Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.     

                                   HEROES AFTER THE EVENT

I’ve just been dissecting Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins, set in Paris immediately after the Second World War and including some minor characters whose business was tracking down and either killing or denouncing people who had collaborated with the occupying Nazis. This put me in mind of people (like Jean-Paul Sartre) who acted after the war as if they had been in the Resistance, but who in fact had had virtually no connection at all with the Resistance. The fact is, there were many people in France (and other occupied counties) who later claimed to have acted heroically during the war, but who were only heroes after the event.

Such claimed heroism was not unique to the Second World War. In 1991, the popular English novelist Laurie Lee produced a memoir called A Moment of War in which he claimed to have spent three months fighting in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War…but no surviving British members of the International Brigades had even heard of him. They classed his book as pure fiction. However this is a complicated case as later, one of Lee’s hitherto lost diaries was found and it seemed to prove that Lee did indeed take some part in the Spanish war, although it is still uncertain how deeply he was involved. Most of the events he recorded in his memoir had no way of being verified. Perhaps his narrative was true, or perhaps he was largely a hero after the event.

One person who definitely lied, on many issues, and played the hero when she came to write her memoirs, was the American playwright Lillian Hellman. This included concocting fictions about single-handedly standing up to the HUAC during the McCarthy era. It also included her fiction about having acted as a courier for an anti-Nazi group in Germany in the 1930s. This tale involved a member of the anti-Nazi underground whom she called “Julia”. The fiction was later made into a film called Julia. It has now been thoroughly debunked by credible researchers, historians and the people who were genuinely part of the German anti-Nazi underground (see on this blog my review of William Wright’s Lillian Hellmann – The Image, The Woman). Hellmann was certainly a hero after the event.

I could give further examples of this form of charlatanry, but I think you get the idea.

Considering the French Resistance, my mind turns to all the (post-war) French films I have seen which deal with the era of Occupation.

Rene Clement’s Bataille du Rail (Battle of the Rails) was the first such film. I was recently able to catch up with it on Youtube. It was made in 1945 only months after the war ended. It is a semi-documentary with non-professional actors, many of them railwaymen, chronicling how the Resistance sabotaged railway lines to prevent Nazis deploying armoured trains and heavy artillery in the weeks after the D-Day landings. Still vivid as a film of action, it has no other political agenda than to celebrate the saboteurs and the defeat of the occupiers.

My research tells me that for many years, there were very few films made in France concerning the war years. In many respects the subject was too painful and there was too much political factionalism with different groups (Gaullists, Communists etc.) claiming to have been the most prominent resisters in the war. In the 1950s, there were some French films set in the war years, but they were largely apolitical. Two of the best were Rene Clement’s Les Jeux Interdits [Forbidden Games] (1952) about the impact of war on two young children; and Robert Bresson’s Un Condamne a Mort est Echappe [A Man Escaped] (1956), a methodical account of how a Resister escaped from a Nazi prison. These were films which, in New Zealand, were more likely to be seen in Film Society screenings rather than in commercial theatres, and that indeed was where I saw them as a student.

Only in the 1960s did there begin to be French films that examined the rival Resistance groups and the extent of collaboration in France. The war was now far enough in the past to be seen in perspective and even laughed about (as in Gerard Oury’s La Grande Vadrouille, made in 1966, starring the comedians Bourvil and Louis de Funes). Only now were specifically party-political factions discussed in the context of the war.

In 1966 it was again Rene Clement who directed the all-star extravaganza Is Paris Burning? Based on an American non-fiction book, scripted by two Americans, largely American-financed, and with as many American as French actors on screen, it is hard to see this international enterprise as a French film. To be fair, it is largely accurate in its account of the liberation of Paris in 1944; but it does have a political agenda. President de Gaulle made it clear that filming in Paris could not take place unless the film showed Gaullist resisters playing the dominant role in the liberation. The leading French character (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) was a Gaullist and there is a scene where, noting Communists have taken over a certain building, he remarks “We got here first”.

 

Naïve non-French audiences may assume that any French film made about the Resistance will be politically “neutral”. Such is not the case. All have a political agenda of some sort. What I regard still as the best French (fiction) film about the Resistance is Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armee des Ombres (Army of Shadows) made in 1969. The film goes out of its way to show that many politically-different types were involved in Resistance. The main character (played by Lino Ventura) is Gaullist and there is even a scene when, in London, he is personally awarded a medal by de Gaulle. But when he’s in a Vichy internment camp, other resisters include a young Communist, a Catholic and a non-partisan guy, a pilot who just wants to get back into fighting the Germans. Later, there’s a crusty old aristocrat, previously a Royalist who hated the French Republic, but who is now dedicated to fighting the Boche. The film also has much painful truthfulness because it shows all the compromises Resisters had to make and especially the brutal way informers had to be treated. There is a long and painful sequence in which a tearful young informer is strangled by resisters as he is compromising their agents. Yet, when the film was first released, it was severely criticised by French reviewers and had only a limited release. This was because 1969 was the year of student riots in Paris and rising anti-de Gaullism. For the reviewers, L’Armee des Ombres was not “politically correct”. Only in later years was it reassessed and re-released to acclaim. I caught up with it recently at a niche Auckland cinema.

Interestingly, in the same year that L’Armee des Ombres was released (1969) so too was released Marcel Ophuls’ long and detailed documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitie (The Sorrow and the Pity) which showed, scathingly, the extent of collaboration between 1940 and 1944 and especially the Vichy regime’s role in assisting Nazi persecution of French Jews.

 

Only a few years later (1974) appeared Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien about a naïve peasant boy who, in his general ignorance of the world, joined the Milice (the Vichy regime’s militia) purely to do something exciting, and sets about assisting the Gestapo. A collaborator, but in this case seen as a pathetic dupe who didn’t understand the consequences of his actions. In the 1980s appeared Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980), concerning a Jewish theatrical producer who, during the Occupation, had to remain in hiding while other people pretended to run his theatre. Then there was Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants (Goodbye Children)  (1987) based on Malle’s memories of attending a Catholic school during the Occupation. Surprisingly for a director of decidedly secularist views, the hero of the film was a priest who was protecting a Jewish kid from deportation.

And [sticking only with films I have seen] we come to the 1990s. One of the most contentious Resistance films was Claude Berri’s Lucie Aubrac (1997). The film celebrated a woman who genuinely was a member of the Resistance, as was her husband Raymond. But there was a big problem. Even as the film was being made, there were strong rumours [still much contested] that it was Lucie’s husband who, while being tortured, had dobbed in to the Gestapo the (Gaullist) Resistance leader Jean Moulin. (For evidence of this, see on this blog my review of The Death of Jean Moulin by Patrick Marnham). Knowing this, the film’s scriptwriters had to include such improbable lines as “After the war they will say that …” and then proceeded to make defensive statements about Raymond’s innocence.

 

Finally, and returning at last to my original theme of false heroism, we come to what should be essential viewing for anyone interested in French films about the Resistance. This is Jacques Audiard’s 1996 film Un Heros tres discret (literally A Very Discreet Hero but called A Self-Made Hero for English language release). It concerns an enterprising young man who has lived a quiet life throughout the Occupation, but after the war is over he realises he could gain prestige and hero status by claiming to have been an active Resister. His path is made clearer by the fact that  there were many opposing factions within the Resistance, and as he presents himself, each faction assumes he must have been part of another faction. The film begins as ironical comedy but gradually works its way to tragedy as the “discreet hero” is given the task of hunting down and destroying former collaborators. Only too late does he realise that he does not have the moral authority to do such things, but by then blood has been shed.

When major conflicts are over, there are always heroes after the event.