Obrazy (w) historii: film kompilacyjny i francusko-niemieckie kroniki filmowe w latach 1940-1944
Images in/of History: Compilation Film and French-German Newsreels between 1940 and 1944

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to present various aspects of the film form known as compilation film theorized by Jay Leyda and developed by both mainstream documentary filmmakers and also authors of more experimental (sub)genres of nonfiction cinema: avant-garde found footage film, authorial documentary film, essay-film and others. Key aspects examined by the author include the role of found footage material as a source of historical knowledge, narrative and discursive strategies of appropriation, the idea of historiophoty (Hayden White), plus different ways of approaching archival and found footage materials. Reflection upon the theory and aesthetics of compilation film is followed here by a historical case study presenting three movies produced after World War II that construct radically different narrations based on Vichy newsreels. The three movies in question are Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), Edgardo Cozarinsky’s One Man’s War (1982) and Claude Chabrol’s The Eye of Vichy (1993). Together they represent and address different stages in postwar history (and the politics of memory) in France and also different ways of confronting traumatic history.

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