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about October 17 that Smith's novel, written by a foreigner in France and published in the United States (it could not be published in France), would stand as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s–until the moment, that is, when a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.
Read more about this topic: Paris Massacre Of 1961
Famous quotes containing the words massacre, popular and/or culture:
“The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)