forces occultes (1943)

this film is a nazi's fascist-nightmare. seen within a context of a history beyond world war two, the narrative ironically reads like a genuinely foretelling resistance film :: the band of illuminated republican+fraternal infrastructuralists, fighting a 'discreet' ideological war against the german national-socialists.

one's utopia is another's dystopia. it's all down to the rhetoric; of how well one can argue in favor of such-and-such reality :: but does it oppress? is the charm of the debate also an enslavement? or is my oppression, too, a matter of argument? what if systems are built primarily upon releases and oppressions; and some are one, and some the other, some become both, and some, somehow, are also none? the dramatic narrative, certainly, is activated only by an action/reaction, known popularly as a beat, and what etymologically is inferred within the term drama ("to do"). yet all of this is in service to a singular unconsciously itching question :: what is the resolution to whole of the Human Story?

the function of this idea serves toward the styling of the image / narrative, leading further away from the perfection of a content in abstract ('divorced') from its form :: style provides the rhetorical framing in the picture :: the way shakespeare contradicts his modes of love within his sonnet sequence (the feeble exercise of writing against the face of time, to his poem being an eternal monument for his love, etc) one can easily see that so long as "love and tongue-tied simplicity" adorn the work (what Occult Forces labels, "a united front for one cause"), well, then, style is substance.

//

there is a hint of a power-structure even beyond free-masonry —

In masonry, we hide everything from the little people. At the bottom you know nothing. At the top you start to see the global game more clearly. Even I'm not sure of the intentions of our order's rulers. And when I say rulers, I am mistaken. There are no rulers among us. There are only executors. I, too, am a pawn on a chessboard. I carry out a function. I receive messages. I obey. I pass on messages. I respond. [...] It is much more complicated, and simple at the same time, than we think. What is masonry? Groups of men who are unified from the four corners of the earth, wrapping the world in a network of unbreakable links. There are 50,000 of us in France. 500,000 in England. 3 million in America. It's not many. But it's a huge number because we form a united front for one cause. We spread everywhere. We have control everywhere. Here, 300 parliamentary members are masons. In England, the King is part of our order. In the U.S., the president is at the 32nd degree. There is not a country where we do not have our secret supporters; our men, our banks, our devoted groups. And that's nothing. I'm only describing the physical force of free-masonry. There is perhaps something else... A superior doctrine. An ancient power in the world which allows us to push people sometimes towards life, sometimes towards death, as is necessary.

Death? But I thought free-masonry stood for peace?

A certain peace. Our peace.

are these the reptilian shape-shifters of david icke, unbeknowingly? alas, given the situation it is quite clear that spidery jewish international plot that so worked up the nazi estate is even here at work beyond the fringes of the depicted free-masonry; the references to judaism, however, are kept with a kind of explicit distance... at least significantly more so when compared with other contemporary axis-powers hate-propaganda films — Jew Süss (1940), The Eternal Jew (1940), The Rothschilds (1940), etc... and with this distance opens the potential for a poetic Mystery, for an allowing fluid spectatorship (to project one's own bias into the gaps), giving this films its peculiar, and also curious, aura.

KNOW YOUR PROPAGANDA

The film was commissioned in 1942 by the delegation of Nazi Germany's propaganda ministry within occupied France by the ex-Mason, director Jean Mamy. It virulently denounces freemasonry, parliamentarianism and jews as part of Vichy's drive against them and seeks to prove a Jewish-Masonic plot. On France's liberation its writer Jean Marquès-Rivière, its producer Robert Muzard and Mamy were purged for collaboration with the enemy. On 25 November 1945, Muzard was condemned to 3 years in prison and Marquès-Rivière was condemned in his absence (he had gone into self-imposed exile) to death and degradation. Mamy had also been a journalist on 'L'Appel', and on the collaborationist journal 'Au pilori', and was thus condemned to death and executed at the fortress of Montrouge on 29 March 1949.