Franco Solinas, who wrote the screenplay for “The Battle of Algiers,” set out to demystify colonial war. Honor, glory, maintaining peace, bringing freedom and the advantages of civilization, guaranteeing human rights—whatever the occupier’s stated motivation for fighting—all of this was sentimental drivel. Solinas felt compelled, he said, to present the events in a harsh light because he was against “a hypocritical, phony, romantic, fictionalized idea of war.”

It’s true that the French do not come off well in this film. The colonists seem spiteful, their young people spoiled, their policemen immoral and underhanded. Apart from the paratrooper commander, Colonel Mathieu, who upholds his warrior code, the French army appears callous at best, sadistic at worst. In one brutal sequence, we see Algerians being tortured in graphic detail, Ennio Morricone’s mournful score heightening our revulsion. Not only must we endure the men’s agony as they are beaten, burned, waterboarded, and subjected to electric shocks, we are also shown the faces of their wives and mothers, tears running down their cheeks, as they too are made to witness the torture.

But none of this would have surprised audiences in the mid-1950s, when the events marked by the film took place. The fact that torture was routinely used in France’s “dirty war” in Algeria was widely known and hotly debated. Exposés were written by prominent figures, from decorated army generals to Catholic theologians. Soul-searching was the order of the day, particularly among Left-Bank intellectuals. Former members of the French Resistance routinely denounced the “Gestapo methods” of the French army. And efforts by the authorities to censor this literature only increased the demand for it.

The European-born editor of a left-wing Algerian newspaper critical of the colonial regime was tortured for a month at the height of the Battle of Algiers. His account, smuggled page by page out of prison, sold 168,000 copies in a clandestine Swiss edition published in 1958, after the original version was confiscated in France. His ordeal became a cause célèbre.

The shock value of “The Battle of Algiers” did not reside in its revelation of French brutality, difficult as the scenes of torture are to view. I think it was the film’s glorification of revolution, its endorsement of the argument found in Frantz Fanon’s radical manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, that violence could be a cleansing force, enabling an oppressed people to overcome their fears and reclaim their dignity, that earned the film its acclaim, and its notoriety (depending on the viewer’s politics).

In a famous sequence, three Algerian women prepare to bomb civilian targets in the European area of Algiers. Who doesn’t root for them to get through the checkpoints? 

Pretty shocking, I’d say, even today.

In her new title, Dirty War: Terror & Torture in French Algeria, Lisa Lieberman tells the story of the Algerian war and its impact on French intellectuals and political and military leaders.

More Questions Than Answers About Wounded Knee 1973’s First Fatality

This is Part Two of a weekly blog that will take a look at several aspects of the Wounded Knee Occupation as the 40^th anniversary of the controversial 71-day event continues from Feb. 27 to May 5. Next week: The residents of Wounded Knee.

Last year, the Oglala Sioux Tribe sent a list to U.S. attorney for South Dakota requesting that the he investigate approximately 56 suspicious deaths that had occurred in Pine Ridge or nearby.

It was an odd list. It looked like there was some padding going on. The first name that jumped out at me was Raymond Yellow Thunder. I wrote a book, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, in 2008, and I was perplexed as to why his name appeared there. The killers were caught, tried, convicted and served their time in in the 1970s. This all happened in Nebraska, outside of South Dakota and the FBI’s jurisdiction. And even if someone believed that the manslaughter charge should have been murder, what, you’re going to retry the case on a different charge 40 years later? Ridiculous.

The second name that jumped out at me was Frank Clearwater aka Frank Clear (or vice versa depending whether you’re in the FBI or American Indian Movement camp). Since the last name is in question, I’m just going to go with Frank for the remainder of this article.

Now here is a death worth investigating.

Frank Clearwater was the first fatality during the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973. His name has been surrounded in mystery since the day he arrived in the village on April 17.

