Paris Massacre of 1961 - The Massacre in Popular Culture

The Massacre in Popular Culture

• The massacre was referenced in Caché, a 2005 film by Michael Haneke.
• The 2005 French television drama-documentary Nuit noire, 17 octobre 1961 explores in detail the events of the massacre. It follows the lives of several people and also shows some of the divisions within the Paris police, with some openly arguing for more violence while others tried to uphold the rule of law.
• Drowning by Bullets, a television documentary in the British Secret History series, first shown on 13 July 1992.
• The massacre is described in the opening verse of Irish punk rock band Stiff Little Fingers song 'When The Stars Fall From The Sky'.
• French rapper Médine dedicates a whole song to the massacre on his album Table d'écoute.
• It forms the core of Didier Daeninckx' 1984 thriller Meurtres pour mémoire, which is also the first attempt to mine the archives of the massacre through the form of a fictional enquiry. However, expatriate American novelist and journalist William Gardner Smith's 1963 novel The Stone Face, is now recognized as the earliest known fictional treatment of the events surrounding this infamous event. Although the "body count" of this massacre is listed in many places (including this Wikipedia article) at 140 dead or missing, writer and social critic Kristin Ross points out otherwise while invoking Smith's and Daeninckx's work: African-American novelist William Gardner Smith put the figure at "over two hundred" in his 1963 novel, The Stone Face. It is a mark of the success surrounding the official blackout of information about October 17 that Smith's novel, written by a foreigner in France and published in the United States (it could not be published in France), would stand as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s–until the moment, that is, when a generation of young Beurs, as the children of North African immigrants call themselves, had reached an age at which they could begin to demand information about their parents' fate. Professional or academic historians have lagged well behind amateurs in the attempt to discover what occurred on October 17; investigative journalists, militants, and fiction writers like Smith, or the much more widely read detective novelist, Didier Daeninckx, kept a trace of the event alive during the thirty years when it had entered a "black hole" of memory.