The Battle of the Sexes

in french cinema, 1930–1956

Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier

Translated by Peter Graham
The Battle of the Sexes
in French Cinema, 1930–1956

Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier

Translated by Peter Graham

Duke University Press

Durham and London
2014
Translation © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾
Designed by Kristina Kachele
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burch, Noël, 1932–
[Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930–1956. English]
The battle of the sexes in French cinema, 1930–1956 / Noël Burch and
Geneviève Sellier ; translated by Peter Graham.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5547-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5561-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Man-woman relationships in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—
France—History—20th century. I. Sellier, Geneviève. II. Burch,
Noël, 1932– Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930–1956.
Translation of: III. Title.
pn1995.9.m27b8713 2013
791.43094409′04—dc23 2013018959
"
Contents

Introduction 1

Part I. The Prewar Period, 1930–1939

Chapter 1. Panorama of a Cine-­Family Romance 15
Film Analyses 54

Part II.
The German Occupation, 1940–1944: Fathers Take a Backseat
Chapter 2. Castrated Fathers 91
Chapter 3. Women in the Service of the Patriarchy 103
Chapter 4. Misogyny Lingers On 114
Chapter 5. Absent Men, Fleeing Men 125
Chapter 6. Women Take Control of Their Destiny 133
Chapter 7. The Zazou Film: A Dissident Style during the Occupation 140
Chapter 8. A Woman Faced with Her Desire 150
Chapter 9. Gentle Male Figures and New Fathers 164
Film Analyses 180

Part III. The Postwar Period, 1945–1956: Settling of Scores

Chapter 10. The Destabilizing Effects of the Liberation 237
Chapter 11. Restoring the Patriarchal Order 269
Film Analyses 305

Conclusion 341
References 347
Index 357
"
Introduction

Although neither of the authors of this book is a trained historian, his-

torical research of the kind that has emerged in France over the past fifty years
or so, and in particular the history of representations, no doubt sparked our
desire to approach film analysis from a fresh angle. This required a considerable
change of course on our part in view of the fact that the disciplines that nur-
ture film studies in France, quite apart from the traditional areas of aesthetics
and art history, have, since Christian Metz’s key contribution to the debate,
been linguistics and psychoanalysis.
Not that the history of the cinema has been unexplored territory in France:
ever since Georges Sadoul’s first comprehensive surveys of the subject, many
researchers have focused their attention on an “art” which, although only just
over a century old, has not always been very accessible. But among the multi-
tude of angles from which such a protean object as the cinema can be ap-
proached—as both a technique, a language, an industry, a business, an art, a
popular culture, an institution, and an instrument of propaganda—we feel
that French researchers have so far failed to take full advantage of film’s poten-
tial as an ideal area in which to study the history of representations.
This can perhaps be explained by the difficulty that film specialists and his-
tory specialists have in communicating with each other, the former often being
Introduction

enthusiastic cinephiles and too fixated on their subject of study (and love!) to
be able or willing to use it as a way of achieving another end, the latter tending
to instrumentalize the cinema as just one of several sources and to overlook its
relative autonomy. Even the most pertinent historical work from our point of
view (Ferro 1977/1988; Garçon 1984) articulates its argument around a non-
cinematic factor (a political one in this case): films serve to gauge the impact
of a political ideology on civil society or to confirm the existence of an ideology
that opposes a given political regime. What we attempt to articulate here is an
argument based on the films themselves.
The cinema, a collective cultural product in the way it is both produced and
consumed, is probably an ideal medium for the expression of a social imagi-
nary. But it does nevertheless also constitute a language in its own right, whose
highly complex and very diverse codes (mimesis, narrative, fiction, characters,
lighting, sets, spectacle, music, dialogue, and so on) require a specific approach
of the kind that the art historian Pierre Francastel wanted to see applied to
painting.
Our book is the result of our wish to combine certain aspects of contem-
porary historical research with our so-­called inside knowledge of the cinema
as an object and of the specific tools that have been developed to analyze it.
Among the approaches that have changed the way we look at films, mention
should also be made of the fairly recent discipline of cultural studies, developed
chiefly in English-­speaking countries, which seeks to understand the symbolic
productions of a given society without reference to the evaluation grid im-
posed by the dominant culture. In France, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979/1984) revo-
lutionary approach to the sociology of culture adopted similar criteria, but
France’s elitist view of culture is so pervasive that it acts as a hindrance to that
kind of historical research, which is difficult to find anywhere except in the
work of a historian like Pascal Ory (1989).
In the field of cinema, in particular, the relatively recent struggle—which
has been crowned with success in France—to get the cultural legitimacy of
the cinema recognized by both the intelligentsia and official cultural institu-
tions has had the effect of encouraging the setting up of a pantheon of “great”
directors at the expense of a more modern (and in some ways more relevant)
approach to cinema as a collective cultural production. This is the approach
we have adopted in our book.
Finally, the most recent but by no means least important ramification of
the New History—the history of women, or rather the history of gender rela-
tions—has begun to emerge in France with the five volumes of Georges Duby