The story, as told in several history books, reputable and otherwise, is that Frank Clearwater, 47, an Apache, made his way into the occupied village with his pregnant wife — Morningstar — arriving sometime on the night of April 16.

The two weary travelers laid down to rest in the either the church or one of the houses, and while they were sleeping one of the most intense firefights of the occupation broke out. A stray bullet penetrated the wall and struck Frank in the head.

A ceasefire eventually came and he was medically evacuated to Rapid City, where he hung on for eight days, but succumbed to his wound on April 25.

His widow then asked that he be buried at Wounded Knee Cemetery.

A dispute immediately broke out between AIM and its avowed enemy Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson. Wilson produced documents claiming that Clearwater was named Frank Clear Jr., and that he was a white man who had served time in a military prison for abandoning his post in World War II. Wilson said only Natives could be interred at Wounded Knee.

To make a long story short, Frank was ultimately buried at Crow Dog’s Paradise, AIM spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog’s home on the Rosebud Reservation.

So who is buried there? Frank Clear or Frank Clearwater?

As usual, we have two completely different interpretations of this event depending whether you believe the former FBI Special Agent in Charge Joe Trimbach, whose name appears on the cover of a book called, American Indian Mafia, or the AIM leaders.

American Indian Mafia goes into some, but not much detail of this event. Trimbach, of course, says he was Frank Clear. But he doesn’t go into why he would have lied to AIM leaders about his name and ancestry.

Curiously, in a timeline in the book’s Appendix, on page 513, it reads “April 17, 1973: Wounded Knee infiltrator Frank Clear is struck by a stray bullet that had penetrated a wall.”

“Infiltrator?” What a curious choice of words.

Is Trimbach saying that Frank was sent in to gather intelligence? I could ask him. But he wasn’t at Pine Ridge at the time, his superiors having removed him from the scene by that then. And now in his late 80s, I am not sure he would remember.

At the Augustana Conference in Sioux Falls, last year I asked Trimbach how many informants he managed to put inside the occupied village. None, he insisted. He was only on the scene for two weeks.

Later, I read his book in which it details gathering information from a total of four informants during his two weeks on the scene. This suggests to me that his memory is faltering in his old age, or he isn’t familiar with the information in a book that has his name on the cover.

Now to AIM. Four decades later, they continue to assert that Frank was a Native American. Proxies such as Ward Churchill, the former University of Colorado professor, asserted in his series of pro-AIM books that the documents Wilson produced were fake and it was a ploy to discredit him. He couldn’t be a martyr for their cause if he was an FBI informant.

My question to AIM leaders like Dennis Banks, who was there at the time of his arrival, is how did they know for sure? The prevailing story was the Frank and his wife weren’t there very long before they went off to rest.
They arrived at a time when leadership was deeply, and rightfully, paranoid about infiltrators.

According to Roland Dewing’s, Wounded Knee II, the best blow-by-blow account of the occupation published to date (sourced mainly from FBI documents), AIM initially gave authorities a number of names: First he was Matthew High Pine from Pine Ridge, then he was Frank Still Water, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, and finally Frank Clearwater, an Apache from Cherokee, North Carolina.

An Apache from North Carolina? Well, maybe.
Banks has a pretty bad record on telling who was and wasn’t a Native American. Doug Durham, a white man posing as an Indian, turned out to be the FBI’s most successful informant, and was one of Banks’ right hand men for years before he was discovered.

Was Frank Clear/Clearwater sent in as an informant? But with a pregnant wife? Or was he just a wannabe Indian, who was escaping a troubled past?

Or was he really who AIM claimed him to be?

I don’t have the answers, but I am certain they are out there. The Apache Nation would presumably have records of a Clearwater family.

And where is his widow — Morningstar — and where is the child — unborn at the time of its presumed father’s death, today? He or she would be about 40 or 41 years old. Could they shed any light on this man’s identity?

If you have answers to this mystery, send me a message. (stewmag (a) yahoo.com)

Stew Magnuson is the author of Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding, published by the Now & Then Reader. It is available as an eBook on Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iTunes.

