Mary is secretly in love with her neighbour, Jack. But he only has eyes for Sylvia, who prefers David. Their lives take a dramatic turn when Jack and David join the US Air Force and fly off to war in France in 1918. Love, friendship, epic grandeur, poetry, humour… this legendary film has it all. It was the first to receive an Academy Award for Best Picture, and also one of the first to show nudity and two men kissing.It was the first American aviation film and one of the hugest silent film productions: thousands of extras, one hundred and sixty planes, dozens of cameras, two million dollars and nine months of shooting were needed to reconstitute the Battle of Saint-Mihiel near Verdun. Shot as a silent film, after some screenings in 1927 and 1928, it was then released in a sound version in January 1929. With Thierry Escaich at the console, the monumental organ of the Auditorium will render full power to the realistic reconstitutions and the romanticism of the story.

“Revealing unblemished inventivity and passion, as well as a science of the timbres and spectres, Thierry Escaich’s improvisations are eruptive, extatic, dizzylingly inventive.” Libération, July 2008

A co-production with lnstitut Lumière.