Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945–1995 by Hugo Frey (review)

The New York Times Sunday magazine of February 22, 2015 contained a lengthy article on the state of France’s Front National, the far right political party headed by Marine Le Pen. Several years ago she took over the leadership from her father Jean, who is still active in promoting the party’s original political program of reserving France for the French-born. Having just finished Hugo Frey’s book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France, 1945–1995, I was not surprised to see how neatly his final chapter, “The Cinema and the Extreme Right-Wing Undercurrent,” dovetailed with the Times article and Marine Le Pen’s presidential ambitions for 2017. Plus ça change…

Combining Roland Barthes’ still pertinent Mythologies and Marc Ferro’s notion of the “film event,” Frey constructs a cultural history of post-war cinema in France by analyzing “how films narrate stories colored by nationalist ideology” (10). After an introductory chapter that explicates Frey’s modus operandi, we find seven chapters organized by themes that highlight Frey’s contention that significant films and the cultural events that surround them can be fruitfully mined for ideological content, a content that betrays their loyalties to certain ideas and definitions of that contested place we call France. My own reading and understanding of Frey’s engaging discussions—which are carefully developed and mercifully free of jargon—rely heavily on Louis Althusser’s writings on the workings of state apparatuses.

Frey begins with a detailed examination of François Truffaut’s La Nuit americaine, de-emphasizing American influence in order to bring to light the film’s nationalist subtext. Frey contends that Truffaut balances the pro-Hollywood aspects of the film “with his intelligent but conservative promotion of France… a perspective that added to the longstanding belief in French primacy in cultural affairs” (24). In an original take on Un Homme et une femme (Lelouch, 1966) and its reception both in France and the United States, Frey demonstrates how the central romantic relationship is marked by ideological values, how this “modern chic couple” promotes an impression of France’s cultural superiority. By exposing the ideological underpinnings of several New Wave films, Frey underscores their desire to preserve the Hexagon’s cultural values. Extending this idea, Frey goes on to show how the historic “events” of 1968 are covered over by films of eroticized beautiful people (think Bridget Bardot) who belong to the international jet set. The complexity of the New Wave is neither ignored nor homogenized; for example, Frey highlights Godard’s contempt for the American military and his rejection of U.S. power in Europe in Le Mepris. Yet even Godard’s films, says Frey, imagine France as in depen den t an d pu re, offerin g a n admirable resistance to American might, particularly concerning issues of economics and trade.

According to Frey, postwar films often employ their mythmaking capacity to bring about a unified notion of “the nation,” a public sense of one united France at a time rife with tensions and lingering divisions from the Vichy past, the Algerian War, the end of colonization, and the Cold War. One noteworthy example of this effort was to imagine WWII resistance through the lens of comedy. Gérard Oury’s La Grande vadrouille (1966) depended on codified stereotypes to present a WWII France in which everyone had been a hero. Such films “offered a nationalist myth that argued for male lower, middle-, and upper-class harmony” (51). Simplifying the past also helped reduce anxieties and divisions linked to decolonization.

Yet the past was not always so easily rendered in film and “the glorification of resistance was never hegemonic” (55): to wit, Jean-Pierre Melville’s undervalued L’Armee des ombres (1968), and Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974). Then in 1983, Jack Lang, minister of culture under Frangois Mitterrand, helped to fund what was planned as a major celebration of the French Revolution and its concomitant...