World Cinema and Cultural Memory

I. Hedges

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137465122
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies represent themselves. Hedges discusses the role of cinema in creating cultural memory within a global perspective that spans five continents. The book's innovative approach and approachable style should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects.

1

Living Memory: Representations of Drancy

The enthusiastic reception granted to Suite française, Irène Némirovksy’s recently discovered novellas of the French experience of defeat and German Occupation, and Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), recounting World War Two through the eyes of an SS officer, a work for which this American writer won France’s highest literary prize (the Prix Goncourt), is evidence of continued interest – in France, and even worldwide – in imaginative engagement with a historical period that now lies more than half a century in the past. Yet in French literary fiction and fiction film, there is, for the most part, silence on one topic, despite numerous official commemorations and days of remembrance: the arrest and deportation during the Occupation of nearly 76,000 Jews, including 11,400 children – most of whom passed through the concentration camp at Drancy, just outside Paris. Suite française does not mention Jews at all,¹ and Les Bienveillantes focuses on the protagonist’s participation in Hitler’s eastern campaign. France appears mainly as a backdrop to his personal life.²

This silence brings up several questions: Has French society reached a saturation point in its willingness to revisit the trauma of the period 1940–1944? Should one even try to represent the experience of the victims in fiction, or does respect demand that one remain silent? If fictional representations are to be avoided, what is the value in relation to fiction of documentary and eyewitness accounts, and how should these be presented? Is the Jewish experience of the Shoah in France solely a French concern or does it concern the world at large, including non-Jews? These are all important questions that are still debated both in France and elsewhere.

The French debate about historical memory

Over the past three decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the French public discussion of the World War Two years in France, when the northern part of the country was occupied by German forces and the southern French State (as opposed to “The French Republic”) was governed out of the resort town of Vichy by French collaborators with the Germans. In 1987 the French historian Henry Rousso, in his book The Vichy Syndrome, broke down French historical memory of this period into successive psychological phases that he characterized as “repressed memory” (the immediate post-war period and the Gaullist myth of résistancialisme, according to which the French population as a whole resisted the Germans), “the broken mirror” (the period after 1968, when a new generation challenged this version of the past), and finally “obsessive memory” (characterized by the increasing willingness of survivors to tell their stories by the creation of new commemorative ceremonies and by changes in educational curricula).

Six years later, in 1994, Rousso, along with journalist Éric Conan, warned of what they considered a dangerous new phase – what they called a “sanctification” of Jewish memory of the Vichy years. The new insistence on “the duty to remember,” they argued, was leading to an impasse, an inability to get beyond the experience of the Shoah in France. According to the authors, the country had now come full circle from an earlier claim that everyone had resisted, to the new (and equally false) claim that most French people had willingly collaborated, and that resistance was exceptional and sparse. Above all they insisted that some of the new commemoration ceremonies were based on incomplete knowledge and a misreading of the facts. They deplored, for instance, the creation of a national day of commemoration on July 16 to honor the memory of Jews rounded up at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (an indoor bicycle track) in Paris on July 16–17, 1942, arguing that this roundup, although carried out by French gendarmes, had actually been ordered by the German authorities. The authors suggested that a more significant date, one that would involve a more honest recognition of French anti-Semitism, would have been October 3, the day in 1940 when the Vichy government – on its own initiative and with no prodding from the occupying forces – promulgated the first Jewish Statutes.³

Pierre Nora, the author of the influential Realms of Memory offered his sympathetic support to Rousso, adding that his own work had also had the unintended consequence of leading to the use of commemorations and memorializing for political ends. Nora characterized the shift in the national temper as a change in emphasis: Where people previously had been concerned with France under Vichy, the emphasis was now Vichy and the French – at every level, the behavior of average French people was examined and criticized.⁴ Rousso’s work, Nora argued, suffered from what he called a “boomerang effect.”

In the same way that the idea of a “place of memory,” a tool forged for creating a critical distance, a counter-commemorative type of instrument, was recuperated, digested, and transformed by commemorative bulimia into becoming, against my will, the instrument par excellence of commemoration; in this same way, the rising tide of Vichy memory, whose irresistible ascent was described by Rousso, carried him off in its flood-waters to give to the Syndrome something he probably didn’t anticipate and probably wouldn’t have wished.⁵

At the same time, Nora wondered whether what Rousso and Conan describe as a “clinical aggravation of the syndrome” might not already have run its course, noting that the revelations (in Pierre Péan’s 1994 Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand 1934–1947) about President François Mitterrand’s youthful connections with Vichy as well as his friendship with René Bousquet (formerly the Vichy government’s head of police, who had played a prominent role in the roundups of Jews), had had little effect on Mitterrand’s public reputation and persona.⁶

Two decades after the opening of this new phase, the matter of Vichy and, in particular, the arrest and deportation of Jews from France to Auschwitz and other death camps,⁷ remains current. One symptom of this was the decision in 2002 to create a traveling exhibit about the children who were deported. Organized by Serge Klarsfeld and the Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees from France (FFDJF), and with the aid of the French national railroad company (the SNCF, which had participated in the deportations in 1942–1944), this exhibit was shown in major train stations throughout the country before being installed in the Hôtel de Ville, the governmental seat of Paris, during the spring of 2007.⁸ Subsequently, the exhibit traveled to Germany. In addition, between March 27, 2002 and August 18, 2004, commemorative ceremonies were held on the 60th anniversary of each deportation. Sixty-three of the seventy-seven ceremonies were held at Drancy, which served as a collecting place for Jews (adults and children alike, though the children were almost invariably separated from their parents) before they were loaded onto the trains that took them across the border to an “unknown destination.⁹ A surfeit of memory? Or a necessary corrective to the French social and historical imaginary?

