The Christmas Truce of 1914

The Christmas Truce

firstworldwar.com / http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/christmastruce.htm

 You are standing up to your knees in the slime of a waterlogged trench.  It is the evening of 24 December 1914 and you are on the dreaded Western Front.

Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over the watch.  Having exchanged pleasantries, your bleary-eyed and mud-spattered colleague shuffles off towards his dug out.  Despite the horrors and the hardships, your morale is high and you believe that in the New Year the nation's army march towards a glorious victory.

But for now you stamp your feet in a vain attempt to keep warm.  All is quiet when jovial voices call out from both friendly and enemy trenches.  Then the men from both sides start singing carols and songs.  Next come requests not to fire, and soon the unthinkable happens: you start to see the shadowy shapes of soldiers gathering together in no-man's land laughing, joking and sharing gifts.

Many have exchanged cigarettes, the lit ends of which burn brightly in the inky darkness.  Plucking up your courage, you haul yourself up and out of the trench and walk towards the foe...

The meeting of enemies as friends in no-man's land was experienced by hundreds, if not thousands, of men on the Western Front during Christmas 1914.  Today, 90 years after it occurred, the event is seen as a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War One - a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians.

  The reality of the Christmas Truce, however, is a slightly less romantic and a more down to earth story.  It was an organic affair that in some spots hardly registered a mention and in others left a profound impact upon those who took part.

Many accounts were rushed, confused or contradictory.  Others, written long after the event, are weighed down by hindsight.  These difficulties aside, the true story is still striking precisely because of its rag-tagged nature: it is more 'human' and therefore all the more potent.

Months beforehand, millions of servicemen, reservists and volunteers from all over the continent had rushed enthusiastically to the banners of war: the atmosphere was one of holiday rather than conflict.

But it was not long before the jovial façade was torn away. Armies equipped with repeating rifles, machine guns and a vast array of artillery tore chunks out of each other, and thousands upon thousands of men perished.

To protect against the threat of this vast firepower, the soldiers were ordered to dig in and prepare for next year's offensives, which most men believed would break the deadlock and deliver victory.

The early trenches were often hasty creations and poorly constructed; if the trench was badly sighted it could become a sniping hot spot.  In bad weather (the winter of 1914 was a dire one) the positions could flood and fall in.  The soldiers - unequipped to face the rigours of the cold and rain - found themselves wallowing in a freezing mire of mud and the decaying bodies of the fallen.

 The man at the Front could not help but have a degree of sympathy for his opponents who were having just as miserable a time as they were.

Another factor that broke down the animosity between the opposing armies were the surroundings.  In 1914 the men at the front could still see the vestiges of civilisation.  Villages, although badly smashed up, were still standing.  Fields, although pitted with shell-holes, had not been turned into muddy lunarscapes.

Thus the other world - the civilian world - and the social mores and manners that went with it was still present at the front.  Also lacking was the pain, misery and hatred that years of bloody war build up.  Then there was the desire, on all sides, to see the enemy up close - was he really as bad as the politicians, papers and priests were saying?

It was a combination of these factors, and many more minor ones, that made the Christmas Truce of 1914 possible.

On the eve of the Truce, the British Army (still a relatively small presence on the Western Front) was manning a stretch of the line running south from the infamous Ypres salient for 27 miles to the La Bassee Canal.

Along the front the enemy was sometimes no more than 70, 50 or even 30 yards away.  Both Tommy and Fritz could quite easily hurl greetings and insults to one another, and, importantly, come to tacit agreements not to fire.  Incidents of temporary truces and outright fraternisation were more common at this stage in the war than many people today realise - even units that had just taken part in a series of futile and costly assaults, were still willing to talk and come to arrangements with their opponents.

German and British officer together during the 1914 Christmas truceAs Christmas approached the festive mood and the desire for a lull in the fighting increased as parcels packed with goodies from home started to arrive.  On top of this came gifts care of the state.  Tommy received plum puddings and 'Princess Mary boxes'; a metal case engraved with an outline of George V's daughter and filled with chocolates and butterscotch, cigarettes and tobacco, a picture card of Princess Mary and a facsimile of George V's greeting to the troops.  'May God protect you and bring you safe home,' it said.

Not to be outdone, Fritz received a present from the Kaiser, the Kaiserliche, a large meerschaum pipe for the troops and a box of cigars for NCOs and officers.  Towns, villages and cities, and numerous support associations on both sides also flooded the front with gifts of food, warm clothes and letters of thanks.

