Intimate Ennemies

L’Ennemie Intime (original title) is a war movie that takes place in 1959 during the height of the Algerian war (1954-1962), that ultimately led to Algeria’s independence from France. The movie ends with a scene on a road in Algeria. The text reads, “Two million young French people were mobilised in Algeria. 27,000 lost their lives. Between 300,000 and 600,000 deaths are estimated on the Algerian side. It wasn’t until October 1999 that the French state officially recognized the war in Algeria.“

Motion graphic designer Laurent Brett, who you might know from his outstanding title work for Sky Fighters, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and Hostage, shows another side of himself with the end credit sequence for L’Ennemy Intime. More subtle and contemplative than his previous work, Brett created a sequence that seems to serve as a metaphor for the futility of war. Hundreds of names are horizontally aligned next to each other, invoking the image of a memorial wall. “The ‘memorial names’ are the movie crew,” says Brett. “The difficulty was to make a memorial style page with all the names well placed for their ‘switch on’.”

During production, the original plan was abandoned, as it didn’t seem to work for the film. “Florent [the director] asked me to work on an opening sequence that uses stylized freeze frames of Benoit Magimel‘s [the main character] arrival in the military camp. But after one month of work, we – Florent and I – agreed that the effect of this kind of concept was like pausing the film every 15 seconds. This would have been disturbing for the audience. So I worked on the prologue text and the movie title with the memorial wall effect. This sequence was for me a way to add an abstract epilogue to the movie.”

Article: Remco Vlaanderen, © Submarine Channel, 27 October 2008.