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WAR FILMS 169
interest us only inasmuch as they show something that could be shown by no other medium save the film. What concerns us here are not open-air photographs of thousands of guns, flying armadas or bursting bombs and shells but what is at the root of it all, the human face, which only the film camera can approach so intimately.
In general war-films are as primitive and brutal as is war itself. For this reason only one war film is to be mentioned here. Its artistic and moral message is such that it is worthy of being preserved for ever in some Pantheon of greatest human documents.
This film was made after the first world war and its title was Pour La Paix du Monde. It was produced by the French organization of the most grievously injured of all warwounded the name of which was 'Les Gueules Casses'. The director who compiled the film from the strips in the archives of the armed forces was Colonel Piquard, chairman of the organisation of the 'Faceless Ones', the men who lived like lepers in an isolated, secret community of their own, because the sight of them would have been unbearable for their fellow-men. The film begins by showing these faceless ones in close-up, their mutilations covered by masks. Then they take off their silken masks and with it they tear the mask off the face of war.
Those whom the war has robbed of their faces show the true face of war to those who know nothing of it. And this physiognomy of war is of an emotional power, a force of pathos no artistic feature film about the war had ever attained. For here war is presented by its victims, horror is presented by the horrified, torture by the tortured, deadly peril by those endangered — and it is they who see these things in their true colours.
A panning shot glides over a quiet, a now quietened battlefield. The desolation of a lunar landscape. Nowhere a single blade of grass. On the mountainside gunfire has peeled the earth from the naked rock. Shell craters, trenches without end. The camera pans slowly round without stopping. Trenches full of dead bodies, more trenches and more and more and more. An immense space in which nothing moves. Corpses, corpses,