2
 Introduction

and Michelle Perrot’s Histoire des femmes en occident (1991), whose scientific
value is enhanced by the authors’ constant concern to weave together the ma-
terial and symbolic dimensions of male domination of women that forms the
basis of our societies. The historical precision of that collective work, which
is based on the premise that sexual identities are not essences but relation-
ships and differentiation processes inherent in a given society and period,
lent a useful extra dimension to the work of English-­speaking historians—­
particularly in the field of gender studies—which, while substantial, was all
too often sub specie aeternitatis. Moreover most of those same historians’
work on cinematic representations of gender was chiefly, if not exclusively,
concerned with U.S. cinema. It fairly soon became clear to us that, ever since
Laura Mulvey’s (1975/1981) trailblazing essay, any analysis aimed at under-
standing the symbolic function of film and of its spectator as regards sexual
relationships could not be applied directly to French cinema, for reasons that
have precisely to do with history in general and cultural history in particu-
lar. We do, then, distance ourselves from the principal feminist theories in
English-­speaking countries insofar as we are unwilling and unable to lock our-
selves into the notion that any analysis of representations of gender relations
would be of interest only to women endowed with sexual awareness (an argu-
ment implicit in Modleski [1988]). Just as the French cinema continues to
be aimed at spectators of both sexes without discriminating between them,
we feel that gender relations concern men just as much as they do women.
Equally, we have not followed the practice of most American feminists, who
ignore the issue of class, for we feel that in the cinema of every period and in
every culture that issue is profoundly interconnected with the issue of gender.
In the end, while we would like our work to be seen as part of the general
framework of the struggle for sexual equality, we regard as of secondary impor-
tance the theoretical construction of a female spectator, which can be used as a
basis for reassessing movies against the grain, so to speak, in other words, with-
out paying any attention to a film’s historical and social environment (Petro
1989; and, from a critical viewpoint, Williams 1988). We are more interested in
identifying and understanding the generally conflicting and contradictory im-
portance of gender relations at a given period, particularly since, in a country
like France during the period under study, the spectator’s position is resolutely
male, in that the great majority of women, at least up until the 1970s, had in-
ternalized patriarchal values along with the secular and libertine connotations
peculiar to France (Fraisse 1992; Rosanvallon 1993; Viennot 1995).
Our decision to focus on the period 1930–56 was motivated by various fac-

