Reality and Fiction, Black and White, and Blood
by David McReynolds
3 September 2006
Recently I went with friends to see Army of Shadows, a French film produced in 1969 but only recently released in the US. Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, (and including in the cast the great Simone Signoret), it is an account of the Resistance under the Nazis. As a film, it is worthy of the raft of rave reviews critics gave it. Filmed in color, but very film noir, it is based on semi-fictional remembrance of the Resistance in France.
But at the end of the film, as the three of us sat talking about it, about the courage of those depicted, their icy nerve, one of my friends asked "yes, but what did they do?". And quite suddenly we realized that the Resistance, despite the drama of agents parachuted in from England, or picked up by British submarines, actually did very little, though they were tortured and executed for trying. (I did know one man - Claude Bourdet - a great French radical, who was among those heroes of the Resistance and survived.)
Only three people were killed in the film. One, somewhat by accident, and the other two killings were members of the Resistance executed by the Resistance. The first execution was chilling because the killers were amateurs, drawn to the Resistance not because of a criminal background but by their idealism, uneasy at the need to murder the young man who had sold them out, and very clumsy at the deed.
No bridges blown up, no trains derailed. The Germans, when they appeared, weren't encased behind barbed wire, but quite at ease in the restaurants or on the streets. Their police headquarters were not under "zones of protection". (I do, before going on, want to give the film the plug it deserves - a quote from Anthony Lane in the New Yorker "Lovers of cinema should reach for their fedoras, turn up the collars of their coats, and sneak to this picture through a mist of rain . . . For the first, and maybe the only, time this year, you are in the hands of a master.")
Not long after seeing this, a friend brought over a DVD of another French film, which a group of us watched at my apartment. This was a black and white documentary, The Eye of Vichy, produced by Claude Chabrol, made up entirely of selections of news reels produced by the Nazis or their French collaborators. Shown on French movie screens during the Occupation, the films begin with the "enthusiasm" shown by the French public in receiving Hitler and the Nazis, the support for Marshal Petain, the collaboration of some of the French (a "legion" was recruited to be sent to fight the "Bolsheviks" on the Eastern front).
The news reels gradually get grimmer, as food and fuel shortages take their toll and as the bad news from the front lines can't be hidden. For those who have wondered what "raw anti-Semitism" looks like, it is here, as the Nazis seek to make their case against the Jews.
However the films give little evidence of resistance. (Though there is a brief discussion of the execution of some members of the Resistance.) The Germans and their French collaborators do not look uneasy. It is a film worth seeing for those who have no memory of the war, and have forgotten that half of France was fully occupied by the Germans, and half remained (in theory) free of Occupation, but run from the small town of Vichy. It takes us back in time - I'd forgotten that Finland ended up on the German side in the war.
But we shift then from the grim drama of The Army of Shadows, which in the end achieved so little, and The Eye of Vichy which showed so little angst, from these events of a half century ago, to the front page of the New York Times of July 5 where, with photographs, there is a story headed: In Ramadi, Fetid Quarters and Unrelenting Battles. Let me quote from it:
"The Government Center in the middle of this devastated town resembles a fortress on the wild edge of some frontier: it is sandbagged, barricaded, full of men ready to shoot, surrounded by rubble and enemies eager to get inside.
"The American Marines here live eight to a room, rarely shower for lack of running water and defecate in bags that are taken outside and burned.
"The threat of snipers is ever present, the marines start running the moment they step outside. Daytime tempeatures hover around 120 degrees, most foot patrols have been canceled because of the risk of heatstroke.
"The food is tasteless, the windows boarded up. The place reeks of urine and too many bodies pressed too close together for too long."
The report (by Dexter Filkins) goes on to say that the American commanders have given up the fight for the downtown area - instead they plan to level it, to bulldoze about three blocks in the middle of the city and converrt it into a "Green Zone", similar to the fortress in Baghdad where the American Embassy is housed.
As I read it I thought back to the films I'd seen. The Army of Shadows operating in the heart of German occupied France, but not striking more than an occasional glancing blow at the Nazis. The Eye of Vichy which showed so many peaceful scenes of French and German politicians, under little guard.
We have been in Iraq for more than three years. We have spent tens of billions of dollars. We have complete control of the air space. We have the most complex and sophisticated weapons our military can buy. We have radar, night vision, guided missiles. And still, more than three years after Bush claimed victory, our troops in Ramadi are packed eight to a room, and for toilets use bags that are then tossed outside and burned.
Very few stories made it so vividly clear that the war is lost, no matter what the Generals may tell us. I don't know how many of you have seen Downfall, the great German film made last year about Hitler and his final days in his bunker in Berlin, but George Bush, though he still has the comfort of the White House and his Texas ranch, has sent American men to the bunkers of Iraq, where they are trapped. How much one wishes that we could bring the troops home, and send George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to take their place in Ramadi.
We don't need any special plan for withdrawal - we just need roadmaps, helicopters, armed convoys and a final try to see if the various rebel factions would let the US leave without planting bombs along the way. I remember the Vietnam War, when we were told, by men very much like Bush and Rumsfeld, that we dared not leave or there would be Communists in the North Beach of San Francisco. I remember Ho Chi Minh offering to line the roads with rose petals if our troops would only leave. In the end they left in humiliation, lifted off from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon by helicopters.
The news from Ramadi is that the Iraqi Resistance, unlike the existentially courageous and militarily irrelevent French Resistance, long ago overwhelmed the American Occupation. For the United States in Iraq, it is past midnight. The crime and the tragedy is that, unlike the Nazi Occupation of France (which left deep scars of its own - which you can see painfully documented in Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity), our Occupation has thrown the Iraqis at each other, so that most of the murders committed this past week were not against the US and British troops but against Iraqi civilians, victims of the sectarian conflict which did not exist until Bush's invasion.
Go to:
Reload David McReynolds Archive
Archives Root Directory
Socialist Party of Oregon Home Page