Verdun, visions d'histoire (1928)

User Rating:

8.2/10   

Director:

Léon Poirier

Writer:

Léon Poirier (writer)

Release Date:

23 November 1928 (France)

Genre:

War

Plot Keywords:

Anti War | WWI | Place Name In Title

Cast

Albert Préjean	...	Le soldat français
Jeanne Marie-Laurent	...	La mère
Suzanne Bianchetti	...	L'épouse
Hans Brausewetter	...	Fritz - le soldat allemand
Thomy Bourdelle	...	L'officier allemand
Berthe Jalabert
Maurice Schutz	...	Le maréchal d'empire
Pierre Nay	...	Le fils
Jean Dehelly	...	Le jeune homme
Daniel Mendaille	...	Le mari
Antonin Artaud	...	L'intellectuel
André Nox	...	L'aumônier
Paul Amiot
José Davert	...	Le paysan
Henri Delannoy	...	François

Country:

France

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Silent

Company:

Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique (CUC)

Trivia:

There were very few prints of the film available. Many were lost over the years and before the DVD release, very few existed. Since it's original release, the film has been shown very rarely and often showings were canceled. The print used for the DVD was stolen by the Nazi's and found again in a Russian archive.

Quotes:

Sundial: Today me, tomorrow you

Verdun re-enacted

"Verdun, visions d'histoire" is a dramatised account of the key World War I battle in which French troops, fighting alone and often in desperate hand-to-hand combat, had to halt the German advance at all costs. The film uses newsreel footage, Poirier's own highly realistic reconstructions of the conflict (by far the largest element of the film) and some little dramatic scenes which are fairly perfunctory compared to "The Big Parade", say, but which nevertheless add a thread of personal interest to the events. The film is told from both sides and is surprisingly sympathetic to the German point of view, considering when it was made. Poirier's pacifist stance is revealed in several moments, notably in one scene when two angels descend onto the battlefield and extract the souls of two soldiers, one German and one French, and place them together on a stretcher which they carry up to heaven.

The re-enacted battle sequences, for which Poirier used original locations and even some of the surviving combatants, place the viewer in the midst of the horror, crawling across no-man's-land, cowering in fox-holes, or being blown apart in trenches. In fact, when you watch documentary programmes with "historical" footage of trench warfare, chances are it came from this film, made 10 years after the battle. (Most actual newsreel footage of the time shows lines of smiling troops marching off to battle but avoids depicting the carnage of war, for obvious propaganda reasons.)

In 1931, a re-edited sound version, "Verdun, souvenirs d'histoire" was released with some re-shot scenes using different actors. A restoration of the best existing print of the original silent version (stolen from France by the Nazis, then grabbed by the Russians at the end of the war) has recently been issued in an English-friendly French DVD edition.