The 1940 Saumur

Oh, wait. That's not a very original idea, is it?

Well, I'd like to make a film dramatising a particular event that took place during the fall of France, partly because it's a good story, and partly because it makes a good delivery system for a particular cultural payload I want to deliver.

The story is that, the day after the official surrender of France, the cadets of the Cavalry School at Saumur sur la Loire decided that they would have a go anyway.

Luckily, the commander of the German troops facing them was an old-fashioned gentleman who (if I've remembered this correctly) ended the engagement (after two days' fighting) by invoking the otherwise obsolete convention of "honours of war".

This meant that the boys agreed to stop fighting on that occasion but, instead of surrendering themselves as prisoners of war, would be allowed to go home.

This is important, because it allowed a sort of moral redemption to both sides - to the French, because in this case they were resisting the Nazis against impossible odds, and to the Germans, because in this case they did not behave like Nazis (even though some of their colleagues at the same time were, for example, shooting POWs elsewhere).

And it is important because this mutual moral redemption was not achieved through any sudden face-to-face recognition of common humanity, but rather through what you might call the channeling of collective cultural memories. It was about transcending and overcoming the impulses of the time (cowardice on one side, brutality on the other) by reference to tradition.

The problem I'm trying to solve here is that war films usually seem to be made either from a left wing or a right wing perspective, and they're both wrong.

The right wing perspective is wrong because it denies the moral difficulty of war; "those guys are the baddies, so we can kill them - what's the problem?"

The left wing perspective is wrong because it always seems to reduce the moral difficulty to the idea that wars are always wrong and stupid, and if only we could get away from our institutions and traditions, and instead respond more directly to our feelings, then there would be no wars.

This story seems to offer the opportunity to contradict both those views.

I would want to include in this film some wives of German officers, and some mothers of French cadets, not so as to do the obvious tear-jerky things, but so as to establish contrasts. I would show the wives as being more in tune with the spirit of vengeful triumphalism than their strait-laced husbands, and the mothers as being more in tune with the spirit of panicky sauve-qui-peut than their starry-eyed sons.

The story would then be a vindication of not-being-in-tune.

I see two main practical difficulties.

One is that no-one would go to see it (it would, of course, be filmed in French and German, and if anyone demanded subtitles I would supply them reluctantly, possibly in Swahili).

The other is that cinema, with its short time-span and its propensity for gigantic close-ups of individual human faces, might be the wrong medium for the point that I'm trying to make.