Double Take: Louis Malle's Competing Versions of France Under Nazi Occupation

13 Double Take: Louis Malle's Competing Versions of France Under Nazi Occupation Judith Holland Sarnecki Lawrence University Introduction: Film as History Teaching our students how to become close readers of films now forms a vital component of a liberal education. Not only do students need to recognize ideological dimensions of their favorite movies, they also need a deeper understanding of how and why films have been called upon to function as History. In Visions ofthe Past, Robert Rosenstone examines the ways in which films challenge conventional ideas about the past. Tony Barta, editor of Screening the Past, credits cinema as playing a significant role in the transition to a postmodern consciousness in the practice of history (2). He questions the belief that written history is more complete or complex than its cinematic versions: "There is no Great Net, representing a unified historical narrative, for historians in any medium" (14).' Although many of our students possess highly developed visual skills, they often come to us as naive viewers, willing to take cinematic representations at face value. Since some academics still do not consider popular films a serious subject of discussion, it becomes even more important for those of us that do to address these films critically in our classrooms. Films that attempt to represent History are a particularly problematic case in point. For example, students who have been shown Schindlern List in high school may feel they have a firm grasp on the Holocaust. And yet, the award-winning film also deserves a critical approach. Take note of the fact that Mr. Schindler, played so beautifully by Liam Neeson, once again gives us a white, Christ-like hero saving Jews portrayed almost exclusively as victims. Think, in particular, of the scene where Neeson stands with arms outstretched above a virtual herd of factory workers congregated at his feet. With the exception of Ben Kingsley's 1 4 CULTURE AND LITERATURE THROUGH FILM rather unremarkable accountant, this "herd" is never accorded individual stories.2 All too frequently entering students have not yet learned to examine films either for their historical context or ideological content. The time frame in which a film is produced may influence its content as much or more than the historical period it supposedly represents. Take, for instance, the cinematically breathtaking Cold Mountain, in which the representation of the Civil War is quickly displaced onto a fictional love story. A film foregrounding the divisiveness in America during the 1 860s could easily be said to mirror the current ideological split in our own nation over the war in Iraq and its horrific aftermath. The final scene of the film, which depicts a family picnic complete with single mother and daughter, married couple with baby, aging widow, and formerly estranged father—a scene not fully developed in the book —suggests that we can all become one big happy family again (as if we ever were) once we have forgiven and forgotten our differences and are no longer preoccupied with war. In her eloquent book, Landscapes of Loss, Naomi Greene focuses on France's preoccupation with its postwar past in films produced from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. She carefully traces how the dramatic split in French politics from the time ofthe Dreyfus Affair through World War I, the Popular Front, and Vichy's collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation all served to create the need to rebuild a unified nation—so brilliantly carried out by de Gaulle's myth of unified national resistance. Speaking initially about post-war French literature haunted by the past— especially Duras's and Modiano's—Greene goes on to explain the role of cinema in the battle for memory that has raged since the May 1968 "revolution": [F]Hm offers the most visible evidence of a widely shared fascination with national memory and history. But in addition to its visibility, cinema also offers a privileged site, a very special perspective, from which this fascination may be explored. . . Imbued with a particular sensitivity to groundswells of feelings and to changing sensibilities, films also lend themselves to the expression of sentiments that have yet to assume verbal form, or that resist clear articulation. (5...