A youngster in uniform playing soldier, other children tumbling in summer straw, an old weaver’s calloused hands, Breton women knitting beside the waves, an orderly procession, a country wedding crowded with people in their Sunday best, a garment workshop with its infernal machines and spools, baronesses and overdressed matrons in hats, cheekily low-cut necklines, crowds of musicians and pan-bangers, camera operators recording workers streaming out of factories in overalls…
Henry Colomer has chosen an original approach to recounting the first part of the twentieth century, from the stirrings of the First World War, when cinema was still in its cradle, to the rise of totalitarianism. A silent, black-and-white history woven from French, German, Yugoslav and British archives, with fabrics as its common denominator. Flags, clothes for town, countryside and seaside, from one social class to another. Another way of reading history, with its uniforms, bandages, swaddling clothes and shrouds. Signs that fix an era, bear witness and carry symbols from birth to death; signs that identify, distinguish and confront.
Paced by remarkable editing and Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s contemporary symphonic music—an original score created for the film—Sous les drapeaux unfolds in three movements. It opens on the tranquillity of the beginning of the century before proceeding into the fury of the Great War. Drum rolls and tightly ordered marching ranks, parades, gas masks and spiked helmets. Infantry and cavalry. Soldiers dead at the bottom of muddy holes, uncertain movements in the trenches, cohorts of disfigured and maimed men, women ploughing, funerals stretching through shades of mourning grey.
Once peace returns, celebrated with top hats and fanfares, music returns too: the jolly tunes of the Roaring Twenties, elegant dresses alongside wretched people in rags, destitute and down at heel. The respite lasts only briefly, before another fabric asserts itself—a standard bearing a swastika, like a parenthesis of horrors that would never close.
Jean-Claude Renard
Sous les drapeaux, Sunday 15 February, 12.35 a.m., Arte, 45 minutes.
Caption: History told through fabrics.
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