It is striking to observe that the Second World War inspired so few French fiction films, given the considerable importance of this event in contemporary history. Without making cinema a “reflection” of society, but on the contrary an element of the very society in which it is produced — a crossing-place of the representation it wishes to give of itself, but at the same time of what it wishes to conceal from itself in a more or less avowed way — one can follow the various stages of these representations from the end of the 1940s to the end of the century, noting instructive, if not explanatory, correlations between the two instances.
As early as the end of the 1940s, the war is represented exclusively as an armed or passive struggle against the occupier; two antagonistic and hostile forces govern the universe of these films: the Germans and the French. Whether it is the mute resistance of Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea), inspired by Vercors’s eponymous novel, or action films, one sees only two opposing camps, embodied most often by ordinary men and women whose courage and determination lead them to engage in the fight against the occupier — without the ideological factor being clearly expressed, for example the struggle against Nazism. Most often these are people with no particularly important role in public life, but simple folk: railwaymen, small shopkeepers, employees, schoolteachers. Besides the evident Manichaeism animating this representation — the good ones being the French and the wicked ones the Germans — there are neither traitors nor collaborators, and when they do exist, their role is individualized and fits into a suspense story; the Resistance appears united in a single goal, the divisions and rivalries that punctuated its history are not evoked, and, finally and above all, there is no ideological project; it is merely a matter of “driving” the enemy out of France, and not of reflecting on the country’s future once its liberation would be effective, nor, above all, on the responsibilities of those who brought about the defeat.
There is, moreover, another way of approaching this period, by way of comedy, which derides the occupier and exalts the resourcefulness of little people swept up, in spite of themselves, in a dangerous adventure. La Grande Vadrouille (Don’t Look Now… We’re Being Shot At!), or La Vache et le Prisonnier (The Cow and I), to cite only the principal ones, stage decent “average Frenchmen” gathered in an epic that owes more to farce than to tragedy, and from which collaborators, and especially the Jews, are absent.
With time, one may wonder why such unanimity, why such a will to smooth over conflicts and to give a schematic, sanitized vision of reality. One must briefly recall the policy of national reconciliation desired by de Gaulle, the necessity of reconstruction prevailing over the examination of the facts, and the acceptance by the parties of the left, in particular the Communist Party, of this policy. There ensued, after a brief purge and the trials of Pétain and Laval, the establishment of a veritable taboo on the Vichy period, one that would affect not only cinema and all the intellectual output of those years, but the very memory of the acts committed during this period.
Subsequently, from the end of the 1940s, the Cold War divided the former allies, and the use of the atomic bomb pushed the memories of the past into the background, making way for the fear of a total war that would destroy France and Europe. Ideological confrontations dominated the intellectual and political life of France, and the atomic threat hanging over international politics created a permanent tension that was exploited by every party at the slightest sign of a conflict that might turn into a worldwide conflagration. Measured against the supposed consequences of such an event, the disasters of war as such were almost minimized.
It is in this atmosphere of anguish that, in 1957, the film by Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima, My Love), was released. We shall not enter into the entire problematic and aesthetic of the film, stopping only at the question of war. The principal idea of this film is that one cannot represent war, nor even remember it consciously, hence the incantatory repetition of the Japanese man’s sentence to the heroine: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” However much she repeats — I saw photos, films, exhibitions, I saw women and children in the hospitals, burned, mutilated, I read statistics on the incandescent heat of the bomb, I read every detail about Hiroshima — the Japanese man can only tell her to the point of satiety: you saw nothing, because this horror cannot be recounted or even shown. The documentary film in which she plays as an actress under the headdress of a nurse is itself derisory, and the shooting in the open street ambivalent: one does not know whether it is a real demonstration of Hiroshima survivors or actors playing that role. No description can make war visible. War destroys individual life; it destroyed that of the actress who, at eighteen, loved a young German soldier, and for this was dragged, her head shaved, through her town and shut up for a year in a cellar by her family. Shame, incomprehension, madness, made of the young girl a marked woman who had no other recourse, in order to survive, than to forget the past. For the past cannot be recounted, and it will take the journey to Hiroshima to free a memory blocked for years and to relive the past in deliverance. But at the same time, in this film, there is a troubling element: the fact that war, because it destroys all normality, permits the amorous encounter: “it is because of the war that I can know you,” says the Japanese lover to the young woman, and “it is probable that we will die without seeing each other again,” she says, and he answers, “except perhaps, one day, the war.” Astonishing and perhaps shocking phrases, which express the idea that war, in its paroxysm, permits passion — even if one day it is forgotten, because it is an event that must not prevent life from reclaiming its rights, provided that one carries out, sooner or later, the work of elucidation and assumption necessary in order no longer to fear that “it will begin again one day or another.” This certainty that war is near, fatal, that one is powerless before this terrible event, makes of it almost a natural event, or one subject to regulating powers uncontrollable by individuals. It is war taken in its universal sense, reaching all of humanity; and it is the general feeling of the Cold War years, fed by the threats of conflict that ran through the international field on the occasion of the USA / USSR confrontations in which France and Europe found themselves, willingly or not, implicated — despite de Gaulle’s efforts to extricate himself from this dichotomy.
