Les premiers survivants du judéocide dans le documentaire français : témoignages ou mises en scène cathartiques?

Le Temps du ghetto (Frédéric Rossif) and Chronique d’un été (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin), both released in 1961, are the first French documentary films featuring Jewish survivors recounting their persecutions during World War 2 in front of a camera. The appearance of Shoah survivors in cinema is commonly assessed as a consequence of the 1961 Eichmann trial. This article aims to take a different stance, highlighting the mise-en-scène of these two particular films, which invite a survivor to symbolically relive his traumatic past in front of the film crew and showing that this cathartic process is used similarly twenty years later in selected sequences of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.