Oddball
12-15-2005, 06:14 AM
The Times (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14931-1930111,00.html)
The Times December 15, 2005
And the order went out: don't mention the war
by IAN JOHNS
The French military’s extraordinary reaction to a film about a 90-year-old truce
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gifIt may be more than 90 years since a brief bout of peace interrupted the First World War, but French generals still can’t fathom why their soldiers disobeyed orders and joined the German enemy in the silenced battlefields for a forbidden Christmas truce. That’s why, when the director Christian Carion came to make Merry Christmas, which imagines one such truce between French, Scottish and German troops in northern France, he found the French military less than co-operative. When Carion came to shoot the trench truce scenes, the French army withdrew permission for a no-man’s-land to be created on their training field. Filming was postponed for months as the production was moved to Romania. “The generals said: ‘You go ahead and make your movie, but without us. We don’t want to be partners to this rebellion’,” says Carion. “I said: ‘Rebellion? It was 90 years ago. Is that still a rebellion?’ They said: ‘Yes’.”
Carion’s film arrives at a time when France, having opted out of the campaign in Iraq, is reliving its military history in a welter of books and films about 20th-century battles in which the Tricolor was not always triumphant. As the historian Jean-Jacques Becker observed in Le Monde, this reveals “more about today than the war itself. It reflects our vision of its absurdity.”
Carion’s film follows Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement, in which Audrey Tautou played a French widow who confronts bureaucratic obstructions and official hypocrisy as she tries to discover whether her infantryman lover actually died on the Western Front after being sentenced to death for self-mutilation in 1917.
Jeunet wanted the film to look “like photographs of the war. That was important for me. I was worried about the reality.” All primary colours were virtually drained from the trenches and battlefields, while the streets of Paris looked like tinted postcards.
Carion wasn’t so convinced by Jeunet’s “grandiloquence or aesthetic choices”, which he felt overwhelmed the story. Merry Christmas is far less flamboyant in its visual style. He quotes Roman Polanski’s response to criticism that his Second World War film The Pianist had been too conventional: “Polanksi said that when you have a story like The Pianist, you don’t need to turn somersaults. For my film, no fireworks, no somersaults were needed.”
Carion’s pan-European production shares the humane internationalism of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), in which there are no villains. The camp commandant (Erich von Stroheim) becomes as sympathetic a figure as the French working-class hero (Jean Gabin) or his French friends, a rich Jew and a haughty blueblood.
For Carion, “Renoir’s cinema is my family”. Grand Illusion was a career high point for all of its actors, including Gabin (who wore Renoir’s own uniform as his costume). But as the British and American film industries created the war movie as an entertainment genre during the Second World War, the previous war was supplanted as a film subject.
The few film-makers who went back to the earlier period seemed to have lost touch with its meaning. Just look at John Ford’s flagwaving mess What Price Glory (1952). It took Stanley Kubrick with Paths of Glory (1957) to tackle France’s troubled past in the trenches. Dealing with the execution of French soldiers “to encourage the others”, the film was banned in France for 20 years.
“As a historical event in France, the First World War has been covered in official lies,” the director Bertrand Tavernier has said. His films Life and Nothing But (1990), set in 1920 in Verdun, and Capitaine Conan (1996), about hostilities in the Balkans in 1919, explore the continuing human cost of the conflict. As he observed at the time of Capitaine Conan’s release: “Many young people have a total ignorance of and a total lack of interest in history, which I find very frightening. If you wilfully ignore the past, you will be forced to relive it.”
For Tavernier, the First World War was a turning point: “That war started Fascism, Communism, Nazism . . . And it’s a subject that’s very close to the French. After all, it was fought on our ground, in our country.”
Carion, the son of a farmer, was born and raised in a region of northern France that was under German Occupation during the war: “I grew up with the memory of the war. It was something omnipresent, not merely honoured on those inescapable celebrations of Armistice every November 11. I remember as a child how I would carry a shell that had come uncovered in our fields while we were ploughing the land.”
For Merry Christmas Carion has drawn together events that occurred during various truces. Although the film states that its characters are fictional, Carion says the detail is historically accurate. But he admits that some incidents he discovered were unbelievably absurd.
In the film a tomcat roams between the French and German trenches. “In reality, the cat was accused of spying,” says Carion, “arrested by the French army and then shot according to regulations!” Carion filmed the execution scene but left it out in the final cut: “The audience would have lost interest, never believing that such a thing happened.”
Although there are plans to show Merry Christmas to British soldiers stationed in Iraq and German soldiers overseas on peacekeeping missions, the French military has declined the offer. “For me, the film is about humanity,” says Carion. “These soldiers decided in a war, by themselves, to just stop fighting. I love the idea of soldiers doing that, forgetting the hatred.”
