Retracing the beginning of the twentieth century with textiles as the guiding thread is the wager of this beautiful documentary, entirely set to music against silent archive footage.
The approach is original, to say the least. Films about the Great War and the interwar years are innumerable, but documentary maker Henry Colomer has chosen to approach the period through fabrics: from bathing costumes to flags, liturgical vestments to uniforms, swaddling clothes to bandages.
Against contemporary symphonic music composed by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, Sous les drapeaux unfolds a succession of silent black-and-white archive images. They perfectly convey an age of carefree innocence, rapidly displaced by military parades, mobilisation and then conflict, before giving way to the Roaring Twenties, which cannot conceal the rise of totalitarianism.
The forty-five-minute documentary shows Breton women sewing, schoolchildren in uniform and women washing clothes. Then the pace quickens, suggesting a muted rumble. Battle scenes alternate with images of soldiers waiting in the trenches amid cold and mud. Behind the lines, women organise themselves and work in fields or factories, sometimes as munitions workers.
Images of the return of the men known as the gueules cassées, the facially disfigured, are overwhelming: their physical suffering is palpable. Victory came at a human cost without precedent at the time, as the war memorials springing up in French villages attest.
Yet life quickly regains the upper hand, and the end of the First World War announces the Roaring Twenties, with flappers and the Charleston. It will not last: Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin cast their shadows over Europe.
Awarded a special mention at the 2008 International History Film Festival in Pessac, Sous les drapeaux offers images so powerful that they almost call for commentary…
Flore de Bodman
Arte, 12.35 a.m., Sous les drapeaux.
[The unrelated review of an Amazon documentary on the upper half of the page is excluded.]