Abstract
The second part of Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Éloge de l’amour (2001) concerns a Resistance couple named Samuel, who had taken their Resistance name Bayard after the war. The couple sells the film rights to their story to the American director Steven Spielberg. A leitmotif of Éloge de l’amour is that one thinks of something by thinking of something else. This essay examines Éloge de l’amour by thinking of a heroic Resistance couple whose prewar name was Samuel, who took their Resistance name Aubrac after the war, and who sold the film rights to their story to a prominent French director, Claude Berri, whose Lucie Aubrac was released in 1997. Godard, a man with his own feelings of guilt about the heroic world of the Resistance he had never entered, suggests that Americans need the historical memories of others to survive - especially memories of resistance. Éloge de l’amour is Godard’s own act of resistance to the imperial aggression he sees himself confronting today in the form of Hollywoodization. Beginning with an examination of the complex relationship of history, memory and the hero raised by the release of Lucie Aubrac, the essay moves to an analysis of the Aubracs’ interactions with American institutions of power during and after the war. Viewed through this prism, the United States’ relationship to the experience of resistance and resisters is more imbricated than the troubled story Godard has Spielberg buy from the Bayards would suggest. The paper concludes with the transmission of memory to the generation coming of age with Éloge de l’amour in 2001, that of resisters’ grand-children, represented in the film by the Bayards’ granddaughter and for the Aubracs by the intended audience of Lucie Aubrac’s La Résistance expliquée à mes petits-enfants (2000).
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