The Belgians and French also received goods, although not in such an organised fashion as the British or Germans.  For these nations the Christmas of 1914 was tinged with sadness - their countries were occupied.  It is no wonder that the Truce, although it sprung up in some spots on French and Belgian lines, never really caught hold as it did in the British sector.

With their morale boosted by messages of thanks and their bellies fuller than normal, and with still so much Christmas booty to hand, the season of goodwill entered the trenches.  A British Daily Telegraph correspondent wrote that on one part of the line the Germans had managed to slip a chocolate cake into British trenches.

Even more amazingly, it was accompanied with a message asking for a ceasefire later that evening so they could celebrate the festive season and their Captain's birthday.  They proposed a concert at 7.30pm when candles, the British were told, would be placed on the parapets of their trenches.

The British accepted the invitation and offered some tobacco as a return present.  That evening, at the stated time, German heads suddenly popped up and started to sing.  Each number ended with a round of applause from both sides.

The Germans then asked the British to join in.  At this point, one very mean-spirited Tommy shouted: 'We'd rather die than sing German.'  To which a German joked aloud: 'It would kill us if you did'.

December 24 was a good day weather-wise: the rain had given way to clear skies.

On many stretches of the Front the crack of rifles and the dull thud of shells ploughing into the ground continued, but at a far lighter level than normal.  In other sectors there was an unnerving silence that was broken by the singing and shouting drifting over, in the main, from the German trenches.

Along many parts of the line the Truce was spurred on with the arrival in the German trenches of miniature Christmas trees - Tannenbaum.  The sight these small pines, decorated with candles and strung along the German parapets, captured the Tommies' imagination, as well as the men of the Indian corps who were reminded of the sacred Hindu festival of light.

British soldiers bringing in Christmas hollyIt was the perfect excuse for the opponents to start shouting to one another, to start singing and, in some areas, to pluck up the courage to meet one another in no-man's land.

By now, the British high command - comfortably 'entrenched' in a luxurious châteaux 27 miles behind the front - was beginning to hear of the fraternisation.

Stern orders were issued by the commander of the BEF, Sir John French against such behaviour.  Other 'brass-hats' (as the Tommies nick-named their high-ranking officers and generals), also made grave pronouncements on the dangers and consequences of parleying with the Germans.

However, there were many high-ranking officers who took a surprisingly relaxed view of the situation.  If anything, they believed it would at least offer their men an opportunity to strengthen their trenches.  This mixed stance meant that very few officers and men involved in the Christmas Truce were disciplined.

Interestingly, the German High Command's ambivalent attitude towards the Truce mirrored that of the British.

Christmas day began quietly but once the sun was up the fraternisation began.  Again songs were sung and rations thrown to one another.  It was not long before troops and officers started to take matters into their own hands and ventured forth.  No-man's land became something of a playground.

Men exchanged gifts and buttons.  In one or two places soldiers who had been barbers in civilian times gave free haircuts.  One German, a juggler and a showman, gave an impromptu, and given the circumstances, somewhat surreal performance of his routine in the centre of no-man's land.

Sir Edward Hulse of the Scots Guards, in his famous account, remembered the approach of four unarmed Germans at 08.30.  He went out to meet them with one of his ensigns.  'Their spokesmen,' Hulse wrote, 'started off by saying that he thought it only right to come over and wish us a happy Christmas, and trusted us implicitly to keep the truce.  He came from Suffolk where he had left his best girl and a 3 ½ h.p. motor-bike!'

Having raced off to file a report at headquarters, Hulse returned at 10.00 to find crowds of British soldiers and Germans out together chatting and larking about in no-man's land, in direct contradiction to his orders.

Not that Hulse seemed to care about the fraternisation in itself - the need to be seen to follow orders was his concern.  Thus he sought out a German officer and arranged for both sides to return to their lines.

While this was going on he still managed to keep his ears and eyes open to the fantastic events that were unfolding.

'Scots and Huns were fraternizing in the most genuine possible manner.  Every sort of souvenir was exchanged addresses given and received, photos of families shown, etc.  One of our fellows offered a German a cigarette; the German said, "Virginian?"  Our fellow said, "Aye, straight-cut", the German said "No thanks, I only smoke Turkish!"... It gave us all a good laugh.'

Hulse's account was in part a letter to his mother, who in turn sent it on to the newspapers for publication, as was the custom at the time.  Tragically, Hulse was killed in March 1915.

