(A Vow of Silence)
France, 1936, 109 min, b&w
Dir and Scr Léon Poirier; Prod SACIC; Cinematog Georges Million; Music Claude Delvincourt, J. E. Szyfer, and a Chopin study; Sound Maurice Menot; Act Jean Yonnel (Charles de Foucauld), Pierre de Guingand (General Laperrine), Thomy Bourdelle (a general), Pierre Juvenet (a colonel), Jacqueline Francell (Mademoiselle X), Alice Tissot, Suzanne Bianchetti, Pierre Nay, Fred Pasquali, André Nox, and Alexandre Mihalesco.
L’Appel du silence acts as a useful reminder that right-wing films were at least as common as the more celebrated left-wing films during the Popular Front years, and that they were routinely more popular. This film can usefully be compared to Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (#73), commissioned by the PCF the following year, since both were to be funded by subscription. But whereas, despite the enthusiastic support of government and unions, La Marseillaise raised less than a third of the required 3 million francs (and finally cost 10 million), such that the workers’ cooperative had to be transformed into a standard production company controlled by the workers’ union (CGT), Léon Poirier’s film, backed by the National Catholic Confederation, reputedly met its subscription target with ease.
It is readily recognizable as a right-wing film: by way of a biography of Charles de Foucauld, it celebrates the French colonization of North Africa and the spiritual mission of the Catholic Church that accompanied it. Certainly the life of de Foucauld was a rich source of material, which had already been exploited as the basis for Lieutenant Morhange in L’Atlantide (#16) in 1932, and indeed earlier, in 1921, but, while still fictional, L’Appel du silence remains truer to the original. It sketches de Foucauld’s frivolous immoral life as a cadet at Saint-Cyr, where he befriended Laperrine (later General Laperrine), then follows him to North Africa with his regiment. There his commanding officer discovers that de Foucauld’s supposed wife is in fact his mistress; he is told to get rid of her, refuses on a point of honor, and resigns. Hearing of war in Tunisia, he reenlists but again resigns in order to undertake an unofficial reconnaissance to the interior of Morocco, disguised as a Jewish trader, with a view to France’s future colonization of that country. More and more attracted to the silence and immensity of the desert, de Foucauld has a religious vision, symbolically burns his materialist past, and devotes himself to the service of the church. With a view to converting the Tuareg, he joins with his old friend Laperrine on a combined military/ religious expedition ever farther southward into the desert. Befriending the Tuareg, he builds a church in their territory, but treachery leads to misunderstandings, a revolt against the French presence, and de Foucauld’s death. Laperrine returns to bury him by his hilltop church, and later is himself buried there—a soldier of the faith beside a soldier of the nation.
Poirier, the director, was a survivor of the “First Wave,” the directors of the silent cinema. One of the brilliant group of Gaumont directors before World War I, he had made a number of fiction and documentary films shot (at least notionally) in exotic Asian and (more authentically) African locations—La Croisière noire following the 1924 rally down through Africa (see #29), La Brière in Madagascar, La Voie sans disque in Ethiopia. But, as Charles Ford notes, “From 1920 onwards he put his talent to work in the service firstly of France, secondly of Christianity. On occasion the two coincided, as in Verdun, visions d’histoire, in Soeurs d’armes, and especially in L’Appel du silence which is one of the most characteristic of Léon Poirier’s films.”13
One of the great strengths of the film is its powerful location shots of the bleak interior of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Inserted into successive episodes of de Foucauld’s North African experience, they lend credibility to his reputed fascination for the silence and majesty of the desert, such that both his military and spiritual vocations can at times come to seem mere pretexts to attain the solitude, silence, and stillness that the desert represents for him. Then in the latter half of the film, the narrative begins to underline the parallels between his experiences and biblical events, notably the life of Christ, that ultimate model for all spiritual biographies—the vision, the retreat into the desert, the hill from which he surveys the land where God has called him, the “miraculous” cures of the locals, the Judas figure who betrays him, and the martyrdom at the hands of the Tuareg. Numerous premonitions of his forthcoming end provide that element of predestination without which no spiritual biography is complete.
The one episode in his life that clearly posed problems for the biographer was his mission to Morocco as a spy disguised as a Jew. The central event of his “military” reputation, this expedition nevertheless involves an element of deception, and the somewhat racist representation of de Foucauld’s decision to adopt the guise not of an Arab but of a Jew. Both of these sit uneasily with the rest of the film. François Garçon sees this episode as betraying Poirier’s instinctive anti-Semitism, typical of right-wing attitudes in France throughout the period.14 Yet perhaps even more surprising is the relatively little space given to such Jewish stereotypes in the films of the decade, and the consistent refusal of the French cinema later under the occupation to pander to German anti-Semitism.15
L’Appel du silence was by far the most popular film of the 1935–1936 season, attracting nearly 900,000 spectators in Paris alone. This was a good year for right-wing populist triumphalism, with several other military and colonial films sharing the honors—La Bandera (#42, 2nd), Veille d’armes (4th), L’Équipage (#44, 6th), the spy story Deuxième Bureau (7th), and La Route impèriale (12th). L’Appel du silence won the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français for 1936, an award founded in 1934 by the film industry and attributed by a panel overseen by the minister. In the spirit of the times, a number of “independent” critics were so outraged by the conservative orientation of this award that they founded a counter-award, which they called the Prix Louis Delluc. Its first beneficiary, in 1937, was Renoir for Les Bas-Fonds, not so much (as Lucien Rebatet grumpily but justifiably observed) recognizing the artist Jean Renoir as recognizing the antifascist Jean Renoir. It also perhaps served to counter the award of the 1937 Grand Prix to Maurice Gleize’s Légions d’honneur, which blends aspects of the narrative of L’Appel du silence and L’Équipage.
13. Ford, Le Cinéma au service de la foi, 132.
14. Garçon, De Blum à Pétain, 178.
15. See Crisp, Genre, Myth and Convention, 68–71.