Naomi Greene,
Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema .
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 691 02959 8
234pp
US$18.95

(Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press)

Uploaded 1 November 2000

This intelligent and thoughtful book looks at the way in which French history and culture has been represented in certain post-war French films, notably those by Resnais, Tavernier, the retro movement and the “cinèma du look”. Its thesis can be summarized as follows: cinema is uniquely suited to responding to shifts in communal states of mind, and post-war French cinema has been obsessed by shifting characterizations of the national past. Globally these are marked by nostalgia and a sense of loss, by paralysis, trauma and regret, deriving primarily from the fact that a nation used to thinking of itself as central to European ideals of progress, enlightenment and individual liberty has had to come to terms with a contemporary reality in which its sphere of influence is severely limited. The consequent fragility of French national identity has led to an awareness of the vast gulf between a remembered (or imagined) past of commitment, purpose and plenitude and the glittering but vacuous surfaces of a hollow society, diminished and relatively aimless.

This argument is conducted very effectively, mobilizing and explicating a number of useful sociological and historical sources in its support, then matching them up against relevant films or groups of films. Although no mention is made of him, the method used resembles the genetic structuralist approach of Lucien Goldmann, whose suggestive essays on certain large scale homologies linking social and cultural phenomena between 1900 and 1970 were also readily applicable to French cinema, as his wife Annie Goldmann demonstrated. Greene’s study overlaps this a little, taking us from 1950 to the 1990s, but treats the interaction between these phenomena at a finer level, seeing almost annual correlations between specific films and specific political events.

Certain themes recur: the myth of a resistant France during World War II fostered by de Gaulle, and the developing awareness that France had in fact been weak, divided and guilty; the suppression for many years of all mention of that “war without a name” in Algeria, and the gradual emergence of tales of torture and terror inflicted by French agencies; the mythic unity of a national past as it was traditionally represented, and the gradual surfacing of popular memory “histories from below” which the myth of a unified nation had served to repress. And this gradual surfacing of repressed voices is correlated closely with key films and directors. The ambiguities of Resnais’ films, especially the “repressed memories and pathetic lies” of Muriel’ s characters, are seen as corresponding to an almost willed amnesia about World War II, to the official lies and the “rhetoric of grandeur” of those in power. His film about Stavisky is seen as not about the 1930s but about the 1970s, about “he meaning of inflation and the constant change in policies, about a society in crisis”. (53) Between 1974 and 1978 the “mode retro” films are seen as perpetuating many of the symptoms resulting from the trauma of the Occupation: “Veering between the need to know and the wish to ‘deny’ they suggest why it has been so difficult to confront and to exorcise the Vichy past”.(65)

May 68, the departure of de Gaulle, the development of the Annales school of historians, the rise of a technocratic conservative regime under Giscard D’Estaing, the electoral victory of the socialists and the death of Mitterand are events which serve to mark out a rapidly changing political landscape, in which new ways of representing the past become possible and even necessary. And the historical films released at the time of these events are seen as “capturing the mood of the moment” or as pointing “directly but unmistakably to the crisis of ideology that would erupt before the end of the decade”, or as “saying much about the ‘hollowness’ and uncertainties of the 1970s” – as constituting what amounts to “a seismographic record of their era”. (109) Overall they are seen as demonstrating a growing sense of inadequacy and loss, and a nostalgia for an age when unifying national myths still held good. “Just as the political curve of Renoir’s films mirrored the swiftly evolving climate of the 1930s” Greene observes “so too, as I have attempted to show, does the course charted by Tavernier correspond to profound changes in the political sensibility of the last quarter century”. (128)