What Was the Larger Impact of the Wounded Knee Occupation?

This is Part One of a weekly blog that will take a look at several aspects of the Wounded Knee Occupation as the 40^th anniversary of the controversial 71-day event continues from Feb. 27 to May 5. Next week: Who was Frank Clearwater?

Forty years after members of the American Indian Movement and its local allies occupied the village of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge Reservation, controversy swirls around the 71-day event.

Much of the debate centers around what did or didn’t happen as the federal government laid siege to the village.

Perry Ray Robinson, a black civil rights activist, made his way inside Wounded Knee, and was never seen alive again.

The Trimbachs — former special agent in charge on the scene Joe, and his son John — are the leading critics of AIM leaders and of the occupation itself. They publicly claim that AIM leaders were responsible for several deaths inside — including two men who were allegedly felled by government bullets, Frank Clear aka Clearwater and Buddy Lamont, as well as five other bodies they say are buried there.

Tim Giago, the founder of several local newspapers, has been out front over the past four decades in pointing out that the occupation destroyed a community. Oglalas, white and mixed-blood residents — were run out of their homes, which were later looted and destroyed, with none of them ever receiving compensation for their losses.

AIM leaders at the Dakota Conference at Augustana College in Sioux Falls last year brushed aside these criticisms and made a case that the occupation changed things for the better in Indian Country. AIM founder Clyde Bellecourt in particular said everything from the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 to the rise of tribal casinos and the economic power they wield, were a direct result of the change in attitudes toward Native Americans brought on by AIM and the occupation.

Of course, it is hard to say whether this is true, or not, and there are arguments to be made both ways.

The late Russell Means, in his biography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, said, “What Wounded Knee told the world was that John Wayne hadn’t killed us all. Essentially, the rest of the planet had believed that except for a few people sitting along the highways peddling pottery, there were no more Indians. Suddenly, billions of people knew we were still alive, still resisting.”
‘Billions? Well, aside from that probably inflated figure, I think there is a kernel of truth there.

Putting the occupation in context, it was widely covered by the mainstream media. The first armed insurrection on U.S. soil since the Civil War made headlines everywhere. This was still during the Cold War, and the Soviet Bloc countries sent reporters along with CBS, NBC, NPR, the wire services and all the major newspapers. The media relished this story. Yes, here were Indians resisting the U.S. government.

Were viewers watching or reading about it angry at AIM, or the U.S. government? It was undoubtedly a mix of both, but for those who root for the underdog, certainly they sympathized with the occupiers.

This was also a time when Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a number one bestseller. That book opened the eyes of a lot of Americans to the injustices perpetrated on Native Americans in the 19^th century. For many, Indians had only been the bad guys in Westerns, who scalped the poor innocent settlers. Historians continue to criticize the book, but it had an enormous impact in its day.

Now, here was a group of radicals who had another story to tell. Love them or hate them, Means and AIM co-founder Dennis Banks, were charasmatic and ever quotable. The occupation started out as a protest against the tribal government of Dick Wilson, but it grew into something more as the weeks wore on.

AIM leaders spoke of many failed 20^th century policies. Relocation, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs tried to depopulate the reservations by giving incentives to families to move to big cities, was one. Termination sought to take away some tribes’ legal standing. Boarding schools were havens for child abusers, whose purpose was to destroy Indian culture and language.

The land, the source of power in the countryside, had been slowly taken away from tribal hands thanks to the Dawes Allocation Act. The Indian Reform Act of 1935 imposed Western democracy on tribes, and in the case of Pine Ridge, created a schism between traditionals and non-traditionals that scholar Akim Reinhardt argues led to the occupation.

These stories by 1973 had largely escaped the attention of most Americans. If they knew any Indian history at all, their knowledge probably stopped at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.

Reservations were — and some still are — places of horrific poverty. But how did they get that way?

Until 1973, that story had not been widely told.

