French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

experiences during the Occupation and at the same time addresses issues of women’s rights and capital punishment contemporary to its release.

Thus we have a film sur la guerre that eschews war for other concerns. This is the primary tactic employed in the strategy of allegory. Jean Renoir’s 1936 La Grande Illusion explodes the illusory barriers of nationality and ethnicity while using cinematography to illustrate a more liberal, fraternal, and egalitarian society organized along class lines. However, one may find a certain paradox at the heart of this work. While Renoir’s ideal would seem to suggest an erasure of difference, the basic Self/Other binary remains. Instead of German/French or Jewish/Gentile, the divide is most prominent along the lines of gender. In Les Visiteurs du soir (1942),Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert use war in the opposite manner as in La Grande Illusion, allegorizing the wartime era of the film’s society of production rather than using a war setting as a metaphor. Through sumptuous production values and a fantastic medieval setting, the filmmakers voice a subtle but acerbic commentary on the misuse of power and the fascistic tendencies of the Occupation.

Though the Devil is ultimately chased from the château of Les Visiteurs, its inhabitants pay a heavy price; there is no clear victory. One can understand this ambiguous ending as the reflection of a popular consensus that things must change but an equally widespread uncertainty as to how. After the shattering humiliation of the Occupation, French cinema rose to the challenge with deliberate assuredness embodied in the myth of Resistancialism. René Clément’s 1946 La Bataille du rail is “the mythic film of the Resistance.” ¹⁹ In an effort to recuperate a sense of pride and national unity, it deploys the strategy of Barthesean myth, infusing its signification with an invisible ideology. Surprisingly, The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966) performs much the same function. In an effort to render its Communist and anti-colonial ideas accessible to a Western audience, it adopts a documentary-like style that results in a faux-naturalism. Despite its anti-hegemonic agenda, it ultimately recycles ideas (that is, Western and colonialist ones) inherent to conventional film form.

Chapters 4 and 5 mark an important shift from a Sorlinian emphasis to a Rosenstonian one. These films are more than artifacts of their respective