Punishment or Forgiveness?

Collaboration Horizontale dir Ciaran Cassidy (2010)

This is a short documentary film about sleeping with the enemy. The film’s starting point is a photograph (above) by Robert Capa of a woman, Simone Touseau, being paraded through the streets of Chartres in disgrace after she’d had her head shaved in revenge for having slept with German soldiers during the occupation. Her ‘Horizontal Collaboration’ is remembered by the townspeople 60 years later with anger and disgust.  

At one point the local butcher – ironically filmed chopping and filleting pieces of meat – plays down their treatment of the woman: 

“There were cries of ‘bastards this’ and ‘bastards that’ but it stopped there. Afterwards we let them free. They were French after all. It only lasted one day and after that the old hair grew back. We didn’t put them in prison.”

The film maker slowly shows how the revenge did not ‘stop there’; that ‘prison’, even summary execution might have been kinder. Simone Touseau moved away but her story followed her and she was ostracised and eventually drank herself to death at the age of 43 in 1966.

Her child was brought up in Chartres but was treated awfully and eventually just disappeared. The film is truncated; we never learn where the child went after this and so if a satisfying narrative arc is essential to a documentary this is not a fully realised piece at all.

So, it’s far from a perfect example of documentary film making.  It is for all that, very provocative. It touches on themes – revenge, betrayal – that are profound.  


In his play, Translations, the Irish playwright, Brian Friel captured the potency of sexual/tribal transgression:

“Do you know the Greek word endogamein? It means to marry within the tribe. And the word exogamein means to marry outside the tribe. And you don’t cross those borders casually – both sides get very angry”


Collaboration Horizontale reminds me of Heaney’s great poem “Punishment”.

“Punishment” by Seamus Heaney (1975)

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Heaney, by implicating the reader into sympathy for both the punished and the punishers makes it very hard to know where to place oneself in this dynamic. He  identifies with the iron age victim, addressing her with terms of endearment “little adultress…my poor scapegoat..I almost love you” and denounces her tormentors: “your betraying sisters”. Still, he confesses that it is not so easy to act, to shake off the useless passivity of lip service – only opposition, which is no opposition at all.

In just a few lines of poetry Heaney’s  articulates the useless (and voyeuristic!) disengagement of the onlooker in a way that is only hinted at in the film Collaboration Horizontale. He admits that he “would have cast, I know,the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur”. 

His ruthless honesty that he understands the “exact and tribal, intimate revenge” that takes place in the punishment that he had already denounced reveals the scarcely conceivable polyvalent complexities and unresolvable contradictions that must lie below the surface in Collaboration Horizontale.

In short, Heaney’s poem fills in this film’s blind spots. I suppose there’s no shame in that though!

The themes at work in Collaboration Horizontale and “Punishment” got me thinking about the difficulty of forgiveness and mercy.

In that context I can only think about the enormity of certain betrayals in comparison to the domestic, banal non-incidents that trouble most people’s unremarkable lives – for example, mine. How is it possible to bear resentments of a trivial nature when we see acts such as these on an historical, epochal scale? It’s all a question of scale and imagination. Imagination to see oneself as relatively comic, imagination to see others as imperfect and blundering, imagination to  move beyond the irrelevant and believe as Portia in The Merchant of Venice did that mercy and forgiveness is its own benefit:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes

It may be just a cliché on a paperweight but really Einstein’s insight that imagination is more important than knowledge is the only conclusion I can draw here.