The Wall of the Dead (Eugène Green, 2022) (Patreon)

Eugène Green's latest film begins with a quote from St. Augustine, relating to the nature of time. There is no past, present, or future, according to Augustine, but rather three distinct forms of the present: the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. In other words, the past is only comprehensible inasmuch as we think about it, and use it, in our own time. Likewise, the future is a projection from the place we currently occupy, and is tinged with present-day needs and desires.

As The Wall of the Dead very concretely shows, temporality is a political question, especially as it relates to the social functions of history. This is a film about remembering the dead, in particular those who died in war. These spirits are very often mobilized in order to promote fealty to the nation-state, holding their sacrifice up as something holy and necessary. Patriotism, if not outright jingoism, frequently relies of the image of the fallen soldier, who is held up as an ideal. If we are similarly called, we are expected to serve.

After a group of establishing shots overlooking a military cemetery, Green's film begins with Arnaud (Saia Hiriart) narrating a letter of "Claire," explaining that he is in Paris contemplating the meaninglessness of his life. Seemingly headed toward suicide, Arnaud chances upon the wall with the names of those who died fighting for France in World War One. One of the soldiers, Pierre (Édouard Sulpice) is "reincarnated," temporarily brought back to life because Arnaud noticed his name on the wall. He asks Arnaud to return with him back in time, where we meet those the solider left behind.

In a series of still shots, with the actors directly facing the camera, we see Pierre explain that he is going to the front, first to his fiancee Juliette (Lola Le Lann), then his grandmother (Françoise Lebrun), and finally his little brother Paul (Alex Terrier-Thiebaux), who suffers abuse at the hands of their father. He tells each of them that he will return. He does not, of course, and so Pierre asks Arnaud to return in his place, telling each of Pierre's loved ones why it is vital that they keep going, making space in their hearts for love despite their anguish at Pierre's death. 

There is nothing extraordinary about Pierre's particular circumstances. But this is Green's point. By extracting a single name from the wall and showing his personal loss, the destruction of his young life, we can extract the individual from the mass, remembering that all of those names were just people whose existence mattered to many. When Juliette, Paul, and the grandmother ask Pierre why he's going to war, he has no good answer. They need him more than France does, but as he says, he isn't brave enough to desert. And he comments that he hates his father much more than he could ever hate the Germans.

Green has created a kind of counter-memorial, one that mourns life instead of worshiping death. The war was a waste of life, and the abstract gratitude that the nation affords to the fallen is nothing next to the immediate needs the soldier's absence left unattended. If in the end, meeting Pierre restores Arnaud's will to live, it's not because of the dead man's patriotism, but because he and so many others had their futures squandered, and we have a responsibility to those who lost their lives to some abstract cause. Much like Maya Lin's still-controversial Vietnam Memorial, The Wall of the Dead is not a monument but a wound.