Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema by Antoine de Baecque (review)

In the introduction to this provocative and sometimes exasperating book Antoine de Baecque recounts the epiphanic moment when he realized that cinema embeds historical realities within its framed images. He argues that such "untimely irruptions" constitute "cinematographic forms of history" (3) that can be discovered in films especially after the Second World War. With the enthusiasm of a convert, de Baecque shows how film can reconstruct the past imaginatively as well as provide an archive of its lived worlds. Cinema can be an interpretive tool to understand history and one that professional historians, he alleges, do not understand: "Historians are not cinephiles" (9). De Baecque, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Paris X Nanterre and a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, proclaims triumphantly that "the present book is intended to affirm the arrival of what might be called the age of history in film" (380).

De Baecque's revelation about history and film occurred after watching Resnais' Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour as well as Rossellini's Europa '51. In particular he cites the shots where survivors of concentration camps gaze directly at the camera, an image of mass death in which "history itself is staring at us" (32). De Baecque traces the origins and subsequent invocations of these haunting images in a number of films, arguing that they represent a rupture in history that films directors subsequently explored. Death frequents post-war cinema in new forms. Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, for example, represents the demise of the Tramp, "a contemporary incarnation of the figure of the Wandering Jew" (56) and, astonishingly, "the profound moral of Monsieur Verdoux is that modern society turns us all into mass murderers" (52). He traces how the films of Sam Fuller and Alfred Hitchcock embody new realities about horror and mass extermination in a complex dynamic of "foreclosed images and disclosed forms" (74). In The Trouble with Harry, for example, Hitchcock "fully partakes of the hallucinatory resurgence of the foreclosed images of mass death, even if he draws from it the exact opposite life lesson" (63).

De Baecque finds the films of Peter Watkins particularly impressive. In works such as Culloden, first broadcast by the BBC in 1964, Watkins employs the techniques of contemporary news reportage and British documentary to reconstruct an eighteenth-century battle. Interviews with participants, the use of hand-held cameras, and reporters who provide commentary on gruesome scenes of massacre and rape make the past come alive. De Baecque argues that in Culloden and other films Watkins draws particular attention to historical events in which the suspension of law and civil liberties result in the murderous consequences of might over right or what de Baecque calls "the deathblow" (188). An agitator whose techniques evoked the immediacy of history for polemical purposes, Watkins suffered years of neglect and isolation, which de Baecque seeks to overcome. "Watkins is experiencing a Renoir-like utopia, that of an ordinary director turned civil-society hero" (204).

One of de Baecque's best chapters focuses on the French New Wave. Often accused of right-wing affiliations, the New Wave embraced American popular films in ways that initially dismayed Parisian intellectuals. Young directors created styles and narratives that critics dismissed as frivolous and politically disengaged. De Baecque makes a different claim. New Wave films rejected the simplifications of conventional French politics by reflecting the restlessness and youthful exuberance of a new generation "who recognized itself in the mirror, often identifying with, sometimes rebelling against, the reflection" (139). Far from ignoring the Algerian War, these films captured the anxieties of a demographic cohort alienated by military policy and subsequently drawn to anti-heroes who reflected their estrangement. Indeed, de Baecque endorses the New Wave fascination with Brigitte Bardot, whose films with Roger Vadim "constituted a formal and political manifesto" (134). The unique style and content of the New Wave in France embodied cinematically both the energy and malaise of...