"Lacombe Lucien" Louis Malle (1974)
01-15-06, 01:12 PM
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"Lacombe Lucien" Louis Malle (1974)
French editor Arte Video is going to release this film on DVD in February, there's no english subs or dub. You'll have to wait the Criterion release in March, this is one of my favourite Malle's film.
Portrait of a teenage collaborator during World War II, an unknowing, tough young farm kid cultivated by the Nazi occupiers who battles the Resistance fighters and then falls in love with a Jewish girl.
Louis Malle couldn't work in France after this film, so he moved to the US.
Quotes from "The French Occupation on film" by Ben McCann
http://www.kamera.co.uk/features/the...on_on_film.php
Thus the director forces us to address and reconsider conventional ideas of the Occupation (i.e. collaborator as monster) and instead asks the question "Was Lucien really aware of what was going on?" Malle regards the definition of a collaborator in Occupied France as an ideological sympathiser with fascism, yet Lucien is depicted as politically naïve and merely the victim of chance. When such monochromatic categories begin to blur, who is to say what a collaborator really is? Thus the prophylactic spell of the Gaullist narrative is broken – anyone might be guilty.
Public reaction to the film is a useful starting point in any debate on the historical presentation of the Occupation. Right-wing commentators in 1974 resented the fact that the collabos were represented as marginals devoid of ideological commitment and were instead driven by latent brutality, whilst the Left criticised the film's portrayal of the Resistance as petty murderers, and the notion that collaboration was widespread. Yet this collaboration was something that was far more widespread than French historians would admit, whilst records have shown that up to 95% of the population at this time were just keeping their heads down and waiting for the impending Liberation. This 'attentisme' already begins to fly in the face of the dominant Gaullist discourse. In parts of France where collaboration had gone on and had been accepted (especially in the southern, Non-occupied Zone), the film was welcomed as an honest portrayal of provincial life, whereas for Parisian left-wing intellectuals, the film was an apology for collaboration. The editorial of Le Monde declared: 'We are told that he might just as well have been a resister – it was due to bad luck. Resistance, Gestapo – it's all the same.' This whole debate highlights the deep unwillingness along the political and cultural spectrum to demystify the Resistance or to delve into the logic of collaboration (a debate recently reanimated by the Papon trial in Bordeaux).
Portrait of a teenage collaborator during World War II, an unknowing, tough young farm kid cultivated by the Nazi occupiers who battles the Resistance fighters and then falls in love with a Jewish girl.
Louis Malle couldn't work in France after this film, so he moved to the US.
Quotes from "The French Occupation on film" by Ben McCann
http://www.kamera.co.uk/features/the...on_on_film.php
Thus the director forces us to address and reconsider conventional ideas of the Occupation (i.e. collaborator as monster) and instead asks the question "Was Lucien really aware of what was going on?" Malle regards the definition of a collaborator in Occupied France as an ideological sympathiser with fascism, yet Lucien is depicted as politically naïve and merely the victim of chance. When such monochromatic categories begin to blur, who is to say what a collaborator really is? Thus the prophylactic spell of the Gaullist narrative is broken – anyone might be guilty.
Public reaction to the film is a useful starting point in any debate on the historical presentation of the Occupation. Right-wing commentators in 1974 resented the fact that the collabos were represented as marginals devoid of ideological commitment and were instead driven by latent brutality, whilst the Left criticised the film's portrayal of the Resistance as petty murderers, and the notion that collaboration was widespread. Yet this collaboration was something that was far more widespread than French historians would admit, whilst records have shown that up to 95% of the population at this time were just keeping their heads down and waiting for the impending Liberation. This 'attentisme' already begins to fly in the face of the dominant Gaullist discourse. In parts of France where collaboration had gone on and had been accepted (especially in the southern, Non-occupied Zone), the film was welcomed as an honest portrayal of provincial life, whereas for Parisian left-wing intellectuals, the film was an apology for collaboration. The editorial of Le Monde declared: 'We are told that he might just as well have been a resister – it was due to bad luck. Resistance, Gestapo – it's all the same.' This whole debate highlights the deep unwillingness along the political and cultural spectrum to demystify the Resistance or to delve into the logic of collaboration (a debate recently reanimated by the Papon trial in Bordeaux).
