When the French government was preparing to sign an armistice with the Nazi government, Charles de Gaulle’s speech in London on June 18th, 1940 reignited the flames of resistance. The speech, perhaps among the most famous ever in French history, eloquently united France and entire Europe to counter the Nazi regime which was at the peak of power at the time. Of course, the rest of history speaks for itself, but underlying de Gaulle’s eloquence is a careful manipulation of French collectivity and national pride, which ultimately grows so overwhelming that voices of others remain silent even decades after the war. This is what Naomi Greene terms “the myth of the Resistance” that creates an illusion of France as a unified frontline in which all men actively participate in the opposition against the invaders.

“Cultural myth” certainly does not speak to France during WWII only. The notion is almost a transnational, and even timeless one. And film as a medium is especially fitting for the promulgation of myths. If “political myth” consists of a dynamic of images that cannot be reduced without loss of richness, films too cannot be reduced to concepts such as plot summary or thematic discussion. For Greene, “just as cinema lends itself to the expression of dreams, so too is it a powerful medium for the transmission of historical and political myths that, frequently, soften or obscure the most brutal or unpalatable of historical truths even as they give rise to compelling visions of the national past” (6).

This project, therefore, proposes to comparatively examine films of Alain Resnais and Oshima Nagisa, who both stood at the forefront of critiquing and radically reimagining the “cultural myths“ in France and Japan in the 1960s and 70s. By examining Night and Fog (1955), Night and Fog in Japan (1960), Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), and The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), I argue that cinematic techniques such as the tracking shots and film-within-film challenge state-sponsored myths of French national unity and the Japanese aesthetic traditions.

The project is supported by 2019 Tufts Tisch Summer Scholar Fellowship.