ICFFS-Diversity & Difference

During the 1930s films set in Paris cultivated wistful nostalgia for the Belle Epoque and an idealized representation of working-class culture that helped popular audiences extract pleasure from an era of increasing socio-political turmoil and economic hardship. Popular realism's therapeutic amalgam of regret for the past and hope for the future was suddenly shattered by France's cataclysmic defeat and occupation in 1940. Of the 220 feature films made in France during the war, very few contained footage shot on location in Paris because of strict security regulations enacted by German military authorities. The capital appeared constantly in Nazi-produced newsreels, but as a signifier of trauma rather than nostalgia or hope. Even today period footage of Nazi troops marching past the Arc de Triomphe, Hitler strolling pedantically before the Eiffel Tower, and the city being devastated by Allied bombs remain at the forefront of collective consciousness. Films of the Liberation helped purge some of this trauma, but incorporated new wounds in the form of summary executions and the public humiliation of women found guilty of sexual collaboration. Attempting to heal the damage done to Paris as a signifier of French collective identity and memory has been an ongoing yet repressed priority in French cinema since 1945, one that is still incomplete. Using examples taken from post-war films such as Melville's Le Silence de la mer, Godard's Breathless, Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7, Besson's Subway, Carax's Les Amants du Pont Neuf, and Kassovitz's La Haine, this paper’s goal will be to stimulate reflection and discussion of the hypothesis that the on-screen image of Paris, and at the same time French identity as a whole, were in many ways irrevocably scarred by the Second World War.




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