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La Deuxième Guerre mondiale au cinéma: le jeu trouble des identités. Par Josepha Laroche; Préface de Christophe Malavoy

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 73; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/kny305

1468-2931

Ben McCann,

Diverse Academia and Research Topics

French cinema’s depiction of resistance, combat, and collaboration during the Occupation has long been thorny and problematic. The predominant ‘everyone resisted apart from a few bad apples’ myth of post-Liberation France was severely stress-tested in Marcel Ophüls’s Le Chagrin et la pitié (1971) and Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974), which demolished the Gaullist narrative by portraying collaboration as a widespread phenomenon during the Second World War. In the 1990s, films explicitly about the Resistance (Lucie Aubrac, dir. by Claude Berri, 1997; Un héros très discret, dir. by Jacques Audiard, 1996) shifted uneasily between national shame at collaboration and the glorification of Resistance heroism. More recently, works such as Elle s’appelait Sarah (dir. by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2010) and La Rafle (dir. by Roselyne Bosch, 2010) have focused on the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up of Jews. While only Malle’s film makes it into Josepha Laroche’s study, the various historical contestations in French cinema about this period are dealt with in lucid, jargon-free detail. Laroche presents twenty films, from Jeux interdits (dir. by René Clément, 1952) to Au revoir les enfants (dir. by Malle, 1987) via Marie-Octobre (dir. by Julien Duvivier, 1959), that take as their central subject matter the Second World War, and in particular the effect of the conflict on French identity politics. Usually no more than six pages long, each chapter rattles along, with Laroche focusing principally on four key ideas: ‘le règne de l’anomie’, ‘la fragilité des rôles’, ‘les solidarités combattantes’, and ‘l’altérité libératrice’. Each reading nuances issues of identity confusion, the ambivalence of individual behaviour (denouncing, sheltering, resisting, getting by), and the fragility of France’s institutional structures during the war, and elucidates just how many of the selected films seek to code redemption and heroism into their narratives. As such, this is an apt companion piece to Laroche’s earlier La Grande Guerre au cinéma: un pacifisme sans illusions (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014), which surveyed the contradictory forces at play in First World War films from a domestic (Jean Renoir, Abel Gance) and international perspective (Stanley Kubrick, Francesco Rosi). The diptych breaks down simplistic notions of patriotism and facile anti-German feelings and points up not only the brutality of war but also psychologically nuanced portraits of small communities seeking merely to survive. The short bibliographies at the end of each chapter are useful and well selected. The first ten films highlight ‘combien la guerre a affaibli la cohésion sociale au sein des nations belligérantes’ (p. 27): films such as La Chatte (dir. by Henri Decoin, 1958) depict a world of chaos and loss of identity. The second half of the book features films that mark a ‘cohésion retrouvée’ through acts of heroism, self-sacrifice, and the saving of France’s cultural heritage from Nazi looters (Le Silence de la mer, dir. by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1949; The Train, dir. by John Frankenheimer, 1964). The longest chapter is an in-depth look at Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), combining film analysis, a meditation on doubling, and detailed political history. Laroche concludes that all these films reflect how the war ‘avait exacerbé l’ambivalence des conduites […] oscillant entre une quête permanente de soi plus que jamais périlleuse et la reconstruction d’une altérité vécue finalement comme libératrice, sinon rédemptrice’ (p. 178). Such complex, multi-faceted notions are thoughtfully addressed in this useful primer.