AHR Forum

Film and the Matrix of Memory

JAY WINTER

In the preliminary stages of work on the construction of a museum of the history of World War I at Péronne on the river Somme, I asked a number of French veterans of the war what kind of films they wanted in the museum. Three of them responded directly to the question, and all said the same thing. The film they wanted to see in the museum was Jean Renoir's La grande illusion (1937).	1
The choice made by soldiers who had seen combat, ceux de '14, of poetry to express a "truth" about the war, in this case filmic poetry in one of the great imaginative moments in cinema, raises central questions about our understanding of the status and character of films about war. Renoir's film does not show a single combat scene, and yet I am not alone in the view that it is an unmatched elegy, an illuminated poem throwing a flood of light on what war is. That is what these men were saying by choosing this one film to be shown in a museum about their war, the Great War.	2
When it came out in 1937, Renoir's film puzzled everyone. Was it pacifist? Hardly, when the "Marseillaise" is sung in a rousing scene clearly stolen a few years later in Casablanca. Was it nationalist? Hardly; it was kind to the Germans; it showed actor Erich von Stroheim in a tragic light; his stereotypical national stiffness as a Prussian officer was explained by a steel brace and other metal "gifts" in his body from his war service. Was it formulated in terms of class consciousness? Yes and no. Renoir was a man of the Left, but in his film, Pierre Fresnay, playing the French aristocrat and counterpart of von Stroheim, gives his life for two commoners; in fact, one was a Jew. The world, Fresnay tells his social equal and captor von Stroheim, has no further need of them. What did the title mean? That war would return; that after the war, the commoner hero, played by Jean Gabin, would return to the German widow he came to love (Dita Parlo)? Sixty years later, we are still perplexed by this work of genius.	3
The Grand Illusion is a unique work, in some respects unparalleled in the history of cinema. But its example does suggest the danger of treating any film directly and in an unmediated way as a text to be incorporated within discursive fields of different origins and character. To be sure, this is especially the case in works of artistic originality and power. Like poetry, film—film at the highest level—does not instruct or indicate or preach. It ministers, it challenges conventional categories of thought, it moves the viewer. Other films do so to a lesser degree, but no film is strictly didactic, since images have a power to convey messages of many kinds, some intentional, some not.	4
Even if we take account of the exceptional nature of The Grand Illusion, it is still evident that the historical analysis of war films presents real pitfalls. These three essays on World War II in film both reflect the dangers of a mimetic reading of film and its linear interpolation within political frameworks and show some ways in which those dangers may be addressed, mitigated, or averted.	5
The framework of analysis in all three cases is similar. In different ways, the aim of these essays is to relate film to an inchoate yet dynamic category roughly termed "collective memory." Perhaps this term is intended to follow Maurice Halbwachs's original usage; perhaps not.1 The term is simply used without interrogation. Since we are never told precisely what this category is, it is difficult to see how it might relate to other adjacent notions used in these articles: "popular memory" in Geoff Eley, "authentic memory" in Denise Youngblood, or "cultural memory" in John Bodnar. Without precise categories of analysis, the structure of interpretation offered here is bound to remain vague and to a degree unsatisfactory.	6
Thus we are invited in these essays to relate film to something called "collective memory" and to do so in the context of cinematic reflections on World War II in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. What is it that we learn of these three countries' cultural history from the authors' analysis of film? In Bodnar's discussion, we learn that Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan encapsulates a shift from framing the war experience in terms of collective trajectories—democracy, freedom, welfare, the icons of politics in the 1940s—to individual trajectories. Indeed, Bodnar follows Dominick LaCapra in seeing the turn to the past, in this case the past of World War II, in terms of individual memory, as a renunciation of political commitments tout court. This is his reading of the last scene in Saving Private Ryan where the surviving hero visits the graves of the men who died in the mission that brought him back home. Ryan asks his wife to confirm that he was a good man and had led a good life. The individual, Bodnar suggests, is the measure of the worthwhile character of the sacrifice of soldiers in war.	7
