5 - Mythologies of war: films, popular religion, and the business of the sacred

Summary

This book opened with the apocalyptic imagery of the return of the dead in Abel Gance's J'accuse. In 1919, using the most advanced mode of communication of the time, one film-maker reached back into the reservoir of romantic ideas about war, and fashioned a mélange of the new and the old, a collage of the strikingly original and the profoundly banal. In the following chapters I explore some ways in which the catastrophic losses of the Great War stimulated reflections of many kinds about war and the sacred. Here I discuss the link between films, the graphic arts, and popular piety. J'accuse was only one of many works of art which appropriated religious images both before and during the war to create a revived form of popular romanticism, which both dwelled on mass death and attempted to strip it of some of its most disturbing features. In later chapters, I shall turn to images of the Apocalypse in contemporary art and literature and to the reconfiguration of the sacred in war poetry. Here the focus is on works aimed at a mass audience.

The sacred and the secular: nineteenth-century popular piety

To appreciate the emotional appeal and allusions of this romantic epic, we must turn to the history of popular piety from the middle of the nineteenth century. Virtually everywhere in nineteenth-century Europe, popular religious imagery was produced, bought, and sold. A flourishing industry of such art dated back to the seventeenth century, but grew rapidly when printing techniques became simpler and products cheaper.