In a world where political and social developments increasingly tend to resemble processes that the generations alive today have known only through the accounts of their elders and the history books, what is the role of cinema, and of art more broadly, in speaking in a contemporary way about the laws of historical development? The way we learn about and experience History has changed dramatically in just the past few years. Those who saw themselves and their own lives reflected in Rossellini’s films, projected in black and white, had no need to see a horrific world brought back to life before their eyes, a world from which they had only just escaped. Almost eight decades later, however, technological development, human curiosity, and the need to understand the reality of other historical circumstances through our own senses have led to an explosion of products that transport us back to eras whose events we know, but whose “scent” we also want to experience.
Period cinema often takes on this role, that of a museum. The ability of a fully realised production to immerse us in the sets, costumes, behaviours, and material foundations upon which historical phenomena unfold has a unique power to impress us. More recently, artificial intelligence, in most cases remaining remarkably far removed from any attempt at a carefully considered historical interpretation, and reproducing an almost standardised, easily recognisable aesthetic, has been bombarding us with material that seems to bring back to life before our eyes that irretrievable material reality, feeding sometimes an innocent curiosity and sometimes the desire to escape into a past that, precisely because it is safely behind us, has become romanticised.
And while, under different conditions of technological development, the discussion about the usefulness of this kind of period cinema could have included various arguments whose validity has since faded, it is worth having that discussion in light of today’s circumstances and asking what period cinema actually contributes in our time. Unfortunately, more often than not, neither the glorified portrayal of the heroes of the past nor the extraordinarily charged—both technically and artistically—cinematic depiction of atrocities and ideologies that have now been rejected and condemned in the collective social consciousness offers anything new, anything useful for the development of our own social life.
To put it more simply, a film that speaks in general terms about antisemitism in nineteenth-century Europe, about Nazi atrocities through the personal tragedies of their victims, about racism or gender inequality, beyond cultivating an awareness of the historical existence of these phenomena, does no more than a history book to help us understand today’s society, let alone envision the society we want for tomorrow. Cinema, however, is not a history book; it is itself History. And that is why the great cinematic works of any era are those that reflect the radical ideas of their time, rather than softening their criticism of the past while leaving the present unchallenged.
This year, a series of films set during the Second World War were released in France. Hardly surprising, one might remark, given the parallels within French society itself, less than a year now before an electoral contest that could bring the far-right (fascist, to call it by its proper name) formation to governmental power for the first time under the French Fifth Republic. Has this society, then, which is ready to surrender (once again) to fascism, not studied History? Does it not know the facts? Does it not know about the atrocities? None of these things is true. And despite the technical excellence one may find in a number of these films, the great question remains: which of them answers the questions of today? Which of them even raises those questions?
Emmanuel Marre‘s film, which won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival, is not merely the only one to raise questions about the present through the use of historical documents, but also an oasis within a cinematic genre that, for many years, had accustomed us to comfortable, albeit aesthetically pleasing, reconstructions. Inspired by letters the director discovered in a drawer in a family home, correspondence between his great-grandfather and great-grandmother, he created a shocking cinematic work precisely because the shock it produces emerges through our perception of present-day reality.
Henri Marre, an ambitious civil servant and official of Pétain’s Vichy France, begins his journey amid the dust of the Second World War with very clear ideas about the ostensibly patriotic programme he wants to see implemented by the regime he serves. He leaves Yvelines and the suburbs of Paris, escaping the German occupation and, in effect, his family as well, in order to pursue his dream of climbing the state hierarchy of this French fascist caricature. Around him, a succession of opportunists, careerists ready to make any ideological concession in the face of the “pragmatism” imposed by the times—and by the regime—shock us as they speak, in another era, the very language we hear spoken everywhere around us today.
And this is where director Marre’s greatest artistic proposition lies: he does not dress reality in emotionally charged colours, sets, and music, but stages it through the world of today, with anachronisms that, instead of transporting us into the position and mindset of the people he depicts, bring those people into our own mindset, to a place right beside us, creating the space for us to think about and judge our own attitudes towards them and towards the events of our own lives, rather than towards the past.
With an almost documentary-like technique (tellingly, the directorial instruction was “imagine The Office in Vichy”), with music that accompanies the events of today on our television screens (Live Is Life accompanying a Pétainist parade and Popcorn the surrealist dance at a dinner of regime officials), Emmanuel Marre employs Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the necessary distancing from the characters that Brecht first established in order to prevent spectators from losing their critical awareness during the spectacle, to wonderful effect. Marre’s film is quiet enough to ensure that we cannot feel at ease while watching it. With an almost complete absence of any dramatic climax, it insists on an almost boring narrative in order to keep alive the essence of what might otherwise be lost amid the spectacle of historical reconstruction.
This restraint—as well as the ideological division—is at the heart of the arguments in the clashes between sections of the audience and between critics in France. There are people who leave the cinema saying they have seen a film in which absolutely nothing happens, with no plot whatsoever, no development of the drama, while there are critics who, defending the “literary quality” they believe cinema ought to possess, find the film devoid of content. On the other hand, there are spectators and critics who enthusiastically embrace this contemporary critique, a cinema that speaks in the present tense, that does not remain confined to the darkened auditorium but magnifies the reality that exists outside it, that uses its techniques to present us with the truth and confront us with difficult questions, with fierce confrontation on the ideological level. Perhaps these two camps are also the ones competing at every level within French society itself at this moment. And in this sense, the very existence of such an intense clash may constitute yet another great distinction for Marre’s creation.
Cinema, in an era of war, of brutality in the way the lives of billions of people are being transformed, cannot be a poetic procession of yesterday. Such an approach could render it obsolete as an art form altogether, overtaken along with the eras in which it held a monopoly on the ability to project the lives of the people seated before the big screen. *Notre Salut* offers hope, an extraordinary attempt to reformulate the cinematic language we need in order to approach historical truth in a meaningful and useful way.
Emmanuel Marre’s film “Notre Salut” is released under the English title “A Man of His Time”.