On many parts of the line the Christmas Day truce was initiated through sadder means.  Both sides saw the lull as a chance to get into no-man's land and seek out the bodies of their compatriots and give them a decent burial.  Once this was done the opponents would inevitably begin talking to one another.

The 6th Gordon Highlanders, for example, organised a burial truce with the enemy.  After the gruesome task of laying friends and comrades to rest was complete, the fraternisation began.

German officer in a British trench during the Christmas truceWith the Truce in full swing up and down the line there were a number of recorded games of soccer, although these were really just 'kick-abouts' rather than a structured match.

On January 1, 1915, the London Times published a letter from a major in the Medical Corps reporting that in his sector the British played a game against the Germans opposite and were beaten 3-2.

Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxons recorded in his diary: 'The English brought a soccer ball from the trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued.  How marvellously wonderful, yet how strange it was.  The English officers felt the same way about it.  Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.'

The Truce lasted all day; in places it ended that night, but on other sections of the line it held over Boxing Day and in some areas, a few days more.  In fact, there parts on the front where the absence of aggressive behaviour was conspicuous well into 1915.

Captain J C Dunn, the Medical Officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, whose unit had fraternised and received two barrels of beer from the Saxon troops opposite, recorded how hostilities re-started on his section of the front.

Dunn wrote: 'At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with "Merry Christmas" on it, and I climbed on the parapet.  He [the Germans] put up a sheet with "Thank you" on it, and the German Captain appeared on the parapet.  We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again.'

The war was indeed on again, for the Truce had no hope of being maintained.  Despite being wildly reported in Britain and to a lesser extent in Germany, the troops and the populations of both countries were still keen to prosecute the conflict.

Today, pragmatists read the Truce as nothing more than a 'blip' - a temporary lull induced by the season of goodwill, but willingly exploited by both sides to better their defences and eye out one another's positions.  Romantics assert that the Truce was an effort by normal men to bring about an end to the slaughter.

In the public's mind the facts have become irrevocably mythologized, and perhaps this is the most important legacy of the Christmas Truce today.  In our age of uncertainty, it comforting to believe, regardless of the real reasoning and motives, that soldiers and officers told to hate, loathe and kill, could still lower their guns and extend the hand of goodwill, peace, love and Christmas cheer.

Tarka author tells of 1914 Christmas truce

Henry Williamson, 1915, having been commissioned.

 Tarka author tells of 1914 Christmas truce

Remarkable account of the 1914 Christmas truce between British and German soldiers on the Western Front emerges in interview with veteran, never before seen in full

By Jasper Copping8:00AM GMT 09 Mar 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/10685149/Tarka-author-tells-of-1914-Christmas-truce.html

It was one of the most poignant episodes of the First World War – as the guns fell silent and the troops emerged from opposing trenches to come together in no-man’s land to exchange gifts and sing carols, during a brief period of festive peace.

Now, almost a century on, perhaps the most moving account of the Christmas truce of 1914 has emerged, in an interview with a veteran recorded in the 1960s.

Henry Williamson was on a patrol in no-man’s land on Christmas Eve just 50 yards from the enemy lines when it became clear that an informal ceasefire was emerging. His unit had feared they were going to come under attack at any moment, but as the atmosphere became more relaxed, he and his comrades were soon “walking about and laughing and talking”, with no interference from the Germans.

Williamson, a private in the London Rifle Brigade, had been sent on the operation from the British lines at Ploegsteert – part of the front near to Ypres, in Belgium.

He recalled: “We crept out, trying to avoid our boots ringing on the frozen ground, and expecting any moment to fall flat with the machine guns opening up. And nothing happened. And within two hours we were walking about and laughing and talking, and there was nothing from the German side.

“And then about 11 o’clock I saw a Christmas tree going up on the German trenches. And there was a light. And we stood still and we watched this and we talked, and then a German voice began to sing a song – Heilige Nacht. (from the German carol Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, or, in English, Silent Night).

Henry Williamson's letters home

“And after that, somebody, ‘come over, Tommy, come over’. And we still thought it was a trap, but some of us went over at once, and they came to this barbed wire fence between us which was five strands wire ... hung with empty bully beef tins to make a rattle if they came. And very soon we were exchanging gifts.”

The following day, the exercise was repeated. Williamson recalled: “The whole of no-man’s land as far as we could see was grey and khaki. There they were, smoking and talking, shaking hands, exchanging names and addresses for after the war, to write to one another.”

Williamson – who would later become famous as the author of Tarka the Otter- also describes an exchange with an opponent, as the two sides were burying their dead and he observed the Germans marking their graves with little wooden crosses, made from ration boxes, with writing, in indelible pencil, ‘Für Vaterland und Freiheit’ - ‘For Fatherland and Freedom’.

