In 2003 I saw a film that absolutely knocked me out with its incomparable visual beauty, its exploration of traumatic memory, its unexpected historical resonances, and its gently hopeful message about human communication and community. The film was A Little Birch Tree Meadow (La Petite prairie aux bouleaux), written and directed by Marceline Loridan-Ivens. She was 75 at the time and recently died at the age of 90. The film’s title comes from the French translation of Birkenau, that place of despair, adjacent to Auschwitz, where Jews were systematically imprisoned and murdered during World War Two. In the film, Myriam (Anouk Aimée), a survivor of the concentration camp, wins a raffle at the annual gathering of the women of Birkenau and returns there, to the site of “her murdered adolescence”, where, finding what she considers to be her “true identity”, she engages in the work of memory and reconciliation. When I saw the film, I remembered something from Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1959), that exploration of contemporary French life, made as a cinéma-vérité documentary (of the kind that became a hallmark of the French New Wave) by the filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin. I realised that the diminutive ball of energy with the wild halo of red hair who presented Meadow at the New York Jewish Film Festival had been, some 40 years earlier, the young Holocaust survivor (interned at Auschwitz-Birkenau at age 14) who was a central figure in that early-‘60s black-and-white documentary of Parisian life. Her presence in the documentarists’ picture of postwar Paris, then plagued by anticolonial conflicts in Algeria and Congo, felt like a layering of past and present (and future, if you count subsequent readings), of film and public memory; in short, it evoked the emergence of Holocaust witnessing in the quotidian patterns of forgetfulness. There, embedded in this early film of daily life, is Marceline’s recollection of the last time she saw her father, brutally separated from her in the camp. She returns to this in her penultimate book, But You Did Not Come Back (2016), written as a letter to the father she never saw again. Thus her public life is framed, start to finish, by the intimate, searing memory of loss, a yearning to survive and a commitment to remember. That sense of social responsibility, bound up in the most unspeakable trauma of the past, remained with Loridan-Ivens throughout her life, and she remains for us an icon of indomitable courage, compassion, and, yes, of humour and friendship. She said that Meadow was her way of transmitting the unutterable:
Hidden from everyone is the fact that each deportee was an individual, with her own experience, her own life, her own feelings and personality. Today each survivor has memories, grief, of this period that marked her in her flesh and her soul. They all share with the other survivors having lived the same tragedy, but each of us, as a function of what she was and what she became, has personal feelings that escape general group classification, feelings that can’t be uttered. It was important for me to transmit through cinema, because that’s my profession, what can’t actually be spoken. To transmit this differently.
When I saw that galvanising presence at the screening of Meadow, I was in the process of writing entries for The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women (now The Jewish Women’s Archive online). I had written on the women of Izieu, on Anouk Aimée, on Simone Signoret, and Irène Némirovsky, and this film led me to suggest an entry on Marceline Loridan-Ivens, who was then relatively unknown to the English speaking world. The editor, Moshe Shalvi, approved, and now the short summary of her work is supplemented by the various tributes and new kinds of recognition that this amazing woman deserves, providing us with the enduring legacy of her strength and inspiration. After surviving the Shoah, she led a varied and exemplary life, always committed to empowering women by example. She advocated for human rights and social justice throughout her work almost as easily as she breathed air. She worked as a journalist, a television producer, an actor, a screenwriter, an author, a filmmaker (both documentaries and fiction), and, as Vanity Fair recently described, a salon-convener for a whole new generation (in her apartment on Rue des Saints-Pères, next door to her publisher Grasset). At the heart of every enterprise, and articulated clearly in the discourse around Meadow and in her later books about her Holocaust experience (Ma vie balagan, But You Did Not Come Back, and L’Amour après), was a commitment to remember and to assert humanistic values. On her return from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Loridan-Ivens immersed herself in the Left Bank intellectual milieu of the ‘50s, married and then divorced Francis Loridan, and worked for Roland Barthes. Her participation in Chronicle of a Summer, initiated by Barthes, proved to be a significant contribution to the film’s unique blend of intimacy and committed politics. In his book Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg points out that “Marceline creates a ghostly space in which spaces (the camps, Paris) and times (the war, the postwar) intersect with little transition… Her dramatic testimony continues to mark viewers’ memories.” And it is this traumatic haunting, always present, which seems to have compelled Loridan-Ivens to embrace life with the urgency and energy of transformative action.
