A massive, radical monument: this is how François Lagarde’s immense posthumous film Le Rouge et le Gris— currently in theatres—appears,(1) born of his fascination with Ernst Jünger’s writings on the First World War, in particular Storm of Steel.
Le Rouge et le Gris is a lifetime’s work. François Lagarde read Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger at the age of eighteen.Ten years later Lagarde was amazed to learn that the author was still alive, and wrote to Jünger asking to photograph him. The Ernst Jünger ‘photo album’, which was published in 1983 by Lagarde’s publishing house, Gris banal, already signalled the film’s approach, combining images from private and public archives, photographs of the landscapes Jünger describes, pages from his notebooks, summarily captioned. The project took shape in the 1990s, when Lagarde began to collect the extraordinary collection of images (3,000 in total)—photographs, postcards, survey maps—which constitute the film’s material. Together, these precisely document Jünger’s account of his movements, step by step, but also, more generally, the Germans’ perspective, that is, the ‘gaze of the vanquished’ on the frontline in occupied France—all the more significant because, as the introductory text explains, one fifth of the German soldiers had their own cameras. With the few exceptions of panorama shots of battlefields, Le Rouge et le Gris is a long slide show where the montage sequences, infinitely slow zooms and fades, show the breaks from one image to the next rather than smoothing them out. The film’s chronology faithfully follows Jünger’s experience, the twenty ‘chapters’ are short and of uneven lengths, unstable like military life. The text (about half of Storm of Steel), is read in a doleful voice by German actor Hubertus Biermann, playing the basso continuo; but the scansion’s monotony and the strange effect of the accent regularly shifts the assurance of narrative continuity to the images.
THE IMAGE’S MEDITATIVE SILENCE
As soon as war was declared in August 1914 Jünger was an enthusiastic volunteer, but he didn’t see action until the following spring, on the Champagne front, where he was quickly wounded. After he left the military hospital, he entered officers’ school; it was in this capacity that he rejoined his regiment in the trenches of the Somme. His story is characterized by its technical precision, the extreme attention paid to the choice of words, the repudiation of lyricism, and as has often been noted, its photographic dimension. At times, the film’s images are the exact visual response to the voice-over, which seems to describe, in a kind of hypnotic repetition, the landscape or scene before us. With regards to this, the exceptional research Lagarde undertook must be mentioned; he stretched his collection to the most obscure places, to the smallest details of armaments and means of transport, making dynamic and effectively didactic use of survey maps and cross-sectional diagrams. For most of the time though, the images and voice-over maintain a tension all the more intense because of the editing; each new association and explosion is in slow motion. The photographs of the mobilization contrast their neutrality, their calmness, their joviality with the tragic disquiet of a text written post festum. This dramatic tension emerges from the first bombardment. ‘This was something that was to accompany us all through the war, that habit of jumping at any sudden and unexpected noise. … the heart would stop with a sense of moral dread.’ The images of explosions, earth flying, black smoke rising into the sky, reveal the latent danger hidden in moments of calm. But it is the text the voice-over recites that carries the entire violence of the war. The images are confined to the spectacle of ruins and corpses, always shy of the limit that is, in war photography, the representation of the precise moment of death. In the same way the many photos of explosions, of smoke, of blurred images create a ghostly atmosphere, as if death should always be beyond the visible. Lagarde’s montage affirms the text’s irreducibility in comparison to the image: the soldiers’ exhaustion in the trenches is illustrated by photographs of them resting, sleeping or writing; the visual response to an atrocious episode where Jünger describes the wounds on the bodies of his soldiers in detail is simple notebook pages. The temporality of the text—death, war, history—is detached from the background of the peace of the visible, whose discreet soundtrack underlines its mute character. Lagarde neither conceals nor diminishes what in Jünger’s writing interrupts the objective narration in order to become ideological: the aestheticization of war, which would lead to the writer becoming one of German fascism’s bullhorns; his nationalism, treated perhaps with a kind of irony when the film superimposes the story of Jünger’s last wounding over an image of his military decorations. The film thus achieves its objective of presenting a German perspective, punctuated by the hussars’ drunkenness and the strange sentences made on the landscapes of Champagne and Artois, which seem somewhat familiar to us, at least not foreign. In his photographic portraits of writers and the films he devoted to them, Lagarde also extends the way in which silence plays such an important part; he constantly opposes the evocative power of language with the meditative silence of the image.
Translation: Bronwyn Mahoney
(1) François Lagarde died on 13 January 2017, when the film was still in the editing stage. He entrusted his instructions for the project’s completion to the director Christine Baudillon. See her account ‘ Le Rouge et le
Gris : le film d’une vie’, in the September 2018 issue of the magazine Mettray.