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.