Women in the Resistance

Show & Culture

For far too long, cinema filmed the Resistance from a male perspective and reduced women to the roles of nurses and messengers in the shadows of railway stations, as in La Bataille du rail (France, 1946). In this lecture, we will trace their journey to leading roles, from the political cinema of the 1960s with Le Terroriste (Italy, 1963), which rendered them invisible, to works such as Lucie Aubrac (France, 1997), which gave female resistance fighters a name and a face. The radical break in Inglourious Basterds (USA, 2009) finally enabled women to become heroines, and the camera finally dared to show yesterday’s extras as important actors in history. But does cinema serve historical truth by portraying the female resistance fighter as a symbol of revenge, or does it simply create a new myth? . .