Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, Nazi pro­pa­gan­da min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels did not admit to spread­ing a “Big Lie.” As schol­ar of Ger­man pro­pa­gan­da Ran­dall Bytwerk says, “Goebbels always main­tained that pro­pa­gan­da had to be truth­ful. That doesn’t mean he didn’t lie, but it would be a pret­ty poor pro­pa­gan­dist who pub­licly pro­claimed that he was going to lie.” Still, Goebbels inces­sant­ly accused oth­ers of lying and spread­ing dis­hon­est pro­pa­gan­da, and he bru­tal­ly sup­pressed those truths he found incon­ve­nient. He was par­tic­u­lar­ly incensed at the 1937 release of a film by French direc­tor Jean Renoir (son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir) called La Grande Illu­sion — a film that ques­tioned sev­er­al fan­tasies the Nazis seemed des­per­ate to main­tain.

Among these were the idea that war was inevitable and desir­able, that a nat­ur­al aris­toc­ra­cy should rise above the com­mon horde — and that elites should have no sol­i­dar­i­ty or sym­pa­thy for Jews or oth­er minori­ties. These beliefs were cen­tral to fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy and to Goebbels’ pro­pa­gan­da project. Renoir’s Grand Illu­sion under­mined them all, despite the fact that it was set in World War I and based on an even ear­li­er British book, Nor­man Angell’s The Great Illu­sion, from 1909, which argued that war in Europe was eco­nom­i­cal­ly destruc­tive in con­trast to mutu­al co-oper­a­tion. Goebbels so feared Renoir’s anti-war film he called it “cin­e­mato­graph­ic ene­my num­ber one” and ordered every print turned over and burned and the orig­i­nal neg­a­tives destroyed.

Cin­e­ma Tyler explains in the video at the top how the effort to stamp out The Grand Illu­sion “had the full might of the Nazi pro­pa­gan­da machine on a mis­sion to destroy every copy.” They failed. As Roger Ebert notes, the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive, assumed destroyed in a 1942 Allied air raid, “had already been sin­gled out by a Ger­man film archivist named Frank Hensel, then a Nazi offi­cer in Paris, who had it shipped to Berlin.” In the 1960s, Renoir him­self “super­vised the assem­bly of a ‘restored’ print,” Then, thir­ty years lat­er, at the time of Ebert’s writ­ing in 1999, the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive resur­faced and a sparkling new print cir­cu­lat­ed, renew­ing praise for a movie about which Franklin Roo­sevelt pro­claimed, at the time of its release, “all the democ­ra­cies in the world must see this film.”

The film came out as Nazi Ger­many and the Sovi­et Union squared off aggres­sive­ly in mon­u­men­tal pavil­ions for the 1937 Inter­na­tion­al Expo­si­tion of Arts and Tech­nics in Mod­ern Life in Paris. Ger­many was three years away from invad­ing France, and while Renoir could not have known the future, the film uses its char­ac­ters “to illus­trate how the themes of the first war would trag­i­cal­ly wors­en in the sec­ond,” Ebert writes. It cen­ters on three cap­tured French offi­cers: “De Boield­ieu (Pierre Fres­nay), from an old aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly.… Marechal (Jean Gabin), a work­ing­man, a mem­ber of the emerg­ing pro­le­tari­at, and Rosen­thal (Mar­cel Dalio), a Jew­ish banker who has iron­i­cal­ly pur­chased the chateau that de Boield­ieu’s fam­i­ly can no longer afford.”

The French offi­cers’ jailor, wound­ed pilot von Rauf­fen­stein (played by great Ger­man silent direc­tor Erich von Stro­heim), believes him­self to have more in com­mon with de Boield­ieu than the lat­ter does with his coun­try­men, and in many respects, this proves so. Still, the French aris­to­crat uses his priv­i­lege, as we might say today, to help the oth­er pris­on­ers escape, at the cost of his life. When Marechal and Rosen­thal are giv­en shel­ter by a Ger­man farm wid­ow, “per­haps Renoir is whis­per­ing that the true class con­nec­tion across ene­my lines is between the work­ers, not the rulers,” writes Ebert. Per­haps it was also the nation­al sol­i­dar­i­ty among the pris­on­ers that unset­tled Goebbels — their per­sis­tent, “sin­gle obses­sion: to escape,” despite the com­forts of their cap­tiv­i­ty, as the film’s trail­er says dra­mat­i­cal­ly above. The war had not yet begun, and yet, writes A.O. Scott at The New York Times:

In France the late 1930s were the years of the Pop­u­lar Front, an attempt by the left to counter the rise of fas­cism and over­come its own ten­den­cies toward sec­tar­i­an­ism and ortho­doxy. The polit­i­cal face of the front was Léon Blum, a mod­er­ate Jew­ish Social­ist whose two trun­cat­ed, frus­trat­ing terms as prime min­is­ter coin­cid­ed with the pro­duc­tion and release of Renoir’s film.… The action takes place dur­ing World War I (in which Renoir had served as a pilot), when the Drey­fus Affair was still a recent mem­o­ry, but it has an eye on con­tem­po­rary anti-Semi­tism and labor mil­i­tan­cy as well as a sub­tle, anx­ious pre­mo­ni­tion of glob­al con­flicts to come.

