2023-09-25 21:28:19
Passionate about revolutions and West Indian culture, the activist at the heart of Cédric Khan’s film did not hesitate to throw himself into adventure and armed struggle.
“In my cradle, there were leaflets and weapons that we hid,” writes Pierre Goldman in Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France. His life would make an almost too perfect film scenario: there we would immediately find the encounter with history – a birth at the very end of the Second World War, “I was born a Jew and in danger of death” –, the fever of a youth both militant and disillusioned – policing of student movements, criticism of May 68 – we would find danger there, a lot (Venezuela, the robberies) and love, a little (that of West Indian culture and a woman, Christiane Succab-Goldman). There we would find what is the subject of Cédric Kahn’s film, namely the accusation of the murder of two pharmacists during a robbery and the trials which followed – the film focuses on the second trial, the one under review, resulting by the publication of Memories…
Obsession with death
In this incredible autobiography, written in prison, Pierre Goldman decides to demonstrate his innocence by A + B but above all delivers the material of this life which is about to take a double turn: finally exonerated, Goldman will nevertheless die shortly after, at the age of 35, murdered in the middle of the street, a crime claimed by the small group “Honneur de la police” but whose members were never arrested. So that’s the scenario, but it’s about a man’s life, so let’s start again. Who was Goldman? Today, the surname evokes the singer – his younger half-brother – more than the activist. He, Pierre, grew up in Paris with the pride of having had communist and resistant parents, but also, perhaps, in the shame of having been born at the end, of not having been able to help, of arriving too late. As he tells it, he always lived in an obsession with death, in a sort of solitary daze which did not prevent him from throwing himself body and soul into the adventure: in 1965, he discovered, during A party, Cuban music, West Indian culture, he is captivated by it, everything revolves around him, his obsession becomes joining a Latin American guerrilla. He, a child of Poland (his mother returned there, he was raised by his father), fascinated by the West Indies and South America, is looking for a boat that will take him around the world.
Ideal culprit
Pierre Goldman’s life is like a great, eventful journey, a race against time which constantly brings him closer to what he fears the most. He was in Havana the day Che died, then returned to Paris, then finally Venezuela, at 24 years old. Pierre Goldman stayed there for a little over a year, he taught French to L., his comrade-in-arms, by making him read A Season in Hell. He doesn’t kill anyone, he isn’t killed, he returns. In Paris, his life somehow becomes more banal, precarious and infertile. Stuck in West Indian bars at night, where he goes crazy to the sound of the tumba, he plots small hold-ups during the day to ensure his livelihood. Come December 19, 1969, and the Richard-Lenoir affair. For Goldman, if we believe in his innocence – as justice will do after having first found him guilty – it is a day of toothache that he spends not far from the scene of the crime, in Saint -Paul, hesitating to commit petty theft and ending the day with his friend Joël Lautric. He said he learned of the double murder in France-Soir the next day, and thought he would make an ideal culprit. Denounced by a mysterious “X2”, he is preparing to spend five years in prison, the last five years of his life. “It seemed to me that, after a long journey, I had arrived home,” he wrote, still in his Memories… We know the rest, or we will go see Cédric Kahn’s film to find out. In any case, it is in this paradox, between destiny and destination, between a desire to act in the world and the desire to annihilate oneself, that Pierre Goldman stood, famous in spite of himself, innocent after all.
#Pierre #Goldman #life #race #time #Libération