L'affaire Dreyfus

I have seen just about every extant film by the great French filmmaker Georges Méliès and I must say that if I didn't know better, I'd swear it was not one of his films. The style, look and composition bear no similarities to his work....none. With Méliès, you expect trick cinematography--such as appearing and disappearing people or objects. However, this film is very different--very 'normal' and apparently set outdoors (whereas his other films were made in an odd set that looked indoors while using natural light by not having a roof overhead.

Of all the films about the Dreyfus Affair I have seen, this is the only one that was made during the height of the incident--while Dreyfus was incarcerated on Devil's Island for supposedly betraying his country. He's simply shown in a stockade-like enclosure doing not much of anything. Then a jailer comes in and gives him a letter--though we have no idea WHAT that is all about. In many ways, it is so mundane that you'd almost think it was by the famous Lumière Brothers.

All in all, a rather brave political statement, as like Zola and a few other celebrities, Méliès is trying to sway public opinion in Dreyfus' favor in order to win his release. While not the most interesting film, an important one historically.

"The Dreyfus Affair" was an 11-part serial by Georges Méliès. As John Frazer ("Artificially Arranged Scenes") described it, they were sold for $9.75 by part to exhibitors, and, by the eleventh film, the series was essentially banned in France. From looking at Frazer's account, it appears that the second and eleventh films are not included in the Flicker Alley set, although, apparently, they aren't lost. Selling scenes individually was a common practice in the early days of cinema, when exhibitors, rather than producers, were in control of the assembling and final appearance of films. Most subjects, regardless of their connectedness, were sold as individual shot-scenes (by 20 meters of film or whatever established length). This is how the Lumiére Company sold their 13-tableaux 1897 passion play. It's how Mutoscope offered their 8-part "Rip Van Winkle" in 1896 (re-released as one whole in 1903). Méliès would actually lead the way in seizing editorial control for producers the same year with "Cinderella".

To understand this film, it helps to have some knowledge of the events surrounding the Dreyfus scandal. In 1899, this was a contemporary controversy, so Méliès reasonably assumed audience familiarity. Furthermore, in early cinema, lecturers would describe films at screenings. "The Dreyfus Affair" serial is not a self-contained narrative, which is rather common of early films and is why many of them may be confusing to modern viewers. Suffice to say here that, Dreyfus was a Jew and artillery officer in the French military and was fraudulently convicted of treason by anti-Semites. That this even happened and was controversial demonstrates the widespread bigotry and institutional corruption back then. With these films, Méliès took the side of Dreyfus.

Aside from the politics, this serial is interesting because it's such a significant departure for Méliès from his usual style of film-making and preferred subject matter of wacky magic, fairy tales and amusing fantasies. There's nothing else in his oeuvre like it. It's a dramatic and starkly realist reenactment of the affair's events. Even the decors, although naturally primitive by today's standards, are realist. Moreover, there is some very unusual (for Méliès) staging, including characters entering and exiting the frame beside the camera—in depth, foreground to background and vise versa, as opposed to the traditional and theatrical lateral, left/right long shot staging Méliès adopted for every other film. He uses this atypical staging in two of the available scenes.

Additionally, the film contains a letter motif. I wouldn't think it intentional or think much of it given this is an early film if it weren't so prevalent and a salient underscoring of the narrative. In almost every brief, some one-minute scene, there are either letters or legal papers involved. In some of them, someone is either writing or reading a letter. This underscores the fraudulent case that was made against Dreyfus, whose trial was based on the supposed similarity between his handwriting and the handwriting on discovered treasonous papers. This film demonstrates the versatility Méliès had as a filmmaker and suggests the cinematic possibilities he didn't develop further.

Since I know all about the Dreyfuss affair, I was able to piece together a plot line here, sort of. This film is eleven minutes long and is broken into one minute segments. The events are never explained. Anti-semitism was alive and well in France and because Dreyfuss was seen in a positive light, the audiences were rather naughty. The great director risked his standing in order to show a belief in the ill-treated Dreyfuss.

This is the first movie ever censored for political reasons. The title refers to a historical event in France decades earlier in which a Jewish military officer was discharged for bribery, and it was alleged that he was framed due to anti-semitism. The status the event held in France at this time in history was probably about similar to the way Vietnam is viewed in the US today. Anyway, Melies made clear in the film that the officer (Dreyfus) was framed. There were riots at the theaters, and the film was shut down. Also interesting is that this is the first (ever) multi-scene film. Before this, they set up the camera, ran it until the film ran out (about 50 seconds), and showed it exactly as it came out of the camera. "The Dreyfus Affair" was shot on I believe 11 reels (hence 11 different scenes) and shown in sequence.

The scandal of Dreyfus in eleven acts: the arrest, the imprisonment on the island of the devil, the imprisonment between the bars, the suicide of Colonel Henry, landing of Dreyfus at Quiberon, the meeting of Dreyfuss with his wife, attack against the life of the lawyer Labori, the battle of journalists, the court martial in Rènnes.The judicial innocence of Dreyfus was also defended by the writer Èmile Zola. A national division after the Franco-Prussian war that is a prelude to tensions towards the First World War.