The 1914 War Remains the Matrix

Jean-Michel Frodons interview with Laurent Veray

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You are a specialist regarding films about WWI; why was this period so crucial?

Above and beyond the obvious chronolgical reasons, this particular was has remained an ever-present theme in the cinema, with varying approaches, which are significant in themselves. The first stage, during conflict itself, was that of the invention of the filmed propaganda during wartime, and the broad lines of this practice have not changed very much to this day. The second stage, the period in between the wars, is that of fiction: as early on as The Big Parade by King Vidor (1925), the basic rules for this genre were established. These films almost always had a peace-loving “discourse” but above all they established a view of the war in our imaginations by filling in huge voids through representation, which censorship or simply the impossible task of filming on location had created – a typical example was Verdun vision d’histoire (trans: Verdun: Visions of history) by Léon Poirer, from which scenes from the film were subsequently used as actual archival material.

After World War II, the 1914 War was used primarily as a metaphor, to evoke the liberation wars in the colonies. Then, starting with La Maison des Bois (trans: The House in the Woods) by Maurice Pialat, and then Life and Nothing But by Bertrand Tavernier, cinema rediscovered cinematography, became interested in the subject of grief and loss, and waht became of women and families as the result of war. Even though Saving Private Ryan revived the subject of WWII for many, in Europe especially we continue to make a lot more films about WWI than about WWII. No doubt because it is a conflict about which most Europeans agree, for which memories are very comparable – which is not the case for the Second World War. The other side of the coin is that this war, at least as far as how long it lasted and the extent of the massacre, remains incomprehensible and can serve as a backdrop to profound questions regarding identity [..].

So, for you, the representational systems used to treat the subject of war are well established and not subject to change?

No, of course not, there are constantly new things happening. Most recently, I feel there is an important trend taking place, which is the recording of material, physical, and psychological traces, the idea of filming the after-effects of war rather than just action scenes, even when the action is also shown. One decisive film was surely Kippur, especially when we look back at the journey Amos Gitai made leading up to this films, his actual personal experience of the war and the images he filmed as an amateur at the time, as well as the experimental film he made following the war, called After, a documentary about the survivors of the 1997 conflict, and finally the feature lenght fiction he arrived at in 2000. It is a comparable journey to the one lived by Ari Folman for his film Waltz with Bashir. But films as different and as creative as The Lonely Voice of Man bu Sokurov, Terra Incognita by Ghassan Salhab, Saia by Florent Marcie, or The Forsaken Land by Vimukhti Jaysundara, also use this same relationship to the resulting after-effects of war.

Documentary images filmed during wartime have always been the subject of scrutiny. Did WWI set these norms?

It was a time when a lot of filming problems were formulated, and the responses to these problems have certainly evolved since then. One of the striking aspects of the films of that time is that, in spite of the very tight framing of shots, the viwer is confronted with phenomena that can be disturbing, that can challange his ethics, for a simple reason: the shots are long. This lenght opens up an area that escapes censorship. The one new thing in contemporary television coverage is speed. During the Viet Nam War, American television was still using time frames and a rapport wth real events that came from the cinema. After that everything changed. The representation of the first war in Iraq went too far in the sense of manifest derealization; people were quickly stopped believing in it, and the second war was much better planned by the people responsible for communications, but in the end it didn’t hold up: nowdays the war in Iraq is a war that is eclipsed by the American media, and the disinterest of people, that we see in the commercial failure of films on the subject, is a great victory for propaganda.
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*Full text can be found: Cahiers du cinéma, 10′08, 72.-73. p.

Prepared by: Zane Krūmiņa