La Croix et la bannière

In Beverungen in Westphalia, as in plenty of German towns, the Marksmen’s Festival periodically attracts a quarter of the male population. And with good reason: for more than ten centuries, everyone is given the chance, provided they are a crack shot, to become king for a year, to choose their queen and parade through the streets. In this film which, like Jean Eustache’s La Rosière de Pessac, records a tradition that is a priori anachronistic, the face-on framing and the precision of high definition introduce a worrying element: what if the game went beyond the costumed parade? What if this celebration immersed in anthems lauding the sweetness of the Homeland had less jovial political underpinnings? In the second part, the relevance of the title becomes clear, confirming this anxiety: in 2008, the same town hosted a more important event, the Festival of the Confederation of Historical German Marksmen’s Brotherhoods. Surprise, the protagonists change: the soldiers with their heavy moustaches proudly parading in the military costumes of their respective traditions fade into the background. Now it is the German aristocracy and high-ranking clergy, present in large numbers, who dominate the scene. The memory of the submission of temporal power to spiritual power reappears, as if the Enlightenment had never existed. Westphalia, however, is the home region of the hero of Voltaire’s Candide…