As summarized above, this argument can seem to be making a claim for films as a fairly precise reflection of society – or if not of society then of its moods – but Greene fills out her claims with meticulous detail which lends credibility. And as in the case of Goldmann, wherever possible the “voice” of each film is correlated to a specific social group, and the scriptwriter/director of each film is seen as articulating in a relatively coherent manner the incoherent and even tentative anxieties and desires of that “collective subject”. Thus Lacombe Lucien (Malle, 1974) marks the moment in the early 1970s when the traditional Right, which had been sympathetic to Vichy, slowly began to reemerge. Blackened by the taint of collaboration after the war, the Right could only have welcomed the blurred moral landscape, the implicit message of national reconciliation, of Lacombe Lucien. The protagonist – amoral, apolitical and opportunistic – is less a creature of the 1940s than very much “a man of today”. Le Crabe-Tambour views France’s humiliating defeat in Indochina and later the loss of Algeria from the point of view of the military; Outremer portrays the Algerian war from the viewpoint of the community of French settlers who would later be known as “pieds-noirs” who had made Algeria their home. Yet other films reflect the views of the new generation emerging from a period of profound apoliticism and “the moral uncertainties of a bourgeois intelligentsia caught in a crisis of modernization”. What emerges is a picture of France as a nation in constant internal conflict between different interest groups, fighting over contradictory interpretations of the national past.

All this is very well done indeed. Greene picks her way sure-footedly through difficult territory, producing carefully worded and occasionally memorable formulations of the problems posed by the films she analyses and of their implications. Most importantly, she manifests a constant desire to understand – to understand film, to understand social and political developments, and especially to understand their interrelationship. If I have any reservations they are not of a sort to call into question the undoubted achievements and usefulness of this book. One of my reservations is methodological: the films analysed represent a small proportion not only of the films produced over this period – many of which could have been cited to support or not the points being made – but even of those films dealing with the national past. This arises because Greene seems committed to canonic directors and pays little or no attention to historical films written or directed by “lesser” figures. This “qualitative” criterion for the selection of texts serves to sideline quantitative criteria related to, say, the number of films mobilizing particular tropes, or the box-office success of films echoing a particular worldview.

My other main reservation relates to Greene’s perfectly valid analysis of that nostalgia for a cinematic past evident in the “cinèma du look”, and particularly nostalgia for the supposedly self-confident and committed cinema of the 1930s. While I realize her main point is that the 1980s represents the cinema of the 1930s as self-confident and committed, she herself often seems to lose sight of this distinction, implying that it really was thus, and that its embeddedness in its age is an undoubted fact, apparent from audience response to the social films produced during that decade. This was not so. Greene shows she is aware of the small number of films involved in this social cinema, but as before she seems to assume its importance primarily on auteurist (i.e. qualitative) grounds, citing films by Vigo, Renoir, Clair and Carnè. When she does appeal to quantitative grounds she is on less certain territory. For example she instances Le crime de Monsieur Lange (1935) as one of the films “(that) did enjoy unprecedented appeal” and spends some pages explaining why that film is important. In fact it was far from successful with audiences, ranking well below halfway in the year’s releases, even in Paris. L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) which she mentions elsewhere at some length would have been invisible even to most inveterate film-goers of the decade. Moreover while there are reasons to agree with her generalizations about “the paralysis and unease” (176)which gripped the cinema in the late 1930s, there are also reasons to qualify it. A large number of highly successful upbeat nationalistic and colonial films could be adduced to argue the contrary. Altogether, as her introductory remarks on earlier French historical films make apparent, her knowledge of those periods, and particularly of the 1930s, is much less profound than her knowledge of later periods. The resulting dichotomy (1930s/1980s) – of which she makes much in her chapter on “le cinèma du look” – is consequently overstated and excessively schematic. Indeed many of the traces of numbness, amnesia and paralysis that she identifies in her post-war films were already well established tropes in 1930s representations of the nation. These minor gaps in her knowledge lead to the rather surprising assertion that “the sense of crisis that was very much in the air in the 1980s” (184) as the industry lamented its imminent demise was somehow peculiar to that age. Yet if ever there was a decade when that “sense of crisis” was voiced it was the 1930s. In fact the industry lamented its imminent demise in every decade after 1910, as part of an on-going propaganda campaign to obtain government assistance.

Despite these minor weaknesses, Greene has provided us with a tightly argued and thought-provoking book on post-war French cinema, convincingly relating its evocation of and nostalgia for the past to a sense of the nation’s “diminished present”.

Colin Crisp