Consider an alternative reading of this scene. In pilgrimages to cemeteries and battlefields, the notion of symbolic exchange dominates the structure of feeling and behavior. Those who return to these places confront the names of people who gave everything. What can the visitor give in turn? A small bunch of flowers, a personal offering, perhaps? But of equal importance is the statement that the sacrifice palpably evident in the cemetery has produced something that transcends it. The search for some redemptive meaning is at the heart of social and collective languages of mourning. These are hardly matters of individual valuation or construction. Saving Private Ryan ends on a collective note: the gesture of redemption, here secularized, has many equivalents in both world wars. What makes it sustainable in this context is that it dealt with the Western front of World War II. When applied to the East, and in particular to the Holocaust, it is much harder to justify. But Spielberg has tried to do so. The end of Schindler's List (1993) shows the descendants of the men and women Oskar Schindler rescued putting pebbles on his gravestone in Jerusalem. "The people of Israel live," is how a religious person might configure it. The collective survived, and Schindler was one of those who, by saving a single life, saved the world entire. Spielberg is clearly interested in individual stories, but his notation is hardly the denial of collectivities Bodnar imagines it to be.	8
Other facets of Bodnar's handling of the subject of memory and collective behavior make one pause, too. He claims, "Contests over public remembering were certainly not pervasive in most nations after World War II."2 This statement flies in the face of an avalanche of recent scholarship on precisely such contestation. Pieter Lagrou has shown convincingly how narratives of the Resistance in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were strategies of restoration, needed to revive political cultures damaged or destroyed by occupation and collaboration.3 The struggle to displace communists from their rightful position within the resistance community was intense all over Western Europe; the same harsh contest over who resisted and who did not punished social democrats, liberals, and Catholics in Eastern Europe. And this does not even begin to touch the question of the eclipse of Jewish accounts of the war. All this was contested terrain. It is true that, by the 1960s, the process of political stabilization in both East and West had taken its course, and that then and only then other narratives of victimhood could emerge fully. The Adolf Eichmann trial was a catalyst in this respect. But it is not true that the representation of what Bodnar calls "homegrown victimization" was limited in Europe.4	9
Precisely in the field of film, such victims were visible. As Pierre Sorlin has shown, from very early on, cinematic narratives adopted the voice of the child as the core of cinematic tales about the war. Anyone who saw René Clément's Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games) of 1952 or Roberto Rosellini's Roma città aperta (Open City) of 1945, or Hans Müller's Und finden dereinst wir uns wieder (And Should We Ever Meet Again) of 1947 would be puzzled by Bodnar's assertions. Children are the quintessential victims in war; they cannot be blamed for its viciousness or its stupidities; they just have to endure them.5	10
Such filmic presentations of children at war demonstrate the danger of any argument that, in narratives dealing with World War II, images of victimhood were a late twentieth-century phenomenon, following and displacing a different and prior "collective memory" of collective aspirations toward a better world. The lonely, isolated, damaged, or suffering individual in film could and did point to the need for collective action. The filmic children of postwar Europe were hardly icons of the triumph of individualism over collective action.	11
There is another problem in this kind of analysis. Bodnar takes issue with work on traumatic memory, understood as an underground river of recollection, likely to erupt unbidden when triggered by some external stimulus. He argues that trauma may not be so much buried as displaced, and in part displaced onto film. The problem here is the direct transposition of a category of individual psychopathology into the arena of cultural production. The notion of "trauma" is in itself contested terrain.6 It is understood, in psychiatric or neurophysiological terms, only in a very rudimentary way. How is it possible to take the term and apply it to a culture as a whole?	12
Here is one feature of the discussion of "collective memory" that is at the heart of the problem. The assumption is that individual memory and collective memory are related in a linear or aggregative way. I know of no study in neurology or cognitive psychology that justifies such a conclusion. The language of "collective memory" or "cultural memory" is simply too vague to bear the weight of such an argument.	13
Bodnar's claim is that film served as a field of traumatic displacement. Cinema "articulated" anxieties arising out of "popular nervousness over brute force in both wartime and peacetime America." What film showed is that "violence could be homegrown." This imagery therefore enabled a "substantial amount of the trauma and anxiety, at least in the United States," to be not so much "restrained . . . as displaced into the narratives of mass culture."7 In this context, "trauma and anxiety" evidently become collective phenomena. It is hard to know what evidence would help us evaluate these massive claims. Did the Hollywood "Western" before World War II or gangster films of the 1930s serve the same purpose? And African Americans, victimized in a myriad of ways by segregation, hardly needed a demonstration of the proposition that "violence could be homegrown." The generalized form of this kind of claim about "cultural memory" makes it virtually impossible to evaluate its validity.	14
