Abstract
France’s ongoing efforts at self-definition at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have involved new conceptions of citizenship and nationality, as well as what it means to be French, culturally and internationally. But the struggle to set national parameters has also entailed the search for an accurate portrayal of a past in which France could recognize itself. In a 2002 essay entitled “What is a European,” A. S. Byatt noted that, in Europe, “a lot of 50- and 60-year-olds seem to become spontaneously obsessed with genealogy and memoirs.”1 Belgian born filmmaker Chantal Akerman has said that the “only thing countries in Europe have in common is their collective guilt in allowing the Nazis to slaughter Europe’s Jewish population during the Second World War.”2 The fixation on the war’s moral dimensions has no doubt besieged all of postwar Europe. It has been particularly acute in France, as the French have persistently and agonizingly reconsidered the war’s effects on their “collective memory.”3
The function of cinema, even above its artistic function, is to satisfy the immutable collective psychic needs that have been repressed.
—Andre Buzin (October 1943)
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Notes
A. S. Byatt, “What is a European” New York Times, October 13, 2002, 50.
Chantal Ackerman, “The Filmmakers’ Panel,” in Screening Europe: Images and Identities in Contemporary European Cinema, ed. Duncan Petrie (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 67.
James E. Young has changed this formulation from “collective memory” to “collected memories,” given that “we don’t share memory but rather forms of memory.” While this alteration is warranted, it may risk underestimating a shared desire for a public understanding of historical events. See The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), xi.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 41.
Claudio Fogu and Wulf Kansteiner, “The Politics of Memory and the Poetics of History,” in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 296.
Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).
Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1987);
The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
See Henry Rousso and Eric Conan, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan Eracher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998); and
Nathan Eracher, “Timely Predications: The Use and Abuse of History in Contemporary France,” Soundings 81, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1998): 235–56.
See Moses I. Finley, The Use and Abuse of History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975);
Stanley Hoffmann, “Regards d’outre-Hexagone,” Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire 5 (January–March 1985): 142;
Jacques Revel uses the term “éclatement de l’histoire” in his essay “Histoire vs Mémoire en France aujourd’hui,” (“History vs Memory in France Today”) French Politics, Culture & Society, 18, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–11.
See also Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History or How the Past is Taught (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981);
Régis Debray, La République expliquée à ma fille (“The Republic Explained to My Daughter,” Paris: Seuil, 1998);
Max Gallo, L’Amour de la France expliqué à mon fils (“The Love of France Explained to My Son,” Paris: Seuil, 1998).
Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 8.
Henri Rousso, La Hantise du passé: Entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Editions Textuel, 1998).
The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France, trans. Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 2002.
Pascal Ory, “Why Ee So Cruel? Some Modest Proposals to Cure the Vichy Syndrome,” in France at War: Vichy and the Historians, eds. Sarah Fishman et al., trans. David Lake (New York: Eerg, 2000), 278 (my emphasis).
Iain Chambers, “Citizenship, Language, and Modernity,” PMLA, 117, no. 1 (January 2002): 25.
See: The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial, ed. Richard J. Golsan (New York: Routledge, 2000).
Jean-Benoit Levy, Les Grandes Missions du cinéma (Montreal: Lucien Parizeau & Compagnie, 1994), 11 (my translation).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions, 1983), 40,
cited in Allen Carey-Webb, Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity (New York: Garland, 1998), 4.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 122.
Jean-Michel Frodon, La Projection nationale: Cinéma et nation (Paris: Ed. Odile Jacob, 1998), 19 (my translation).
Jill Forbes has shown that, in fact, the time limit coincided more or less with the actual production capacity of the French, but that perception was different. See: “The French Nouvelle Vague,” in World Cinema: Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 77.
Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “The Reconstruction of French Cinema,” in France in Focus: Film and National Identity, ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Sue Harris (New York: Berg, 2000), 16.
André Bazin, French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Critical Esthetic, intro. François Truffaut, trans. Stanley Hochman (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981), 33.
Truffaut’s equally famous piece of 1954, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” taking issue with the “The Tradition of Quality” of the war years, adds the notion of the cinematic auteur who is the artistic creator of the film, writing the script, controlling its vision, again expressing the filmmaker’s personality. Truffaut’s essay appeared in English in Movies and Methods, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 224–37.
Timothy Murray, PMLA 3 (March 1999): 280.
Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (“What Is a Nation?”) in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Caiman-Lévy, 1947–1961), 892.
Michael Kelly, “The Historical Emergence of Everyday Life,” Sites: The Journal of 20th Century/Contempomry French Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 77.
Jacques Le Goff, “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities,” in Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, intro. Colin Lucas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169.
Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 4.
Dominique Veillon, Vivre et Survivre en France 1939–1947 (“Life and Survival in France 1939–1947,” Paris: Payot, 1995), jacket cover.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 33–35.
Quoted in Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2.
Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, “Evil Women in the Post-war French Cinema,” in Heroines with Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema 1945–51, ed. Ulrike Sieglohr (New York: Cassell, 2000), 61.
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 35.
Michèle Sarde, Regard sur les Françaises (Paris: Editions Stock, 1983), 612.
Paula Synder, The European Women’s Almanac (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 125.
Albert and Nicole. du Roy, Citoyennesl Ily a cinquante ans, le vote des femmes (“Women Citizens! The Women’s Vote Was 50 Years Ago,” Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 220 (my translation).
The du Roys are quoting from Florence Montreynaud’s Le XXe Siècle des femmes (“The Twentieth Century of Women,” Paris: Nathan, 1992), 305.
See Laure Adler, Les Femmes politiques (“Political Women,” Paris: Seuil, 1993), 120–28.
See, for example, Margaret L. Rossiter, Women in Resistance (New York: Praeger, 1986).
Paula Schwartz, “Redefining Resistance: Women’s Activism in Wartime France,” In Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 142.
Sarah Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 169.
Robert Gildea reports that Pierre Laval actually remarked that Pétain wielded more power than Louis XIV. See The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 25.
Charles de Gaulle, The Complete Memoirs of Charles lie Gaulle 1940–1946, vol. 1, The Cull to Honour, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), 3.
See Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1989–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 9.
André Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 170.
Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944–1968 (“Cinephilia: Invention of a Gaze, History of a Culture 1944–1968,” Paris: Fayard, 2003).
Ginette Vincendeau, “Brigitte Bardot,” in World Cinema: Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 112.
Noel Eurch and Geneviève Sellier, La Dróle de Guerre des sexes du cinéma français: 1930–1956 (Paris: Nathan, 1996).
François Garçon, “Ce Curieux Age d’or des cineastes français” (“This Curious Golden Age of French Filmmakers”), La Vie culturelle sous Vichy, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1990), 293–313.
Claude Berri’s autobiographical film, The Two of Us (Le Vieillard et l’enfant), is an exception, given that it came out in 1966, thus well before Robert Paxton’s work and The Sorrow and the Pity in the 1970s.
Jean Douchet and Cédric Anger, French New Wave, trans. Robert Eonnano (New York: Distributed Art Publishers and Editions Hazan/Cinématique Française, 1999), 11–12.
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 63.
See Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1950).
Lynn A. Higgins, “Two Women Filmmakers Remember the Dark Years,” Modern and Contemporary France 7, no. 1 (1999): 60.
Marc Ferro, Cinema and History, trans. Naomi Greene (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 81–82,
cited in Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past of Postwar French Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999), 12.
Lynn A. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 22.
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© 2008 Leah D. Hewitt
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Hewitt, L.D. (2008). Film as Memory: A Battleground for Shaping Identity. In: Remembering the Occupation in French Film. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612105_1
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