Over many gruelling months in 1919, after the last shots of the First World War, the leaders of the major powers and a host of other delegates met in Paris to piece together a new world order. Owing to the pitfalls of modern documentary filmmaking, it has taken the National Film Board of Canada and a host of broadcasters even more time, a number of years, in fact, to create a film of those events.
The NFB's long-awaited co-production of Paris 1919, its half-documentary, half-dramatization of the tenuous Paris peace conference, is finally making the rounds of the film-festival circuit before it eventually airs in various countries.
Inspired by Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan's award-winning book Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, the film focuses on the idealism, nationalism and competing egos among the Big Four, namely U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, British prime minister David Lloyd George and Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando.
The original plan for the film had a kind of Wilsonian idealism, akin to the President's lofty ambitions. “There'll be no revenge,” the film quotes Wilson saying to Clemenceau. “I'll give you something better. I'll give you a League of Nations and peace everlasting.”
The early plan for the Paris 1919 film was also ambitious, in its way, in relying for the most part on actors' re-enactments of the peace talks and thus testing the boundaries between what constitutes a documentary and what is historical docudrama. For years, there has been talk about this project in the documentary community.
But in the end, the number of re-enactments in Paris 1919 were cut back due to budget constraints, and archival footage made up a higher proportion of the finished film, director Paul Cowan said.
But what a trove of footage the filmmakers found, enabling Cowan to play in greater depth with both archival shots and re-enacted scenes in ways the earlier idea for Paris 1919 might not have allowed.
“For me, the challenge was to make a film where the dramatic material and the documentary material would flow seamlessly in and out of each other,” Cowan said. “What we did was to start combing archives all over the world. I knew approximately the story I wanted to tell. But once I found specific sequences, then I would write drama that would flow in and out of that documentary sequence.
“Generally, it works the other way around: You do drama and then you go find documentary footage to fill in the bigger picture or the external shots you can't afford, or you just use it for filler. But I felt that the archival material had to be as knitted into the story as the dramatic material, that I didn't want it just to be cutaways. I wanted it to be actually advancing the story, and I wanted to see the same individuals in the archival material that I was seeing in the dramatic material,” he said.
Black-and-white, hand-cranked vintage footage of the ruined countryside and death on the battlefield is juxtaposed with the celebratory mood in Paris, then with the smoky, colour-depleted re-enactments of the peace conference.
Yet it's the original footage that pulls the viewer in. It was the era when men still tipped their bowler hats while walking in front of a moving-picture camera, and when women in ankle-length dresses paraded down the boulevards, arm in arm, celebrating the end of war. In one of many miraculous bits of old footage, the American president, seen as the great shining hope for peace in Europe, rides past throngs of waving Parisians in an open-top carriage, gendarmes pedalling alongside on bicycles.
But Cowan had to bridge the enormous gulf between this light-hearted footage and the inner failures of the Paris peace talks. And cameras then were simply not allowed into the conference rooms. On the few times they were, film speeds were too slow for the dim light, and the movies of course were silent as well. Many historians have written gripping accounts of how the leaders failed. Cowan had to show it.
