It has been exactly 100 years since the United States entered World War I. To commemorate the event, PBS recently debuted THE GREAT WAR, a 6-hour documentary as part of its ongoing American Experience series. It was called The Great War back then, because nobody had the farsightedness to predict that there would be a Second World War. In addition to this nonfiction interpretation of the war, two feature films offering very different accounts of the Great War have been made available.
As for the PBS documentary, it is chock-full of candid, sometimes gruesome, footage of the war. While many 21st Century folks believe that expert war coverage began with World War II or the Vietnam War, the truth is that the Great War was covered in great detail by brave cameramen working in foxholes, on the battlefields, and in field hospitals, at air bases, and in European villages and world capitals where civilization was replaced by devastation. In the late teens, filming the actualities of war was almost as new and exciting as the other 20th Century phenomenon of mechanical flight.
The PBS documentary includes an incredible selection of 100-year-old motion picture footage. With its emphasis on the American experience in the war, the visuals presented included many clips of Woodrow Wilson and other significant members of the U.S. Government. Visuals also featured parades, battles, corpses-- and pieces of corpses-- strewn on bombed-out fields, soldiers kissing their sweethearts good-bye, and bombed and mustard-gassed soldiers in military hospitals who suffered leg amputations, loss of noses, eyesight, and jaws -- and shell-shocked men and boys with mental illnesses and nervous tics and spasms.
Maybe because the series was made for PBS, which has a liberal political stance, or maybe because it is an important issue which connects 1917 with 2017, the documentary spends a lot of time on the theme of racism during and after the war. Brave African-American soldiers fought for months in France to keep the world safe for democracy, but democracy was not theirs for the taking. Of course, this is very mean-spirited and unfair, but typical of race relations in the early 20th Century. While only a very small percentage of troops who fought in the Great War were black, this PBS series would lead viewers to believe that racial prejudice was a major topic in the conflict. Until seeing this series, I did not know that it was a topic.
Two feature films which stress the effect of the Great War on Americans and Europeans are now available. The first, FRANTZ, written and directed by Francois Ozon, is a new film showing in theaters now. The story, inspired by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 masterpiece, BROKEN LULLABY, takes place in the aftermath of the war, just a few months following the Armistice, in a small German town. A Frenchman arrives and makes a number of visits to the grave of a local young man who fell in the war. Before long, he has bonded with the dead soldier’s parents and brought a smile to the face of the dead lad’s forlorn fiancée. Who is he? Why is he there? FRANTZ is well-crafted and involving, but it has an aura of melancholy and death to it that made it very difficult for me to endure for two hours. The mystery of the plot and the well-developed characters will keep sophisticated film viewers watching, but those less serious will pass.
BEHIND THE DOOR is a silent film from 1919, released just months after the Armistice. It has been virtually unavailable for close to 100 years, but Flicker Alley has just released a restored version on DVD and Blu-Ray. I have long heard about this legendary feature – one that presents the evil German – the Hun—as a ferocious animal to be feared and hated. U.S. media used horrific images and anecdotes about the Huns to make Americans eager to defeat them. One film of the period has Eric von Stroheim playing a Hun who throws an infant out a window before moving to rape its mother. But BEHIND THE DOOR even beats that nastiness. In this film, a filthy pig of a German submarine commander who has turned a man’s wife into a gang rape victim will be punished by the husband. I’ll give you a clue as to the punishment: The husband is a taxidermist who’s a wiz with a knife! The psychological horror of BEHIND THE DOOR is reflective of the psychological damage with which millions in Europe and America were left in the months and years following the Great War. BEHIND THE DOOR is a fast-paced and extraordinarily moving film. Its subliminal message is that the horrors of war are capable of turning even god-fearing humanity into wild animals.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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