THE GREAT WAR
THE EFFECTS OF WAR

This is a highly idiosyncratic program, and makes no pretense of being even-handed in covering all combatants and all fronts. Glaringly absent are any films from the UK, despite the extraordinarily comprehensive holdings of the Imperial War Museum. My initial goal was to cast a wider net, but a larger program would have been unwieldy, and the emotional content of many of these films means that curatorship was daunting. Anyone familiar with the invaluable EFG1914 European Film Gateway website has a sense of just how much footage is out there, but there’s a great deal more. Much of it is difficult to watch; some should not be seen except by scholars in a private setting. I have not included those films, but they exist. Cameramen trained their apparatus on these horrific subjects to bear witness to an inhumanity too shocking to convey in words, hoping, no doubt, that these atrocities would never be repeated if their scale were properly comprehended.
Part of my rationale for this program was to underline the sulfurous links between then and now. Mosul, Raaqa, Aleppo, Homs: ancient cities that currently look like the flattened towns in Les Ruines des villes d’Armentières, Lens et La Bassée or incinerated Thessaloniki in Après l’incendie de Salonique. Malnutrition and rickets have returned to the children of Iraq, Yemen is reporting more than 600,000 cases of cholera, and scurvy is again seen in Afghanistan. The refugee crisis is graver than at any time since World War II. If any lesson was learned in the trenches of the First World War and the front lines of the Second, it was quickly forgotten, and we should feel no smug sense of superiority in comparison with our forebears. Sigmund Freud’s words from November 1915, in his essay “Vergänglichkeit” (Transience), still ring true: “…the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our culture, our admiration for many philosophers and artists, and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races.”
However, the program isn’t an endurance test. There are a few comedies, such as André Deed’s La paura degli aeromobili nemici, in which Cretinetti’s fear of an enemy air raid acts as kindling to his destructive proclivities, and Comment j’ai mangé du pain K.K., a sly anti-German piece of propaganda that appeals as much to a Frenchman’s stomach as his sense of humor. Food is an important part of Sammelt knochen!, a public service short bound to elicit laughs as well as groans as it details a rather extreme way in which the German government tried to address shortages in margarine and flour as well as industrial lubricants and animal feed. For some, the most important way to carry on was to pretend that life continued as normal: the recently discovered 1917 Val Duchesse shows a glamorous high-society benefit for Belgian and French war orphans, yet the location is German-occupied Belgium.
How women were affected by the war features prominently in the chosen films. Many entered the workforce for the first time, while others shifted into jobs designed to help the war effort. Women were suddenly thrust into earning a living as well as caring for their families, while also offering emotional support to the men at the front; millions kept their farms going through back-breaking efforts while their husbands and fathers were on the battlefields. And then there were the 3 to 4 million women widowed during the war, which explains the necessity for publications such as the Journal des Veuves de Guerre, begun in 1924. La Femme française pendant la guerre and Frauenarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, very different types of films, detail the range of jobs women undertook in the war years, while two fiction shorts, Noël de Guerre and La petite Simone, deal with women widowed by the war, trying to scrape by while raising children.
The war’s effect on soldiers is disturbingly seen in the footage made by neurologist Camillo Negro, which clinically records the repetitive movements of a young patient with shell-shock. The term, first used in February 1915 by Dr. Charles S. Myers in The Lancet, quickly became a standard diagnosis; for a truly sobering read, take a look at the medical journals of the era. Rééducation des mutilés: aux champs shows men with amputated limbs being fitted with prosthetic devices and re-trained for agricultural work; at the end of La Vie reprend dans les régions libérées, other similarly wounded men learn new skills so they can be gainfully employed. Malnutrition and the war’s impact on children are addressed in Två hungrande städer vid Donau, and the refugee crisis – it’s estimated 10 million people were displaced in Europe and the Ottoman Empire – is glimpsed in a rather privileged form in La Croix Rouge suisse accueille des réfugiés français en gare de Bâle.
The films in the program deal with what’s quantifiable: malnutrition can be countered, injuries treated, refugees given homes, buildings resurrected. Yet the traumas of war, the lasting effects, aren’t so easily assessed. Ask anyone from Friuli, where the First World War was experienced on a harrowing level. How we look at these films is conditioned by everything that’s come after, and by an understanding of where we are now. I’ll leave the last word to historian Leila Tarazi Fawaz, who writes in her magisterial book A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War: “perhaps nothing has changed more clearly in the last hundred years than the trenches of World War I, replaced by the drones of 2014. The modern Middle East is so challenging that despite considerable progress in health, education, science, and technology, the world of 1900 has its appeals, the greatest of which is that people of the region then still had hope.”

Jay Weissberg

Prog. 1
Lun/Mon 2 – 11:45 – Teatro Verdi