The Ghost of Grandeur

Abstract

Carsten Meiner analyses a series of classic French films, from Truffaut to Haneke, and their uses of the home with respect to the relation between grandeur and individuality. Homes thus become problematizing mediators between individuals and national grandeur, and together the films form a historical series of quite consistent albeit surprising articulations of the metabolism of life in national grandeur. This focus on the home leads to reflections on the problems of the idea of “represented nationalism” in cinema.

Keywords:

• cinema
• France
• domesticity
• grandeur
• nationalism

Notes

1. See also Girling (2001), especially chapters four, on “Republican Values” and five on “Grandeur” in part one. Also the “Introduction” Green (1999).

2. Raoul Girardet (1995: 96) quotes it as “une formule de [Paul] Déroulède” (without specifically attributing to him the responsibility for coining the phrase) in his fine history of L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962.

3. For theories “mapping” in cinema see Conley (2007).

4. Jean-Paul Rappenaud made his Cyrano de Bergerac in 1990, Claude Chabrol a Madame Bovary in 1991, just as Jacques Rivette the same year used Balzac’s Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu from 1831 for his La belle noiseuse. Patrice Chéreau used Alexandre Dumas’ novel as the source for his La Reine Margot (1994) on the Bartholomew’s night and in 1999 Raoul Ruiz created a Temps retrouvé; Besson made his Jeanne d’Arc and Patricia Mazuy ended the decade with Saint-Cyr in 2000.

5. See Higbee (2006: 69–79) for a technical analysis of the opposition between Les Muguets and Paris. The scenes in Paris were recorded in mono, the ones in Les Muguets in stereo.

6. In what became known as the Paris Massacre, the French police attacked, intentionally, a pro-National Liberation Front demonstration in October 1961 in Paris. Over 200 Algerians are estimated to have lost their lives in this confrontation. The head of the Parisian police, Maurice Papon, former collaborator in the Vichy government, was in 1998 convicted for crimes against humanity. In Caché, Haneke changed the name of the street where the family lives from Rue Brillat-Savarin to Rue Papon.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carsten Meiner

Carsten Meiner is PhD from university of Paris VIII in 2002 and professor in French literature and culture, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen. He has published works on different topoi in French literature and cultural history for instance Les mutations de la clarté (Honoré de Champion, Paris, 2007), Nouvelles topologies littéraires, (eds Carsten Meiner and Remo Ceserani), Revue Romane 42(2) (2007), Le carrosse littéraire et l’invention du hasard (PUF, Paris, 2008), The Cultural Life of Catastrophes (eds Carsten Meiner and Kristin Veel, De Gruyter Verlag, Berlin, 2012), and La clarté à l’âge classique (eds Carsten Meiner and Emmanuel Bury, Garnier Classiques, 2013). He is currently leading the research project “Cultures of topology. French literary history” at the University of Copenhagen, funded by the Danish research council.