Ordinary people from all nations involved probably experienced the onset of war much like Rigadin, his wife and their fun-loving neighbours: with a bomb exploding in their garden patch, setting the world afire. War turned neighbouring countries into enemies. But then again, have people ever chosen on which side of the fence they were born, or into which army they would be drafted to kill and be killed?
The war, obviously, changed cinema. We have deliberately decided to overlook all the films presenting the indelible narrative of innocent victim, barbarian aggressor and noble hero used extensively in fiction films during WWI, and focus, instead, on the great wealth of undiscovered documentaries: dispassionate records, all the more moving and necessary to watch because they are objective and distant. ECPAD, the archives of the French army, holds over 2000 films from 1915-1919, some from the Service de Santé, most rushes made by the cinematographers of the Service cinématographique de l’Armée (SCA). Several well-known directors, among them Alfred Machin and Franco-Tunisian photographer and filmmaker Albert Samama Chikly, worked during the war years for the SCA.
The war transformed documents into monuments, and it gave birth to one of the very first public film collections, the Imperial War Museum. Sadly, even nowadays documenting war seems to be the best argument for convincing political institutions of the usefulness of film preservation, as can be seen from the successful EFG WWI project. Cultural value rarely ever works for raising funds.
In 1915 Sacha Guitry had the brilliant idea of filming the greatest living French artists and intellectuals, conveying their moving images for posterity. Since he had yet to make a film, he turned for help to Charles Pathé, who put Ferdinand Zecca to the task. From Zecca’s handwritten note about Ceux de chez nous we learn that Guitry meant this film to be a riposte to a “hateful piece of propaganda”, an anti-French manifesto signed by German intellectuals, and we feel our hearts sinking. Incidentally, Zecca also writes about a final sequence to the film, now missing, showing “Mr. Pathé and myself examining the film I’m submitting to him”. A grainy frame enlargement exists.

Mariann Lewinsky