French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

This moment from Alain Resnais’ 1959 Hiroshima mon amour illustrates a radical conception of time and space whose particular enunciation may be unique to cinema. More important to the present study, it demonstrates an equally radical shift in artistic and popular attitudes toward the traumatic memory of war. After the Débâcle, collaboration, resistance, and the rafle Vel’d’hiv, storytelling on the silver screen would never be the same. This is not only a matter of narrative content, but also that of the jump-cut: using cinematic form to raise questions or elide them, to explore history in new ways, or to camouflage bias in historical “fact.”

How does form relate to the ideas circulated by a given film? More specifically, how does French cinematic form react to the tumultuous events of the war-plagued twentieth century? What forces does it deploy and what strategies does it adopt in order to cope with the unprecedented brutality of trench warfare or the humiliation of foreign occupation? By extension, how does it address new and changing conceptions of history and historiography?

This book makes a close formal analysis of ten French war films from across the twentieth century. It investigates the discrete, if complex, enunciations of the philosophies of each movie, the ideologies it embodies without necessarily declaring them openly. ¹ It concentrates on war films because they explore especially powerful moments of crisis in French national identity. Examining a selection of works from across the past century allows me to do two things. First, I can place an emphasis on films made in the shadow of war. Abel Gance’s 1919 J’Accuse, René Clément’s 1945 La Bataille du rail, and Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers all resound with the temporal proximity of their subjects. Second, the breadth of this selection also permits me to sketch an evolution of popular attitudes toward historical film, specific conflicts, and historiography in general.

To date, only four books exist dedicated to the French war film. ² Joseph Daniel’s Guerre et cinéma appeared in 1972. The work is an admirable effort in many respects but outdated today. Paul Virilio published Guerre et cinéma in 1984, but instead of the film industry’s portrayal of war,