Wooden Crosses: War isn't a poem, it's just mud and noise

Is it worth your time?

If you have the patience for a film that doesn't care about your comfort, then yes. It’s for the folks who want to see how cinema handled the Great War before everything got sanitized by big-budget spectacle.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Wooden Crosses (1932) through its definitive frames.

If you need a clear hero or a tidy plot where everyone learns a lesson, you’re going to hate this. It’s messy, loud, and frankly, it feels like it might just reach out and grab you by the collar.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Wooden Crosses (1932) through its definitive frames.

The first thing that hit me? The sound. They didn't have fancy digital mixing back then, but the constant, low-level thrum of artillery makes the whole movie feel like a headache you can't shake. It’s claustrophobic in a way that modern movies struggle to fake.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Wooden Crosses (1932) through its definitive frames.

There is this one shot of the soldiers just... sitting. Waiting. The camera doesn't cut away. It just watches them wait for a shell that might or might not kill them. It goes on way longer than it should, and it made me feel kind of restless. That’s the point, I guess.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Wooden Crosses (1932) through its definitive frames.

Pierre Blanchar as the lead is just fantastic, mostly because he looks so tired. Not 'movie tired' with a bit of dirt on his face, but that deep, hollowed-out look of someone who stopped caring about home months ago. Watching him try to hold onto his sanity while the world literally falls apart around him is… rough.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Wooden Crosses (1932) through its definitive frames.

Antonin Artaud pops up, too. Seeing him in such a grounded role is a weird little trip if you know his later work. He brings a jagged, nervous energy to the group that makes the whole dynamic feel way more unstable than it had any right to be.

Some random notes I scribbled:

• The trenches look less like a movie set and more like a fever dream of wet clay.
• The way they handle the pacing—it’s not a straight line, it’s a zig-zag of boredom and pure panic.
• Sometimes the dialogue is buried under the ambient noise, and honestly? It’s better that way.

It reminds me a bit of the suffocating domestic tension you get in All of a Sudden Norma, though obviously with more explosives and way less living room furniture. Both films just know how to trap their characters in a corner.

There's this moment where a group of men are just talking about food—specifically a nice meal back home—and the contrast between their hungry faces and the literal cratered hellscape behind them is brutal. No music, no swelling score, just them talking about bread. 🥖

It’s not a perfect movie. Some of the edits feel a little clunky, like they had to shove a whole war into a runtime that was just a bit too short. But maybe that fits. War doesn't care about your runtime, right?

Don't look for a grand moral. You won't find one. You’ll just find a bunch of wooden crosses sticking out of the dirt, and honestly, that’s all you really need to know.