The same problem mars Eley's essay on British film and World War II. History, he posits reasonably, is both a "relation to something that really happened" and also "a container of meaning, a representational project" that was of use to certain groups in British politics. What Samuel Hynes calls "the war in the head," the war imagined, offered what Eley terms "an active archive of collective identification."8 This set of images associated with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war contributed to "an insidious postmodern gesture" whereby the history of real events was "erased in the very act of its recuperation."9 His central argument is that through war remembrance, imagery occluded history.	15
Sometimes, this occurred in very indirect ways. Kenneth Branagh's bold interpretation of Henry V clearly cut across Sir Laurence Olivier's film version of the play, produced as stirring wartime drama in 1944. But to Eley, "Branagh ventriloquized Thatcherist rhetoric in spite of himself."10 Here's the rub: how in the world do we validate such a statement? Representations perform functions independent of their authors, to be sure, but why adopt this one interpretation when others seem equally valid? The chaos of battle is much more evident in Branagh's film, when actor Brian Blessed walks right across his king's post-battle path. This device seems to remove some of the fictive order of battle and its aftermath, and thus works entirely against post-Falklands Thatcherite posturing. I do not want to argue that my interpretation is any more valid than Eley's, just that his method of analysis rests on a set of unexamined and doubtful assumptions about what memory is and how it is manipulated. Vagueness here opens the door to tendentious political interpretations of the effect of film, in the form of stating that Kenneth Branagh inadvertently spoke for Margaret Thatcher, interpretations that are at best difficult to evaluate.	16
Film does indeed have power in projecting national stereotypes and narratives. But it is unwise to link these images directly to political argument, such as that over British national identity in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. In this regard, the range of reference in Eley's essay is unnecessarily limited. He is right to state that "something like a renegotiation of national culture has been taking place" in Britain since the 1960s, but he defines this process too narrowly.11 Thatcher certainly tried, Canute-like, to stem the tide, but so much was against her that her failure was inevitable. Europe sealed her fate. Surprisingly for a German historian, Eley spends little time on the revolutionary implications of British integration, albeit hesitant and incomplete, into the European Community. For at least a century, what is British has been defined as against what is European. "Lesser countries"—in Dickensian rhetoric—had to follow a path that the more fortunate British had bypassed. Now that is no longer the case. How has film accommodated this sea change? Are European stereotypes less or more evident in British film now that integration is a reality? Here is an issue arguably central to a "renegotiation of national culture" but one on which Eley offers no clues.	17
Another difficulty in Eley's unanchored approach to "collective memory" and cinema concerns his handling of specific filmic material. "It is hard," he tells us, "not to read [the] boyhood memoir in [John Boorman's Hope and Glory] of a wartime society of women against the Thatcherized political language of the 1980s." Is that really so? Images of childhood, as Pierre Sorlin has demonstrated, have been salient features of World War II films from the later 1940s. Their power is in confronting war from the standpoint of someone who could not possibly be implicated in causing or fighting the conflict, but whose life is shaped by it anyway. Thus I remain unpersuaded by Eley's claim that the film "does have a metanarrative about World War II after all, though one coded through the formally depoliticized reconstructions of everyday life."12 But whether or not I share Eley's views is less important than the fact that he offers no criteria through which to evaluate them. Take it or leave it seems to be his approach to the study of memory, politics, and film. On balance, I would prefer to leave it.	18
Elsewhere, Eley writes of "the promiscuous use" of the trope of nostalgia in the last two decades tending to flatten "the specificities of particular periods and their place in collective and personal memory."13 There is force in this claim, but it fades rapidly when it is used to reach a political conclusion, namely that being nostalgic about the war tends to shift attention away from the period 1945–1951, when the Third Labour government created the basic institutions clustered under the heading of the "welfare state." This period of political achievement, Eley notes, was the one in reference to which "collective memory" had been "organized" and the postwar consensus had been "characterized."14 Remembering the war in nostalgic film is thus, from Eley's point of view, a way to avoid remembering the postwar years, years when the welfare state was born. To turn away from this period served the interests of Thatcherite conservatives who aimed to undo that postwar settlement.	19
I find this argument unpersuasive. Wartime settings accommodated many different thematic readings. For only one prominent example, it would be useful to consider the egalitarian message of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1943 film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Here is the stuff of nostalgia, nostalgia in huge quantities, married to a message deeply offensive to traditional conservatism. Apparently, Winston Churchill wanted to stop it from being made, then from being exported.15 And this film is far from the only filmic war narrative with a powerful populist flavor.	20
