Film and the Matrix of Memory

Abstract

IN THE PRELIMINARY STAGES OF WORK on the construction of a museum of the history of World War I at Peronne on the river Somme, I asked a number of French veterans of the war what kind of films they wanted in the museum. Three of them responded directly to the question, and all said the same thing. The film they wanted to see in the museum was Jean Renoir's La grande illusion (1937). The choice made by soldiers who had seen combat, ceux de '14, of poetry to express a truth about the war, in this case filmic poetry in one of the great imaginative moments in cinema, raises central questions about our understanding of the status and character of films about war. Renoir's film does not show a single combat scene, and yet I am not alone in the view that it is an unmatched elegy, an illuminated poem throwing a flood of light on what war is. That is what these men were saying by choosing this one film to be shown in a museum about their war, the Great War. When it came out in 1937, Renoir's film puzzled everyone. Was it pacifist? Hardly, when the Marseillaise is sung in a rousing scene clearly stolen a few years later in Casablanca. Was it nationalist? Hardly; it was kind to the Germans; it showed actor Erich von Stroheim in a tragic light; his stereotypical national stiffness as a Prussian officer was explained by a steel brace and other metal gifts in his body from his war service. Was it formulated in terms of class consciousness? Yes and no. Renoir was a man of the Left, but in his film, Pierre Fresnay, playing the French aristocrat and counterpart of von Stroheim, gives his life for two commoners; in fact, one was a Jew. The world, Fresnay tells his social equal and captor von Stroheim, has no further need of them. What did the title mean? That war would return; that after the war, the commoner hero, played by Jean Gabin, would return to the German widow he came to love (Dita Parlo)? Sixty years later, we are still perplexed by this work of genius. The Grand Illusion is a unique work, in some respects unparalleled in the history of cinema. But its example does suggest the danger of treating any film directly and in an unmediated way as a text to be incorporated within discursive fields of different origins and character. To be sure, this is especially the case in works of artistic originality and power. Like poetry, film-film at the highest level-does not instruct or indicate or preach. It ministers, it challenges conventional categories of thought, it moves the viewer. Other films do so to a lesser degree, but no film is