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The aim is to make the titular outcry flesh, soldiers lend their bodies in tactical maneuvers later remembered in Bondarchuk's Waterloo. Provincial France on the eve of cataclysm, "c'est la guerre," a pronouncement via uncomprehending cherubs. The poet (Romuald Joubé) keeps his pastoral verses in a collection entitled Les Pacifiques, his opposite number is the huntsman (Séverin-Mars) with snarling pooch and bleeding stag. Between the two is the maiden (Maryse Dauvray), bard's muse and ogre's wife, the Gallic soul cowering from the Hun's heavy shadow. Rivalry melts into comradeship at the front, back home awaits the fruit of the foe's violation. "Death leaves by one door, life enters by another." The Great War's large-scale Danse Macabre, just the monumental panorama for Abel Gance at the crossroads of archaic melodrama and modernist vehemence. The old generation is the heroine's father (Maxime Desjardins), a veteran of Alsace-Lorraine with a military shrine, the young generation is the moppet (Angèle Guys) born from rape and playacting with a Prussian helmet. Prancing skeletons are a recurring sight, there's also the omen of an owl's eyes and talons over the small-town fête and an impromptu jig wearing gas masks. "Chance does not like secrets." A choice shot in the flurry, an opening in the trenches splitting the screen vertically while smoke gets reflected in muddy water, an art of imagistic paroxysms. The rallying visionary with "strophes de lumière," a filmmaker by any other name. The endless field of graves gives way to a cadaverous procession, cf. Grosz's The Funeral, infantrymen on leave recruited to play their own phantoms. For the artist coming home means completing his ode to the sun, when illumination is inseparable from madness. "I need to know the mental state of the nation." Gance's remake follows a line of notable variants (The Big Parade, Arsenal, All Quiet on the Western Front, Westfront 1918). Cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |