The Long Road of Women’s Memory: Fred Zinnemann’s Julia

Abstract

In a corner of one of his pages of film notes on Julia, Fred Zinnemann wrote, “I am in a totally false position,” and then circled it for emphasis. Part of a tapestry of sketches for camera set-ups, script jottings, commentary, and phone numbers written in several varieties of his handwriting, it is initially very difficult to see the small note. There are hundreds of pages of the director’s production notes in his archive. But as with all of Zinnemann’s films, every detail counts. When Zinnemann signed to direct Julia, he had already made two other films about the history of the European resistance to fascism (The Seventh Cross, 1944; Behold a Pale Horse, 1964), and six others about the Second World War and its aftermath (The Search, 1948; The Men, 1950; Teresa, 1951; From Here to Eternity, 1953; The Nun’s Story, 1959; The Day of the Jackal, 1973). Julia’s 1930s Resistance context was perfect Zinnemann material, and was destined to become one of Hollywood’s most complex and powerful historical films about women. He had one problem, however: Lillian Hellman. Although adapting Hellman’s “memoirs” posed significant difficulties for the film as a traditional Hollywood biopic, Zinnemann’s discomfort, articulated in his production notes, enabled him to explore the very real struggle for historical legitimacy plaguing women’s history in film.