Elle s'appelait Sarah and the Limits of Postwar Witnessing and Memory

Abstract

This study offers an analysis of Gilles Paquet-Brenner's Elle s'appelait Sarah (2010) as historical and testimonial fiction. It investigates narrative strategies and storytelling choices used to represent France during the Nazi Occupation and to promote the importance of remembering and bearing witness to that period in the twenty-first century. This investigation will show that while the film's representation of 1940s France is admirable in its historical accuracy, the promotion of postwar rememoration is hampered by the use of a variety of complex and unconventional storytelling strategies. That narrative complexity results from Paquet-Brenner's close adaptation of Tatiana de Rosnay's novel Sarah's Key. This study shows that de Rosnay resorts to certain storytelling techniques due to generic constraints and the borrowing of tropes from non-fictional Occupation narratives. The film and the novel ultimately present a case study of genre and narrative authority in relation to the limits of the transmission of memory and the representation of witnessing. Specifically, this study contends that the story of Sarah Starzynski shows—provocatively, though unconsciously—that the distinctive power of testimonial war narratives might be limited to those told by first-hand witnesses and their immediate descendants.