Framing the Nation

Documentary Film in Interwar France

Alison J. Murray Levine

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441139634
• eBook ISBN: 9781441169228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia europea

Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France argues that, between World Wars I and II, documentary film made a substantial contribution to the rewriting of the French national narrative to include rural France and the colonies. The book mines a significant body of virtually unknown films and manuscripts for their insight into revisions of French national identity in the aftermath of the Great War. From 1918 onwards, government institutions sought to advance social programs they believed were crucial to national regeneration. They turned to documentary film, a new form of mass communication, to do so.

Many scholars of French film state that the French made no significant contribution to documentary film prior to the Vichy period. Using until now overlooked films, Framing the Nation refutes this misconception and shows that the French were early and active believers in the uses of documentary film for social change - and these films reached audiences far beyond the confines of commercial cinema circuits in urban areas.

Chapter 1
Introduction

In 1901, Charles Pathé wrote prophetically that cinema would be “the theater, the newspaper, and the school of tomorrow.”¹ By the 1920s, the theater, the newspaper, and the school each had its reflection in one of three major cinematic forms: the entertainment film, the newsreel, and the documentary. It was during the interwar years that film would undergo a revolutionary transformation; no longer a novelty entertainment, it would become the powerful force of mass culture and communication that we know it to be today. With the huge increase in film audiences during this period, cinema would come to play an extraordinary role in shaping public taste and opinion.² If film has, as Antoine De Baecque has written, shaped “the mental universe of the twentieth century,” it was during the interwar years that the shaping process began.³

At the end of the nineteenth century, cinema was part of a culture that increasingly demanded representations of the real.⁴ But as film grew more and more popular, its very realism attracted a certain suspicion. Its appeal to mass audiences was at once powerful and dangerous. Conversations about its potential to encourage violence, delinquency, or immoral sexual behavior are strikingly reminiscent of twenty-first century discussions of the effects of video games on young people. In the 1920s, some observers thought that the only antidote to the nefarious effects of commercial cinema was film itself—a different kind of film that would tell the truth. In a matter of years, this truthtelling cinema already had its own name: documentary film. Its advocates saw it as a potentially revolutionary medium because it could reach mass audiences with true stories. With the right people behind the camera, these true stories could serve as agents of popular education, moral regeneration, and the correction of social evils.

After the First World War, enthusiasm for the social applications of documentary film captivated filmmakers from the Soviet Union to the United States. In the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov used his background in newsreel compilation to create the documentary magazine entitled Kino-Pravda (Film Truth).⁵ He exploited the medium’s visionary power to portray the birth of a new society. His work inspired other Soviet filmmakers such as Esfir Shub, Victor Turin, and Alexander Medvedkin.⁶ Their careers and contributions to the development of the medium are well documented, as are the experiments in the use of documentary film to promote fascist values in 1930s Germany and Italy. The work of Leni Riefenstahl stands out here as legendary.⁷ So, also, is the rise in Great Britain of John Grierson, who is often credited as the inventor of the term “documentary” in English, and who also put its truth telling at the service of social advocacy, beginning with the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit.⁸

Most film historians would have us believe that despite Auguste and Louis Lumière’s invention of the cinématographe, the overall contribution of France to the development of documentary film was negligible prior to the Second World War. With a few exceptions, French documentaries of the interwar period are dismissed as not “good” enough esthetically, not polemical enough to merit the label “Griersonian,” and not politically sophisticated enough to interest a modern viewer.⁹ In his book on Vichy documentaries, Screening Reality, Steve Wharton manages to dismiss interwar documentaries in one sentence, summing up their role as that of a “lyrical chronicler.”¹⁰ Guy Gauthier finds the documentaries of the period facile, boring, and full of platitudes; they merit no substantive coverage in his 2002 survey book, Un siècle de documentaires français.¹¹ He criticizes their conformism, as does Thomas August, who briefly mentions the “healthy conservatism” of colonial documentaries prior to 1939 in his book, The Selling of the Empire.¹² After acknowledging France as one of the countries in which “documentary proper” originated, Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane exclude it from their 2005 survey, A New History of Documentary Film, presumably because it is not social enough in the Griersonian sense.¹³

One of the arguments of this book is that the ordinary educational documentaries produced in France during the interwar years are in fact of great interest. To an astonishing degree, these interwar films, scattered around in diverse locations, are virtually ignored.¹⁴ Within the cool walls of the French national film archives, a military fortress west of Paris, canister upon canister of documentaries line the shelves. These reels might not provide the palpitations an audience might have felt in the steamy presence of L’Atlantide, but they have a stirring effect all their own. As the first few words of the self-assured “voice of God” narration ring out—that very declamatory style that avant-garde documentarists after the war despised—the viewer experiences the strange sensation of being directly addressed by the voice of the 1920s or 1930s French state. Jean-Michel Frodon’s characterization of cinema as a “national projection” can be taken almost literally.¹⁵ Suddenly, what might have appeared to be a dreary litany of the progress of electrification of the French countryside snaps into focus as an early example of the mobilization of film in the service of shaping public opinion.

