Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Cet article aborde L’appel du silence
(1936), film de fiction de Léon Poirier, à la
lumière de l’étude du cinéma colonial de la
France de l’entre-deux-guerres. Il approche
l’œuvre de Poirier à travers sa conception
des décors naturels, du documentaire et des
sujets historiques contenus dans ses films des
années 20. Sont analysés les éléments
d’exotisme, militarisme, et antisémitisme
contenus dans le récit de la vie du Père
Charles de Foucauld, aristocrate français
qui abandonna sa carrière militaire pour
suivre l’appel chargé de mysticisme du
désert d’Algérie. Cet appel confronta le Père
Foucauld avec les valeurs modernisantes du
tournant du Siècle.
for rural nature at a remove from urban spaces. It was a predilection
that came to full expression in his lyrical depiction of the desert a
decade later in L’Appel du silence.
Verdun, visions d’histoire redirected Poirier’s sense of place toward the
genre of the historical reconstruction. The film’s première in
November 1928 coincided with the tenth anniversary of the
Armistice ending World War I. Poirier chose not to follow a strict
chronology related to the notorious 1916 battle. Instead he mixed
documentary footage with re-enacted sequences for which he
recruited French and German army veterans on the actual
battlefields. Maréchal Pétain was so taken with Poirier’s project that
he donated his old uniform and agreed to play himself.3 Because the
vision Poirier wanted to convey was that of epic tragedy, he fashioned
the film around character types such as the French soldier, the
German soldier, the peasant, the intellectual (played by Antonin
Artaud), the chaplain, the wife, and the mother. These abstractions fit
the three sections of the film whose titles - La Force, L’Enfer, Le Destin
- sought to convey the collective entities of France and the French
well beyond individual agency. For Richard Abel, the film defined a
French spirit “in terms of suffering, sacrifice, respect for one’s
enemies, and a desire to return peacefully to the past (where it still
might be possible to cultivate one’s garden)” (Abel, 204). Often
compared with Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoléon, Poirier’s reedited Verdun:
visions d’histoire in a1932 sound version.
A final aspect of Poirier’s work prior to the 1930s involves La
Croisière noire (The Black Journey); a 1926 documentary
commissioned by André Citroën to promote his corporation’s halftrack
vehicles by showing their ability to cross the African continent
from Algeria to the Indian Ocean and Madagascar. This was far from
a simple travel or adventure film. As he was to do two years later in
Verdun: visions d’histoire, Poirier adopted an epic tone that portrayed
the motorized caravan crossing the desert and jungle as something
close to a living entity. La Croisière noire linked the automobile and
cinematography to an updated version of France’s civilizing mission.
This time out, it was new technology rather than explicit military
force that “conquered” the desert. Accordingly, the film’s popularity
drew on a chauvinism that made its screening a regular part of
charity events to raise money for World War I military widows.
Poirier’s role in La Croisière jaune, the 1934 film of the Citroën
follow-up expedition across Asia, was somewhat more complicated.
He was brought in to edit the film when the man hired to make it,
André Sauvage, was fired after early rushes revealed an anticolonialist
perspective that was presumably unacceptable to Citroën.
The Pathé-Natan company in charge of production sold the rights for
the film to Citroën. He, in turn, hired Poirier to reedit it. The result,
as René Daumal wrote in a 1934 review, was “an assassinated film.”4
L’Appel du silence both extended and deviated from French colonial
films of the mid-1930s such as Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu and
42 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001