Summary
A celluloid fever-dream carved from the mud of 1916, Hans Brennert’s Bei unseren Helden an der Somme liquefies the canonical war archive into a single, relentless dolly that begins in a Berlin cabaret where champagne flutes shiver to the bass-drum of distant artillery, then tunnels—literally, through a splice-hole burned into the screen—into a trench that snakes like a ruptured vein toward the river of death. Along this gangrenous corridor, a cinematograph unit cranks hand-cranked cameras while soldiers rehearse their own deaths for the lens, mascara-running clowns trade helmets for papier-mâché crowns, and a seventeen-year-old telephonist named Leni rewires her switchboard so that every scream becomes a lullaby broadcast back home. The front line is a proscenium: bayonets glint like footlights, flares bleach faces into porcelain masks, and the Somme itself—shown only as a mercury horizon—becomes a mirror in which Germany watches its own heart stop. Mid-film, the footage folds in on itself: the same charge is staged, re-staged, and then staged again, each repetition more threadbare, until uniforms dissolve into lint and dialogue collapses into stuttering anagrams of Heimat. In the final reel the camera is left behind, still grinding, buried under chalk and bone; what we watch is the slow triumph of emulsion over flesh, the moment when cinema, not war, becomes the final spectator.