“I said to a German, ‘excuse me but how can you be fighting for freedom? You started the war and we are fighting for freedom’,” Williamson said.

“And he said, ‘excuse me, English comrade – Kamerad – but we are fighting for freedom. For our country.’ And I say, ‘You also put, ‘Here rests in God, ein unbekannter Held ‘ – Here rests in God an unknown hero. In God? ‘Oh yes, God is on our side.’ I said, ‘he’s on our side.’ And that was a tremendous shock. One began to think that these chaps, who were like ourselves, whom we liked and who felt about the war as we did,” he added. The two sides began to argue over who would win the war, until the German said: “Well English comrade, do not let us quarrel on Christmas Day.”

Williamson confirmed in the interview that football matches were played during the truce but said that these had been behind the German lines, rather than in no-man’s land, and does not specify whether they involved both British and German troops.

The truce went on for four days before a British order came round that fraternisation had to stop. The Germans also sent over a note saying their senior officers were visiting the trenches that night, that they would have to fire their machine guns, but would do so high, to avoid hitting anyone.

The interview was recorded in 1964 for the landmark BBC series, The Great War, but only a segment was used. From Tuesday, an extended version will be available on the BBC iPlayer, while on Friday, excerpts, along with unseen testimony from other veterans, will be shown in a BBC Two programme, “I Was There: The Great War Interviews”.

Williamson’s son, Richard, said that the interview had been the only time his father had talked openly about his experiences. “He had never talked about the war with us as children. He would tell us it wasn’t possible. The show was a catalyst. It drew our father out,” said Mr Williamson, 79.

He said his father had found Christmas a difficult time of year and usually wanted to be alone. He has seen a preview of the new show. “It was very moving to see him talking again. It was almost difficult to watch without tears.”

Christmas Presents from Princess Mary

Williamson had joined the Territorial Army before the war, as a private in the London Rifle Brigade.

After the outbreak, he recalls their bayonets being taken off to be sharpened. “When they came back we were a little bit nervous about the sharpness, because we realised the other side had bayonets also,” he said.

Shortly after the truce, he was invalided home after a gas attack. He remained in Britain for two years, recovering, and undergoing training. He returned to the front near to where the Battle of the Somme had recently been fought. But, in June 1917, he was once again injured, after another gas attack. He recovered but was not considered fit for service on the front, although he appears to have returned for three weeks in 1918, during Germany’s Spring Offensive.

In his interview, he described the mud of the trenches, which claimed the lives of some men. “Some of our chaps slipped in and were drowned and weren’t seen until we trod on them perhaps later.” When heavy frosts came, the mud ceased, but the trench was “half ice” and had to be abandoned.

He also recalls waiting for an attack which, in the end was called off. “I felt drained out and when I tried to get up I couldn’t. My knees were wobbling.”

As well comrades killed in action, he remembered one who died after swallowing what he thought was his rum ration. In fact, this had been stolen from the bottle and replaced with a chemical fluid to avoid detection. As befits someone who would go on to become a leading naturalist, he also recalled the suffering of mules and horses used.

In his interview, Williamson also speaks poetically about the onset of peace, when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918.

“No more very lights going up with their greenish wavering flare. No lilies of the dead, in the light. No flash of howitzers on the horizon. No downward droning of the shells. no machine guns. No patrols going out. Just nothing. Silence.”

After the war, deeply traumatised, he moved to Devon and started to write about natural history – partly in response to his experiences. Tarka was first published in 1927 and has never gone out of print.

However, his experiences had also driven him in other, darker directions. His abhorrence of conflict led him to believe that it was best avoided by strong, authoritarian leaders.

He attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, spoke warmly of Adolf Hitler and became a follower of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist. However, he later attacked Hitler as “wicked” and “Lucifer”.

Richard Williamson’s wife Anne, 77, who has written a book chronicling her father-in-law’s war career, said: “The 1914 truce marked him for life. His writing was cathartic and the 1964 interview gave him an opportunity to express what he felt out loud – as opposed to the inner writing – which no doubt helped him to come to terms with what had happened.

“The modern emphasis on his politics puzzling – actual politics were minimal in his life. It was the prevention of war that occupied him. He was not a fascist in the sense that we understand it today. He thought Hitler – as an ex-soldier and having seen the same horror as he had – would never consider another war.”

Williamson died in 1977, on the very day that the death of Tarka was being filmed for a celebrated film adaptation.