3
Introduction

tors. First, as can be seen from publishers’ catalogues, university degree courses,
and art-­house programs, most cinephiles and teachers of film studies are not
overly familiar with French movies made before the New Wave arrived on the
scene at the beginning of the 1960s and tend to look down on them, apart
from a handful of established masterpieces. This can easily be explained by
the history of film appreciation in France and in particular by the role played
by Les Cahiers du cinéma, in whose pages were elaborated the theories of the
future New Wave filmmakers who came to prominence at the end of the 1950s
by elbowing aside the previous generation. But before pre–New Wave movies
become totally incomprehensible once cultural benchmarks disappear, it is
perhaps high time to rescue from oblivion those twenty-­six years of French
cinema, from the beginning of the talkies to the rise of the New Wave—a
period notable in France for enjoying the highest cinema attendances and
drawing on the widest social spectrum of filmgoers. From the end of the 1950s
on, government support for high-­quality cinema brought about a two-­tiered
system, auteur cinema and commercial cinema, a situation that persists today
for better or for worse. Irrespective of the changing tastes that have, over the
past forty years or so, led cinephiles to prefer Hollywood classics to French
films over the same period, we felt it legitimate for us to look back over that
production so as to understand its place, its function, and its significance in
French society of the time. More crucially our intention was to focus on our
recent past, certainly more useful than a study of Hollywood movies in help-
ing us to understand where it is that we come from.
The choice of that period also seemed to us to be the right one for historical
reasons: France was then going through the darkest and most traumatic years
in its recent history; during the 1930s violent political clashes took place in
an atmosphere of mounting ideological confusion; they were followed by the
“phoney war,” resulting in military defeat and the Débâcle, an unprecedented
political and human disaster, which in turn led to four years of German occu-
pation with its attendant miseries, suffering, and humiliation; finally came the
Liberation, which marked both a deliverance and the end of an epoch, one in
which France could still claim to be a great world power. That situation was
confirmed by France’s inability to escape the mechanism of the cold war, with
the well-­known impact it had on domestic politics. Ten years later, economic
prosperity ushered in a new era, that of modernity and the consumer society.
The “Brigitte Bardot bombshell” burst on the scene in 1956, the point at which
we bring our study to a close.
Halfway through that period came the four years of the Occupation, which

4
 Introduction

we have studied more particularly because, at a time when the French were
going through the most painful ordeal in their history, the cinema occupied
a very prominent place: along with sport, it was the only mass leisure activity
that was authorized by the authorities and became, through the device of fic-
tion, an outlet and an ideal means of expression for a society where the press
and publishing were gagged by the dual censorship of Vichy and the German
occupying forces. We were of the opinion that it was legitimate for us to delve
more deeply into the film production of the time, which had hitherto been
dismissed by film historians as merely a duller continuation of the cinema of
the 1930s ( Jeancolas 1983).
It was, on the contrary, on the basis of the abrupt change we noted between
cinematic representation before the war and during the Occupation that we
began to construct our argument, which seemed to be borne out by an equally
marked shift that emerged in postwar cinema. Our definition of the corpus of
movies we examined was geared to cultural history rather than a simple love
of the cinema. So we watched, in the case of the 1940–44 period, a very large
proportion of France’s output (180 movies out of the 220 produced), while
in the case of the 1930s and the postwar period we focused on a very broad
sample of films that was representative of every genre and of every economic
and cultural level, initially leaving aside all qualitative criteria, whether those
of the time or later. Indeed as we progressed in our research, we felt the need to
redefine those qualitative criteria, with the result that what we regarded as the
“best” films were those that succeeded in dealing with the issues that were to
be found in all films produced during that period in a sufficiently complex way
to bring out its conflicts and contradictions, regardless of stereotypes. These
movies were often the same as those in the film buffs’ pantheon, but we ap-
proached them in a different way, which required us to eschew praise of their
timeless beauty as created by some solitary genius and to demonstrate their ex-
traordinarily acute approach to the problems of the time. As a result, certain
other movies usually left out of the pantheon, often because they were not the
work of established auteurs, came to be seen as more important.
As regards our choice of the central issue, it arose initially from our desire
to take into account the specificity of the cinema, and of French cinema in
particular, whose fictional material derives extensively from interpersonal re-
lations between men and women and/or between people of the same sex. In
other words, an analysis of cinematic representations of gender relations as a
particular expression of a social imaginary enabled us both to respect the rela-
tive autonomy of our subject (fictional films do not touch much on politics in

