Le temps retrouve: Memory and revision of World War II in French and Italian fil

Using 1970 as a starting point, this dissertation investigates France's and Italy's intense interests in the WW II period. It focuses on how each country has remembered and represented the period on film, and on what these representations tell us about their historical imaginations. France and Italy have been involved in similar projects of interrogating and reinterpreting the past, but they have done so with varying degrees of success and controversy. This is due to the traumatic experiences of the war and the way in which these traumas have been perpetuated within their cultures.;France's and Italy's wartime experiences have become a part of each country's collective memory. Psychoanalysis provides a metaphor for interpreting the representations of this memory on film. Since the war's end, behavior in France and Italy has mimicked the psychological mechanism of repression and recall used by an individual when confronted with trauma. In 1970, a new generation with an intense interest in questioning the past broke this pattern of repression. Their questions provide the starting point of this study.;This dissertation analyzes nine films as manifestations of France's and Italy's obsessive memories and of their attempts at reinterpreting the past: Le Chagrin et la pitie, Strategia del ragno, Lacombe, Lucien, Amarcord, Il portiere di notte, Mr. Klein, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Le Dernier metro, and La notte di San Lorenzo. These films depict France's and Italy's understanding of their traumatic pasts and gauge the progress that has been made in confronting and overcoming the traumas.;The persistent presence of films on the WW II period throughout the 1980s and 1990s challenges the psychoanalytic model and its assumption that a "cure" can be realized by interpreting and working through a traumatic memory. The fact that France and Italy continue to produce films on the past reveals they have not resolved their obsessions. This dissertation provides a new context for understanding these films as it points to the need for further examination of how the two countries have remembered and continue to reinterpret the past.