Verdun, Visions d'Histoire is a 1928 French silent made to commemorate the 10th anniversary of World War I by Leon Poirier, previously unknown to me. The idea was to mark France's great victory in the war, but also to convey the terrible losses of the war; I knew the name Verdun of course, but not really a lot of the details, so Wikipedia filled me in:
Essentially the Germans planned a grisly battle of attrition against the French and once having gained ground, found themselves fighting the same battle of constant slaughter and loss before giving it up. Add in the fact that the French heroes of the battle included the future Marshal Petain, who would end the next war sentenced to death for treason, and, well, even a rousing victorious finish isn't going to make Verdun seem sheer glory for jolly lads.Verdun was the strongest point in pre-war France, ringed by a string of powerful forts, including Douaumont and Vaux. By 1916, the salient at Verdun jutted into the German lines and lay vulnerable to attack from three sides… As Falkenhayn recalled it, his so-called Christmas memorandum to Kaiser Wilhelm II envisioned a massive but limited attack on a French position 'for the retention of which the French Command would be compelled to throw in every man they have'. Once the French army had bled to death, Britain could be brought down by Germany's submarine blockade and superior military strength. The logic of initiating a battle not to gain territory or a strategic position but simply to create a self-sustaining killing ground—to bleed the French army white—pointed to the grimness of military vision in 1916…
On 7 June, following almost a week of bitter resistance, Fort Vaux fell to the Germans after a murderous hand-to-hand fight inside the fort itself. On 23 June the Germans reached what would become the furthest point of their advance. The line was just in front of Fort Souville, the last stronghold before Verdun itself. Pétain was making plans to evacuate the right bank of the Meuse when the Allies' offensive on the Somme River was launched on 1 July, partly to relieve pressure on the French. The Germans could no longer afford to continue their offensive at Verdun when they were needed so desperately on the Somme. At a cost of some 400,000 German casualties and a similar number of French, the attack was finally called off. Germany had failed to bleed France to death.
The battle continued, however, from October to the end of the year. French offensives, employing new tactics devised by Pétain's deputy, General Robert Nivelle, regained the forts and territory they had lost earlier. This was the only gleam of hope in an otherwise abysmal landscape.
Poirier's film is done somewhat along the lines of The Longest Day— it sticks to marking the main historical events of the battle and though there are main characters, they are also consciously representative of common types (including, this being France, Antonin Artaud as "The Intellectual" who finally sees his duty). There are moving moments among them but this is not aiming to be an emotional story in the manner of The Big Parade, say. Poirier used actual soldiers and shot in the actual locations of Douamont and Vaux mixed adroitly with newsreel footage, and the result is easily the most grimly realistic picture of WWI on film, a nail-bitingly intense picture of men scrambling around exposed on open ground doing ghastly things to each other. Somehow it's the quaint mechanization of the war that's most awful— when a German has to dodge bullets to drag a hose on the outside of Fort Vaux to poison the French inside, it seems especially horrible, as glorious in the traditional military sense as drowning a baby, and horribly predictive about what the next war would bring in scarcely a dozen years.
Poirier's direction is mostly efficient rather than inspired, though there are lyrical shots here and there. The influence of J'Accuse (and Intolerance) is clear in scenes that go from stark realism to superimposed ghosts or the dead, and a visual metaphor involving a ghostly hand twisting a sundial. Kino released this Cinematheque de Toulouse restoration with relatively little attention, but it's a quality version with good image quality and a first-rate mostly piano score. To anyone for whom WWI is one of the silent film's most important subjects, this is essential viewing.
