French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

dernière à Marienbad both articulate literary concerns and express a literary approach to film form. Thus we need to expand our vocabulary slightly. To examine both of these categories, I will adopt the term “literary appropriation.”

Abel Gance’s 1919 J’Accuse is a landmark of early cinema that signaled the establishment of movies as a significant art form and meditated upon the brutality of World War I in a unique way. Despite a stated project to create a language of tragedy “from scratch,” the film’s singularity stems rather from an irreverent borrowing and amalgamation of preexisting literary forms. Classic narrative structure, theatric conventions, melodrama, and the ever-shifting paradigmatic associations of nineteenth-century poetry all collide in this film. Gance uses familiar forms to engage his audience but subtly prepares them for a radical transformation from a melodramatic love story and conventional war heroism to a redemptive myth that seeks to express a new language of loss.

A key concept in helping us to understand Gance’s cobbling together of so many disparate elements is bricolage, a discursive strategy from Claude Levi-Strauss’s La Pensée sauvage, wherein he contrasts the bricoleur with the engineer. Whereas the latter thinks scientifically and approaches obstacles in a straightforward manner, the formerthinks magically, or mythically, and approaches obstacles in an irreverent way. ²⁰ The engineer is mostly concerned with concepts; he tackles each problem he encounters anew and crafts tools and resources specific to his task. The bricoleur deals with preexisting signs; he uses whatever materials are already at hand. Since these preexisting tools are not necessarily the “best” for the job, the bricoleur, through mythical thought, works by analogy and comparison, and his creations are effectively just rearrangements of various elements. ²¹ Though bricolage is constrained to functioning upon the ruins of a previous discourse, it performs a fascinating reversal of the Saussurean signifier and signified. Its components are endlessly reversible, associable, and even interchangeable.

While J’Accuse borrows widely from myriad literary forms, Claude Chabrol’s Une affaire de femmes (1988) is derived primarily from a single written work, the book of the same name by Francis Szpiner. This is