War News, "Lo Journal de Guerre," is being shown regularly in forty British newsreel and foreign-language cinemas. This is good news, for the "Journal de Guerre" is good history and good film making. In form, it is less of a newsreel than a documentary "short." Every department of the French Army and Air Force has its own official camera unit, working, as it were, on a roving commission. These men, skilled cinema technicians in peace time—for the whole industry was mobilized at the outbreak of war—shoot whatever may seem interesting to them at the front and behind the lines.
The negatives are rushed to a studio near Paris, sorted, cut, and edited. From the material finally chosen, perfect little documentary films are made up, each one self-contained, with a dramatic shape, and that characteristic mood of contemplation that one admires so much in the French peace-time picture.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.