French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

Chapter Reconnaissance:

A Product of Patronage

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Reconnaissance

Think of the extraordinary spectacle offered us: the birth of an art which is as important by virtue of its esthetic innovation—the depiction of movement—as by its social consequences, unprecedented since the invention of printing.

—André Bazin, 1943, “Let’s Rediscover Cinema!”

A young European woman sips coffee in the morning sun on her hotel room balcony. The kimono draped casually over her slight frame and the brush of a smile upon her lips speak silent volumes of her contentment—even happiness. The cup clinks on a saucer as she turns to look inside upon her sleeping Japanese lover. With a sigh, she leans upon the doorframe and watches his hand twitch slightly as he dreams. Suddenly, we are no longer in a hotel room; the hand is not upon a bed of soft linen; the hand before us is not the same, resting limply now upon the stony ground. The woman recoils from this unexplained intrusion, disturbed as much by its seeming randomness as by deeper secrets to which we are not yet privy.