And that is precisely what French documentary filmmakers were trying to do in the interwar years. It was a watershed moment for France. The First World War had ravaged the nation, destroyed nearly five million acres of farmland, killed 1.4 million Frenchmen and wounded three million more. A series of unstable and ineffectual governments failed to respond effectively to a depression that arrived later but lasted longer in France than elsewhere. A brief flowering of left-wing optimism accompanied the election of the Popular Front government in 1936 that was short-lived and left most of its promises unfulfilled. After a short war, 1940 would herald a voluntary plunge into right-wing dictatorship, collaboration with Germany, and four years of German occupation.

Alongside these political and economic events, France experienced an important social transformation as well. It was no longer the rural nation it had once been; a decades-long rural exodus led to the tipping point in 1931, when the urban population surpassed the rural population.¹⁶ The year 1931 would also see an International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, a symbolic marker of the apogee of French colonial domination, where the “greater France” of 100 million people that stretched from French Polynesia through the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia was on display. Herman Lebovics characterizes the social transformations of the early twentieth century as a cultural “rite of passage” for a young republic, newly consolidated politically, that struggled to define its social and cultural dimensions.¹⁷ The endeavor to define True France, which for Lebovics was primarily a conservative one, had two principal strands: first, debates about perceived tensions between modernization and tradition; and second, the question of social and cultural diversity, or, more simply put, who was and who should be considered French.

These debates will seem familiar to contemporary readers with an interest in France. In the 2007 French presidential election, the age-worn concept of national identity was dusted off, burnished to a warm luster, and brought out as a fresh new theme in the campaigns of all the leading candidates. To some, it seemed vaguely quaint and anachronistic in this post-national age of European unification to hear candidates reach into the archive of myths about France and Frenchness to dress up their platforms. For left-wing observers, it was a nightmare to see an issue associated with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right National Front party slide surreptitiously into the center. This was an ironic triumph for a politician who had defeated the Socialist candidate in the first round of the 2002 election, sending an electric shock of fear through the nation. Although he fared miserably in 2007, Le Pen’s central issue—defining the Frenchness of France—had become coveted terrain for which all the candidates, even the Socialist Ségolène Royal, had to scramble.¹⁸ After his victory, Nicolas Sarkozy enshrined the concept in his administration, which included a new Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development.

Although it would be unwise, as Herrick Chapman reminds us, to apply contemporary concepts of identity politics to historical investigation, it is nonetheless intriguing to observe that in times of crisis, the identity of France continues to resurface as a topic of debate across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.¹⁹ But have attempts to define national identity always been conservatively inflected? Has the idea of a single, centralized Frenchness to which others must assimilate been the dominant cultural model from the early Third Republic, as Eugen Weber would suggest? If so, how can one explain the origins of such laws as the Appellation d’origine contrôlée that value local specificity and bolster much of the late twentieth-century French tourist industry? How did the French provinces and the colonies figure into the equation of who was more or less French? Can we learn anything about contemporary responses to questions of integration and assimilation, about French concepts of alterity and difference, from cultural projects, whether successful or not, earlier in the century? These are some of the questions that started me on this investigation of “true” stories told in early film.

Documentary film is a particularly useful historical source because of its “claim to the real”—the assertion of the filmmaker that he is making a good-faith attempt to create true statements about the real world. As Bill Nichols has argued, documentary film is a kind of “rhetorical fiction,” in which “the world as we see it through a documentary window is heightened, telescoped, dramatized, reconstructed, fetishized, miniaturized, or otherwise modified”²⁰ in the service of a rhetorical structure, usually an argument.²¹ However, as a genre, documentary film continues to command respect as a vehicle of information and education, because of a cultural code that defines it as the opposite of fiction.²² Documentaries, as both Nichols and Alan Renov have pointed out, claim to speak about the world outside the frame (the one in which we live, past or present), whereas fiction alludes to a world (one in which we may imagine living).²³ They peddle truths, winning the trust of their audiences through a relationship with other nonfictional systems Nichols calls “discourses of sobriety” (science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion).²⁴ Because of this relationship, documentary film can provide the historian with crucial insights into the kinds of “true” stories being told in the guise of “education” at a particular historical moment, as well as into the kinds of audiences who were expected to believe them. Stated even more simply, in the words of Marc Ferro, “the film is History.”²⁵

