French and Francophone Cinema as Testimony

Grappling with how to live together after mass trauma, this book argues that cinema—as philosophy and as history—can aesthetically construct each and every one of its spectators as responsible agents of a present fully informed by the traumas of the past. Inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of testimony as the expression of the subject’s responsibility for the other, this new testimonial genre of cinema, narrating for-the-other, emerges from the close analysis of a constellation of French-language films that form memories into arguments against totalitarian systems. These films include Le silence de la mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1949), Mr. Klein (Joseph Losey, 1976), La Noire de… (Ousmane Sembene, 1966), Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1958), Trahir (Radu Mihăileanu, 1993), and Goulag (Hélène Châtelain and Iossif Pasternak, 2000). Within contexts of extreme violence and oppression, these cinematic narratives reinscribe a unique subject who by definition bears an irreducible responsibility for the hatred, suffering, and injustice inflicted upon the other. By bringing into dialogue the Holocaust, colonialism, and the Gulag, this French and Francophone approach to memory mobilizes the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of testimony as a transnational response to 20th century trauma.