Tracing the shadows of Occupation: memory as ‘screen’ in La Dénonciation (1962) and Tu ne tueras point (1961/1963)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite ravaging the minds of a generation of young French men threatened with the prospect of death-in-combat, the Algerian War—which tore through the landscape of French colonial Algeria from 1954 to 1962—has consistently been described as a ‘forgotten’ conflict, which left precious little trace of its trauma in the vectors of metropolitan, collective memory. Typically, scholars have tended to conceptualise this amnesia as a symptom of three main factors: political hagiography (see, for example, the work of Henry Rousso), modernisation (Kristin Ross), and censorship (Benjamin Stora). This article does not aim to challenge the elemental premise upon which this scholarship is founded—that the Algerian War was indeed forgotten by large swathes of French society—but rather dilates the scope of this inquiry in order to include an ambivalent obsession with the Second World War that arose at precisely the point at which Algerian nationalists began to stake their claim for independence. In the first part of this article, we will therefore explore how this obsession manifests itself in the sublimated landscape of Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s La Dénonciation (1962), before shifting our attention to Claude Autant-Lara’s mystifying portrayal of post-World War Two pacifism, Tu ne tueras point (1961/1963).