At the beginning...
I have always been interested in the Great War for as long as I can remember, and this fascination was not triggered by this year’s commemorations. I wrote a play around twenty years ago – “Au Bonheur des invalids” – that staged the chaotic journey of veterans in a decimated family in the aftermath of the First World War. The text was read out in public several times but did not find a production. The subject matter was not deemed sufficiently ‘attractive’ in those days… “Who will be interested?"
Since then, significant changes have taken place in the collective memory and have tooled to revive this sombre era. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren have reclaimed their long-disregarded family heritage. Within the framework of French history, the “Great War” is predominantly important in our family histories, as the latter were more particularly and deeply shaken by this seism than during the Second World War. I was only a boy when I first heard of the family legend and discovered the many tales, notes, letters, photographs, medals and souvenirs of Léonce, my grandfather on my father’s side. I never knew him. In spite of a piece of shrapnel in his thigh that would bring his memories to life on rainy days, Léonce conscientiously went back to his teaching job after the war and only ever returned to the hell of Verdun’s Fort de la Laufée in horrendous nightly
nightmares. He died at barely 50 years of age, in 1944, looking like an old man. For those who like him, went back to a seemingly normal life, how many returned depressed, crazed, suicidal, their lives rhymed by what was not yet know as post-traumatic stress?
My imagination has fed on reference works by Genevoix, Barbusse, Dorgelès, Vercel, Céline, Cendrars, Remarque, Junger and many other more modest or anonymous writers who all tried to testify the unspeakable violence of their experience in the trenches.
In this context, I decided to propose this project based on my play to producer Christophe Mazodier. I reused some elements and transposed them on screen with the aim of making an epic, romantic film by tackling the huge trauma of the war through the intimacy of a family. “Ceasefire” stems from this intent. In the dictionary, a ceasefire means “a temporary suspension of fighting, typically one during which peace talks take place; a truce”. This order or signal to stop fighting is the minimum that any one party can demand to start negotiating for peace. In the story, our main characters have reached that stage, and are begging their memories for a truce so that they may start making peace within themselves. In 1923, History saw the French and the English occupy the Ruhr as a payment for war damages. Peace was already nothing more than a ceasefire. The after war – later known as the “Interwar Period” – offered the striking contrast of millions of dead, missing, wounded, mutilated and traumatised men of a ravaged generation, confronted to the whirlwind of the “Roaring Twenties” society in full economic and artistic boom and the frenzied will to turn the page.
These powerful hallucinated literary evocations and the many archive images made popular by such colourized documentaries as Le bruit et la fureur, or more recently 14-18 l'Apocalypse, have rendered any translation on screen a high-risk enterprise. Such is the challenge that I will attempt to take up in an unforgivingly brutal introduction.
