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RESTORING MEANING TO DEATH AND CHANCE

Pierre Beuchot, Le Temps Détruit (Time Destroyed)

Dying as a conscript in war is, for the living who loved the deceased person, testimony to everything prehistoric and barbaric about the state of humanity. The epics of those savage civilizations in which all the young men of good family were trained for such a death were well aware of this when they allowed the protestations of women or friends to be heard in opposition to the glorification of strife and blood, without deciding in favor of either one. The fact that Andromache is as worthy as Hector, that Achilles is more deeply wounded by Patrocles’ death than he is glorious on account of his own valor, tells us, in songs with clashing tones, that if fighting for the survival of one’s country, a politics, or freedom is necessary, that does not automatically imply that dying for one’s native land is the most beautiful fate of all. War – the just war – is a form of coercion that has come down to us from the barbarians, let’s not forget, and it is certainly to the credit of the invention of politics that we are able to imagine a country where the most beautiful fate for young men would be to be able to live and to think, even if necessary wars might have to be fought in order for such a thing to be achieved.

But what can be said when, in addition, someone dies as a result of a war that never took place? And which didn’t take place even though, from the point of view of the person who had to fight, it was an especially justifiable war and so he had reluctantly accepted to be conscripted for it?

This is the pivotal point of our history that Pierre Beuchot’s fine film Le Temps détruit deals with. It is about the “phony war” when, between Autumn 1939 and May 1940, the French divisions – which were every bit as armed as the German ones, despite the myths that have been bandied about since then – were in a state of morbid stagnation behind the Maginot Line, with time dragging endlessly on, the bitter-cold winter, the spectacular incompetence of the high command, and the government’s hypocrisy. After this, with a mere cavalcade of tanks, the situation was destroyed by the Nazi military machine, and the old criminal Pétain emerged from the utter shambles as the man in charge of making sure any politically valid national identity would cease to exist.

Pierre Beuchot’s method is that of contemporary cinema, a cinema beneath whose rigor – as we know since the works of Straub, Dindo (Max Frisch), Oliveira, Godard on occasion, Syberberg, and a few others – the return of the realistic repressed leads to banal images. This cinema’s principles, which are in other respects flexible, necessarily include the primacy of the text, the deliberately artificial nature of the locations, the de-centering of the actor, the historical significance of the subject, and the alignment of all the material with a conception of cinema as a process of Ideas, an act of thought, not representation.

The text chosen by Pierre Beuchot is a collection of letters written by three mobilized soldiers to the women they loved. The first of these men was Paul Nizan,¹ right after his break with the French Communist Party, a break occasioned by his refusal to accept the Party’s servility with regard to the Hitler–Stalin Pact. The second was the composer Maurice Jaubert, known for his film music. The third was the director’s father, a worker who died when his son was two years old. The film is thus an admirable filial tribute as well, a quest for the father, and therefore for meaning, in the very place of non-meaning. The letters, read by practically indistinguishable voices that make equals of the intellectuals and the worker, are the voice of men in the non-place of war. The letters speak, very simply, of the most important connections of life: war and love, distance and waiting, matter and thought.

On the basis of these letters, which punctuate the passage of time and in which the ultimate tragedy is almost indiscernible, Beuchot shows archive footage in which the bustle of military life is seen as a sort of camp-out in the country; in which war is not captured in the changeless, ever-identical act it is – men running and falling amid the horrifying racket and smoke of the battlefield – but rather in its food, the tedium of its duties, its overwhelming inconvenience; or else in its effects, namely the destruction it causes, rendered all the more real in that it is viewed from close up, and very calmly: walls blown to bits, bridges broken in half, precarious roads. From time to time, the grotesque, mustachioed generals, their action narrated by the stirring voices of newsreel commentators of the time, hand out sandwiches paternalistically to the soldiers covered in mud and snow. The three men and their wives – who were all very beautiful – will be seen only in some old photos.

It is not true that these three poorly informed, idle men have no desire to fight. Each of them directly connects the meaning of his life and his love to the need to fight against Nazi barbarism. The worker is plagued by serious money worries where his pregnant young wife and two children are concerned, yet he is the one who complains about their not being able to do much of anything with only two twin machine guns to shoot at the Nazi planes. Jaubert, a man of tradition, is imbued with his role as an officer and conceives of his duty as being the person who will be in charge when his men attack. Nizan broke with the French Communist Party on account of this war, and when he sees the pathetic forms of entertainment cooked up by the high command to boost “the soldier’s morale” he asks them to be concerned instead with “the soldier’s metaphysics.”

So it was really the politicians, the film claims, who decided on surrender. A bleak period it was, when the right did not want to fight because it admired the Nazi order nor did the left since, having made no genuine assessment of World War I, half were pacifists and the other half – the PCF – went along submissively with Stalin’s tactics, the only real concern of which was the fate of the Russian nation.

The calmness of the film thus delivers a harsh, painful lesson. When men are uprooted from their normal lives like this, when they consent to it, and when the hidden agenda behind this uprooting is the elimination, at the cost of defeat, of every connection between politics and national identity, you’ve hit the bottom of the abyss. The death of these three men, all of them good people, all of them torn between life and principles, testifies to nothing, alas, but this abyss.

For there may not have been a war, but there was nevertheless a true massacre: a hundred thousand French soldiers were killed, in a random rout, in silence and meaninglessness. Among them were Nizan, Jaubert, and Beuchot. These dead are captured in the film by the place where they died – a bridge, a forest – seen from today’s perspective, in color, as if a hundred thousand men were buried in black and white within a colored memory that has forgotten them forever.

But not quite. Beuchot’s film is timely: everyone knows that we need to rethink France and that such thinking founders, as though on the point of its real, which is also a point of departure, on the monstrosity of the year 1940. The film’s intentional tenderness, which moves one to tears, should encourage us to examine what happened to us there and how to prevent its being constantly reproduced in the body of the nation. The film will then have succeeded in restoring a real meaning to these three deaths, precisely because they died completely by chance and, by all appearances, for no reason at all.

Le Perroquet, December 31, 1985