Unknown Love

An American girl becomes the pen pal of a front-line soldier in the trenches of the First World War. They fall in love through their letters.

I first became aware of Leonce Perret (1880-1935), the director of this movie, as the director of some short features produced in France. His visual sense, I thought, was very formal, with a lot of his shots framed, almost posed, in windows, doorways, and so forth; he also liked to hold his shots a long time, leading me to think that he was more concerned with the beauty of his work than the telling of a tale. More recently I have seen several of his earlier shorts as a performer and director of situational comedies with a strong sense of the beauty of technology and gardens -- French-style gardens, planned and geometrically shaped, unlike the more naturalistic gardens preferred by the English. I see those tendencies here: a tendency to concentrate on the images of beauty and allow extensive titles -- including long passages from letters to carry the story.

Perret last appeared onscreen in 1916, but he continued to direct through the year of his death in 1935. Although his techniques do not particularly appeal to me, it is clear that they were successful. I am obviously missing something about his aesthetic, one that most of cinema abandoned for its own reasons, but in Perret's hands, was successful well into the sound era.