Cinema and Nation:

French Cinema
Week 8-9
 War and Occupation
• History of Occupation by the Nazis, Vichy government,
extensive collaboration by populace to get by – leads to a
need in the 1970s to revisit the war years and reassess them

• France declares war at the same time as the UK in 1939,

but by 1940 has been occupied by Germany. The gov’t
surrenders, and France is separated into Occupied and un-
Occupied Zones. The Occupied Zone is directly under Nazi
authority, while the un-Occupied zone becomes the
supposedly independent Vichy government.
 Vichy Government
• Vichy government was authoritarian, corporatist, anti-semitic –
violently opposed to pre-war French leftist government

• The regime contained many French elements – nationalism and anti-

communism as well as rural conservatism that derive from pre-war
French society

• Anti-Semitism – another controversy – most agree now that Vichy

regime shamefully deported French Jews to death camps in
Germany. However, some argue that the Vichy government tried to
minimise the effect and it was better than being completely
Occupied. And while some Vichy officials claimed they were forced
to comply with Nazi orders, others saw the rise of French anti-
Semitism that cannot be all blamed on the Germans.
• Meanwhile, exiled leader Charles de Gaulle in London –
leading France’s resistance, develops idea of Free France

• Important to note that there was real debate about who

represented France best – UK supported de Gaulle, but the
US still saw Vichy as the real gov’t of France

• Idea of civil war: Naomi Greene suggests – a deep split in

French national identity that had long-lasting effects

• Debates in France: was the Vichy gov’t a temporary

aberration? Or can we see continuities between the period
of Nazism and the Republics before and after.
 Resistance
• French resistance – groups of guerrillas composed
of ordinary citizens working with Allied military
and spies, who opposed the Nazi Occupation from
within

• Modes of guerrilla warfare – sabotage of bridges,

roads, communications, occasionally on a large
scale, also smaller acts of resistance, spying,
gaining information
 Resistance
• Résistancialisme / Myth of Resistance – postwar, it became
a cliché that everyone claimed to have been in the heroic
Resistance – nobody would admit to having collaborated,
or even to having done nothing. Since the Resistance was
secret, it was easy to make false claims. Not just individual
claims though – national myth developed that made
France’s wartime experience seem as heroic as possible

• It is this myth that gets attacked in the 1970s – not to say

that many people did not fight heroically in the Resistance
– but that there were also those who collaborated with the
Nazis
 Post 1968 Critique
• In the class on Weekend, we looked at the '68
évènements – both the readings pointed to popular
memory as one of the issues. Important that '68 was not
only about directly political changes, but also cultural
change – how France saw itself. The impact of 68 on
electoral politics is open to debate, but its impact on
cultural politics is huge.

• Key element in this revolt was to rethink the war years –

protest by younger generation against the political class
that had insisted on a glorious narrative of French history
• 1970s in France involved a national debate about
history, and responsibility – film plays a huge part
in this debate.

• Marcel Ophüls' Le chagrin et la pitié/The Sorrow

and the Pity – documentary that first debunked
the Resistance myth – Greene describes it in terms
of skepticism – challenge to conventional
wisdom, ideologies of left or right – although the
left supported the film, while the right hated it and
wanted to censor it.
• Memories of this era were repressed in mainstream culture –
very similar to the situations in Germany and Italy. However,
while those countries could hardly deny responsibility, even if
they mostly didn’t face it, France was in a different position.
Because France was one of the Allies, and the Vichy gov’t
part of Occupation, it was possible to repress it almost
completely, focusing instead on the heroic exiled gov’t of De
Gaulle.

• So when criticisms began in 1968, it has been described as

opening the floodgates, the return of the repressed (explain
concept)

• Idea of remembering Vichy years as traumatic – films go back

to the moment of trauma in order to exorcise its power
• Political act of memory – forgetting as associated
with conservatism, confronting difficult memories
as a leftist, radical act

• However, in France the situation can get

complicated, because the myth of the Resistance is
part of both rightist and leftist mythology – both
Gaullists and the French communist party fought
fiercely against the Nazis, and both groups were
invested in the myth. So by rejecting it, claiming
that people were quite cheerfully Fascistic, these
films were not welcomed by all on the left.
 La mode rétro
• La Mode rétro is the name given to films that
returned to the past, often the wartime past

• This cycle of films became hugely popular in

France

• They range from the difficult and controversial, to

more nostalgic films like The Last Metro

• They begin a debate around historical

representation and art cinema in Europe
• Even though the films can sometimes be radical in
their interpretation of history, the movement is
often believed to be reactionary – contrast to the
immediacy and roughness of the French New
Wave – use of the past to avoid difficult issues in
the present, rather than to address them.

• There’s a real ambivalence about the rise of

historical films in France – they can be interpreted
in very different ways
 Lacombe, Lucien
• Naturalistic, low key – relates to French idea of history
from below

• Greene relates this to The Sorow and the Pity –

interviewing ordinary people, looking at small details of a
time period to really understand it

• Relates to French debates on historiography – shift from

the traditional top down narratives of great leaders, wars,
politicians to a bottom up method – studying peasants,
everyday life, building up apparently trivial details to
construct a version of the past
• Radicality – sees ordinary people as equally
important as leaders in shaping history – history not
driven purely by individuals, or by economic forces,
but also from below

• However, this method does not always paint ordinary

people as heroic – in the post-68 years, the method
debunked the myth of heroic resistance, showed the
everyday life of collaboration

• LL caused controversy – some felt it was too

sympathetic to the collaborators, that the film
essentially forgives them.
 Postmodernity
Both Lacombe, Lucien's form as a 'new history film' as
well as Les Amants du Pont-Neuf's Cinéma du Look
can be seen as postmodern

• The historical elements of postmodernity: late

capitalism (i.e. consumer culture, service economy, end
of gold standard, credit economy, financial uncertainty)

• Also end of Euro-communism, globalisation – 1989

moment of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is significant
 Historical / philosophical aspects of postmodernity

• Lyotard – incredulity towards metanarratives – post-WWII lack

of belief in progress, end of Enlightenment project, decentering
of subject – related to social movements, civil rights, feminism,
gay rights – universal male subject unseated.

• Also, it can be related to the rethinking of French history,

resistance myth.

• Seen by some as negative – inability to think totality, imagine

change, or relativism, no ground for moral judgment.

• For others positive, breaking down of false certainties, ability to

centre other kinds of subjects (e.g. As in poststructuralism:
Derrida, Foucault, etc.)
 Cultural aspects of postmodernity

1. Art attempts to express new experiences of fragmentation, lack of

straightforward belief, complexity, speed. Hence: bricolage,
reflexivity, textual layering and complexity.

2. Nostalgia, turning back to the past – if nothing is new, or nothing

can be believed in, that past can seem utopian. Retro fashions,
creative reuses of the past.

3. Political engagement – rise of postcolonialism, queer, feminist

filmmaking, as we will see after the Spring break.

4. Irony, doubling – relates to lack of belief.

5. Spectacle, the image – engagement with image culture, neo-gaudy,

neo-baroque
• Some of these elements come from modernism –
post- is still related – fragment, reflexivity, etc.

• But with postmodernism we see both a change in

scale – more, excessive aspects and a change in
kind – from JLG’s Marxist, politically radical use
of reflexivity to Les Amants du Pont-Neuf much
less certain references.