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In pictures: London street scenes then and now

In pictures: London street scenes then and now

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/10660481/In-pictures-London-street-scenes-then-and-now.html?frame=2833764

 1 - The Streetmuseum App 2.0 from the Museum of London gives the user a chance to explore how locations across the capital looked in times gone by. Hundreds of images are visible through the app, showcasing London's history, from the Great Fire of 1666 through to the Swinging Sixties.

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/explore-online/museum-london-apps/

Here: A street seller of sherbert and water is photographed on Cheapside in 1893, completely unaware of the camera. Paul Martin was the first photographer to roam around the streets of London with a disguised camera taking candid pictures such as this solely for the purpose of showing 'life as it is'.

Picture: Paul Martin

 2 - View of Duncannon Street near Charing Cross in 1902, decorated with bunting and banners for the coronation ceremony of Edward VII. There are pedestrians and vehicles in the foreground and the National Gallery is visible in the distance

 3 - George Davison Reid took this photo of Blackfriars station entrance from outside 179 Queen Victoria Street around 1930. The station was originally called St Paul's and was opened by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway in 1886. Above the station were the premises of Oppenheimer Son and Co Limited, which manufactured pharmaceutical specialities. The Times newspaper was also based here in Queen Victoria Street. A decade or so after Reid photographed this exterior, the station was bombed in the Blitz of 1940 and largely destroyed. The offices of The Times newspaper were also hit.

Picture: George Davison Reid

4 - A view of Bow Lane circa 1930, off Cheapside in the City of London, looking south to the crossing with Watling Street and St. Mary Aldermary in the middle distance. 'Ye Olde Watling' tavern was originally built just after the Great Fire of 1666. George Davison Reid supported the Society of Antiquaries of London, which promoted the study of London's architecture, and was interested in photographing older architecture and locations. He took this photo of Bow Lane in the late 1920s.

Picture: George Davison Reid

5 - A view of the forecourt of the Southern Railway's terminus at London Bridge circa 1930. This was the oldest railway terminus in London, having been built for the line linking London and Greenwich in 1836.

Picture: George Davison Reid

 6 - From the west side of Tower Bridge, George Davison Reid composed this photo looking out across the Upper Pool circa 1930. This image is atypical of Reid's work, being a posed shot. The children appeared in other photos at different riverside locations. It has been suggested that some of the girls could be Reid's daughters.

Picture: George Davison Reid

7 - Charing Cross Road is renowned for its specialist and second-hand bookshops. Wolf Suschitzky was attracted by the extensive array of second-hand bookshops and teahouses, and the crowds that flocked to them. The resulting series of photographs, circa 1935, are amongst Suschitzky's most acclaimed work.

Picture: Wolf Suschitzky/Museum of London

 8 - This photograph shows Byward Street near Tower Hill circa 1930, looking west with the church of All Hallows by the tower on the left and the former Mark Lane Underground station on the right. George Davison Reid photographed the streets and buildings of London and the activity in them in the 1920s and 1930s.

Picture: George Davison Reid

9 - Boy shining shoes outside the Tea Room at Victoria station in 1950. A group of porters can be seen with their trolleys waiting to help travellers with their luggage.

Picture: Henry Grant

10 - Piccadilly Circus, Coronation day, June 1953. Crowds gather to witness the Coronation procession of Elizabeth II. The coronation went ahead in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, and at the Queen's request, the entire ceremony was televised throughout the Commonwealth, and watched by an estimated twenty million people.

Picture: Wolf Suschitzky/Museum of London 

 11 - People sunbathing in Hyde Park in 1956, with Marble Arch and the Odeon cinema in the background. The attendant is selling tickets for the deckchairs which are available for hire in the park. The Odeon which was originally a 'Regal' cinema, opened in 1928. The facade of the building was made from Portland Stone and featured columns and statues however in 1964 it was thought too small and the building was demolished and a larger cinema complex was built in its place.

Picture: Henry Grant

 12 - Oxford Street circa 1903. Horse-drawn Hansom cabs dominate the traffic.

Picture: Christina Broom

 13 - Street scene at Covent Garden circa 1930 with underground station and horse and cart in the background. George Davison Reid photographed activity in the marketplace from opposite Covent Garden Underground station on Long Acre. A police constable was often needed to control the congestion of the horses and carts and increasing numbers of motorised vehicles. The long established market place was under pressure to move. The congested facilities were described at the time as 'altogether inadequate to the necessities of the trade'. However, the fruit and vegetable market did not relocate until 1973.

