"I'm led in my films to give documentary reality the appearance of fiction," Franju has said. Critic Raymond Durgnat (in Franju) has put it otherwise: "In Franju, the reference is constantly to the objective world in which we...all move, and at which our eyes unseeingly stare. Far from cutting out the real world, his vision lets it in. No comment can better Gabriel Vialle's citation of Paul Eluard: 'There is another world, but it's inside this one.'" In Hôtel des Invalides, Franju uses collision and juxtaposition to make strange the all-too-familiar in a tour of Paris' famed war museum, the Hôtel des Invalides. What the army thought would be a prestige documentary is a poetic attack on the banality of military heroics. Durgnat writes, "(The) monuments become protests against themselves. A damaged bronze bust becomes a slaughtered man; a half-suit of armor becomes a legless man. A priest officiates with style and grace while the disfigured faces of his congregation are silently revealed to the camera." And Maurice Jarre's music jars with its false gaiety.