French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

Apollinaire, by whom the keystone revenant sequence is doubly inspired. The central importance of poetry, especially as it is depicted visually during Jean’s recitations, spills over from the film’s diegesis into its very form.

Jean is an archetypal figure of the nineteenth-century poet, blending romantic style with Rimbaldian hallucinatory vision. When not timidly wooing Edith, he works constantly on his project, “Les Pacifiques,” writing in a pool of light cast by his desk lamp and reciting his works to his mother. Jean’s verse, though we see little of it in written form, is composed largely of conventional, romantic idylls. His “Ode au soleil” is depicted directly upon the screen via images of the rising and setting sun, with a ghost-like woman (who may be Edith) floating through a series of natural landscapes. The heavy stylization of the recitation sequence, especially the matte painted backgrounds and the superimposed woman, connote a transcendental and transformational theme in Jean’s poetry. Maman Diaz mirrors these themes in the diegesis; she falls asleep during the first recitation and dies at the same moment during the second. His verse is thus implied to have a real effect upon the outside world, even if only an ironic or negative one.

Jean’s poetry is initially a characterization device, casting him as meek and sensitive. It provides a moment for him to dote upon his mother and further differentiates him from François the Brute. Later it becomes much more, developing a transformational theme from the page to the outside world. For its first return, at Maman Diaz’s death, Jean’s poetry becomes a device of (melodramatic) tragedy, its celebration of life and light contrasted with the destruction and death caused by the war. It returns a second time at the very end to close the book, as it were, on Jean’s life. Here the very title of the collection indicates its ironic and outmoded nature: in the aftermath of the Great War, “Les Pacifiques” is naïve in both intent and content. Nothing is peaceful for Jean, and the transcendental idylls found within are inadequate to represent his tormented soul—so much so that Jean modifies the closing stanzas of his “Ode au soleil,” transforming the erstwhile celebration into a vitriol of despair and death.