Until then, films had made no mention of the fate of the Jews under the Vichy regime. It was only in the 1970s that filmmakers — themselves Jewish, moreover — began to situate themselves in this more specific field, such as Claude Berri, with Le Vieil homme et l’enfant (The Two of Us), Michel Mitrani with Les Guichets du Louvre (Black Thursday), or Michel Drach with Les Violons du bal (Violins at the Ball). Autobiographical works recounting the childhood of young Jews losing their identity, their family, their bearings, pursued by a mortal threat, but escaping death in the end. These films are, moreover, imprinted with tenderness toward those who helped them, sometimes without knowing it, and while enlightening the spectator about the traumas endured, they resolve into a glimmer of hope and a soothing ending. A spirit of conciliation and gratitude animates them, insofar as they recount the rescue of individual cases thanks to decent people who, sometimes knowingly, sometimes in ignorance of the children’s Jewish status, risked their lives for them. La Vie devant soi (Madame Rosa), by Moshe Mizrahi, on the other hand, because it stages an old woman broken by a past that those around her are unaware of and of which she does not speak, reveals the solitude and despair of the survivors of the Shoah.
It must also be said that the documentaries Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) and Français si vous saviez (Frenchmen, If Only You Knew), by revealing — with documents and interviews in support — the extent of the collaboration, began to shake the consensus that had wrapped the Vichy period and its turpitudes in a modest veil. Very early, in 1956, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), by Alain Resnais, had been the first to show — what could be shown of it — the horror of the extermination camps of the Jews, but it is above all Claude Lanzmann who, in his extraordinary work Shoah, laid the cornerstone of the unnameable.
By the end of the 1970s, it became impossible to avoid the persecution of the Jews in a cinematic fiction relating to the war. Historians finally dared to tackle the phenomenon of collaboration, biographies of Pétain and Laval were published; the first Holocaust-denial interventions provoked energetic stances in response, trials of collaborators were in the offing, and public opinion could no longer ignore the problem of the responsibility of certain French people in the Jewish genocide. A film, Lacombe Lucien, set off polemics. Louis Malle stages a coarse and ignorant young man who enters the path of collaboration by chance and does not seem to suspect the meaning of his functions. For the first time in his life he holds power, becomes arbiter of the existence of individuals who are his superiors, makes himself feared by them, and enjoys privileges that consolidate his prestige. Inserting himself into a clandestine Jewish family, he uses and abuses his power, imposing his menacing and cumbersome presence on the humiliated father who cannot intervene, obliged as he is to endure this power on pain of death. The criticism of the time saw in it above all a discharge of Lucien Lacombe’s responsibility on account of his modest social origins, his ignorance, his isolation. The mere mention at the end of the film of his execution after the Liberation makes of him almost a victim. In reality, it is on another level that the film is ambiguous: the Jews in it are passive beings, bordering on cowardly, incapable of resisting their subjugation with dignity. The father accepts the degrading liaison of his daughter who, herself, discovers sensuality in the arms of their persecutor. In this scheme, both parties, victims and executioners, are equally degraded morally. The notions of good and evil have disappeared on both sides and, by this fact, responsibility disappears. An atmosphere of ambivalence reigns that exonerates the very notion of responsibility — not because Lucien Lacombe is ignorant and incapable of lucidity, but above all because the Jews too are debased. In fact, Malle perhaps described the most common attitude of that time, which is often summed up by the argument invoked by the collaborators according to which only luck failed them in being on the right side at the moment when it was needed; as if chance alone governed the fate of men, and as if the era, murky and opaque, did not permit the average person to make a choice according to moral or even patriotic conscience — since the victims themselves had no moral sense. Let us note in passing that the Resistance fighters — as an organized group — intervene only occasionally in the film, and in a violent mode.
Ten years later, the question of French involvement in the deportation of the Jews came increasingly to the fore. The Barbie trial, the hunt for Touvier, the numerous written and filmed testimonies of survivors of the Shoah had changed the sensibility of public opinion and of the public. Louis Malle then made Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children), a probably autobiographical childhood memory, in which he takes an entirely different stance. His film is the expression of a genuine guilt; guilt, regret, remorse clearly show through in this story of a young Jewish boy hidden in a religious boarding school, denounced by a servant, identified by a nurse-nun, and whom his comrade could not or did not know how to protect. There is no more ambiguity, those responsible are designated by name, and the child as well as the religious man who hid him are images of martyrs that will haunt the filmmaker’s memory for many years afterward.
A few years later, François Truffaut would use the metaphor of the theater under the Occupation in Le Dernier métro (The Last Metro) to place at the very center of the plot the fate of a hidden Jew, in order to illustrate the wartime situation in Paris.
One observes a parallel between the evolution of the way filmmakers approached the theme of the war — from simple resistance and heroic action, by way of comedy, to centering it on the emblematic fate of the Jews under the Occupation — and the evolution of French society which, little by little, comes to accept looking at its past as it really was, and no longer as a heroic or wretched image — food restrictions, difficult material living conditions, and so on. War is no longer a reassuring image of Épinal of heroes fighting against the wicked invaders; it is a disparate assemblage of devoted people, of resisters, but also of profiteers, collaborators, cynics, the indifferent, and of Jews whose fate was no longer a separate, minor element, but an essential one for the understanding of this period.
It should be noted, however, in closing, that in all these films the Jews are physically marked by a strong accent, and that they are all foreigners or the children of foreigners. A way — perhaps unavowed — of discharging the guilt of the Vichy regime by omitting the fact that native French Jews were persecuted just as much as their coreligionists of foreign origin and that they did not escape deportation. A way too of designating the Jews, now and always, as foreigners…