I understand that Eley is not making an argument about history as past events but rather about their imaginary reconstruction. His argument would have been more persuasive, though, had he adopted a more pluralist stance, enabling him to engage with multiple filmic readings of the war. And multiple forms of public recollection in recent years that move in different directions. When John Major tried to turn the fiftieth anniversary of 1945 into a picnic (literally), veterans made him think again. There was too much bitterness and too much suffering for their "collective memory" to be inscribed within the rhetoric of the Conservative Party.16	21
These are issues that ought to be studied and debated at length. My point here is that the attempt to correlate the imagery of film with something called "collective memory" and to relate both to political contestation about national identity is a program fraught with difficulties.	22
In Youngblood's essay on Soviet film and World War II, some of these same problems recur. Once again, the absence of a clear working definition of "memory" causes problems. Youngblood's interpretation is based on a juxtaposition of official lies about the war with filmic "truths," "truths" that "succeeded in returning to the Soviet people an authentic memory of the conflict."17 And yet what makes one memory authentic and another false? Even if we set aside Stalinist shibboleths, how can we know where the "truth" about the war lay? And how can we know that a particular film or set of films came to embody something called "authentic memory"?18	23
The authenticity of narratives about war is a highly contested subject. Some veterans continue to claim a proprietary interest here. The same occurred after the 1914–1918 war, and it is just as unconvincing. Essentialism cannot get us very far in dealing with imaginings of war. The experience was too varied for anyone to claim a privileged viewpoint; furthermore, if rough casualty figures can be believed, more civilians than soldiers lost their lives as a result of the 1939–1945 war.19 There can never be such a thing as an "authoritative" eyewitness to such a multifaceted catastrophe.	24
Multiple witnesses must yield multiple narratives, of which film forms only one dimension. To evaluate cinematic images of war, perhaps the best way forward is to interpret film lightly. Film surely cannot bear the weight of heavy interpretative agendas. This is not to reify film nor is it to suggest that film has no political echoes or origins; on the contrary. It is rather to urge a more complex and textured approach to works that are at one and the same time artistic, thematic, formulaic, commercial, and political.	25
And visual. In all three essays, the visuality of film is given less attention than its textuality. But surely imagery can (and frequently does) escape the confines of written language. And here a final set of problems emerges, concerning the impossibility of visualizing battle and other facets of war. There is a substantial literature on this problem, related to the chaos of combat and the absence of a vanishing point or a visual center around which the space of combat can be configured.20 It is at least arguable that all war films construct a geography of engagement that is inauthentic. The best film can do is to approximate the human or physical environment of war, an environment it can in no sense replicate accurately; the scent or stench of combat will never be there. An authentic war film, pace Youngblood, may be a contradiction in terms.	26
Film is never the same as text, and the ways in which cinema presents past events are never direct or unmediated. The authors of these essays have had the courage to enter a field insufficiently theorized—the field of collective memory—and have tried to relate film to various ways of understanding it. Their presentation of the issues is of importance, and ought to lead to much more systematic work on the matrix of activities, including film, through which both individuals and collectives configure the past. Much interdisciplinary work is currently under way in precisely this spirit.21	27
In this effort, greater rigor in the use of the concept of "collective memory" is clearly essential. Alon Confino has made a similar point in the pages of this journal,22 and his remarks are particularly relevant in the context of historical accounts of film and memory. The term "collective memory" must be handled with precision because it is at the heart of a matrix indicated, though not spelled out, in these essays. "Collective memory" may be understood as a set of signifying practices linking authorial encoding with audience decoding of messages about the past inscribed in film or in other sources. All three authors offer acute comments on the ways scriptwriters and directors encode political and social messages in their films. Some of these hidden agendas are carefully and subtly inserted: living under Stalin required no less. Other messages arrive in what may have been a semi-conscious or unintentional way: such is the nature of Eley's claims about the subliminal "Thatcherite" echoes of Branagh's Henry V, or Bodnar's argument concerning individual rather than collective configurations of World War II in American film. Let us for a moment grant the force of these arguments; the problem still remains as to how such messages, once imprinted on film and projected to a wide audience, are decoded by it. The answer is complex, and related to areas of the history of reading and reception well known to literary scholars.23 There are conventions at work here, and their character in the context of films about World War II is informed by various kinds of images and memories, some personal, some familial, some social, some ethnic, some gendered, some national. One way of understanding these conventions is to term them "collective memory," that is, the memory of different collectives about the past.	28
