Grodek: this is the name of one of the first massacres of the First World War, in September 1914, between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies. Hired as a nurse, witnessing the carnage, the Austrian poet Georg Trakl attempted suicide to escape the screams of the wounded soldiers – before dying three months later, prematurely demented, at the age of 27. Grodek was his last poem. Its conciseness makes it one of the most terrible visions of the horrors of war. Devin Horan's film is a striking cinematic translation of this red and black cry. " But silently gathers on the pastures of the valley / A red cloud inhabited by an angry god / The blood shed, lunar cold; / All roads lead into black rot." » Instead of giving voice to the poem, the filmmaker transposes it into an arrangement of images, texts and music that rediscovers the dazzling density of Trakl's verses. The articulation of cinema and painting draws an arc between two landscapes that are complete opposites, from the pre-impressionist image of an untouched nature (Courbet) to the expressionist vision of a cosmos with colors saturated by violence and human passions (Nolde). Red and black: from the tormented landscape emerges Trakl's face, in a self-portrait painted with the same colors of blood and night. Red and black again the long shot of a sun setting and disappearing into the clouds, while a voice recites two texts, by Dostoyevsky and Bataille, making the same observation of a humanity doomed to self-destruction. The opening trench soldiers of 1914 are met, at the end of the cinepoem, by the terribly contemporary image of two dead soldiers in Ukraine, face down in a pool of blood. In barely nine minutes, it's the most salutary history lesson.