French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

This is a good, Levi-Straussian view of how this kind of movie may function, but it is not sufficient, for a genre is determined just as much by its content. Richard Abel provides such a definition in its earliest stages, referring it to it as “historical reconstruction”: 1) a subject calling for the reconstruction of a historical period; 2) elaborate, sumptuous, authentic decors and costumes; 3) a narrative that emphasizes climatic set-pieces—of dazzling tableaux or sensational, sweeping action. ³ A synthesis of these views gives us a good idea of the conventional historical film: a popular filmic narrative set in the past whose story emphasizes spectacle and/or action and whose primary function is to represent the relationship of the personal to the social.

What, then, can we consider to be a war film? Joseph Daniel divides the sub-genre into two categories. “War films” (films de guerre) are “films de fiction dont le cadre et le sujet sont constitués par un conflit armé, et qui nous donnent à voir un ou plusieurs combats entres forces adverses.” ⁴ On the other hand, the term “films about war” (films sur la guerre) applies to “tout film évoquant, à un moment ou un autre, la guerre en général ou un conflit particulier, à condition que cette évocation ait une certaine importance dans la conduite du récit, dans l’existence des personnages et dans les rapports qu’ils entretiennent, ou dans la morale de l’œuvre.” ⁵ This distinction will allow me to consider films that may not be conventionally classified as war films but that nonetheless concern themselves with war.

Film and History

The intersection of movies and history is a new, growing, and contentious field. It seems that historians, whose traditional methods are based largely on an Enlightenment model of empiricism along with a novelistic mode of representation, are ill at ease with the cinema and its tendency toward historic liberties and even outright invention. Only in 1980 does Pierre Sorlin’s The Film in History boldly advance the notion that the cinematic medium is a valid field of historical investigation. Sorlin focuses on the feature film rather than newsreels or documentaries,