Here we encounter one crucial analytical distinction that these three authors do not make. "Collective memory" is not the same as national memory. National collectives never create a unitary, undifferentiated, and enduring narrative called "collective memory." Nations do not remember, groups of people do. Their work is never singular, and it is never fixed. The anthropologist Roger Bastide wrote thirty years ago of the chorus of voices that address the issue of memories about the past. Some members of the chorus are closer to the microphone, others have louder voices, but no one orchestrates them in a unified way. A cacophony is inevitable.24 For this reason alone, any study of "collective memory" must approach the issue from a pluralist's point of view. In addition, the concept of "collective memory" as a continuous message floating somewhere in the air cannot be sustained. What Carol Gluck has called "memory activists" are groups of people who do the work of remembrance in public.25 When they cease to act, their collective's "collective memory" fades away. Someone else or some other group speaks in their place. Maurice Halbwachs provided the rudimentary form of this story seventy years ago.26 Its implications are still of fundamental importance to the study of memory and history. It is both a chastening and a challenging thought that the task he embarked on prior to the outbreak of World War II, a war in which he lost his life, is a task that still remains to be done.	29
Jay Winter is a professor of history at Columbia University. From 1979 to 2000, he was a reader in modern history and a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. His publications include The Great War and the British People (1985), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), and (with others) Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (1997). He was co-producer, co-writer, and chief historian for the PBS series "The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century," which won an Emmy in 1997 for outstanding informational series of the year. Notes 1 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser, trans. (Chicago, 1992). 2 John Bodnar, "Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America," AHR 106 (June 2001): 808. 3 Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000). 4 Bodnar, "Saving Private Ryan," 808. 5 Pierre Sorlin, "Children as Victims in Postwar European Cinema," in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1999), 104–24. 6 See Mark Mikale's penetrating discussion of the subject in his review in the Times Literary Supplement (September 14, 2000) of Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Baltimore, Md., 2000). 7 Bodnar, "Saving Private Ryan," 809, 811. 8 See Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers' Tale (New York, 1997); Geoff Eley, "Finding the People's War: Film, British Collective Memory, and World War II," AHR 106 (June 2001): 818, 819. 9 Eley, "Finding the People's War," 819. 10 Eley, "Finding the People's War," 820. 11 Eley, "Finding the People's War," 823. 12 Eley, "Finding the People's War," 825. 13 Eley, "Finding the People's War," n. 22. 14 Eley, "Finding the People's War," 828. 15 Ian Christie, "Introduction: A Very British Epic," in Christie, ed., Powell and Pressburger: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (London, 1994), xi. 16 James McKillop, "Party for Everyone Bar Security Forces," Glasgow Herald, May 6, 1995; P.H.S., "Meet Again," The Times (London), December 30, 1994. 17 Denise J. Youngblood, "A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War," AHR 106 (June 2001): 855. 18 See Catherine Merridale, Nights of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (London, 2000). 19 See J. M. Winter, "The Demography of the 1939–45 War," in M. R. D. Foot, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford, 1995), 315–17. 20 See, for some suggestive remarks, Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London, 1993). 21 See the stimulating essays in Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry, eds., Memory, Brain, and Belief (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). 22 Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," AHR 102 (December 1997): 1386–1403. See also the Forum of which this article formed a part. 23 See the discussion in Roger Chartier, On the Edges of the Cliff (Baltimore, Md., 1999). 24 See, for instance, Roger Bastide, "Mémoire collective et sociologie de bricolage," Année sociologique 21 (1970): 65–108. 25 Carol Gluck, Past Obsessions: War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (New York, Columbia University Press, forthcoming). 26 See Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 172 and following. On the genesis of these ideas, see Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993), chap. 4. We await the definitive study of Halbwachs's work by Annette Becker.

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