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  • Film Comment

    Theater of War

    Jul 03, 2018 5 minutes
    BY PHILIP KEMP

    I GIVE YOU . IT’S BY YOU THAT I WANT TO BE BETRAYED.” So said Jean Cocteau to Georges Franju, after he’d seen the director’s powerful, bitterly ironic documentary (1952). The 22-minute film, narrated by the great Michel Simon, at first appears to be simply a guided tour of France’s war museum in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, a huge complex that also includes a military hospital and a retirement home for veterans. But by shrewd juxtaposition of images—from a half-suit of armor to a hobbling, legless veteran, from a priest in ceremonial splendor (via a glimpse of a patriotic slogan on the altar cloth, “Paradise is under the protection of the sword”) to the twitching, disfigured faces and truncated bodies in the congregation—it becomes a subversive denunciation of a state that nostalgically celebrates mutilation and

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