Picture: George Davison reid

 14 - A night shot outside the Palace Theatre before an evening's performance in 1958. The Frankie Vaughan Season ran from 20 January to 16 February 1958 and included Vaughan as the headliner and artists such as Petula Clark, who was to sing her latest hits. Bob Collins created a number of night-time photographs playing with the bright lights of the West End to record people enjoying the buzz of fifties nightlife.

Picture: Bob Collins

 15 - The exterior of the completed Gloucester Road Station on the underground Metropolitan and District Railway, which was opened on 3rd October 1868. From a series of 64 photographs taken in the late 1860s by Henry Flather to document the construction of the railway from Paddington to Blackfriars via Kensington, Westminster and the new Victoria Embankment. Construction was by the 'cut-and-cover' method used to build the first underground railways before the development of the tunneling shield by James Henry Greathead . The first tunneled, or 'tube', railway in London was the City & South London Line, which opened in 1890.

Picture: Henry Flather

 16 - This 1957 photograph captures the view north up Brick Lane in Spitalfields, close to the markets. Some of the textile businesses can be seen. Bengali migrants began to arrive in the area from the late 1950s onwards.

Picture: Roger Mayne/Museum of London

SUNDAY IMAGES / TWEED / TWEED / TWEED.

The "LOOK" of Charlotte Rampling: The Look ~ Documentary Trailer / Charlotte Rampling: 'I know my power'

MOVIE REVIEW | 'CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK'

Charlotte Rampling: The Look (2011)

What’s Behind That Mona Lisa Smirk?

By STEPHEN HOLDEN in The New York Times

Published: November 3, 2011 / http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/movies/charlotte-rampling-the-look-review.html?_r=0

A lesson to be gleaned from “Charlotte Rampling: The Look,” Angelina Maccarone’s fascinating and frustrating documentary portrait of an enigmatic star, might be that it would be foolish to suppose that Ms. Rampling is anything like the transgressive women she portrays on the screen. The same is true of her photographic image, that of a heavy-lidded femme fatale. Could “The Look” be an accident of physiognomy? In this evasive film neither the director nor the star is about to speculate.

Ms. Rampling, now 65, belongs to the short list of cult movie actresses whose combination of

exotic beauty, intelligence and fierce independence lends them a particular erotic mystique. Along with Jeanne Moreau and Isabelle Huppert, she is a screen personality whose smoldering characters project an imperial confidence tinged with disdain. Those catlike eyes, lowered in a seemingly seductive gaze in tandem with a Mona Lisa smirk, send the same danger signals associated with Ms. Rampling’s Hollywood prototype, Lauren Bacall. Both also have deep voices that convey an ominous authority.

Ms. Rampling’s greatest screen performance, a clip from which is included in “The Look,” may be her portrayal of Ellen, an unmarried New England professor of French literature in Laurent Cantet’s “Heading South.” Ellen is the queen bee among a group of middle-aged women who make an annual pilgrimage to a resort in Haiti in the late 1970s to avail themselves of the sexual favors of handsome impoverished beach boys. It is hard to imagine Ms. Rampling as anything like Ellen.

Ms. Maccarone’s admiring study catches Ms. Rampling in conversation with friends and artists on different topics — “Exposure,” “Age,” “Beauty,” “Resonance,” “Taboo,” “Demons,” Desire,” “Death” and “Love” — which the film uses as pretentious chapter titles. The conversations are interspersed with scenes from Ms. Rampling’s films, including Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories”; Luchino Visconti’s “Damned”; François Ozon’s “Swimming Pool” and “Under the Sand”; Silvio Narizzano’s “Georgy Girl,” the 1966 British film that made her star; and Liliana Cavani’s “Night Porter,” in which she plays a concentration camp survivor who reunites years later in a Vienna hotel with the sadistic Nazi guard (Dirk Bogarde) who tormented her.

Rounding out the list are “The Verdict” (Sidney Lumet) and “Max Mon Amour,” Nagisa Oshima’s comedy in which she plays a diplomat’s wife who has a passionate affair with a chimpanzee. Conspicuously missing is her recent cameo in Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime.”

The conversations seem unrehearsed. Although Ms. Rampling has more to say on some topics than on others, there are no blinding revelations or titillating confessions. Talking with the photographer Peter Lindbergh in “Exposure,” she remarks, “If you want to give anything worthwhile of yourself, you have to feel completely exposed.” For her nudity seems never to have been a big deal. The “Taboo” segment examines a risqué series of self-portraits, “Louis XV,” that the German fashion photographer Juergen Teller shot.