In 1962 she co-directed (with Jean-Pierre Sergent) a controversial documentary about Algerian independence, Algérie, année zéro, which provided the foundation for her sustained work in committed documentaries that was to follow. She met Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens in 1963, when he was already a celebrated leftist documentary and experimental filmmaker with a long list of international activist projects to his credit. Their 30-year age difference seems to have enhanced rather than detracted from their relationship, and their marriage and highly productive collaborative career ended only with Ivens’s death in 1989. Among their most well known documentaries are Le Ciel, la Terre (1965), about the origins of the war in Vietnam; 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War, Le peuple et ses fusils, and La guerre populaire au Laos (all 1968, all made in conjunction with North Vietnamese filmmakers, about the Laotian popular struggle); and the highly acclaimed series of 12 films about China, How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976). In 1985 Loridan worked with Elizabeth D. Prasetyo on a screenplay about Ivens’s life and work, which became the film A Tale of the Wind (1988). It follows Ivens’s travels in China as he tries to capture winds on film while he reflects on his life and career. The blending of real and fictional elements, documentary and fantasy, material representations and dream sequences, led Jonathan Rosenbaum to call this last Loridan-Ivens collaboration “a mind-boggling documentary full of magic and fantasy that beautifully encapsulates the career that preceded it”.
In 1998, a German documentary filmmaker named Daniela Schulz made a film about Ivens’s dynamic partner, Bride of the Wind (Windsbraut), as a tribute to their decades of work together. Calling her friend Marceline “the second part of this legend [of Joris Ivens]”, she pays tribute to her as one who, after losing her “beloved and symbiotic partner, has kept her dynamism and liveliness as a person and a filmmaker”. The cinematic portrait illustrates how Loridan was in fact much more than a shadow at Ivens’s side.
For Marceline’s part, Ivens was “irreplaceable”, the great love of her life. She writes, “Our love, which began as a thunder bolt, grew out of a series of chance occurrences, blended two destinies that overcame complex and contradictory obstacles together. A flying Dutchman and a little wandering Jew… Our reciprocal confidence was total… working intensely, together against the odds”. Only work could fill the void of this overwhelming loss, grafted on to the primary loss at Auschwitz, and in fact she worked tirelessly with the foundations she created in his honour, with her writing, and of course with her astounding feature fiction film. Again Marceline proved that she was a dynamic life force in herself, a dazzling example of indomitable strength.
Throughout a life laced with tragedy and longing, Marceline Loridan-Ivens stands as an icon of the power of social activism, but also the power of women’s laughter. The former health minister (recently interred in the Panthéon) Simone Veil, whose lifelong friendship with Loridan-Ivens was forged in disaster (they were both teenagers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the same convoy, with tattoos only one numeral apart) has said that, “Even in the most unbearable situations, she made us laugh”. Particularly moving is a video of the two old friends, in their 80s, reclining on a bed and laughing about those distant, painful memories of Birkenau. Their affectionate laughter, given the horror of their experience, is a reminder of the sacred bond of women’s friendship, its capacity to transcend and endure.
The extraordinary French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur characterised this friendship as “this paradoxical sisterhood, sisters of the camp and of destiny. Simone and Marceline, like two faces that a woman dreams of being: the face of engagement and duty, the face of passion and freedom”. She referred to Marceline, “one of the last witnesses of her generation”, as someone who taught us “what it means to remember and choose life, to know that what happened to you doesn’t say everything about you. Because there’s always something else, you can be, change, create.” In Marceline’s funeral eulogy, Horvilleur called her “a fierce advocate for humanity”, and while we must learn to live without her (many thought she would live forever), her memory teaches what the rabbi reminds us: we must “stand side by side in the heroic struggles that await us”.
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis is one of the four founding co-editors of Camera Obscura. She is the author of To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, and is currently preparing a collection of her essays on the Jewish family in France during World War II.
This piece appears in the second print issue of Another Gaze. To read the rest, you can purchase a digital or print edition here.
