The war also changed the conditions of filmmaking, in France, Germany, Russia and the United States. But grant him this much: If a thoroughgoing aesthete like L'Herbier could be so altered by the war, then whose life wasn't turned upside down? World War I, which changed everything, had film as one of its main tools of transformation. Virilio develops it through that mixture of hyperbole and non sequitur which is French scholarship at its zaniest. I summarize this theory with caution, since Mr. From this condition, there was to be no release after 1918, cinema's shock techniques continued wartime perception by other means. On the front, perceptions became accelerated, discontinuous, mechanized, as if the soldiers' eyes had turned into cameras. The effects were so far-reaching, argues Paul Virilio in his often-cited book ''War and Cinema,'' that the war zone itself may be thought of as a kind of film. In the field, reconnaisance became airborne and cinematic at home, propaganda leapt from the page to the screen. That shock revealed to me that I had to become a filmmaker.''Р”Р„s these memories reminds us, the Great War was the first to be fought before the motion picture camera. I watched scenes of horror I saw soldiers who had been eviscerated, cut in two, decapitated. ''We cut, we spliced, we chose what could be shown. ''Everything that was filmed at the front passed through our hands,'' he recalled. Yet each day at work he found his life ''turned upside down,'' just as surely as if he had been in battle.

Posted to the Army Cinematographic Service, the young L'Herbier spent his war in Paris. I WAS face to face with the awful reality,'' the French filmmaker Marcel L'Herbier used to say of World War I, despite his never having come near the trenches.

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