| Popis: |
Two French films released in 1949 were considered the first to treat the Liberation critically. The prize-winning, now forgotten Manon, by Henri-Georges Clouzot, heralded as French cinema's return to form, updates the eighteenth-century story of Manon Lescaut to Liberation France with the lovers escaping on a boat carrying clandestine Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Retour a la vie, by Clouzot, Andre Cayatte, Georges Lampin and Jean Dreville, explores the return to France of prisoners of war and a deportee. This article argues that it was via commentary on home and homecoming that French cinema made this first critique of liberation, specifically by formulating reflections about the French nation and posing questions about ethnicity, particularly that of Jews. I explore these films' interrogations of nationality, ethnicity and gender, and their international reception in France, Britain and West Germany, as well as responses to pre-state Zionism, which historians of France have sidelined despite France being the headquarters of post-war European Zionist organization and a major transit point for migrants to Palestine. In drawing together several historiographically disparate strands, the article makes a bid for a more transnational approach to histories of post-war France. |
