French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

Virilio focuses on the military use of cinematic technology. Les Écrans de l’ombre is Sylvie Lindeperg’s 2005 offering to the field, focusing upon French films made during and about the Occupation. Philip Dines’ Images and the Algerian War (1994) similarly focuses on a single conflict. This paucity of attention raises an important question: is there actually such a thing as the French war film as a genre unto itself? Has the notion of genre lost any real meaning? Even if one can arrive at a satisfactory definition of “the French war film,” is it still useful? This problematic will become one of our touchstones, for I will stretch the bounds of what may be conventionally considered a “war film,” especially by Anglophone audiences.

Here already we encounter an obstacle and a potential tool: cross-cultural comparisons between Anglophone movies about war and their French counterparts. On one hand, one must shed certain preconceptions. French cinema has little to compare with All Quiet on the Western Front, Patton, Iwo Jima, Rambo, or Saving Private Ryan. Spectacle and individual heroism are infrequent concerns of French filmmakers when they approach the subject of war. On the other hand, some comparisons can be fruitful. Anglophone war films are infused with elements from other cinematic genres, such as romance, action, Westerns, or thrillers—and especially melodrama. Similar French works are also hybrid, though they draw more often from literary or philosophical wellsprings. Already we have begun to accrue characteristics that may help to define the French war film. Works in this category seem to prefer the collective over the individual and quiet drama over explosive spectacle; they are also, perhaps necessarily, hybrid in nature, incorporating not only other genres but other mediums—and always a story of the past.

For the war film is a kind of historical film, but what constitutes the historical film as a genre? Leger Grindon, in Shadows of the Past,offers a good starting point by identifying the genre’s central theme and its recurring elements. Historical films meditate upon the relationship of the individual to society, most often through the recurring figures of both romance (representing the personal) and spectacle (the collective).