Film Review
Suffering from tuberculosis, Abel Gance was unfit for active service
during the First World War and instead ended up serving a short stint
in the Service Cinématographique.
The experience had a profound impact on the young filmmaker and led him to conceive the film
that would bring him international renown and establish him as France's
most important filmmaker in the aftermath of WWI. Taking its
title from Émile Zola's famous open letter in defence of the
disgraced French officer Alfred Dreyfus,
J'accuse was Gance's wholehearted
attempt to expose the stupidity of war by showing the terrible human
cost of conflict, not just on those who are butchered and maimed on the
battlefield, but also on those who must endure the loss of fathers,
sons and husbands as Death reaps its most bountiful harvest.
Cinema's first great anti-war film,
J'accuse
continues to have a powerful resonance through its compelling
story and strong visuals, particularly in its final act where the war
dead rise up in their multitude and demand whether any good came out of
their seemingly pointless mass slaughter.
Before he made this film, Abel Gance was an unknown quantity outside
his native France but he was far from being an inexperienced
filmmaker. Working for the company Film d'Art, he had delivered a
string of commercially successful psychological melodramas, including
Mater
dolorosa (1917) and
La Dixième symphonie
(1918). Overwhelmed by debts whilst making
Ecce homo, Gance was bailed out by
the Pathé brothers, who agreed to bankroll his next film,
J'accuse, little knowing that it
would cost a staggering half a million French francs. As it
turned out, Charles Pathé's trust in Gance was more than
vindicated - the film would become a phenomenal success, at home and
abroad, and netted over three and half million francs. The film's
popularity in the United States was down mainly to D.W. Griffith who,
once he had seen it, took charge of its distribution across the
country, with the result that
J'accuse
was one of the few French films of the silent era to find a large
audience in America. It was on the back of this success that
Gance was able to proceed with two even more ambitious projects, his
epic masterpieces
La Roue (1923) and
Napoléon
(1927).
Gance's loyal cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel once admitted
that
J'accuse
was originally conceived as a war propaganda piece, and that it only
became an anti-war film as a matter of commercial expediency once the
hostilities were over. Gance, a committed pacifist, denied this and insisted that, right
from the outset, his film was intended as a personal condemnation of war, in
the same vein as the identically titled film he would later make on the
eve of WWII,
J'accuse (1938).
Just as he did with his other great films, Abel Gance couldn't resist
tinkering with
J'accuse and
it was released in several versions, the longest running to four
hours. A shorter, American version of the film was given a happy
ending and a more overt anti-German slant. By the 1960s,
the film had become virtually forgotten and it came even closer to
oblivion in 1980 when a fire at the Cinémathèque
Française destroyed a substantial part of the most complete
print of the film. In the 2000s, Lobster Films undertook a
meticulous restoration of
J'accuse
from various existing incomplete prints, releasing the film on DVD in
2008 in its most complete version with a runtime of 166 minutes and a
specially arranged score by Robert Israel.
What is perhaps most surprising about
J'accuse,
given the standing it presently enjoys as an avant-garde masterpiece,
is that it is, for the most part, a fairly conventional melodrama, one
that would fit comfortably alongside the films Gance had previously
made for Film d'Art. It is only in the last third of the film
that the director's much vaunted flair for innovation and
experimentation manifests itself, with a somewhat gratuitous use of
accelerated montage (used to greater effect on Gance's next film
La Roue), colour tinting, superimposition (skeleton
overlays used ad nauseum), split screen and visual metaphor.
After the languorously paced and pretty undistinguished drama that
preceded it, this spectacular finale has an extraordinary, even
visceral impact, and it is with a devastating panache that Gance
manages to drive home his anti-war message with one of the most
striking images to be captured on celluloid: the resurrection of
France's war dead.
Half a century before George A. Romero's
Night of the Living Dead
(1968), Abel Gance gave rampaging zombies their first proper screen
outing in the chilling climax to
J'accuse,
with two thousand mutilated and disfigured corpses rising from their
graves and forming a long, ghoulish procession that is every bit as
unnerving as anything that Romero and his numerous imitators later came
up with. Some expressionistic lighting effects and extreme camera
angles add to the drama and horror as the sacrificial lambs of a
needless war return to condemn those who have profited from their
misfortune. There is a stark and tangible frisson to these
scenes, which doubtless arises from the fact that the revived
casualties of war were played by real soldiers during the few days' leave they had in the
South of France after fighting in Verdun. Having made their
contribution to Gance's film, perhaps knowing full well that they were
playing the ghosts they were soon to become, these soldiers were
immediately sent back to the Front and most were slain in the last
month of the war.
Another moment of pure horror comes earlier on in the film, in a brief
flashback scene depicting the implied rape of the heroine Édith
by German soldiers. All that we see of the soldiers are two
gigantic, menacing shadows that gradually advance on the helpless woman
and ultimately engulf her. In this short but terrifying sequence
we glimpse the precursor of German expressionism and it seems likely
that F.W. Murnau was inspired by it for his famous sequence of the
vampire on the staircase in
Nosferatu (1922).
By contrast, the battle scenes offer little in the way of visual horror
and have far less shock value than what we find in, say, Léon
Poirier's
Verdun, visions d'histoire
(1928) and Raymond Bernard's
Les Croix de bois (1932), films
that serve up a more explicit depiction of the barbarity of the First
World War. This is strange since the scenes were filmed 'for
real' during the battle of Saint-Mihiel, with Gance once again assigned
to the Section Cinématographique of the French Army. To
heighten the dramatic impact of these scenes, Gance felt obliged to use
rapid editing, something he later regretted as it diminished the
realism of the footage. More effective is the quieter sequence
preceding the final battle in which the soldiers, anticipating their
impending demise, compose letters to their loved ones back home.
At the time of its first release,
J'accuse
was widely praised for the realism of its performances, although today
the acting generally appears over-expressive and tends to draw
attention to the caricatured nature of the protagonists. As the
brutish Laurin and dreamy poet Diaz, Séverin-Mars and Romuald
Joubé have their work cut out trying to appear more than the two
dimensional stereotypes they represent. Séverin-Mars
(previously employed by Gance on
La
Dixième symphonie and later on
La Roue) is most successful in
conveying some form of character development, from an outright swine
who loves tormenting his wife and dog to a man with a capacity for
forgiveness, even tenderness. Joubé's somersault from fay
wife stealer to wide-eyed madman is less convincing, but does at least
offer some relief from the dull, clichéd ensemble that makes up
the rest of the dramatis personae.
Exactly who or what Gance is 'accusing' is a matter of contention and
the phrase 'J'accuse' appears so often on screen that it becomes a
vague retort directed at everyone and everything. In the first
half of the film, Gance is content to direct his accusing finger at the
war itself (or war in general), the source of so much human misery,
which is a bit like blaming the rain for being wet. In the last
act, the revived dead soldiers start lobbing J'accuses at anyone they
feel has forgotten them or exploited their absence, failing to honour
them for their sacrifice. Then, right at the end of the film, a
now completely unhinged Diaz delivers the most virulent J'accuse of
all, at the sun for just happily sitting there and doing nothing whilst
so much horror takes place in front of it. What Diaz and everyone
else fails to do is to point the finger at himself, to recognise and
accept that the supreme folly of war is the fault of no one but man
himself. Gance's thesis is that it is man's lamentable inability
to take responsibility for his own actions that makes war
inevitable.
J'accuse
isn't just an apt title for an anti-war film, it is also bitterly
ironic. Its 1938 redux would be a fitting overture to WWII.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Abel Gance film:
La Roue (1923)