J’Accuse (no 68)

by Allan Fish

(France 1919 130m) DVD1

Aka. I Accuse

I am accusing war…I am accusing man…I am accusing universal stupidity

p  Abel Gance  d  Abel Gance  w  Abel Gance  ph  Léonce-Henri Burel, Marc Bujard  ed  Andrée Danis, Abel Gance  m  Robert Israel (DVD restoration)

Séverin-Mars (François Laurin), Romuald Joubé (Jean Diaz), Marise Dauvray (Edith Laurin), Angèle Guys (Angèle), Maxime Desjardins (Maria Lazare), Mancini (Maman Diaz), Elizabeth Nizan, Pierre Danis,

The tagline was Abel Gance’s famed response to the general who, upon seeing the soldiers being formed to spell out the letters of the title, asked “who are you accusing?”  Over the years Gance’s reputation has dimmed somewhat, and his later failed historical extravaganzas have led to charges of vulgarity and naivety in their plots and narrative structure, and even their sentiments.  The very opening title card, “a tragic film of modern times”, might seem somewhat archaic ninety years on, and yet at the time it was the height of both realism and cinema with a message.  It’s a film that was shot in the closing months of the war, often containing footage of real life soldiers on the front line.  True, I cannot argue against some of the charges laid at Gance’s feet, and yet the same can be said to be true of other major silent milestones, from The Birth of a Nation to Metropolis, as that’s the very nature of the passage of time; tastes change along with techniques.  J’Accuse remains every bit the milestone in cinema history it always was, a mixture of Victorian melodrama and 20^th century malaise. 

            Gance’s story is a traditional French ménage à trois, with poet Jean Diaz falling in love with married woman Edith, and her somewhat boorish husband’s treatment of her.  However, the men’s enmity is put to the test when World War I begins, and they end up uniting towards a common enemy, their confrontation over the same woman now something for peacetime.  Needless to say, fate takes several hands before the end.

            By the mid thirties, Gance was reduced to repeating himself, and he remade the film in 1938.  By then the point was lost, and it remains merely a watchable curiosity.  The original version, though dated in its central characters, remains every bit the “masterly and impassioned plea for peace” it was dubbed by Ian Knight.  Even the very opening sequence, beginning with the director himself looking to the camera, and including that long shot the aforementioned general was so intrigued by, summed up the very mood, yet also left it somewhat ambiguous.  The title was, of course, taken from the open letter written by Emile Zola during the Alfred Dreyfus trial and which has since become a byword for the fight for truth and against injustice.  On one level he can be taken at his word that he is accusing war, yet he seems to be accusing more than that.  The deeper meaning can perhaps be garnered from the final scene that even gainsayers must admit is one of the most awesome and powerful in all silent cinema, in which the dead of the battles of the war rise slowly from their graves to accuse those who put them there.  The poet is seen in a house surrounded by people who have lost loved ones and friends, and we see him frantically challenging them about their contribution before and after the armistice.  He summons them to the door to see the massive ranks of the dead file past and asks who benefited from the war?  Who were the victors?  The final Pyrrhic victory finally acknowledged for all to see.  Gance himself later said that the film was “a human cry against the bellicose din of armies”, and few silent films have got over the shriek of that din quite so passionately. 

The film was long unseen in the English speaking world, only gaining recognition with the long overdue DVD release from Flicker Alley in 2008, allowing us to finally consign to history the awful US VHS print, with only French titles and library music ranging from the inappropriate to the surreal to both – Verdi’s ‘Triumphal March’ from ‘Aida’ anyone?  Naïve, bombastic, unsubtle and melodramatic, undoubtedly; but it’s also an unqualified classic of silent cinema.