Did the occupation by itself usher in a new day? There are no before and after public surveys that I know of that could tell us with certainty. But one can say that many positive developments did happen afterwards.

I don’t think AIM can take complete credit for all of them. The Native American Rights Fund, which has been instrumental in fighting many important legal battles in the Indian law realm, was founded in 1970. That is just one example of others who had a role to play.

But to say AIM and the occupation had no impact on the public’s awareness of Native American issues at all, I think, would be wrong.

Stew Magnuson is the author of Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding, published by the Now & Then Reader. It is available as an eBook on Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iTunes.

Damn Yankees

Yankees haters are just as numerous today as they were in 1958, when this picture was released, following the successful run of the Broadway musical. Just about everything else has changed, though.

A rookie baseball star turning his back on fame to go home to his wife? A big home-run hitter not suspected of being on steroids? Pay phones— with dials, no less! — that require a pocketful of change. Who even carries change these days?

"Damn Yankees" takes us back to a simpler time in baseball history. Ballplayers were wholesome guys.  Fans might have gotten excited up there in the stands, but they limited themselves to a few gripes and the occasional raspberry. Fights? You've gotta be kidding! Prejudice? Not a whiff of it here, fellas.

The only character who doesn't play by the rules is the devil. Ray Walston honed his skills playing Satan (a.k.a. Mr. Applegate) before he got stuck being a Martian. I will admit that I kept expecting to see his antennae pop up every time he appeared. He’s suave, sly, and delivers his lines with superb restraint.

“Hey, how’d you pull that off?” asks innocent Joe Boyd, watching the devil light his cigarette without a match.

“I’m handy with fire,” deadpans Walston.

They don’t make temptresses like Lola anymore. And nobody has carried off a number like “Who’s Got the Pain” since Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse choreographed it together — that’s him dancing with her in the film, by the way.

On top of this, you get Tab Hunter, a sterling actor. And such fine harmonizing by the team and their manager in “You Gotta Have Heart!”

Sorry, couldn’t resist. The devil made me do it.

Lisa Lieberman watched her first baseball game in Connie Mack Stadium when she was eight years old and has been a die-hard Phillies fan ever since.

The Hitler Diaries

In retrospect, it was so lame. A cache of Hitler’s diaries, some sixty-two handwritten volumes spanning the period from 1932 to the eve of his death in 1945, was supposed to have been found in an East German barn. The German source who sold the diaries to the magazine Der Stern, Konrad Kujau, claimed to have smuggled them out of East Germany, one at a time — a process that took two years.

Kujau was a well-known forger who’d been caught peddling fake Nazi memorabilia in the past. He was apparently quite good; some of the letters he’d forged were still considered genuine at the time of the hoax. German handwriting experts compared the diaries against some of Kujau’s previous forgeries and pronounced them genuine as well. So did the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was brought in by the Times to authenticate the documents. The first installment was duly published on April 25, 1983. 

Skeptics pounced on the story the minute it hit the press. British historian Alan Bullock, author of the highly-regarded biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, noted that “despite extraordinary efforts... to scrape together every scrap of information about Hitler, there has never been a suggestion that he kept diaries.” Others complained that the diary entries seemed out of character. “I read one excerpt where he was supposed to have written ‘ha, ha, ha,’” said another expert. “He wasn’t that kind of person.”

Still, it must have been hard to resist succumbing to the hoax when you had entries like this one, allegedly written by Hitler in June of 1941: "On Eva's wishes, I am thoroughly examined by my doctors. Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and - says Eva - bad breath." Nobody knew the real Adolf Hitler, not even his closest associates. Who'd have guessed that such a monster had problems with flatulence and bad breath?

Just this past April, Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics that publishing the Hitler Diaries in 1983 was a "major mistake" which he would have to live with for the rest of his life. Murdoch offered Der Stern $3 million for world rights to the diaries in a bidding war against Newsweek. A recent New Yorker blog suggests that even after the hoax was revealed, Murdoch came out ahead.

