The Memory of the French Centurions: Asia-Europe Connections in the Tragic Memory of Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Films

Inspired by Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs, who were French researchers of the mechanism of the memory, and Jean Larteguy, the novelist who gave a voice to the defeated French colonial soldiers, this essay explores the passage of the perilous memories of the veterans of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, which fought in Indochina between 1945 and 1954, based on the regenerative memory of the war and of Asia and on their memories of themselves. The defeat at Dien Bien Phu resulted in the stigma of a dangerous and traumatic memory. Producers of image and rhetorical discourse, such as the French filmmaker Pierre Schoendoerffer, have undertaken acts of image making through films that transformed the humiliating defeat into a grand and redemptive tragedy. For Schoendoerffer, these acts of filmmaking constituted an unsettling and regenerative experience for both sides, creating a film production of transcultural memories connecting Asia and France.