L'oeil de Vichy

As one poster has already commented, this is a movie designed for those who already know what happened in France in World War II - a French audience, in other words. If you have that knowledge, it is indeed fascinating to see how the Vichy government used newsreels to shape French thought - a classic example of Big Brother in action. Watching this movie also requires that you put yourself back in the era to an extent, to realize the impact these newsreels would have had. Today, we get our news from endless different sources. In World War II, there were newspapers, radio, and what was shown at the local movie house. Since the government could control all three of those, it did. (Yes, there was also short wave radio, which was how the French got news from England.) What I would have liked at the end is a few sentences telling us what became of each of the big figures in the newsreels: Pétain, Doriot, etc.