politfilm

Media activism at its best. I highly recommend you to watch this movie.

This movie follows a group of American soldiers through different European battlefields in World War II: Italy, France, Belgium, Germany. It is composed of several short stories that share the same theme and characters, divided by sequences of actual newsreels from the war. This creates a very strong contrast between the stories served to the movie theater audiences at home in which the soldiers were portrayed as optimistic heroes and the dark reality: brutal conditions, exhaustion, depression, futility, sexual exploitation, the black market, war profiteers...

It was made at the time when Second World War movies were still big-budget epics, with an atmosphere of heroism and optimism very similar to the wartime newsreels, and most of the action was limited to battle-scenes. In this film, the focus is on daily life, moreover there are no combat scenes, and short stories complement each other to create an atmosphere of pervasive emptiness and quiet desperation. A few weeks after its release the movie was briefly withdrawn to be modified, abridged and virtually censored. As far as I know, the original uncut version of the movie is still not available.

This two-part documentary analyzes the occupation of France in World War II through the example of a city with a population of approximately 100,000 people. The spirit of the time is quite well conveyed with the use of archive materials, as well as interviews with members of the resistance movement, collaborators with the occupying forces, and German soldiers who participated in the occupation. Everyone is given the space to express their views and explain the logic that guided them during the war. A side of French history, today mostly hidden, is presented: dark and shameful collaboration, but also the heroic resistance to the occupation - all this in the context of a true civilizational tragedy. The film has been banned in France for more than ten years (it wasn't aired on TV until 1981), supposedly because it was too one-sided, but in fact because it showed the extent of the collaboration and the burden of historical responsibility for the committed crimes - a history that was rushed to be forgotten, in order not to disturb the post-war social consensus and the re-established status quo.