On France 2, the Second World War turns into a blockbuster

Violent images, denatured archives, snoring music, dubious animations, frantic rhythm … The documentary series in four episodes “1939-1945: and the world rocks” is full.

En September 2009, on France 2, the six components ofRevelation: World War II were seen by six to eight million viewers in no way put off by their cropped, colorized and sounded sound archives. What encourage designers of historic documentaries of the first part of the evening to adopt this arsenal of artifices serving a spectacularization of the key periods of the XX^e century. Documentarian Mickaël Gamrasni remembers having been “Subjugated” by the « forme immersive » From this program by Daniel Costelle and Isabelle Clarke. So Thésard, he did not know that he would collaborate a few years later in some of their films – including several opus ofApocalypse Consecrated to Stalin, Verdun, the interwar period or the Cold War. Having become a director, today he offers a four -part documentary series on France 2 which too, in its entirety, embraces the Second World War, granting up to date the spectacular aesthetics of sixteen years ago. Written with historian Olivier Wieviorka, 1939-1945: and the world rocks Abounding in violent images, steaks and snoring music, puts the spectator in tension to win a reluctant audience with the more demanding proposals of the second and third parties of the evening. At the risk of a “blockbuster” in history.

Degradation of archives

Years of colorization, sound system and 16/9 format have accustomed us to this denaturation of the archives, brought into compliance with the television flow. These digital special effects also serve the fluidity of a story, in which German, American or Soviet propaganda images are exploited as simple rushs. If the commentary of 1939-1945 Rarely takes the time to report their origin, it is to maintain the hectic rhythm of the story. By adding beigeâtre tones in terms of a pit and detonations on the image of three bodies that fall under the bullets of a Nazi execution commando, the exploitation of the archive degrades it in the name of a doubtful emotional added value, of a paradoxical reality effect like the “Lying-Vrai” fiction.

Confusion des sources

A dozen sequences of 1939-1945 integrate images created by digital magic. This is particularly the case in the thirty-seventh minute of the first episode, when we are reported on the release of a bomb over London by the German pilot Peter Stahl. To an aerial archive which shows the open belly of a bomber flying over an uninhabited plain, succeeds a 3D representation in which the fall of a beautifully drawn projectile is accompanied by a movement of the most beautiful effect. The following plan exploits an explosion archive in a street that is supposed to be Londonian. It doesn’t matter, to tell the truth, whether it is or name. It also does not matter that London is not an uninhabited plain, as the spectator’s eye lacks time to analyze the image taken in the restless flow of assembly. As for the evocation, at the beginning of the third episode, of the sniper Vassili Zaïtsev, Soviet hero of Stalingrad, she seems straight out of a video game, adopting the point of view of the sniper in order to better involve us. To distinguish these images of today from colorized archives, they are presented to us in black and white, maintaining a certain confusion by paradoxically returning to a time when the color was not necessarily in order.

Time discrepancy

Another spectacular contribution of the series to the formula ofApocalypse : nearly thirty sequences briefly escape from 1939-1945, To suggest the extensions of this story in the world after. The survival of Nazism, in recent images of militants with a raised arm, the creation of the UN, the role of “world gendarme” maintained by the United States in Vietnam or Afghanistan … The idea is clever, but its problematic application. Anxious not to break the chronological thread of the main story, the realization reduces these sequences to flashes producing more surprise effect than understanding. These ruptures even add a certain confusion to a documentary series already subject to a frantic pace, which does not hesitate to send the killings of the Einsatzgruppen in seventy-five seconds and the purification in thirty less.

p 1939-1945: and the world rocks. On France 2 Tuesday, May 6 at 9:15 p.m. Documentary series 4 x 52 min.