The movie watched was Danton, which was released in color in 1983 and was directed by Andrzej Wajda. Grard Depardieu plays Danton while Wojciech Pszoniak plays Robespierre, the two main characters.

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Jassi Sikand

Mr. Tustin

AP European History – 3

13 October 2010

Danton Movie Review

The movie watched was Danton, which was released in color in 1983 and was directed by Andrzej Wajda. Gérard Depardieu plays Danton while Wojciech Pszoniak plays Robespierre, the two main characters. Danton was watched in Mr. Tustin’s room on Movie Night. It was based on L'Affaire Danton by Stanislawa Przybyszewska which was based on real historical events.

In Paris, the Revolution's leaders, with the backing of the angry mobs, set policies that the rest of the country, left to their own devices, would probably have disowned, at least initially. The course of the Revolution was shaped by a small group of extraordinary men, all young, who started out as idealists, then became comrades and close friends, godfathers to one another's children. The movie starts in November of 1793, with Danton returning to Paris from his country retreat upon learning that the Committee for Public Safety, under Robespierre's incitement, has begun a series of massive executions, The Terror. Confident in the peoples' support, Danton clashes with his former ally, but calculating Robespierre soon rounds up Danton and his followers, tries them before a revolutionary tribunal and sends them to the guillotine. Not surprisingly, Robespierre is sent to the guillotine not three months after Danton.

All of the major characters portrayed in the movie are based on real historical figures, and for the most part are portrayed quite accurately. Danton is based on Danton while Robespierre is based on Robespierre. Danton was always a very passionate man and was portrayed as such in the movie. An example of this would be when Danton goes into a fury that the people are not being represented his trial and his own basic liberties and rights are not being addressed. He goes into such a rage that he delivers a very loud and very long speech uninterrupted – not that people did not try to interrupt him – that left him hoarse for the rest of the movie. However, what the film does not show the audience is that Danton played a huge part in the September 1793 massacre in which mobs were encouraged to ransack Paris prisons and, without discrimination, murder everyone they could lay hands on as agents of the feared monarchist counterrevolution. Danton, though portrayed as one, was not a saint. Still, this detail does not detract much from the overall message Danton was good and Robespierre bad, and that Danton still believed that the people still had a right to be represented and that no matter what, basic rights still had to be recognized, while Robespierre was prepared to send thousands of people do their deaths, including the head of the Revolution, Danton. Robespierre is portrayed as a heartless person for doing so, and perhaps rightfully so. Robespierre, however, was very passionate about his beliefs as well. He believed in his ideals, however his believe in his ideals was so strong that he started believing that things were done either his way or the high way and as such many of the basic reasons that the Revolution started were discarded in favor of what was in all reality a dictatorship rather than a government that represented the people, though this government still believed that it was doing the best for its people. This is exactly how Robespierre is portrayed in the movie. Robespierre is very politically smart, maybe too smart for his own good. When rumors start floating around that Danton may be a traitor to the Revolution, Robespierre refuses to hear it as Danton is his closest friend. He also knows that if he were to arrest Danton the people would lose faith in the Revolution and turn against it. But once Danton openly declares a sort of war on the Revolution, saying that the Terror went against the Revolution’s ideals, Robespierre does not hesitate in trying and executing Danton, to the point that he sabotaged the trial into basically forcing the jury to convict Danton even though the people were in an uproar over such a decision.

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Danton was set in and around Paris during the French Revolution of 1789 to 1795. The movies’ scenes were actually shot where the events happened, Château de Guermantes, Seine-et-Marne, France, Grandes Écuries de Versailles, Yvelines, France, and in Senlis, Oise, France. Houses, food, tools, weapons and especially hairstyles were depicted quite accurately; in regards to the hairstyle the movie actually depicted how a subject was dressed to be painted and how a wig was put on. Swords and guns were used as weapons; however the guillotine was a still widely used mechanism back in the 1700s.

The film was not ...

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