Martin Guerre, the Historian and the Filmmakers: An Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis

MARTIN GUERRE, THE HISTORIAN AND THE FILMMAKERS: AN INTERVIEW WITH NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS by Ed Benson Le retour de Martin Guerre, starring Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, was written by Jean-Claude Carrière and Daniel Vigne. Vigne, who also directed the film, was best known for a television series of "Le paysage français" for which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie served as historical consultant. The film appeared in New York in June, followed by successful releases in Boston, Washington, and elsewhere. The distributor, Ron Goldman of KB theaters (4818 Yuma NW, Washington, D.C.), is predicting that it will be one of the most successful foreign or "art" films of the year, and the Variety box office figures for the first month bear him out ($.18,000 per screen, after a month). Natalie Zemon Davis, the conseiller historique for the film, moved from the University of California at Berkeley to Princeton in 1978 and is now the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History there. She has been writing on sixteenth century France for twenty years. In addition to her historical and literary study, The Return of Martin Guerre, published this summer by Harvard University Press and supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, some of her best known essays appear in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975). Readers unfamiliar with her work, however, would do particularly well to consult "The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth Century Lyon" in Past & Present, #90 (1981), pp. 40-70. In addition to his writing on French film (see F&H XII #3), Mr. Benson has written on sixteenth century France for the Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the 49 Sixteenth Century Journal. He is a member of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Benson and Davis met for the interview in Professor Davis' digs for the year, a handsome apartment hard by the Canal Saint Martin in Paris in June of 1982, a month after the film came out at Cannes. BENSON: Would you like to start with how you got involved in making a film in the first place? DAVIS: There were several things about my work that pushed me toward finding a new way to tell about the past. One was a long-term interest in reaching a larger audience. Even though I worked in the sixteenth century, rather than, say, on American slavery or World War II, I always hoped that some of my work could have a significance for a group other than just university people. A second thing was the interest in anthropology I'd been developing over the years. An anthropologist tries to flesh out the living experience of people: smell, taste, posture, gestures. Many of the things our documents don't reveal to us can be observed by an anthropologist working in the field. This made me want to visualize the people in the "lower orders" that I studied about, the peasants, more than ever before. Then I began to think that maybe you could tell about what you "saw" not just through stringing words together, but through a film. Your eye would choose from what's being experienced and then you could retell it very economically by images. BENSON: My sense of anthropology in your work is as a frame of comparison, a way of suggesting the gestures, the decor that went with an action, an incident, an event. DAVIS: Yes, okay, but not only the decor. Field work with living persons makes it possible to observe a very wide range of behavior, behavior that goes beyond the abstract analysis of class or region or religion. When you're reading sources about the relations between parents and children or a landlord and his peasants, you might have a wealth of concrete examples and still not realize how much was missing. You might read about an insult and not know what it really meant or how it fit into the life of the village or the urban neighborhood. You might read only about conflicts and forget that people have...