For all her readiness to bare her flesh, Ms. Rampling reveals little of her inner life, and the film stints on biographical information. The closest thing to a nugget of wisdom is her stated belief in not running away from emotional pain. You should “let it happen to you,” she declares.

Her scattered observations on life, love and death are eminently sensible, rooted in an unflappable self-possession. She makes one reference to the emotional “chaos” of her younger days and more than one to her sister’s suicide at the age of 23, but her tone is dispassionate. Her major relationships — with the actor and publicist Bryan Southcombe; the French composer Jean-Michel Jarre; and to her current longtime companion, Jean-Noël Tassez, a French businessman — go unmentioned. Many of the artists and intellectuals with whom she converses are barely introduced, if at all.

This is not to say that “Charlotte Rampling: The Look” is a complete washout. A tease is more like it, an examination of the surface. Ms. Rampling is presented as an endlessly watchable mystery, an aloof but affable sphinx. But we knew that already.

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Angelina Maccarone; director of photography, Bernd Meiners; edited by Bettina Böhler; music by Judith Kaufmann; produced by Charlotte Uzu, Gerd Haag, Michael Trabitzsch and Serge Lalou; released by Kino Lorber. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. This film is not rated.

A version of this review appears in print on November 4, 2011, on page C12 of the New York edition with

Charlotte Rampling: 'I know my power'

Her chilly sensuality has hooked directors from Woody Allen to Lars von Trier. Charlotte Rampling talks to Catherine Shoard about her no-go areas, Hollywood 'crap' – and why we might not like her new documentary

Catherine Shoard

The Guardian, Wednesday 18 May 2011 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/may/18/charlotte-rampling-look-melancholia-cannes

If you were to create an installation that captured the essence of Charlotte Rampling, it would almost certainly involve a stuffed lion and a king-sized bed. And you'd probably place them not in a room, but by a bar, on a beach, at the French Riviera. In this way you'd convey the imperious gloss, the fearsome sensuality, the hint of the ridiculous in Rampling's eat-you-for-breakfast pose.

As luck would have it, this is exactly the scene when we sit down to talk in Cannes. There is a stuffed lion, there is a king-sized bed. Impervious to the taxidermical horror behind her, Rampling perches on a pouffe and fixes me with her laser gaze. The lion peeps over her shoulder; by comparison, he is a pussycat.

Rampling, now 65, is all over this year's festival: she is drumming up interest in Julia, a thriller by her son Barnaby Southcombe, as well as promoting Lars von Trier's Palme d'Or contender Melancholia, in which she plays a woman based on the director's own mother. "She's dead, so he can do it now," she explains. "He hated her. She ruined his life, he said."

It's a small role, yet still a recognisable Rampling monster: all lipstick and bitterness and icy outbursts. So recognisable, in fact, that a ripple of laughter greeted her first line at yesterday's press screening. "Domineering? What a load of crap," she says when her ex-husband (John Hurt) describes her as such in a speech at the wedding of their daughter (Kirsten Dunst).

Rampling is also the subject of a new documentary, The Look, which is screening out of competition. The title comes from two-time co-star Dirk Bogarde, who once wrote: "I have seen the Look under many different circumstances . . . The glowing emerald eyes turn to steel within a second, [and] fade gently to the softest, tenderest, most doe-eyed bracken-brown." The film features plenty more like this: Paul Auster, a friend, tells her that she is more beautiful now than she was as a young woman. A group of elderly men who bump into her in the Tuileries garden in Paris are delighted when she gives one of them a kiss.

Shot by German newcomer Angelina Maccarone, The Look carries Rampling's "absolute stamp of approval"; the actor had final cut. "It was simply a condition of my involvement," Rampling says evenly. "If this film is about me then I have to accept it, and if I can't accept it, I have to know it can be destroyed. I'd rather it didn't exist if it wasn't something I couldn't recognise as being in some way close to who I am."

Not everyone has the confidence to be so unapologetically controlling, but Rampling has form. Last year, she made headlines when an attempt to co-author an autobiography with a friend came undone, ending in legal action. "A lot of people have asked me to do written things or have someone else write them for me," she says. "I've tried lots, nothing's worked. I can't express what I want to express yet."

