French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

points to the artificial nature of all historical writing. In the postmodern era, the supposed objectivity of empiricism has succumbed to epistemological skepticism—the basic modernist conflation of form and content should be a thing of the past. Moreover, cinema is not historiography, and holding the former to the standards of the latter is inappropriate. ¹¹ Rather, historical films must be understood on their own terms. ¹²

Though Marc Ferro’s Cinema and History (published in French in 1977, translated by Naomi Gree in 1988) predates Sorlin, his ideas have much more to do with those of Rosenstone, Munslow, and Marcia Landy. Central to Ferro’s approach are two axes: the “historical reading of a film and the cinematographic reading of history.” ¹³ Ferro insists upon film’s historical agency: more than a mere reflection of its culture of production and consumption, a film can change things, can make things happen. Propaganda is a strong example, but other kinds of films have this potential as well. Ferro demonstrates how Veit Harlan’s Jud Süss (Jew Seuss, 1940) had direct causative effects of the molestation of Jews after its release in Marseilles. ¹⁴ One could also point to Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1955), which continues to have a lasting impact on its audiences and which was so well received in West Germany that it earned national government funding to support its distribution and viewing by various youth groups. ¹⁵ Historical films do even more than make things happen. “Like every cultural product, political action, and business, each film is a history that is History, with its network of personal relationships, its orders of objects and men where privileges and burdens, hierarchies and honors are regulated.” ¹⁶ Most remarkable about this observation is its understanding of history as a (at least partially) subjective construction. Ferro goes directly to the heart of where Sorlin fears to tread: “a cinematographic reading of history presents the historian with the problem of his own reading of the past.” ¹⁷

Theory: the Toolbox Approach

This book deliberately uses a wide variety of theoretical approaches, from gender studies to historical experimentalism, from bricolage to Eco’s typology of the Middle Ages. Rather than attempting to impose