Cinematic Minor Memory Work: Re-visioning the Occupation in the Context of the “Debate on National Identity”

Around the end of the aughts, France witnessed another resurgence of cinematic interest in the Second World War, with a spate of films released between 2008–2011 being linked by a particular focus on “memory work”. This article examines three of them: L’Armée du crime (Robert Guédiguian, 2009), Liberté/Korkoroedom (Tony Gatlif, 2010) and Les Hommes libres (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2011). Although the Holocaust is of secondary (if unavoidable) importance in these films, this article argues that their objective is less to revisit the genocide perpetrated against Europe’s Jews than to shed light on previously un- or under-explored angles of the Occupation period. These films make a novel contribution to the cinematic corpus of the Occupation by focussing on the neglected heroes and forgotten victims of this episode in French history. Examined as a group, these films undertake a process that this article terms “minor memory work”. By analyzing the films and their subtexts, it argues that this cinematic memory work trend is a direct response to the Sarkozy-era debates on the subject of national identity.