She says she wasn't interested in Maccarone making a conventional documentary. "If you were to find all the people I've worked with and ask them what they think of me, they're all just going to say, 'Oh, wonderful', and it'll just be a lot of blah." So instead we have eight conversations between Rampling and one or other of her pals, each with a particular theme, sometimes involving a bottle of red, always drawing on one of her landmark performances. She talks exposure with the photographer Peter Lindbergh, as well as her breakthrough role in Georgy Girl. She hops aboard Auster's houseboat in Brooklyn to chew the fat about getting old. The subject of taboo is put to bed with the artist Juergen Teller, who shot her (and himself) naked for a 2004 fashion campaign. Cue footage of her two films with Bogarde: Visconti's The Damned, in which she played a young wife sent to a Nazi concentration camp; and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, featuring Rampling as a former camp inmate in a sadomasochistic relationship with her ex-guard. The film ends with the theme of love, a conversation with French writer-director Joy Fleury and Fleury's daughter, spliced with footage from Max, Mon Amour, starring Rampling as a diplomat's wife besotted with a chimp.

The Look is an unsettling film, even at its cosiest. Evidently, Rampling wants to make some kind of personal statement after years of submitting to the vision of others, but it is also incredibly exposing. So this is what makes her tick, these are her friends, her family, her confidantes, her concerns. And this is the look, the side of herself, that Rampling thinks the most flattering – or at least the one she wants to share with the world. Did she have any doubts about making it quite so intimate?

"I needed those types of people," she says. "Otherwise it would have been false. At one stage, it was suggested one of them might be a well-known actress, and I thought, 'I don't think it would really work.' I know a lot of actresses, but I don't have that kind of relationship with them." Why not? "Perhaps there's a competitivity, something animal there."

In Cannes, the film has been warmly received. Is she expecting a British audience to be tougher? There is a pause. "Possibly England might not like it. Although it's not French, they'd say it's self-indulgent, chatting away about oneself. The British can be like that. They can put barriers up on certain interesting pieces of cinema for that reason – it's a pity."

'I'm not staying in this madhouse'

Rampling was born in Essex, the daughter of a colonel and a painter. She still keeps a flat in London, but has been based abroad since the late 60s, working in Italy, and then relocating to France with her second husband, Jean-Michel Jarre, in 1976. They divorced some 20 years later; since then she has been engaged to the Parisian tycoon Jean-Noël Tassez.

She says she is comfortable Channel-straddling: it means she has stranger status wherever she is, an extra edge of mystery. In France, she is known simply as La Legende; in Britain, she stands on the edgy end of national treasure. (Some years ago, Barry Norman coined the verb "to rample", which he defined as "an ability to reduce a man to helplessness though a chilly sensuality".)

This duality also aids Rampling's inbuilt contrarianism. "Ever since I was a small child I've had this feeling – it's in my nature, and so it's not even pretentious – that if everyone's going one way I will go the other, just by some kind of spirit of defiance. That's how I can keep myself alive and interested and my emotions going. I could have been a superstar in America – I was certainly taken out there. But I said, 'No way, Jose, I'm not staying here in this madhouse.' So I left and I said, 'I'm gonna make arthouse films now.' I'm gonna find directors that want me for deeper things than all this crap. I knew I couldn't survive in Hollywood, actually. It would send me really round the bend."

She speaks with the certainty of someone who is rarely disagreed with, though what she says is essentially true: Woody Allen, for one, adjusted the schedule of Stardust Memories to fit around Rampling's diary, so that she could play his dream woman. The world has been her oyster; it's just that she has sometimes opted not to shuck it.

In the past, Rampling has said that her choice of roles is dictated not by a desire to entertain, nor by financial imperative, but as a means of self-examination, a way of testing her own limits. (A breakdown in the early 80s, following the birth of her second son, only amplified that impulse.) She laughs when I ask if this is still what drives her – less gravelly now, a touch more grandmotherly. "Yes, that's one of those grand statements I make. I must explore desert ground and see what can grow. But there are limits. I know in my heart what I would never do." What's that? "It's very simple. I'm actually very straight. In all areas. Funnily enough. But my straightness allows me to be incredibly daring in where I'm prepared to go."

She grins, and concedes that some instances of this licence to be daring are less radical than others – a cameo in Streetdance 3D, for example. But there is one surprising no-go area. Rampling shudders at the memory of watching Angelina Jolie process up the red carpet for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life the previous evening. "She must have been there 20 minutes. And when I thought about what it meant, being there for all that time, not even speaking, I thought: Well, that's what I never, ever could do. I know the power of my look, of who I am. And I'll turn it on for the film or the photo session. But it's a question of knowing what you can and can't take. It would burn me. I would be absolutely burned."