Remembering The Occupation In French Film

When collective memory is a source of national debate, the public representation of history quickly becomes a locus of controversy and ideological struggle. This work shows how French film has allowed for a public airing of current concerns through the lens of memory's recreations of the Occupation.

World War II irrevocably shaped culture--and much of cinema--in the 20th century, thanks to its devastating, global impact that changed the way we think about and portray war. This book focuses on European war films made about the war between 1945 and 1985 in countries that were occupied or invaded by the Nazis, such as Poland, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Germany itself. Many of these films were banned, censored, or sharply criticized at the time of their release for the radical ways they reframed the war and rejected the mythologizing of war experience as a heroic battle between the forces of good and evil. The particular films examined, made by arthouse directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Larisa Shepitko, among many more, deviate from mainstream cinematic depictions of the war and instead present viewpoints and experiences of WWII which are often controversial or transgressive. They explore the often-complicated ways that participation in war and genocide shapes national identity and the ways that we think about bodies and sexuality, trauma, violence, power, justice, and personal responsibility--themes that continue to resonate throughout culture and global politics.

Taking a text-led approach, with the emphasis on more recent popular films, Studying French Cinema is directed at non-specialists such as students of French, Film Studies, and the general reader with an interest in post-war French cinema. Each of the chapters focuses on one or more key films from the ground-breaking films of the nouvelle vague (Les 400 coups, 1959) to contemporary documentary (Etre et avoir, 2002) and puts them into their relevant contexts. Depending on the individual film, these include explorations of childhood, adolescence and coming of age (Les 400 coups, L'Argent de poche); auteur ideology and individual style (the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda); the representation of recent French history (Lacombe Lucien and Au revoir les enfants); transnational production practices (Le Pacte des loups); and popular cinema, comedy and gender issues (e.g. Le Diner de cons). Each film is embedded in its cultural and political context. Together, the historical discussions provide an overview of post-war French history to the present. Useful suggestions are made as to studies of related films, both those discussed within the book and outside.

Two World Wars engulfed Europe, Asia and the United States, leaving indelible scars on the landscape and survivors. The trauma of civil wars in Spain (declared) and Latin America (tacit) spanned decades yet, contradictorily, bind parties together even today. Civil wars still haunt Africa where, in more recent years, ethnic cleansing has led to wholesale genocide. Drawing on the emerging field of Memory Studies, this book examines narrative and documentary films, made far from Hollywood, that address memory--both traumatic and nostalgic--surrounding these conflicts, despite attempts by special interests to erase or manipulate history.

This book introduces an English-speaking public to the life of Madeleine Riffaud – one of the last living leaders of the French Resistance. It considers the nature of the rebel hero in France’s founding historical narratives (revolution, insurrection, resistance) while asking what contributions such a hero might make to debates on national identity today. Through a series of narrative close-ups, the book offers perspectives on major chapters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French history through the eyes of activists who experienced them: the Revolution of July 1830 and the 1851 insurrection against Napoleon, as experienced by Riffaud’s ancestor Edme Liron, and the French Resistance, the Vietnam War and French–Algerian conflict as experienced by Riffaud herself. The book aims to explore the kinds of choices individuals face when their beliefs set them at odds with the state, and to suggest that there is a place for individual action in a global arena where state boundaries are becoming increasingly less relevant.

'We request an immediate favour of you, to build a shelter for us women and small children, because we have absolutely no place to take refuge and we are terrified!' This French mother's petition sent to her mayor on the eve of Germany's 1940 invasion of France reveals civilians' security concerns unleashed by the Blitzkrieg fighting tactics of World War II. Unprepared for air warfare's assault on civilian psyches, French planners were among the first in history to respond to civilian security challenges posed by aerial bombardment. France under Fire offers a social, political and military examination of the origins of the French refugee crisis of 1940, a mass displacement of eight million civilians fleeing German combatants. Scattered throughout a divided France, refugees turned to German Occupation officials and Vichy administrators for relief and repatriation. Their solutions raised questions about occupying powers' obligations to civilians and elicited new definitions of refugees' rights.

Movies about significant historical personalities or landmark events like war seem to be governed by a set of unspoken rules for the expression of gender. Films by female directors featuring female protagonists appear to receive particularly harsh treatment and are often criticised for being too 'emotional' and incapable of expressing 'real' history. Through her examination of films from the United States, Europe, Australia and elsewhere, Julia Erhart makes powerful connections between the representational strategies of women directors such as Kathryn Bigelow, Ruth Ozeki and Alexandra von Grote and their concerns with exploring the past through the prism of the present. She also compellingly explores how historiographical concepts like valour, memory, and resistance are uniquely re-envisioned within sub-genres including biopics, historical documentaries, Holocaust movies, and movies about the 'War on Terror'. Gendering History on Screen will make an invaluable contribution to scholarship on historical film and women's cinema.

Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most controversial and uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Although a widespread phenomenon, this was long ignored in the years after the war, when peoples and governments understandably emphasized popular resistance to Nazi occupation as they sought to reconstruct their devastated economies and societies along anti-fascist and democratic lines. Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects, the Quislings who backed Nazi occupation because they were fascists, and focuses instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi uthorities and agencies, and who were ultimately responsible for gearing the economies of the occupied territories to the Nazi war effort. It was their choices which had the greatest impact on the lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen in the occupied territories, including the deportation of slave-workers to the Reich and hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the death camps in the East. In time, as the fortunes of war shifted so decisively against Germany between 1941 and 1944, these collaborators found themselves trapped by the logic of their initial cooperation with their Nazi overlords — caught up between the demands of an increasingly desperate and extremist occupying power, growing internal resistance to Nazi rule, and the relentlessly advancing Allied armies.