Abstract
Film, according to Robert Rosenstone, has become the ‘chief medium for carrying the stories our culture tells itself’.1 This affirmation has special relevance for the first half of the 20th century, given the popularity of historical films in this era, and the emergence of cinema as the most popular form of mass entertainment throughout urban Western Europe. In spite of their popularity, or perhaps because of it, the use of films as historical sources remains contested, and we are accustomed to debates that pit cinematic adaptations against the events on which they are based. Normally, in these contests, the popular media is deemed unsuitable, limited or simplistic, even when allowing for format and time constraints. In addition, two schools of thought treat films differently. While film history tends to assess the documentary evidence related to a film’s production and reception, film scholars seek to elucidate its cinematic ‘language’, reading closely its photographic construction and technical details. This essay merges both approaches to study a doubly partisan subject: civilian resistance to fascism in the Second World War.
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Notes
See Robert Rosenstone, History on Film, Film on History (London: Pearson, 2006), p. 3.
On this, see Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of The Italian Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2013) and
Gustavo Corni, ‘Italy’, in Bob Moore (ed.), Resistance in Western Europe (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), pp. 157–187.
Tom Behan, The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies (London: Pluto, 2009).
See Claudio Fogu, ‘Italiani Brava Gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory’ in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 147–176.
The film remains controversial. See John Sweets’ Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Chris Darke, ‘Monsieur Memory’, Sight & Sound 7 (1997), p. 24.
See Robert Gildea, ‘Resistance, Reprisals and Community in Occupied France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003), pp. 163–185.
See Rod Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France 1942–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London: Simon and Schuster, 2009) and Rousso, Vichy Syndrome.
As Paul Webster notes: ‘It was not until thirty years after the deportations that most survivors found out when and where their relatives had died.’ Pétain’s Crime (London: MacMillan, 1990), p. 8.
M. R. D. Foot, Resistance: An Analysis of European Resistance to Nazism1940–1945 (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 192.
The supposed collaboration of Chetniks with Germans has been questioned by, for example, Simon Trew, Britain, Mihailovic and the Chetniks, 1941–42 (London: Macmillan, 1998).
Marko Attila Hoare, ‘Whose is the Partisan Movement?: Serbs, Croats and the Legacy of a Shared Resistance’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 15 (2002), pp. 24–25
According to Tim Snyder: ‘Half the population of Belarus had either been killed or moved’ by the end of the war. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), pp. 250–251.
Jan Maksymiuk, ‘Belarus Film About Partisans Goes Against Official Grain’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 13 July 2005 (http://www.rferl.org, date accessed 7 April 2014).
Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 22.
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
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© 2015 Mercedes Camino
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Camino, M. (2015). Foundational Films: The Memorialization of Resistance in Italy, France, Belarus and Yugoslavia. In: Carlsten, J.M., McGarry, F. (eds) Film, History and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_6
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