In February 2008 the memory controversy became the subject of acrimonious debate in France after President Sarkozy announced that each fifth-grade French schoolchild in France should be required to learn about the fate of one child-victim of the deportations. In an interview, Klarsfeld explained that since the FFDJF has now published the birthplace of every child-victim, along with the address from which each was deported, it is now possible for schoolchildren to visit those addresses in their own neighborhoods. Thus, he states, the lives of the victims will have served some purpose, and their memory will be rescued from the “night and fog” into which it would otherwise disappear.¹⁰ Counter-arguments were made by Simone Veil (herself a Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust), who claimed that young children would be traumatized by groups who felt that the Jewish victims were being privileged over others, and by those who objected to the religious overtones of Sarkozy’s project.¹¹ Clearly, the debate in France about the right way to commemorate the victims of the deportations is far from over.

Klarsfeld acknowledges the role played by French non-Jews who resisted the Vichy policies against Jews. The online catalogue to his exhibition of the child-victims gives ample credit to average people and members of the clergy who saved or tried to save Jewish children, often at great danger to themselves. Yet the message is clear: Despite this effort, 11,400 children died. In looking at the catalogue published by the mayor’s office in Paris, the reader cannot help but be struck by the importance of narrative in recounting both the history of the events and also the individual histories of the victims, to the extent that these can be found and told. Each child becomes an unfinished story – what might have been. A similar effect arises from reading the letters, published by Antoine Sabbagh in 2002, that young children and young adults wrote from Drancy.¹²

The forcefulness of the Hôtel de Ville exhibition, and of the collections of letters, comes from the fact that these are not exercises in assigning culpability: They do not lend themselves to the political uses of memory that are excoriated by Rousso and others. Simply and eloquently, they are testimonials to tragedy. And they are needed because an understanding of the human experience of the Shoah in France is still not widespread and cannot be comprehended until the vastness of that tragedy is brought down to the individual experiential level. In a trauma that encompasses such large numbers, the particularity of experience is precious – otherwise those who are born generations later cannot identify with the victims or even imagine what it might have been like to be in their place.

Psychoanalyst Donald Spence has introduced the useful distinction between “narrative truth” and “historical truth.” He argues that in helping patients overcome trauma, his goal is to help them find a “narrative truth” that offers a version of the past they can live with – this is more important than finding out what actually happened (as in Freud’s “archeological” model, which focused on retrieving buried memories of past experiences). Yet narrative truth is not a papering over of trauma. It must fit with the remembered facts:

Narrative truth can be defined as the criterion we use to decide when a certain experience has been captured to our satisfaction; it depends on continuity and closure and the extent to which the fit of the pieces takes on an aesthetic finality ... Once a given construction has acquired narrative truth, it becomes just as real as any other kind of truth; this new reality becomes a significant part of the psychoanalytic cure.¹³

In Rousso’s framework, the French nation as a whole is regarded as a patient, at first the victim of the “Vichy Syndrome,” and later suffering from memory obsession. In place of this, I want to argue for the place of literature and film/video – both documentary and fiction – as vehicles for thinking people to reach their own “narrative truth” about what happened in France during the Occupation. In particular, we should look to those few works that have attempted to contribute to the narrative of the Jewish genocide in France. There are countless stories that remain to be told, and that may some day play a greater role in the French social imaginary, or indeed the world’s. As Dominick LaCapra has so eloquently stated, “[T]he study of the Holocaust has now passed beyond the confines of Jewish Studies or a sector of German Studies and has become a problem of general concern.”¹⁴

Fiction film and spectator identification

In 1996, at the height of what Rousso termed an “obsession” with memory, Marcel Bluwal directed a film called Le Plus beau pays du monde (“The most beautiful country in the world”). This has been the first, and to date last, full-length fiction feature film to include a scene that takes place in the Drancy camp. The film represents the workings of the German-owned Continental Film Company, which employed French directors to produce some 30 films during the Occupation. The particular film depicted as being made is Mermoz (directed by Louis Cuny in 1942), about the famous French aviator Jean Mermoz, who never returned from a flight over the Atlantic in 1936. In the film’s last scene, Cuny’s crew drives to Drancy in order to pass a microphone over the barbed wire surrounding the camp so they can record the last lines of the film, to be spoken by the star, Robert Hughes Lambert, who portrayed Mermoz. Lambert has been interned in Drancy, perhaps because he was having an affair with a German officer.¹⁵ After the crew completes its work, Lambert suddenly breaks free of the French police guards and bursts out with the truth about conditions at the Drancy camp. He shouts that “there are men, women, and even children here being treated worse than animals.” This scene was filmed on location at Drancy, which in the present day is a low-income housing complex.

Le Plus beau pays du monde was shown at the Boston Jewish Film Festival in 1998. In France, it was shown on television but did not enjoy a theatrical release. There are at present no copies in distribution. As a French Jew who was 17 years old at the time of the 1942 roundups, and as someone who lost family members to the deportations, Bluwal explained that he felt it incumbent upon him to portray Drancy in a film, but that he felt the fate of Lambert, who was not Jewish but who died in a French concentration camp in 1945, had more intrinsic dramatic interest for the French public than did the actual Jewish deportations.¹⁶ A rolling credit at the end of Le Plus beau pays du monde explains that the film, Mermoz, was premiered in 1943 at the Paris Opera, but that the authorities forbade any ...