dimanche 6 février 2011

Qui fut Robert Brasillach?

Collaborateur comme Pétain? Oui.

Avec Staline? Non: Katyn: Öffnung der Massengräber* - détail: Robert Brasillach

*Ouverture des tombeaux de masse.

Mémoire éternelle!

Je ne l'ai pas encore lu. Mais d'après le détail de la grande photo, il fut là pour écrire sur Katyn. Sur la barbarie communiste. Qui peut dire autant pour Ferrat, sauf cette belle chanson sur le printemps de Prague?

5 commentaires:

Hans Georg Lundahl a dit…

Casablanca semble avoir puisé dans son roman Les sept couleurs - normal, le concepte est bon, est Hollywood, à l'époque pas trop timide en plagiats, ne pouvait pas l'utiliser tel quel ... ajoutons que Humphrey Bogart va bien dans la rôle d'un fasciste expatrié et Ingrid Bergman, conationnellle de beaucoups de volontaires de la mauvaise côté et peu de la bonne (brancardiers ou journalistes, puisque Franco ne voulait pas exporter la Guerre Civile en Suède) dans celle d'une ayant épousé un communiste.

Hans Georg Lundahl a dit…

Chronologiquement il semble que j'eusse les possibilités d'avoir raison. Le roman de Brasillach est de 1939, le film de 1942, et il n'est pas basé sur un roman américain. Le scénariste Epstein avait soit lui-même, soit parmi les proches, des connaissances de la langue française, car Epstein est un nom juif.

Hans Georg Lundahl a dit…

Bien-sûr, Casablanca diffère quelque part aussi:

- étant un drame, il respecte les unités d'action, de temps et de lieu, tout se déroule à Casablanca,

- étant dans une autre guerre, il n'y a pas la libération d'Alcazar dans le film,

- étant par un scénariste d'une autre religion que Brasillach, en occurrence la religion juive ou quelque dérivé sécularisé de celle-ci, il y a la chanson As Time Goes By avec les mots cyniques ... a Kiss is But a Kiss ... qui s'accordent mieux avec le rock qu'avec Cara al Sol.

Pour les anciens, quand l'histoire d'Oreste touchée dans les épopées d'Homer servait à Sophocle et à Eschyle, pour Tolkien qui trouve la version Perrault et la version Grimm du Petit Chaperon Rouge deux histoires différentes, puisque celle de Grimm sauve la grandmère, il s'agit de deux œuvres très différentes. Pour la sensibilité de certains juristes d'aujourd'hui, il pourrait quand même s'agir d'un plagiat.

Hans Georg Lundahl a dit…

La chronologie marche plus ou moins, avec un peu de raideur (et on passe à l'anglais):

1939 Les Sept Couleurs (The Seven Colors), nominated for Prix Goncourt 1939.

The book begins with the courtship of Patrice and Catherine, two students, in Paris in the 1920s. At one point the young couple meet two children, who are also called Patrice and Catherine and who claim to be a couple. His studies completed, Patrice leaves to work in Italy, where he becomes enamoured with Italian fascism. Catherine, desiring a more stable relationship, eventually marries a Communist she has met at the office where she works, François. Patrice leaves Italy and serves a five-year stint in the Foreign Legion, where he befriends a young Nazi. After his time in the Legion, Patrice goes to work in Nazi Germany, where he finds Nazi ritual (e.g. Nuremberg rallies, the banners and marches) very engaging. Patrice learns from a friend from his Paris days that François has become a fascist, having turned from both Communism and the Third Republic following the 6 February 1934 crisis in which the extreme right rioted against government "corruption" and perhaps planned to overthrow the state. Ten years after he last saw Catherine, Patrice returns to Paris to visit Catherine and she agrees to go away with him but asks for a few days to collect her thoughts. She decides to stay with François instead, but François misunderstands and believes she has left him. François leaves France without a word and joins the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, where he has a brief encounter with the Nazi Patrice met in the Foreign Legion. Catherine stays faithful to François, although she meets a young Frenchman who fought for the Republicans in Spain and who turns out to be the young Patrice she had met while he was a child in the 1920s. Meanwhile, the elder Patrice marries a young German woman. The book ends with Catherine on her way to visit François in hospital in Spain after learning that he has been seriously wounded at the front. The title of the book stems from the seven styles in which it is written: a narrative of Patrice and Catherine's time together in the 1920s; letters exchanged between Patrice and Catherine while Patrice is in Italy; Patrice's journal entries while he is in Germany; a series of reflections or maxims, mainly on the process of aging and turning 30; dialogue, in the form of a play, between François and Catherine and Catherine and Patrice in the mid-1930s; a series of "documents" François has put together in a scrap book about the Spanish Civil War; and finally a "speech" ("discours"), in which Catherine describes her thoughts as she travels to meet François in hospital. The book is very sympathetic to fascism as a regenerating ideology. However, given his future as a collaborator, readers may be surprised that Communism and socialism are not attacked outright and that the "Patrice" character mentions several times that Nazism may not be as enduring as fascism and that Frenchmen may have to fight the Germans in the future. Also, it is of note that Catherine, who calls herself a "petite bourgeoise" and who exemplifies French rationalism (and perhaps represents France herself) as noted in the dialogue section, chooses François, the French/native fascist and turns away from Patrice, who has immersed himself in Italian and German ideology.

Hans Georg Lundahl a dit…

Now compare:

In the summer of 1938, while on vacation from his job as English teacher at a vocational school, Murray and his wife Frances traveled to Vienna to help Jewish relatives smuggle money out of the country, occupied by the Nazis since March of that year.[1] Later, the couple visited a small town in the south of France, where they went to a nightclub overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. A black pianist played jazz for a crowd of French, Nazis, and refugees.

Burnett returned to the USA via UK, staying a few weeks in Bournemouth; there he started to make notes for his anti-Nazi play. In the summer of 1940, the 27-year-old teacher completed the play in six weeks with the collaboration of Joan Alison.[1] They featured Rick, an American bar owner of the Cafe Americain in Casablanca, Morocco, whose European exiles and refugees frequent the cafe. Eventually, Rick helps an idealistic Czech resistance fighter escape with the woman Rick loves.

Soon after, Carly Wharton and Martin Gabel took an option to produce the play. But there was resistance to the idea that Lois "had slept with Rick in Casablanca in order to get the letters of transit."[2]


Brasillach, Les Sept Couleurs: 1939
Murray Burnett & Joan Alison, Everybody Comes to Rick's: 1940