To browse Academia. The relationship of French national identity to its cinema is a well-established field. Yet, most studies have so far either taken a broad historical approach or focused on a particular director or period. Using various theoretical approaches, this project seeks to investigate an area so far ill-or untreated by scholars: what is the relationship of film form to the ideas circulated by a given work, whether they be overt or hidden?
To answer this question, the present study makes a close formal analysis of ten French war films from across the Twentieth century.
One significant challenge is to appropriately define the area of study, for the French war film is quite different from its Anglo-American counterpart, and the current study undertakes a gradual redefinition of this sub-genre of the historical film. War films are a subject of choice because they react to, or seek to represent, particular moments of crisis for national identity, especially considering France's troubled experiences during the past hundred years. Thus, one can examine films made under the shadow of war as well as movies made at a historical remove from their subject.
This duality of temporal distance and social function allows the current study to employ a dual prism: looking at movies as both documents of social history and as increasingly legitimate historical reconstructions.
In his book The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since , Henry Rousso looks at how France's way of talking about its past has changed in the last fifty years.
