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