5
Introduction

the strict sense of the term) and to avoid restricting ourselves to the myth of a
timeless art devoted to the worship of beauty.
It was also the work of Ginette Vincendeau, a British-­based French re-
searcher, that supplied us with the starting point for our undertaking. In addi-
tion to her remarkable analyses of the Jean Gabin myth (1985; Gauteur and
Vincendeau 1993), her main contribution to our understanding of French
cinema in the 1930s arose from her observation of the way the image of an “in-
cestuous couple” recurred in movies produced between the beginning of the
talkies and the Débâcle of 1940 (1989). And we ourselves were able to verify
that such movies typically portray a middle-­aged man who enters into a more
or less explicitly amorous relationship with a very young woman. As Vincen-
deau suggests, this pattern was probably overdetermined by factors that ob-
tained at the time, such as the fact that the leading male stars were then elderly
and met the requirements of the talkies because they had a background in the
theater, where the presence of rather elderly young leads was considered quite
normal. Such relationships were all the more unremarkable because bourgeois
values encouraged marriage along those lines, particularly after the slaughter
of the 1914–18 war (McMillan 1981). That pattern also signified, more power-
fully than any other, the prerogatives of the father, whose power over women
was indistinguishable from his power over children and, like French common
law (the Napoleonic Code), maintained them in the same state of submission.
But to describe that narrative pattern as Oedipal, as Vincendeau does, runs
the risk of producing a theoretical misinterpretation. We are happier with the
other formulation she proposes: an incestuous pattern. Apart from a handful of
movies labeled “realist,” whether or not carrying the additional epithet “poetic,”
in which Jean Gabin usually has to face up to a domineering “unworthy father,”
the most characteristic feature of those prewar films is that the subject of the
fantasy is never Oedipus or Electra (the female child, according to the young
Sigmund Freud), but the father as representative of the Law who tries to oust
the “son” in order to appropriate the “daughter.” The term incest also makes it
possible to tie that film theme in with a whole psychosocial paradigm in real life
that extended well beyond arranged marriages between older men and young
women, since sexual abuse of girls by men in a position of power over them is
not just what a psychoanalyst might describe as a fantasy, as Nancy Huston
(1979) and Marie-­Victoire Louis (1994) have usefully pointed out.
Now if the origin of that pattern of the incestuous couple is to be seen
as arising not from a universal, hence “innocent,” psychical phase of human
ontogenesis (if Freud is to be believed) but from a hidden yet very real vio-

6
 Introduction

lence in society, its widespread occurrence in the films of that decade (almost
a third of all movies) begins to make sense. The sexual self-­confidence of such
portly Lotharios as Raimu, Harry Baur, Jules Berry, and Victor Francen, com-
bined with the submissiveness of young women whose faces and names were
so quickly forgotten, can be interpreted as a denial of the crumbling patri-
archal edifice, a denial symptomatic of a fear of changes already under way
(Sohn 1991/1994).
In the study of gender relations, it is commonplace to note that men as a
whole, at all times and in all places, have displayed fear and mistrust of the
female sex (Dinnerstein 1978). Given that context, under the particularly
oppressive and outmoded patriarchy of 1930s France (McMillan 1981), such
images of sexual submission by the child-­woman were taken for granted and
inevitably prompted some left-­wing filmmakers to include examples of rebel-
lion against the father. To be more specific, who was responsible for the fear of
women that features in those films? Frenchmen (a facile generalization much
loved by feminist writers)? French petit bourgeois? French intellectuals? The
male community of filmmakers (in the broadest sense) and their boulevardier
entourage? At the stage we have so far reached in our work, only this last hy-
pothesis seems to us to be indisputable.
Or could it be that we are looking at a displacement of more directly politi-
cal fears toward the register of gender relations, which in that case would be a
smokescreen: fear of war, fear of the loss of national identity, fear of the Other?
That is the hypothesis favored by French film historians when they observe a
thematic regularity in the cinematic representation of relations between gen-
erations and between the sexes (Bertin-­Maghit 1989; Garçon 1984; de La Bre-
tèque 1977). However that may be, such representations also probably reflect a
fear of real women—a fear exacerbated by modest social progress and the very
reasonable demands of the feminist organizations of the time (Bard 1995).
These same issues take on a completely different complexion in the light
of the startling revelations that emerged from our close examination of four-­
fifths of French films produced between 1940 and 1944 under the German
Occupation and the rule of the Vichy government. What we see from start to
finish during that period is a veritable supplanting of the Law of the Father by
a fantasized “Law of the Mother.” This reversal, which is to be found in almost
all movies of the period, can be attributed, as we ourselves are tempted to do,
to the trauma of defeat and the discredit that attached to a patriarchy closely
associated with the Third Republic and its routed chiefs of staff. This hypothe-
sis tends to substantiate, much more even than the incestuous pattern of the

