Personal and National Loss in René Clément's Forbidden Games
Psychoanalysis, Cinema, History: Personal and National Loss in René Clément’s Forbidden Games Esther Rashkin Abstract: What facilitates the psychic process of grieving a traumatic loss, and what happens when that process is blocked? Forbidden Games is, on one level, an intimate film about childhood trauma. When viewed from a psychoana- lytic perspective informed by concepts such as introjection and pathological mourning, however, it emerges as a complex allegory that reflects, through its narrative and filmic elements, on the sociocultural and historical dynamics of France’s troubled response to the loss of its identity as a democracy during World War II. The film also reflects on the even more shameful history of the rise of French anti-Semitism under the Vichy regime and France’s history of silencing or repressing the drama of its willing collaboration with the Nazis’ Final Solution. Private trauma thus screens public, political trauma as Clé- ment’s film becomes both a medium for sociocultural commentary and a memorial to loss that could not be buried or mourned. Keywords: allegory, anti-Semitism, blocked mourning, Collaboration, deper- sonalization, introjection, memorialization, self-cure, trauma, Vichy Since its premiere in 1952, René Clément’s Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits) has been praised for its honesty, simplicity, and unwavering evocation of the emo- tional pain suffered by children exposed to the violence of war (Arlaud 1952; Ebert 2005; Egly 1958; Kast 1952). The film has received numerous awards in- cluding an Honorary Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Lion for Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival, where the jury lauded it for “having known how to raise up, with a unique lyrical purity and an ex- ceptional expressiveness, the innocence of childhood over the tragedy and desolation of war.”1 These well-deserved accolades notwithstanding, this arti- cle argues that Forbidden Games is neither as simple nor as straightforward a meditation on childhood war trauma as it might first appear.
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