L'Affaire Dreyfus (1899)
Directed by Georges Méliès

Film Review

Whilst he is better known for his exuberant fantasies - wild flights of fancies packed with special effects and comic hi-jinks such as Le Voyage dans la line (1902) and Le Voyage à travers l'impossible (1904) - Georges Méliès also distinguished himself with his actualités reconstituées, realistic reconstructions of prominent news stories of the day.  Of the latter, the most celebrated is his L'Affaire Dreyfus, a series of eleven short films presenting key moments in the arrest, trial and imprisonment of the disgraced French artillery man Alfred Dreyfus.  For those who are familiar only with the director's madcap fantasies, the near-documentary realism of this film series will come as a surprise.  The fight between the journalists in episode nine appears so authentic that you could almost swear Méliès had somehow caught the real incident on film (at one point it looks as if the camera is about to come toppling over).  Only the imperfect set constructions prevents us from mistaking the whole film as a compilation of real newsreel footage.

Méliès began work on the film at his film studio in Montreuil whilst Dreyfus's re-trial in Rennes was underway and shows a clear pro-Dreyfus bias.  At the time, France was divided along traditional left-right party lines into those who were for or against Dreyfus.  For one half of the population (mostly on the right), Dreyfus was a traitor who had disgraced the French army by selling secret defence documents to the Prussians; for the other half (on the left), he was a scapegoat and victim of anti-Semitism.  That Méliès was convinced of Dreyfus's innocence is apparent in the sympathetic way he portrays him in the film; he even goes so far as to play Dreyfus's defence lawyer, who narrowly survived an attempt on his life during the 1899 re-trial.

Not only was L'Affaire Dreyfus cinema's first film series, a format that would become massively popular in the following two decades, it was also the first political film, notably the first to take an unambiguous side in a controversial issue of the day.   Each film in the series consists of a single tableaux and runs to around one minute, so that the series in its entirety would have been Méliès's longest complete work up until this time.  The instalments were sold separately, some being more popular than others (which would explain why two are currently missing).  The commercial success of the films led Pathé to make a similar series, released almost immediately afterwards.

Film Synopsis

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus is tried before a military court and found guilty of high treason, having passed sensitive documents to a foreign power.  Stripped of his military honours, he is deported to Guyana and imprisoned on Devil's Island.  Before committing suicide, Colonel Henry writes a confessionary letter which leads Dreyfus to be re-tried in France.  Dreyfus's defence lawyer, Fernand Labori, narrowly escapes an assassination attempt in Rennes.  At Dreyfus's second trial in 1899, the court returns a verdict of guilty...