Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

1 Léon Poirier, 24 images à la seconde: du
studio au désert (Paris: Mame, 1953), 49.
2 Cited in Richard Abel, French Cinema:
The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 104.
3 Susan Hayward, French National
Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993),
96.
4 Quoted in Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, 15 ans
d’années trente: Le Cinéma des Français
1929-1944 (Paris: Stock, 1983), 179-80.
5 Jeffrey Mehlman, Legacies of Anti-
Semitism in France (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 7.
See also Zeev Sternhell, La Droite
révolutionnaire: Les Origines françaises du
fascisme, 1885-1914 (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
6 Poirier, Charles Foucauld et l’Appel du
silence (Tours: Mame, 1936), 126.
7 Abdelkader Benali, Le Cinéma colonial
au maghreb: l’imaginaire en trompe-l’oeil
(Paris: Cerf, 1998), 247.
8 Cited in Pierre Boulanger, Le Cinéma
colonial: de “l’Atlantide” à “Lawrence
d’Arabieî, (Paris: Seghers, 1975), 123.
martyr for the cause of a modern colonial crusade penetrates
Morocco during a year-long reconnaissance mission dressed as
Joseph Aleman, an itinerant Muscovite rabbi who has come to
Morocco to raise funds for “les Juifs misérables de Russie” (L’Appel du
silence, 132).
The scene illustrates how a minor yet characteristic anti-Semitism
augmented Poirier’s portraits of Foucauld and Laperrine within the
articulation of religious and military elements that Abdelkader Benali
has identified as forming the nucleus of the colonial enterprise.7 By
extension, it suggests the extent to which anti-Semitism may have
enhanced the appeal of L’Appel du silence among political
conservatives for whom the ideal of an imperial France was
increasingly at odds with the 1936 Popular Front government under
Léon Blum, the Socialist leader who happened to be a Jew.
My remarks mean to account for the specifically religious effect on
which Poirier founded L’Appel du silence as an ode to the colonial
enterprise. And this is where Poirier’s account of Foucauld’s Christian
spirituality entails concomitant portraits of the non-Christian in
figures of the natives of the Sahara whom Foucauld hopes to convert
and the stateless (apatride) Jew who is more or less invisible. It is the
mark of a filmmaker whose cinegraphic evocation of an exemplary
figure of France’s colonialism was central to what Georges Sadoul has
termed “the official cinema of the Third Republic.”8 That this film
portrays negative attitudes toward non-Christians remains troubling
and offensive some sixty-five years after the fact.
46 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001