An Honorable Exit — France in Vietnam
Folks, I’m shifting my small output these days to Substack https://williamkirkland.substack.com/ This is recent contribution Will Every war has winner …
Tag Archives: France
The War: A Memoir – Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu was seventeen years old when she moved to France from a small village near Saigon, Vietnam, where …
Translation: What Goes Missing in Love
As an excursion away from politics and the mysteries of man’s love-affairs with war I picked up an old classic, …
Andre Malraux — Man in his Violence
Andre Malraux was the quintessential adventurer-intellectual of the between the World War years. Man’s Hope was on 1960s high school …
Under Fire: A French Novel of WW I Trenches
Although All Quiet on the Western Front is the best known, and possibly the best written, novel of soldiers …
The French Resistance, A Priest and Dammed Desire
Updated at * below… Jean-Pierre Melville, whose well-regarded noir gangster film are on every Francophile or film-buff’s list of must-sees, …
The Red and The Black: Love and Ambition in a time of Revolution
If it has been years since you attended to Stendhal’s great novel, The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of …
Inch’ Allah Dimanche: Algerian Immigrants to France
Immigration is big in the news these days – mostly the opposition to it– around the world. It is absolutely …
Potiche – Trophy Wife, a frothy French Labor Film
We took a flyer last night on Potiche – Trophy Wife, based on Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu being the leads. …
Army of Crime — Immigrants Who Fought for France, A Film
My dear Melinée, my beloved little orphan, In a few hours I will no longer be of this world. We …
Chabrol’s Eye on the Eye of Vichy
Claude Chabrol (and here and here,) one of the founders of French New Wave Cinema and director of some 50 …
Surprises in France
Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected President of France, who famously courted Jean Le Pen, the extreme right winger, during the …