Grand Illu­sion not only inspired two of the most famous moments of film his­to­ry — the tun­nel in The Great Escape and the singing of “La Mar­seil­laise” in Casablan­ca — but it remains in its own right one of the great­est films ever made. (Orson Welles claimed it as one of only two films he would take with him “on the ark.”) It con­tin­ues in its “gen­tly iron­ic” way, to “ques­tion all kinds of ‘illu­sions,’ ” writes David M. Lubin, “that, in [Renoir’s] view sus­tain mod­ern war­fare: that one side is moral­ly supe­ri­or to the oth­er… that class divi­sions are nat­ur­al, that men must be con­ven­tion­al­ly man­ly, that Jews are infe­ri­or to Gen­tiles, and so forth.” Rather than sim­ply denounce Grand Illu­sion as a big, pro­pa­gan­dis­tic lie, Goebbels tried to have it snuffed out of exis­tence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fas­cists Are Made

Redis­cov­ered: The First Amer­i­can Anti-Nazi Film, Banned by U.S. Cen­sors and For­got­ten for 80 Years

Watch a Grip­ping 10-Minute Ani­ma­tion About the Hunt for Nazi War Crim­i­nal Adolf Eich­mann

Watch Georges Méliès’ The Drey­fus Affair, the Con­tro­ver­sial Film Cen­sored by the French Gov­ern­ment for 50 Years (1899)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

One could argue that cin­e­ma audi­ences in the 1900s were less sophis­ti­cat­ed than they are today. Mar­shal­ing the evi­dence, one might make an Exhib­it A of Le Cochon Danseur (The Danc­ing Pig), a Pathé-pro­duced silent short that show­cas­es the fig­ure of the title. “Appar­ent­ly based on a Vaude­ville act,” writes the Inde­pen­dent’s Clarisse Loughrey, “it sees a pig dressed in a fan­cy tuxe­do attempt to seduce a young lady, who in turn rips off his clothes and forces him to dance despite his shame­ful naked­ness.”

Just how deeply the orig­i­nal French audi­ences thrilled to these pro­ceed­ings is lost to his­to­ry; but then, so is the name of the film’s direc­tor. This aura of mys­tery made Le Cochon Danseur an object of fas­ci­na­tion a cen­tu­ry after its release. But that was­n’t the only fac­tor in play: the design of the pig cos­tume remains impres­sive today, let alone when con­sid­ered by the pre­sumed stan­dards of 1907.

The film­mak­ers must have known this, since the film’s end­ing cuts — in a time when edit­ing of any kind was a rar­i­ty in the cin­e­ma — to a close-up of the over­sized porcine head express­ing a well-artic­u­lat­ed look of sat­is­fac­tion.

We see the pig “flap­ping his ears, bog­gling his eyes, flail­ing his tongue, and chuck­ling evil­ly, bear­ing his sharp, scary teeth,” as the Vil­lains Wiki puts it. “This implies that he pos­si­bly ate the woman and revealed him­self to be a hor­rid mon­ster.” It is this final sequence that has made the danc­ing pig “a pop­u­lar Inter­net meme vil­lain” over the past decade and a half. You’ve almost cer­tain­ly spot­ted him once or twice, though prob­a­bly not the col­orized ver­sion seen in the restored and enhanced video at the top of the post. The orig­i­nal black-and-white film, the inspi­ra­tion for so many memes and so many night­mares, appears just above.

“Some­how, I feel like I’m actu­al­ly look­ing at a hell­ish human-pig hybrid, not just a 20th-cen­tu­ry human in a 20th-cen­tu­ry ver­sion of a mas­cot suit,” writes cinephile Tris­tan Ettle­man in his own con­sid­er­a­tion of the pic­ture. Per­haps Le Cochon Danseur has proven even more com­pelling to us ful­ly con­nect­ed 21st-cen­tu­ry sophis­ti­cates than it did to its first view­ers. Or per­haps it sim­ply taps into a uni­ver­sal truth of exis­tence: to para­phrase a much-quot­ed obser­va­tion attrib­uted to Mar­garet Atwood, giant anthro­po­mor­phic pigs are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid giant anthro­po­mor­phic pigs will eat them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Amaz­ing 1912 Ani­ma­tion of Stop-Motion Pio­neer Ladis­las Stare­vich, Star­ring Dead Bugs

Watch The Insects’ Christ­mas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Star­ring a Cast of Dead Bugs

The First Sur­re­al­ist Film The Seashell and the Cler­gy­man, Brought to You By Ger­maine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928)

Footage of the Last Known Tas­man­ian Tiger Restored in Col­or (1933)

When Sal­vador Dalí Viewed Joseph Cornell’s Sur­re­al­ist Film, Became Enraged & Shout­ed: “He Stole It from My Sub­con­scious!” (1936)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.