There is an excellent documentary called “The Sorrow and the Pity” directed by Marcel Ophüls in 1970 which deals with the Nazi occupation of France, and also focusses on those who collaborated. Other great films about the occupation and resistance would be Melville´s “Le Silence de la Mer”, Bresson´s “A Man Escaped” which you might already have seen, and Clément´s “Paris is Burning” which is about the final departure of the Germans in 1944.
I have not see any Bresson film nor any of the others you mentioned (I’ve of course heard of The Sorrow and the Pity because of Annie Hall but have never actually seen the film) but I will check them out. Thanks!
You’re not going to like Sorrow and the Pity. It’s four hours, and that’s so self indulgent of the filmmaker.
@Josh – hahahahahahhahaaha!!!
Damnit, I knew I shouldn’t have said that! lol
lol, wait, Isn’t the Sorrow and the Pity the film Woody Allen takes Diane Keaton to see in Annie Hall?
The Sorrow & the Pity is a tough…it’s worth it though…great movie.
Has anyone seen Is Paris Burning? (66) It’s the Rene Clement film set during the Occupation with the all-star cast….everyone from Leslie Caron to Orson Welles to JP Belmondo to Yves Montand to Kirk Douglas. It didn’t fare well but I thought it was really good.
And I love Army of Shadows!
Has anyone seen the film “Le Bon & Le Mechant” directed by Claude LeLouch? Is it any good?
I’m writing a script about the French resistance for my major practical work for my final year at university. I am already hunting for a copies of the films mentioned above. Does anyone have any other good ideas for other films?
‘Les Bons et les Méchants’ = very so-so.
For the period, apart from those mentioned (and ‘Is Paris Burning’ is pretty plodding) definitely Louis Malle’s ‘Lacombe Lucien’, which is about an accidental collaborator rather than the Resistance but is surely Malle’s best work.
THE Resistance film – the first, and probably the most authentic – is René Clément’s ‘La Bataille du rail’, which is available from France at least if you’re OK with that. (final year at uni I guess you are…) Claude Berri’s ‘Lucie Aubrac’ is a rather worthy reconstruction of the resistance story. The British film ‘Carve Her Name With Pride’ gives an interesting glimpse of a different angle on the resistance. And if you can possibly find it Franck Cassenti’s ’L’Affiche rouge’, which had a terrible time from the critics when it came out but which I persist in finding both affecting and well-aimed.
The Last Metro is not really a resistance film, but I think could be put on this list. It does play on the idea of resistance through art etc.
I agree with Ali: Lacombe Lucien is excellent.
Just a comment on Le Silence de la Mer. It is not specifically about the French Resistance. Instead, it explores the dynamic between a German officer (a composer in civilian life) and a French family on whom he is quartered during the occupation. It has an interesting connection to the French Resistance in that, to obtain the rights to the novel, Melville had to to submit the finished film to a jury of Resistance veterans for their approval, and agree to destroy the print if that approval was denied. Melville had himself been in the Resistance, his fellow vets signed off on the film, and it was distributed.
Le Silence de la Mer would make a nice addition to the Criterion library. It is difficult to see in the USA. I had to buy a copy from somebody in Canada, imported from Russia. I’d happily trade the Russian dubbing for a cleaned up print.
It also has a connection to the Resistance in that the book itself was an act of resistance. It was printed in London and smuggled into France where it circulated clandestinely: it’s very short and the book was very thin and with no stiffened cover at all partly because of wartime restrictions and partly to make it easier to hide. Melville films this object in the first sequences, including the dedication and the declaration of principle which introduced it. I have a copy and treasure it :) Bought by my mother in London in 1943 when she was 20 and enthused by the French resistance movement. (No, she never did a Violette Szabo – but she did buy a book).
Movies about Vichy’s governement do not follow the historical aspect of this period, most of the time… The new movie by Robert Guédiguian l’Armée du Crime about Missak Manouchian is quiet realistic so, for the historical aspect, it is something you should see if you’re interest in french history…but the cinematographical aspect is, without being deceiving, very classic.
There is a very good movie about a French village in the hours that follow its liberation by the American. Everyone’s celebrating in a summer banquet, before a series of misunderstandings about the presence of Germans in the village end up in a disaster… It’s a very unusual film because the resistance is not portrayed in a glorifying way. I think it was released in the sixties but, for these reasons, never met its public. And, unfortunately, I can’t remember the title !!! Sorry.
You could also think about Papy fait de la résistance, by Jean-Marie Poiré, with Gérard Jugnot, Thierry Lhermitte, the whole Splendid crew. Of course it’s a comedy, so it won’t tell you much about the resistance, but a good deal about how the French see it – released in the 80s, it was a kind of reaction against the solemn ways in which the story of the Resistance was told. In the same lines, there is also La Grande Vadrouille, one of the all-time box office hits in France, with Bourvil and Louis de Funès.
Anyway, you’ll never top Army of Shadows!
