"Divided in Unity: The Euro-Pudding and the Politics of Remembering the First World War"

Christian Carion’s Joyeux Noël (France, Germany, Belgium, United Kingdom, Romania: 2005) is a European co-production about the First World War that dramatizes the "Christmas Truce" of December 1914, during which French, German, and Scottish soldiers laid down their arms to celebrate Christmas together. Sponsored by the MEDIA program, a media-agency of the European Commission, the film articulates a discursive European identity rooted in notions of collective history and “brotherhood.” This presentation will focus on Joyeux Noël's politics of remembering to analyze how the film translates the European Commission’s doctrine of a Europe “united in diversity” to the screen. First, I will discuss the film from an institutional perspective; that is, I will situate Joyeux Noël in a context of European integration, and analyze how the audiovisual policies of the European Commission’s MEDIA program have influenced both Joyeux Noël's representation of the First World War and, subsequently, its understanding of a European identity. Second, I will investigate the politics of history that Joyeux Noël interpellates. Suggesting that it is in a historical imaginary that a European identity may be found, the film transforms the history of the First World War into a performative discourse that is situated in the present and that constitutes both a re-membering of the War and a re-visioning of a transformed future. This presentation will demonstrate that Joyeux Noël not only narrates the historical event of the War but that it also conceives of a European continent “united in diversity.”