My review was written in October 1982 after a New York Film Festival screening.
"One Man's War" is an initially interesting but ultimately tedious, overlong compilation film dealing poetically with France during the occupation. Using the wartime journals of philosophical German officer Ersnt Juenger as inspiration, filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky has compiled French newsreels, plus other archive footage into a panorama of life during the period, but whatever direct or ironic points he is trying to make were better achieved in Marcel Ophuls' classic "The Sorrow and the Pity".
With contrasting music for effect and periodic newsreels of fashion shows as comedy relief, Cozarinsky follows a nearly chronological format. Juenger's words, full of evocative imagery, are voiced-over in French by Niels Arestrup and frequently create moving moments in juxtaposition with the archive footage "illustrations". The other half of the film's footage consists of newsreels (with their own irritating narrator) which Cozarinsky lets speak for themselves.
Crisp, 35mm black and white visuals, trimly edited, are provocative above and beyond their context here, but become wearying and repetitive, before Cozarinsky has finished. There's the familiar parade of "baddies", Petain, President Laval, Chateaubriand and of course Adolf Hitler himself visiting Paris. As in Ophuls's earlier straight ahead docu, famous personalities who stayed home and at least implicitly supported the "united Europe", German-dominated regime are on display "lest we forget": Maurice Chevalier, Fernand Gravey, Danielle Darrieux.
The horrors of war are included, straying from France to the Eastern front in a segment about the "war against Bolshevism", some death camp footage and even equal time shots of Allied bombing devastation in France.
Worth a look, though hardly anything new, "One Man's War" could use English-language narration for Juenger's text, as the current subtitles distract from the force of the visuals. French newsreels used require retention of their French track, as the narrator's glib is important.