Come to think of it (can’t think why I DIDN’T think of it) an excellent, if deeply cynical, look at making history round the resistance can be found in ‘Un héros très discret’ (A Self-Made Hero), by Jacques Audiard.
You probably never will top ‘Army of Shadows’, but just bear in mind that Colonel Passy plays himself: that is, a man about 60 is standing in the place of a man about 30. One small cameo role, you say? Sure, but it throws a sharp light on something that the whole film is diffusedly doing. There may be nothing better, but there could be.
About Thomas’ comment :
Papy fait de la Resistance and La Grande Vadrouille are movies realased in french during the period when french people tried to forget about collaboration. The first french movie talking truly about this period was Nuit et Brouillard (but it is about concentration camps) and then there was Le Chagrin et la Pitié by Max Ophuls. If you decide to watch french movies released in the 50s and 60s, they will probbably be celebrating a resistant France which didn’t exists. Those movies are not good historical ones but if know about the way the memory was manipulated during this period, watching it could give you an idea about what resistancialism was (and still is for some people)
‘Papy fait de la Résistance’ is from 1983!!!
There’s a middle-term between the ‘we all resisted more or less (and if we resisted we were Gaullists)’ line – which with due respect applies to ’L’Armée des ombres’ -, and the ‘the resistance was a myth’ line which tendentiously applies to ‘Un héros très discret’. ‘Le Chagrin et la pitié’ is pretty balanced: some resisted actively for different reasons and that’s admirable, some collaborated actively for different reasons and that’s usually despicable, the majority tried to ignore the nasty situation and that’s more or less understandable.and/or regrettable
Yes, Papy fait de la résistance does not fall into the “resistantialist” category. You could also argue that Jean-Marie Poiré was hardly trying to make a point, as he has probably more in common with the Wayans brothers than with Truffaut.
As to L’Armée des ombres – I don’t agree with you, Ali, but I do acknowledge that the scene with De Gaulle is a little unsettling. Still, Melville himself claimed that he wasn’t describing the Resistance in a realistic way. Are they Gaullists? They’re a group of men meeting their fate, like so many of Melville’s heroes. I guess it’s open for discussion.
To get back to the topic itself, there is currently a TV series about a village under German occupation. I haven’t seen any of it, reviews are good but I am generally wary of France 2’s broadcasts dealing with “big issues.” They ooze political correctness.
I thought l’Armee de Crime was beautifully directed and interesting in that it raised awareness of the Armenian plight in WW2 but somehow none of the performances moved me. Has anyone seen Charlotte Gray?
Calm down guys…
OK i’m mixed up the things because I took short curts in my purpose…then, i start again : you can’t tell Pay fait de la Resistance is a movie about what truly was France under the nazi Occupation. Even if it was realased later, it tries to banalize the idea of resistance, you can’t denie it as well as you can’t denie it is not an historical movie about WWII and France…
You’re right Vicky, perhaps it wasn’t a great idea to mention Papy fait de la résistance (and La Grande Vadrouille) in this topic, as they are clearly of very little historical relevance.
We could mention Claude Chabrol’s La ligne de démarcation, although it is far from being one of the author’s most personal works. There is Jean Marboeuf’s Pétain (played by the great Jacques Dufilho, but I haven’t seen it). And La Traversée de Paris by Claude Autant-Lara, adapted from Marcel Aymé’s novel. Very controversial, because of the underlying moral relativism, and much maligned by the New Wave critics. Still it’s definitely worth a look because of the actors (Bourvil, Gabin, De Funès), its sometimes brilliant dialogues, and the moral ambiguity of the character played by Gabin.
’Pétain’’s reasonable history in its way, I think, probably a bit too kind to its subject (it’s been a while since I saw it) but it’s very little cinema.
The ‘Armée des ombres’ are all Gaullists in the sense that they’re thoroughly ‘engaged’ in the infrastructure which de Gaulle put in place, and totally committed to the hierarchies it implies: doesn’t necesarily mean they all think like De Gaulle, but in the prison camp scene Melville introduces two young men as representatives of the other two main resistant ‘currents’ – Communist and left-wing Catholic – more or less in order to marginalise them. Sympathetically, certainly. There has been some argument that the larger-than-life De Gaulle is so exaggerated that he represents a satire on too blind an allegiance to the Man of Destiny. Maybe. 1969 was not a propitious year to sanctify de Gaulle :)
You’re right that he said it wasn’t realistic.
“the sorrow and the pity” is obviously great and obviously too long
“army of shadows” did nothing for me.
Fredo
Having just watched Army of Shadows, I was wondering, “What other good films are out there on the French Resistance?” I thought Army of Shadows was superb and I’ve always been intrigued by this subject. With the exception of Le Corbeau and Claude Rains, I know very little about the Vichy government and films about the French Resistance during the war. Does anyone have any suggestions – films either recent or old that are as good as Army of Shadows?