This book brings to light documentary films and film outreach programs developed in France during the interwar years that provide a valuable window onto crucial national debates of the period. In the years following the First World War and throughout the period, many governmental agencies and private organizations in France viewed documentary film as a socially “useful” art form and invested in film projects they thought would help deliver their messages to the public. At the core of this study are films and programs that sought to shore up the image of a faltering nation by pulling the French regions and the colonies into a broader national narrative. No longer dismissed as cultural backwaters in need of reform, these rural areas of metropolitan and overseas France were now seen as important sources of national regeneration. Both public and private organizations sought to use film to educate rural peoples about the French nation and to educate city dwellers about the importance of the regions and the colonies to that nation. They firmly believed that film could bridge the cultural divide between urban and rural France, as well as between métropole and colony. They believed that images could shape perceptions of group belonging, and that they could help the diverse peoples of France to recognize themselves and each other—whether Breton, Senegalese, or “Indochinese”—as uniquely French.²⁶ The films they made tell a story about the role film played in the negotiation of a new symbolic relationship between center and periphery within the framework of the French nation. In short, it is a story of reframing the nation.

In telling this story, I have attempted to bridge several traditional methodological divides. The first is one of divergent models of national identity. Some scholars, following the lead of Eugen Weber, favor a model of a centralized “modern” national identity gradually moving outward to replace “traditional” regional cultures over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Others argue for more autonomy on the periphery in negotiating and responding to the modern republican state.²⁷ While many of my film sources attempt to portray a unified and centralized view of the nation, this book parses the complex negotiations with colony and region that were integral to such a portrayal. Rather than suggesting that these categories should be seen in opposition to one another, I will argue that there was an effort in the interwar period to dissolve dichotomies between nation and region, nation and colony, traditional and modern, authentic and progressive. A portrait emerges of these categories as “fluid ideological construction[s],” constantly in process and given different meanings in different contexts.²⁸ These labels were used, as Herrick Chapman writes, “as much for their rhetorical charge as for their descriptive accuracy.”²⁹

The second divide I attempt to break down is that between rural and colonial studies, which have typically been quite separate fields of inquiry for contemporary scholars. Historians of colonial France have made considerable efforts in recent years to study colonial history not as a separate field, but within the broader context of French history, research that has helped to situate colonial ideology within French republicanism as well as to broaden our understanding of the “culture of colonialism.”³⁰ This scholarship has not, by and large, led to much comparative work on the regions and the colonies, despite the natural link between the two in the early twentieth century as “traditional societies” became objects of study by the developing sciences of ethnology and folklore.³¹ Nor have these links been reflected in the field of visual culture, which has attracted considerable attention from historians of empire, and, to a lesser extent, historians of rural and regional France.³² This book attends to ideological and representational links between visual artifacts circulating in the “center” (Paris or urban France) and those specifically designed for distribution in rural regions or the colonies.³³ Reading the rural and colonial stories in parallel reveals the extent to which understandings of rural and colonial France informed and shaped one another.

A final methodological divide I have attempted to bridge is that between film history and social/cultural history. Social and cultural historians, as Robert Sklar has argued, treat moviegoing as primarily “the social interaction of persons within a theater space” and neglect the esthetic, ideological, and psychological dimensions of the movies themselves.³⁴ Film historians, on the other hand, have tended to pay little attention to the lived experiences of the viewing public.³⁵ In working with a broad range of film and non-film sources, I have attempted to take a more comprehensive approach, integrating close film analysis with a broader narrative of social and cultural history as well of produc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Truth Peddling: Documentary Film in Interwar France
• Chapter 3: The Revolt of the Beets: Educational Film in Rural France
• Chapter 4: “Making the Fiction of the Empire a Reality”: Educational Film in the French Colonies
• Chapter 5: “Mysterious and Subtle Cheesemaking”: Filming the French Regions
• Chapter 6: “Carcasses of Manioc-Eaters”: Filming Colonial France
• Chapter 7: Recycling Rural Images: The Vichy Propaganda Machine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Film Index