Eût-elle été criminelle…
2006 · 9m · France
Directed by Jean-Gabriel Périot
Genres: documentary, experimental, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
In the summer of 1944, French women accused of having had relations with German soldiers are publicly shaved and humiliated; archive footage set to La Marseillaise turns the Liberation’s joy into an indictment of collective punishment.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Périot's move to weaponize La Marseillaise against triumphalism is genuinely perverse—he's not just inverting a national anthem, he's making you feel the obscenity of liberation-as-mob-violence. Most filmmakers would apologize for that; he doesn't flinch.
This sits precisely in the lineage of essay-film practice—Godard's montage-as-argument, Farocki's archive interrogation—where the formal decision (music against image, jubilation against cruelty) becomes the thesis itself. The rigor is uncompromising.
The decision to let La Marseillaise play straight over documentation of humiliation, refusing any ironic distance or underscoring, is what makes this devastate—it forces you to hear your own country's anthem as complicit. That single tonal choice is everything.
Reviews
Un court métrage qui sillonne les frontières du documentaire et de l'animation expérimentale pour servir un propos militant et engagé. D'une efficacité implacable, le film de Périot interroge judicieusement la société sur le concept de châtiment public.