7
Introduction

prewar period, the existence of a male social imaginary as well as its surprising
changeability: fear and hatred of women vanished in no time at all (we noted
that the change took place in a matter of months) and were replaced either by
a rigid female figure on a pedestal, like some monument to discredited mas-
culinity (an attitude typical of the traditionalist right and its mouthpiece, the
right-­thinking Catholic press), or by a dynamic figure that foreshadowed a
future renaissance (a left-­wing stance, as, for example, in Louis Aragon’s novel
Aurélien of 1944).
That male social imaginary in a state of crisis, which can be detected in the
work of the great majority of male directors, has its left-­wing and its right-­
wing versions (which comes as no surprise, given that we are talking about
France, where this division is traditional). But how can one explain why so
many movies are capable of being interpreted in various ways (Le Ciel est à
vous [The Woman Who Dared], 1944, is the most celebrated example) and do
not contrast as obviously with one another as the “unworthy fathers” of poetic
realism did with the “complacent fathers” of the boulevard films or Marcel
Pagnol’s Provence?
Pierre Laborie (1990) notes that the prevailing atmosphere during the pre-
war period in France was one of political and ideological confusion. Yves
Chalas (1985) argues that the Débâcle and the Occupation caused people in all
sections of society—from Resistants to collaborators, from right-­wing Vichy-
ites (supporters of Charles Maurras, traditionalist Catholics) to left-­wing
Vichyites (followers of Paul Faure, then leader of the Socialist Party) and even
apolitical believers in a wait-­and-­see policy—to yearn vaguely for “something
else,” which he describes as a “transcendence of liberal capitalism.”
Let us look a little more closely at the argument—admittedly a controver-
sial one—that some progressive aspirations emerged under Vichy. The theme
of regeneration through women that can be found in the totality of film pro-
duction at the time is comparable to the celebrated “return to the land” advo-
cated by Philippe Pétain. Gérard Miller (1975) notes that this theme was ini-
tially “launched” by the exodus of June 1940, when French living in the north,
east, and Paris region turned their back on the modern, urban, and industrial
society that had been the cause of upheavals since 1936 and had failed to pro-
tect them against the invading Germans, and sought refuge in the agricultural
south, which also represented a retreat into the past. Christian Faure (1989)
points out that, independently of Pétain’s propaganda, the Vichyite desire to
promote the farming world resulted in the creation of a rural French ethnogra-
phy (the opening of the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions) and a major

8
 Introduction

documentary school, the most famous example of which was Georges Rou-
quier’s Farrébique (which was actually made after the war but grew directly out
of one of Vichy’s official programs). Today, now that the farming community,
the landscape of France, and the quality of its farm products are under threat
from the increasingly absurd principles of liberal capitalism, we can take a
more dialectical view of that phenomenon: the aspirations embodied in France
under Vichy both by the official theme of upgrading rural life and by the ac-
tivities fostered by that promotion, can be seen to anticipate certain aspects
of present-­day ecology. In that light, it becomes easier to see that it is a mis-
take to describe the ideological ambiguity that informed civil society, at least
during the first two years of the Vichy government, in solely pejorative terms.
Now the same is true of the aspirations reflected, for example, in the setting
up of schools for women cadres, modeled after the celebrated Ecole d’Uriage
for men, whose stated aim was to rectify the serious deficiencies of the Third
Republic regarding the civic and social education of the national community’s
female members. Those hopes of a greater empowerment for both sexes in
society, as well as for a new relationship for couples and a new conception of
fatherhood (Delumeau and Roche 1990), greatly influenced the Occupation
cinema.
Albert Camus, Emmanuel Bove, Jean-­Paul Sartre, and Aragon were virtu-
ally the only writers at that time who exposed the male identity crisis triggered
by the Defeat. However, in L’Etranger, Le Piège, and Les Chemins de la liberté
(Aurélien, which was greatly influenced by Elsa Triolet, is a case apart), male
self-­doubt is accompanied by often violent misogyny, which is precisely what
distinguishes these books by the literary elite from the great majority of films
of the period. This difference between literature and cinema can perhaps be ex-
plained by the specific characteristics of the two artistic disciplines: the writer
stands alone and is an heir to a French cultural tradition that gives pride of
place to the male universe (Coquillat 1982). Although writers may be aware of
the world around them, they do not write for it; they write for eternity.
The collective artist that makes a movie (that is to say, both the director’s
team and the milieu of film professionals) has an attitude that is more re-
ceptive to the world as a result of belonging to a group, and awareness of the
ephemeral nature of film (which was much greater then than it is now) meant
that people making movies were working in the present for the audiences
of the time. And let us not forget the commercial dimension of the cinema,
which encourages the collective filmmaker, whether consciously or not, to be
receptive to the Zeitgeist—which in our view is not necessarily a bad thing.

