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Comité de libération du cinéma français was an organization of filmmakers in France created in 1943. The most well-known members are Jacques Becker, Pierre Blanchar, Louis Daquin, Jean Painlevé, and Jean-Paul Le Chanois. Members of this organization made projects for French cinema for after the War. During the German occupation of France in World War II they made films about the Maquis, such as one showing a Maquis camp in Vercors. During the uprising in Paris, they filmed the documentary Journal de la Résistance: La Libération de Paris , (directed by André Zwoboda). Parts of this movie were used in the newsreel France Libre Actualités.
The group also created its own underground film journal called L’Ecran français in 1943. After the war, the publication became a place where film critics could debate each other, such as the iconic argument over Citizen Kane between Andre Bazin and Jean-Paul Sartre. The publication ended in 1953.
French cinema consists of the film industry and its film productions, whether made within the nation of France or by French film production companies abroad. It is the oldest and largest precursor of national cinemas in Europe; with primary influence also on the creation of national cinemas in Asia.
The Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French and Belgian Resistance fighters, called maquisards, during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Initially, they were composed of young, mostly working-class, men who had escaped into the mountains and woods to avoid conscription into Vichy France's Service du travail obligatoire which provided forced labor for Germany. To avoid capture and deportation to Germany, they became increasingly organized into active resistance groups.
The French Resistance was a collection of organizations that fought the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy régime in France during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women who conducted guerrilla warfare and published underground newspapers. They also provided first-hand intelligence information, and escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind Axis enemy lines. The Resistance's men and women came from many different parts of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, communists, and some fascists. The number of French people participating in the organized resistance is estimated at from one to three percent of the total population.
René Clair, born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1960. Clair's best known films include Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), I Married a Witch (1942), and And Then There Were None (1945).
The National Front for an Independent France, better known simply as National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement created to unite all of the Resistance Organizations together to fight the Nazi occupation forces and Vichy France under Marshall Pétain.
The Francs-tireurs et partisans français (FTPF), or commonly the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), was an armed resistance organization created by leaders of the French Communist Party during World War II (1939–45). The communist party was neutral at first, following the Soviet Union's official view that the war was a struggle between imperialists, but changed to a policy of armed resistance against the German occupation of France after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Three groups were formed, consisting of party members, young communists and foreign workers. Early in 1942 they were merged to form the FTP, which undertook sabotage and assassinations of the occupation. The FTP became the best organized and most effective of the French Resistance groups. In March 1944, before the Allied forces returned to Normandy, the FTP was theoretically merged with the other Resistance groups. In practice, it retained its independence until the end of the war.
Combat was a large movement in the French Resistance created in the non-occupied zone of France during the Second World War (1939–1945).
Jacques Becker was a French film director and screenwriter. His films, made during the 1940s and 1950s, encompassed a wide variety of genres, and they were admired by some of the filmmakers who led the French New Wave movement.
The National Council of the Resistance (also, National Resistance Council; in French: Conseil National de la Résistance, was the body that directed and coordinated the different movements of the French Resistance: the press, trade unions and members of political parties hostile to the Vichy regime, starting from mid-1943.
The Service d'ordre légionnaire was a collaborationist militia created by Joseph Darnand, a far right veteran from the First World War. Too radical even for other supporters of the Vichy regime, it was granted its independence in January 1943, after Operation Torch and the German occupation of the South Zone, until then dubbed "Free Zone" and controlled by Vichy. Pierre Laval himself passed the law which accorded the SOL its independence and transformed it into the Milice, which participated in battles alongside the Nazis against the Resistance and committed numerous war crimes against civilians. After the Liberation, some members of the Milice escaped to Germany, where they joined the ranks of the SS. Those who stayed behind in France faced either drumhead courts-martial, generally followed by summary execution, or simple lynching at the hands of résistants and enraged civilians.
Jean-Charles Tacchella is a French screenwriter and film director. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his film Cousin Cousine (1975), which was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and which was later (1989) remade in a US version starring Ted Danson and titled Cousins.
The armée secrète was a French military organization active during World War II. The collective grouped the paramilitary formations of the three most important Gaullist resistance movements in the southern zone.
The Service du travail obligatoire was the forced enlistment and deportation of hundreds of thousands of French workers to Nazi Germany to work as forced labour for the German war effort during World War II.
Albert Ouzoulias was a French politician and a Communist leader of the French Resistance during World War II (1939–45) using the name of "Colonel André". He played a major role in the 1944 liberation of Paris.
Jean George Auriol was a French film critic and screenwriter. He was the founder of the film magazine La Revue du cinéma.
The clandestine press of the French Resistance was collectively responsible for printing flyers, broadsheets, newspapers, and even books in secret in France during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. The secret press was used to disseminate the ideas of the French Resistance in cooperation with the Free French, and played an important role in the liberation of France and in the history of French journalism, particularly during the 1944 Freedom of the Press Ordinances.
The French National Committee was the coordinating body created by General Charles de Gaulle which acted as the government in exile of Free France from 1941 to 1943. The committee was the successor of the smaller Empire Defense Council.
Following the creation of SOE's F Section in the summer of 1940, it became eventually apparent that French anti-German sentiment was not as simple as once thought and effectively fell into two camps - those who supported de Gaulle and those who did not. To keep these camps apart, RF Section (pro-Gaullists) was mooted in late 1940 and came into being in early 1941. By May 1941 it was established at 1, Dorset Square and initially headed by Capt Eric Piquet-Wicks. The complexities of the interplay between F and RF Sections and between RF and BCRA is covered in MRD Foot's book "The SOE in France". The operations listed below are effectively, jointly mounted by SOE-RF and BCRA with the former supplying, or access to, the materiél with the BCRA supplying personnel. The men and women who made their ways to London to join BCRA came from a wide background both in terms of profession and location. To assume they were French and lately of the remnants of the French military is an over-simplification - civilians as well as foreign-born pro-French sympathisers make up a notable proportion of the agents prepared to fight for France.
Jacques Poujol was a French essayist and historian of Protestantism. He also fought in the French Resistance during the Second World War.