In Landscapes of Loss, Naomi Greene makes new sense of the rich
variety of postwar French films by exploring the obsession with the
national past that has characterized French cinema since the late 1960s.
Observing that the sense of grandeur and destiny that once shaped French
identity has eroded under the weight of recent history, Greene examines
the ways in which French cinema has represented traumatic and defining
moments of the nation's past: the political battles of the 1930s, the
Vichy era, decolonization, the collapse of ideologies. Drawing upon a
broad spectrum of films and directors, she shows how postwar films have
reflected contemporary concerns even as they have created images and
myths that have helped determine the contours of French memory.
This study of the intricate links between French history, memory, and
cinema begins by examining the long shadow cast by the Vichy past: the
repressed memories and smothered unease that characterize the cinema of
Alain Resnais are seen as a kind of prelude to a fierce battle for
national memory that marked so-called rétro films of the 1970s and
1980s. The shifting political and historical perspectives toward the
nation's more distant past, which also emerged in these years, are
explored in the light of the films of one of France's leading directors,
Bertrand Tavernier. Finally, the mood of nostalgia and melancholy that
appears to haunt contemporary France is analyzed in the context of films
about the nation's imperial past as well as those that hark back to a
"golden age," a remembered paradis perdu, of French cinema itself.