9
Introduction

However that may be, this complementarity between a male identity crisis
and a regenerative view of the female is nowhere as patently obvious as in the
cinema. True, in a handful of works for the theater—another collective art—
we find female effigies surrounded by men in a state of crisis according to a
pattern similar to that of the most typical movies of the period. And Pierre
Laborie (1993) has pinpointed how the Catholic press of southwest France
used Joan of Arc as a symbol of unity and solidarity during the same period.
The huge scale of the phenomenon in the cinema compared with its vir-
tual absence from popular literature, for example, leaves several questions un-
answered and probably touches on an area that has remained little explored
up to now, at least in France: the specificity of various cultural practices, both
individual and collective, in a given social formation at a given time. Taking
the cinema alone, how did creators and technicians become mediators of the
social imaginary—always supposing that such an identity crisis of the sexes
falls under that heading?
The male identity crisis that regularly comes in the wake of a war, that
supreme test of manly values (especially when it results in defeat), has begun to
be investigated in the case of other periods and other nations (Theweleit 1987–
89; Maugue 1987). As regards France in the 1940s, one could argue that as a re-
sult of the two national humiliations triggered by that war—the Débâcle fol-
lowed by the Occupation, then the Liberation led by non-­French forces—the
male identity crisis should be divided into two phases: a collapse followed by a
backlash. Following two complementary trajectories, the active and indepen-
dent woman of the Occupation turns into a diabolical figure (Panique [Panic],
1946), whose actions are exclusively directed against men, whereas the compla-
cent male turns into a victim (Manèges [The Cheat], 1949), as though echoing
the image that the countless French prisoners of war had of themselves as they
returned from their ordeal, terrified that women would no longer accept the
submissive role they played before the war (Durand 1987).
Film representations of the postwar period are, however, highly contradic-
tory; in the context of a dominant atmosphere of misogyny, and at a time
when Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) was poised to become a best-­seller
of the 1950s, a number of truly feminist movies, in the modern sense of the
word, were produced. Often remarkable, like Casque d’or (Golden Marie, 1952),
they attempted to reveal the workings of patriarchal oppression by demon-
strating that it was also a burden for men.
Thus more than any other means of expression, in our view, the cinema
reflects the destabilization of gender relations in French society of the 1940s

10
 Introduction

that was triggered by political and military events. In this book we focus on
their repercussions in the area of private life traditionally regarded as being
governed by a different temporality (the longue durée of the history of men-
talities).
The sensitivity of the cinema to upheavals in the area of gender relations
brought about by war and the Occupation proves, if proof were needed, how
political the private sphere is. Moreover our bringing to light a layer of mean-
ings perceptible only (for the moment) in fictional films, which account for
only part of cultural output, should also demonstrate how useful it can be to
approach the history of the cinema as an autonomous area capable of telling
us much more about the state of our societies, provided films are no longer re-
garded as a mere reflection, or counterreflection, of ideas elaborated elsewhere.
Our book takes the form of a triptych whose central panel consists of an
overall analysis of the French cinema during the Occupation. Two “side panels”
offer a more schematic overview of the prewar and postwar periods, each of
which covers a decade. All three historical panels are accompanied by separate
sections that analyze a number of movies—many of them well known, others
little known—whose complexity we felt deserved special treatment. In each
case, we try to demonstrate how the status of a masterpiece, whether or not
recognized by cinephiles, derives not from some lofty isolation in the firma-
ment of ideas and forms but from a particularly remarkable ability to bring out
the contradictions of the period.

We warmly thank those who allowed us unrestricted access to their archives: Dominique Païni of the
Cinémathèque Française, Michelle Aubert and the Film Archive Department of the Centre National de
la Cinématographie, and Gabrielle Claes of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique.

In the case of prewar and postwar films, we have indicated their date of commercial release, whereas we
have preferred to indicate the date when shooting began in the case of Occupation films, given the speed
of events characteristic of that period and their effects on films as soon as production started.

11