By the time the Battle of Verdun finally ended in December 1916, after eleven carnage-filled months, the French army had suffered more than 350,000 casualties. That’s the background to Noël de Guerre, an extraordinarily tender film released around Christmastime that year, about André, a young boy whose father is away at the front, and whose mother is struggling to get by on the meager earnings she makes with her sewing machine. A kindly postman in mourning for the death of his own young child reads the boy’s letter to Santa, asking for some toys; deeply moved, he and his wife gather their son’s playthings and give them to André.
Although the reconstructed intertitles make it ambiguous as to whether André’s father has been killed – we’re told he’s at the front – I’d argue that audiences at the time would have assumed he was dead, not just by his mother’s melancholy air but by the presence of her sewing machine. Already by April 1916, charities were collecting money to provide sewing machines to war widows with children, so they could earn a living. “This isn’t about charity; the machine would not be donated, but sold. However, monthly payments required of the recipients would be proportional to expected gains” (Le Figaro, 22 April 1916), thereby allowing these women a sense of dignity. Soon after the War, in mid-1919, the State itself stepped in, providing sewing machines to war widows who had at least three children younger than 16. It’s estimated the war turned 700,000 French wives into widows by the time it was over.
The astonishing quality of the direction makes it especially frustrating that we can’t identify the filmmaker. Exteriors in Paris are shot with a true sense of realism, and interiors are lit with an eye to artistically defining people and spaces in ways that enhance the film’s emotional tenor. It’s been suggested that the producer, Georges Lordier (c.1883-1922), was also the director, though it’s impossible to be certain. Lordier was the co-founder of the film magazine L’Echo du Cinéma (merging shortly thereafter with Le Cinéma), and in the busy year of Noël de Guerre, he was president of the Syndicat de la Presse Cinématographique as well as proprietor of the Cinéma des Folies-Dramatiques on the Boulevard Saint-Martin. Today he is best known for “Les Chansons filmées,” conceived in late 1917 as a way of promoting the French cause in allied and neutral countries via filmed enactments of popular French songs. By the time he died in January 1922, he had made over 300 such shorts.

Jay Weissberg