J'accuse (1919)
Directed by Abel Gance

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.

Film Synopsis

In a village in the south of France, Jean Diaz, a sensitive young poet, is in love with Édith, the wife of the brutal and unforgiving François Laurin.  The outbreak of WWI is welcomed as a cause for celebration amongst the villagers and the two rivals soon find themselves serving in the same battalion on the Western Front.  Suspecting that his wife is having an affair with Diaz, Laurin sends her to stay with his parents in Lorraine, but Édith is taken prisoner when German soldiers invade the region.  The realisation that they share the same love for Édith leads Laurin and Diaz to agree a private truce and they become the closest of friends after Diaz voluntarily replaces his rival on a dangerous reconnaissance mission.  On leave, the two men return to their village, equally joyful that Édith is back safe and well.  Édith confides in Diaz that before her imprisonment she was raped by German soldiers, the result being that she is now burdened with an illegitimate child.  At first, Laurin believes the child to be Diaz's but when he learns the truth he is even more outraged, and intends to take his revenge against the enemy when he returns to the Front.  After a fierce battle in the final weeks of the war, Laurin ends up mortally wounded and Diaz is driven insane.  Returning to his home village Diaz gathers together the villagers and recounts a terrible vision in which he saw thousands of dead soldiers rise up from their graves.  A grim procession of France's war dead is now on its way to villages across the country, intent on knowing whether their sacrifice was worthwhile...