Mediating Memory: The Paris Commune and Postwar French Cinema

Abstract

In the late summer of 1944, members of the Comité de la Libération du Cinéma Français (CLCF) seized the historical moment and captured on film the popular uprising that swept across the capital city in the week that preceded the arrival of Allied armies in Paris on 25 August, 1944. For filmmakers such as Jean Grémillon, an active member of the French Resistance and founding member of the CLCF, the scenes of ordinary Parisians battling Hitler’s occupying forces evoked memory of the Paris Commune, whose parallels with the postwar present Grémillon sought to highlight in La Commune de Paris, the feature film he began envisioning in the final months of the war. This essay considers the political climate that doomed Grémillon’s project to failure and calls attention to a second film, a 1951 documentary short, also titled La Commune de Paris, that Robert Ménégoz was able to bring to completion, but that also fell into the oblivion into which government censorship cast it. A central question the essay raises concerns why the efforts postwar filmmakers made to recall the history of the Paris Commune met with such stiff resistance in the years immediately following the Nazi Occupation of France.

Keywords:

• Jean Grémillon
• Robert Ménégoz
• French cinema of the Liberation and the immediate postwar era
• History and Memory of the Paris Commune
• Film Censorship

Notes

1 See Lucile Marault’s thorough study of the political maneuvering and institutional dynamics that doomed Grémillon’s project.

2 Sylvie Lindeperg offers a concise and eloquent account of the situation Grémillon faced in this period. During the Liberation, Grémillon and his fellow resistance activists had worked together to form “une autre conception de la création et de la production cinématographiques. A cette courte période d’embellie succéda celle de la ‘Restauration’ qui vit s’évanouir dans l’amertume les espoirs nourris sous l’Occupation ; dès 1947, les prémices de la guerre froide commencèrent de rebrasser les cartes politiques et cinématographiques pour les redistribuer radicalement lors de la période d’intense glaciation des années 1949–1955” (56).

3 See Haustrate and Mangin.

4 The source of these images shows that Grémillon had provided help to Ménégoz in making his version of La Commune de Paris. In the Cinéma 71 special issue on Le Cinéma et La Commune de Paris, Gaston Haustrate recalled that “[l]e début de son film, ce beau plan sur des pavés symboliques, Ménégoz le doit à Grémillon. ‘Je n’arrivais pas à en trouver de vraiment photogéniques, raconte-t-il. Alors que Jean, qui en avait repérés pour son projet, me “refila” les siens. Ces beaux pavés révolutionnaires, le croirez-vous, ont été filmés à … Versailles” (95).

5 See Louis Daquin, La Grande Lutte des Mineurs (1948), a documentary short on the massive miners’ strike of November-December 1948 in which the arrival of French military units deployed to end the walk-out is described as follows: “C’est les C.R.S. qui parviennent à envahir les mines. C’est l’occupation, comme aux temps des boches.” (8:46–8:48). An image that follows this commentary shows graffiti scrawled on public space that reads “CRS = SS.” The Ciné-Archives names Louis Daquin as the director of this film. In 1953, however, writing in Positif, François Michel credited Ménégoz for this film and pairs it with La Commune de Paris in his assessment of the latter’s clandestin filmmaking (Michel 63).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemarie Scullion

Rosemarie Scullion is an Associate Professor of French, Gender Studies, and Cinema Studies at the University of Iowa. Her areas of specialization include French literary, cultural, and historical studies, Gender Studies and French Cinema. Recent publications include French Cinema and the Crisis of Globalization (co-edited with N. Rachlin), a study of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s critique of neoliberal globalization, and three recent essays focusing on the threat white nationalist populism and authoritarian movements now present to democratic governance around the world, including: “On the Lessons and Experience of History,” “Owning the Nation: Lucas Belvaux’s Chez Nous,” and “Gasping for Breath: Democracy à bout de souffle.”