Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (review)

This study covers in depth twelve French and Italian films from Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog (1956) through Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful (1998), and on to briefer treatments of films produced from 1998 to 2006. The focus is equally divided between film analysis and the analysis of public reception. Lichtner considers cinema a “vector of memory” for popular and institutional culture (p. 8), but emphasizes the need to explore “inaccuracies” that contemporary events imparted to the films’ production and reception (p. 9). The goal is to show how “the understanding of the Shoah in France and Italy has changed over time,” and how films on the Shoah reflect national identities (p. 11). Lichtner adapts the methodology formulated in Henry Rousso’s essential The Vichy Syndrome (1987), which traced how the place of the German Occupation in France’s self-image has evolved: from the initial Gaullist myth of resistance and restoration of sovereignty to the post-1968 return of the repressed, when victims of Nazi and Vichy racism began to be heard and to change popular perceptions. Lichtner acknowledges Rousso’s work, decries the lack of an analogous study of Italian memory (p. 5), and indeed partially fills that gap.

Characteristic of Italian depictions of the Shoah, according to Lichtner, is the failure to recognize Fascist Italy’s 1938 antisemitic statutes as part of the national legacy. Referring to the 1960s, Lichtner notes that “despite having experienced twenty years of Fascism, a regime which in full independence had passed antisemitic laws as early as 1938, and despite having witnessed the deportation and murder of as many as 6,800 of [their country’s] Jews, Italians clearly believed the Shoah was essentially a foreign event” (p. 84). Government recognition of the nation’s role in antisemitic deportations came belatedly, in 1998 (p. 222). Benigni incorporated a satire of “the alleged superiority of the Italian race” in Life Is Beautiful, thus acknowledging the role of indigenous racism (p. 196).

Lichtner’s first chapter focuses on Resnais’s Night and Fog (1954), though the director’s emphasis was not on eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz and other camps, but on “the complexity of comprehending the concentration camp experience through second-hand knowledge” (p. 23). Lichtner shows how the film evokes the Shoah obliquely, merging it with the experiences of resistance and political deportation, and indeed with echoes of the anti-colonial struggle then being waged in Algeria. Chapter Two treats Italian film’s first attempts to depict the Shoah. In Roberto Rossellini’s General della Rovere (1959) and Carlo Lizzani’s The Gold of Rome (1961) the Shoah is overshadowed by the anti-Fascist Resistance, the influence of which was still important politically. Chapter Three (one of the strongest) deals with efforts in France and Italy to convey a Jewish perspective. Reception of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1960) and Armand Gatti’s The Enclosure (1961) reveals a more historically-informed public in France than in Italy; though French filmmakers and critics still had difficulty grasping the uniquely Jewish dimension of events, nevertheless a growing awareness of the distinction between political deportees and Jewish victims was appearing (pp. 73–76, 83–84).

The next chapter is devoted entirely to Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), which is centered on the Gaullist myth of France as a nation of resisters. As Lichtner notes, by interrogating wartime collaboration Ophuls helped lay the groundwork for airing Vichy’s participation in deporting Jews to the camps. The systematic alternation between film analysis in the first half of each chapter and reception analysis in the second half—at times too mechanical—becomes a drawback here: delving into The Sorrow and the Pity qua film deflects the reader from the Shoah and toward the French Resistance, since the latter dominates the film. That said, Lichtner’s basic conclusion—that The Sorrow and the Pity played a major role in breaking down barriers to depicting...