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Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919), a politically and stylistically daring anti-war drama produced while the trench warfare of World War I was still grinding up soldiers on both sides of the battle, opens with the title spelled out by the bodies of soldiers striding into formation, like a marching band at a half-time show. Then they collapse, as if dead, to startling effect. Appropriating the cry leveled by Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair, Gance levels his accusations at war itself.
The film proper begins in the idealized perfection of a French village where peasants relax in outdoor cafes, laughing and drinking as if in paradise. When war is declared, the village erupts in nationalistic fervor, inspired by a misguided fantasy of battle glory that will soon give way to the realization of the horror of war. Against this backdrop a romantic triangle plays out. Poet Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé) pines for his former sweetheart Edith (Maryse Dauvray), who is trapped in a miserable marriage to a François (Séverin-Mars), a boor and a bully as brutish as Jean is sensitive and romantic. Afraid of Edith straying while he's at war, François has her sent away to a far away village, where she is captured by the invading German army. When Jean joins Francois' unit, they refuse to even speak to one another until an act of courage and sacrifice brings them together. What begins as a melodrama of star-crossed lovers ripped apart by war transforms into a veritable love story between two men, comrades in arms brought together by battle and bonded by the mutual love of the same woman. Gance's tale takes us back and forth between the battle and the homefront, charting the losses and sacrifices of everyone along the way. By the third act (Gance divides his film in three separate parts) all fantasy of the glory of battle is buried in the mud and blood of the new industrial warfare and no one, soldier or civilian, escapes unscathed. The accusations only become more damning as a shell-shocked Jean returns as the conscience of the village, a holy fool who gathers his neighbors together to tell of his haunting vision of the dead soldiers rising from the field of battle and marching home to demand that the human race change its ways and be worthy of their sacrifice.
Gance had served in World War I as cameraman and later worked in a gas plant, where he started to develop tuberculosis and was sent home by a generous officer. "He saved my life," Gance confessed. J'Accuse may have been his way of thanking him. It was surely his way of honoring the soldiers and civilians who did not survive the war while trying to offer (in his own words) "proof of the horror and stupidity of war." The epic drama is angry and tender and horrifying and touching, all of it conveyed by his powerful and delicate imagery and sophisticated techniques. As the villagers prance and cheer in the wake of the declaration of war, Gance offers his perspective on the human merriment by cutting to a scene of dancing skeletons: imagery of doom that eludes a citizenry caught up in their fantasy of glorious battle. As the reality sets in, Gance captures the tenderness of the men saying their goodbyes to wives and loved ones before heading to the front in a simple but evocative montage of hands tenderly reaching out to hands, putting out a candle and cleaning up after a last meal at home. So much sadness and fear is conveyed in the simple movements and the understated body language.
Throughout the film, Gance intersperses delicate scenes of grace with terrible images of horror. The deathbed of an elderly woman, who has peacefully slipped away while listening to a beloved poem, is lit with ethereal elegance and an almost saintly glow, an image worthy of Griffith's beatification of Lillian Gish. In the next scene, the terrible rape of an innocent by the enemy is suggested by the looming shadows of distinctively helmeted soldiers filling the frame as the girl cowers below, an image that anticipates Murnau's use of shadow in Nosferatu a few years later.
The third act, which opens on the haunting image of a dead soldier, his face frozen in a horrific grin, delivers a survey of the death and devastation of trench warfare with evocative scenes of expressionist suggestion and documentary imagery of real warfare. Gance's camera lights upon the faces of real soldiers for a heartbreaking sequence where muddy and brutalized and exhausted men write letters home to loved ones, praying for peace or preparing their loved ones for their (what they believe is inevitable) death. The sentiments expressed were no fiction but real letters from friends of Gance who never returned from the war. For the haunting march of the dead, Gance used 2,000 real soldiers who were on a one-week furlough. They weren't acting: the hollow looks and exhausted shuffle of dead men walking were the real thing. With the participation of the French and American forces, Gance took his cameras to the front lines to shoot genuine battle footage for the Battle of St. Mihel.
Abel Gance began shooting his harrowing anti-war drama while World War I was raging, when such sentiments were certainly not encouraged by a government straining to support the war effort, yet he managed to secure the cooperation of the French military by representing the film as a patriotic portrait of the war. Such a project was undeniably a risk at the time, but by the time the film was complete and released in 1919, the war was over and all sentiments of nationalistic duty and battle glory was replaced by mourning. France was devastated and the film was appropriately devastating. Even more astonishing than Gance's passionate drive to create his vision under such conditions, however, is the sophistication of his technique and his storytelling: the rapid editing (which he perfected in his later masterpieces La Roue and ), the expressionist lighting, the metaphoric imagery, the delicate cinematography. At a time when the art of cinematic storytelling was evolving at a whirlwind pace, J'Accuse looks like it was made in the silent cinema glory days of the twenties. The film was a critical hit and a commercial smash and Gance re-released the film in the twenties, editing it down but keeping the style. Gance had anticipated the state of the art by years and J'Accuse was just modern in 1923 as it was in 1919.
The Flicker Alley DVD is a labor of love completed with the participation of Turner Classic Movies. The print source is a reconstruction undertaken in 2007 by the Nederlands Filmmuseum and Lobster Films in France, using a variety of archival prints and materials. Numerous copies of varying lengths were used, including a single surviving tinted nitrate copy, a single reel of original camera negative and a reconstructed print made by the Cinemateque Francais in the fifties, to reconstruct the longest and most complete version possible. The print is sparingly tinted with subtle but effective hints of color, and features French intertitles (many of them from the original print) with English subtitles. The 166-minute film is spread across two discs, with the break coming between the second and third parts. The restoration is excellent and Robert Israel's score makes a fine dramatic counterpart. The disc also features two short films from wartime France offering archival footage of life on the homefront and on the battlefield and a booklet featuring an excellent essay by silent film historian and Abel Gance expert Kevin Brownlow, an essay exploring the influence of the film upon author Virginia Woolf and notes on the reconstruction and restoration of the film.
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by Sean Axmaker
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