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gif
The Times December 15, 2005
And the order went out: don't mention the war
by IAN JOHNS
The French military’s extraordinary reaction to a film about a 90-year-old truce
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gifIt may be more than 90 years since a brief bout of peace interrupted the First World War, but French generals still can’t fathom why their soldiers disobeyed orders and joined the German enemy in the silenced battlefields for a forbidden Christmas truce. That’s why, when the director Christian Carion came to make Merry Christmas, which imagines one such truce between French, Scottish and German troops in northern France, he found the French military less than co-operative. When Carion came to shoot the trench truce scenes, the French army withdrew permission for a no-man’s-land to be created on their training field. Filming was postponed for months as the production was moved to Romania. “The generals said: ‘You go ahead and make your movie, but without us. We don’t want to be partners to this rebellion’,” says Carion. “I said: ‘Rebellion? It was 90 years ago. Is that still a rebellion?’ They said: ‘Yes’.”
Carion’s film arrives at a time when France, having opted out of the campaign in Iraq, is reliving its military history in a welter of books and films about 20th-century battles in which the Tricolor was not always triumphant. As the historian Jean-Jacques Becker observed in Le Monde, this reveals “more about today than the war itself. It reflects our vision of its absurdity.”
Carion’s film follows Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement, in which Audrey Tautou played a French widow who confronts bureaucratic obstructions and official hypocrisy as she tries to discover whether her infantryman lover actually died on the Western Front after being sentenced to death for self-mutilation in 1917.
Jeunet wanted the film to look “like photographs of the war. That was important for me. I was worried about the reality.” All primary colours were virtually drained from the trenches and battlefields, while the streets of Paris looked like tinted postcards.
Carion wasn’t so convinced by Jeunet’s “grandiloquence or aesthetic choices”, which he felt overwhelmed the story. Merry Christmas is far less flamboyant in its visual style. He quotes Roman Polanski’s response to criticism that his Second World War film The Pianist had been too conventional: “Polanksi said that when you have a story like The Pianist, you don’t need to turn somersaults. For my film, no fireworks, no somersaults were needed.”
Carion’s pan-European production shares the humane internationalism of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), in which there are no villains. The camp commandant (Erich von Stroheim) becomes as sympathetic a figure as the French working-class hero (Jean Gabin) or his French friends, a rich Jew and a haughty blueblood.
For Carion, “Renoir’s cinema is my family”. Grand Illusion was a career high point for all of its actors, including Gabin (who wore Renoir’s own uniform as his costume). But as the British and American film industries created the war movie as an entertainment genre during the Second World War, the previous war was supplanted as a film subject.
The few film-makers who went back to the earlier period seemed to have lost touch with its meaning. Just look at John Ford’s flagwaving mess What Price Glory (1952). It took Stanley Kubrick with Paths of Glory (1957) to tackle France’s troubled past in the trenches. Dealing with the execution of French soldiers “to encourage the others”, the film was banned in France for 20 years.
“As a historical event in France, the First World War has been covered in official lies,” the director Bertrand Tavernier has said. His films Life and Nothing But (1990), set in 1920 in Verdun, and Capitaine Conan (1996), about hostilities in the Balkans in 1919, explore the continuing human cost of the conflict. As he observed at the time of Capitaine Conan’s release: “Many young people have a total ignorance of and a total lack of interest in history, which I find very frightening. If you wilfully ignore the past, you will be forced to relive it.”
For Tavernier, the First World War was a turning point: “That war started Fascism, Communism, Nazism . . . And it’s a subject that’s very close to the French. After all, it was fought on our ground, in our country.”
Carion, the son of a farmer, was born and raised in a region of northern France that was under German Occupation during the war: “I grew up with the memory of the war. It was something omnipresent, not merely honoured on those inescapable celebrations of Armistice every November 11. I remember as a child how I would carry a shell that had come uncovered in our fields while we were ploughing the land.”
For Merry Christmas Carion has drawn together events that occurred during various truces. Although the film states that its characters are fictional, Carion says the detail is historically accurate. But he admits that some incidents he discovered were unbelievably absurd.
In the film a tomcat roams between the French and German trenches. “In reality, the cat was accused of spying,” says Carion, “arrested by the French army and then shot according to regulations!” Carion filmed the execution scene but left it out in the final cut: “The audience would have lost interest, never believing that such a thing happened.”
Although there are plans to show Merry Christmas to British soldiers stationed in Iraq and German soldiers overseas on peacekeeping missions, the French military has declined the offer. “For me, the film is about humanity,” says Carion. “These soldiers decided in a war, by themselves, to just stop fighting. I love the idea of soldiers doing that, forgetting the hatred.”
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gif