The last word, I think, should go to Trevor-Roper. "For Mythopoeia is a far more common characteristic of the human race (and perhaps especially of the German race) than veracity," he wrote in The Last Days of Hitler. Or maybe we should go with P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute."

Le Corbeau (The Raven)

All of France resisted the Nazis, if not actively, at least in their hearts. So argued Jean-Paul Sartre in “The Republic of Silence,” an uplifting little address he published a month after the Liberation. “Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest,” he wrote. “And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered NO.”

Of course, Sartre knew better. In “Paris Under the Occupation,” published a few months later, he presented a different picture of the compromises that daily life under the thumb of the Germans entailed. Here he admitted that his countrymen, for the most part, were too demoralized to resist. And yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to acknowledge how eagerly many complied.

Millions of people denounced their neighbors in anonymous letters to the authorities during the Vichy era. You could say this was something of a patriotic tradition in France. During the ancien régime, secret letters led to the imprisonment of countless “enemies,” who would languish in jail, never knowing what crime they had been accused of, not even knowing the name of their accuser. The practice was stopped during the French Revolution, but the habit persisted. Under Napoleon Bonaparte it was said that half of France was paid to inform on the other half. Informers were also employed during the colonial struggles after the war.

Betrayal was an uncomfortable fact of life under the Occupation, and Henri-Georges Clouzot made it the subject of his 1943 suspense film, “Le Corbeau.” Remarkably, the film was produced by a German-owned company, Continental. More remarkably, early publicity for the picture highlighted the theme:  “Informing, the shame of the century!” Goodness, what were they thinking?

The film was a smash hit. The Catholic Church gave it a “6” on its moral scale—“1” being appropriate for all audiences, even children, and “6” being a film so pernicious that it deserved to be banned—thus ensuring that it would find an audience for decades to come. In fact, prominent critics on both ends of the political spectrum condemned “Le Corbeau.” Clouzot was accused of treason in the collaborationist newspaper Je Suis Partout; anonymous letters were “necessary” to maintain public order claimed fascist writer Lucien Rebatet. The Left, meanwhile, objected to the complete absence of admirable characters. Nobody comes off well. Not a single soul. Children, nuns, peasants, shopkeepers, teachers, workers: all are corrupted by the poison pen letters circulating in their small town.

“You think that the good are all good and the bad are all bad,” the head of the hospital, Vorzet, tells the film’s protagonist, Germain, in a famous scene. “The good is the light and the bad is the shadow.” (Here Vorzet swings a lightbulb that is dangling from a wire overhead.) Germain is having an affair with a woman in the town. He desires her, but says that he wouldn’t hesitate to turn her in if she were found to be the culprit sending the poison pen letters. “But where is the shadow, where is the light?” Vorget asks. (By now the zones of light and shadow are shifting crazily as the bulb swings back and forth.) “Do you know if you are in the light or in the shadows?”

It’s only natural to seek clarity, particularly during times of upheaval. Simone de Beauvoir argued in favor of the death penalty for war criminals for precisely this reason. Salutary executions were the only means of restoring the moral certainties that were compromised during the Vichy era, she proclaimed in her essay, “An Eye for an Eye.” And yet both she and Sartre stood up for Clouzot when the postwar French government barred him from making any more films on account of his alleged ties with the Nazis. Sartre even worked with Clouzot on a screenplay during the two-year period before the ban was lifted.

For his part, Clouzot seems to have been quite a piece of work. Germain’s intolerance for the hypocrisy of human nature mirrored the director’s own. He was not an easy man to work with; more than one actress complained of being slapped around on the set. On the other hand, he got fine performances out of his cast and is one of only three directors to have won the top prizes at the Cannes, Venice, and Berlin firm festivals (the other two were Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman).

So, where is the shadow and where is the light?




Lisa Lieberman blogs about old movies at Deathless Prose.