Z

Oliver Stone has named Z as the model for JFK repeatedly, and the two films share a method rather than a subject: a political assassination reconstructed as a procedural, told through an investigating magistrate or prosecutor who keeps going after everyone has told him to stop. The technique carries over too. Costa-Gavras cuts testimony against rapid flashes of what may or may not have happened, so the film assembles a version of events in front of the audience out of fragments; JFK's editing does the same at greater length. Both end with captions rather than resolution.

Z's international success is what made the political conspiracy procedural commercially viable, and The Parallax View belongs to the cycle of American films that followed it. The shared shape: a public killing officially closed as the work of one man, an investigator who will not accept it, witnesses who die one at a time, and an organisation that is never fully shown. Pakula's film removes the one thing Z allows, which is that its magistrate does get as far as indicting the officers before the epilogue takes it away. Weighted low deliberately: this is a claim about a cycle rather than a debt either film-maker has stated.