J'accuse

The first thing to bear in mind is that there are actually two movies ,the 1919 silent film -and its watered-down editing of the twenties- and the 1937 talkie which is (and is not )a remake.

The silent version was filmed when the war was just over ,using real pictures of that slaughter.That was first intended as an anti -German manifesto -but only the rape scene with the big German shadow on the wall shows it-.This is the work of a pacifist ,Abel Gance,the French David Wark Griffith .The director is in the film:he is Jean Diaz -even if he does not play the part- the pacifist poet who writes an hymn to the sun (Gance already displays his love of poetry :later in a duel in "le capitaine fracasse" and in almost the whole "Cyrano and D'Artagnan" ,the actors declaim verses);Gance's depiction of a small village has the beauty of a pastoral:this quiet nature haunts him as the final pictures of "la fin du monde" (1930) bear witness.He bows to no one when it comes to direct movements in the crowd : the inhabitants of the village gathering around the decree of mobilization is a great moment.As is the "farewell scene" : Gance uses only hands on the picture and emotion reaches unbelievable peaks.

Two men are fighting in the trenches.They love the same woman ,one of them is her husband ,the other her lover (Jean Diaz).At times the movie might seem patriotic -which the remake was not at all- but Gance manages to show his disgust with war.The subtitles include moving real soldiers' letters to their family.His hero becomes mad and he thinks that soldiers should write lots of letters so that their wives would receive news long before they were dead.When he comes back to his village ,the film suddenly turns supernatural,and that's Gance's genius ,one of the most famous scenes in the French cinema,which will be even more impressive in the remake:here anger gives Gance the strength of ten.Let the Dead rise from their graves! War casualties' rise from the grave will haunt the viewer till his death."Your dead will come back,Diaz says,and they "ll ask you for an explanation! Shame on you ,unfaithful wives, war profiteers , politicians and president!A dance macabre, a skeletons' dance in a ring had already warned us.

The 1937 remake -by no means inferior to the silent work- had to be different:Hitler had come to power and as Jean Renoir said that very year ,"we are on the verge of a "grande illusion" .So Gance 's snatches of patriotism had disappeared and been replaced by strength born from despair .The 1937 "J'accuse" was a distraught plea for an universal peace ,and, in spite of its grandiloquence,it still stands today as one of the greatest pacifist works of all time.Besides ,the coming of sound allowed Gance to include ferocious lines (such as : "pretty soon ,there won't be enough wood to make crosses" ) A question I will always ask myself:I wrote it in my comment on "Austerlitz" :why was a convinced pacifist such as Gance so fascinated by a warrior like Napoleon (to whom he devoted two works)?

Here's why I deem this the most important film of the first 20 years; DW Griffith also had a lofty message to impart in Intolerance, but his Victorian saga of humanism through the ages was removed from life, unfolding in the shadow of gigantic Hollywood sets for Babylon or in Judea at the time of Christ. It was comfortably nudged in its archaic pulpit. This is important to understand, by contrast. J'Accuse is not a historical epic on WWI. Gance was drafted in the French Army's Section Cinématographique, was discharged for ill-health, but appalled at the horror of the experience, decided to re-enlist and make a film about it. He filmed actual war booming away through the country, actual soldiers on leave from the front and expected back within days.

Oh, the bulk of the film away from the trenches is old-fashioned melodrama, likely to leave the modern viewer cold. What does hold power, is that it is about war inspiring Gance to make the film denouncing war.

See, our protagonist is an artist. Like Gance, he is a poet committed to pacifism and blessed with the gift of granting vision, look at the poem he recites to his elderly mother, rendered in silent images, the sun rising over heaving seas. This is a great moment, later repeated for contrast in the midst of muddy war.

So, the poet enlists in the army to save a girl he loves but is not his, not solely his at any rate, and is really the whole of France. This all preamble of course - a man who grants visions brought to where visions are possible, the mad theater of war. The most celebrated moment in the film is an actual vision, a poem he recites for an audience back home which has gathered to listen about life in the trenches.

It is the rousing sight of the dead rising from the battlefield.

Gance used for the scene 2000 soldiers who had come straight from Verdun and were due back eight days later. You have to appreciate the chilling significance of this. Gance was staging death for these people, and death that both parties could not have failed to know was a rehearsal for the real thing. Within weeks of their return, the majority of the soldiers were dead as presaged in the film.

So death staged for an audience gathered round back home, at the behest of this poet - now raving mad - who conjures a vision of cinematic phantoms, the dead gaunt and in clutches and tatters getting up from shallow graves to march all the way back and haunt the living. They Accuse! ungrateful parents, wives, brothers, who have not honored the sacrifice.

The maelstrom of self-reflexive notions was one of the most advanced things going on at the time, I was surprised really. Gance would go on to invent a new visual grammar with La Roue, and first inklings of that we see here in the rapid-fire cutting and agile camera in the battle scenes that reflect the anxious mobility tearing through Europe, that was really the fight for a modern world.

J'Accuse! (1919)

*** (out of 4)

The French masters 166-minute epic tells the story of two soldiers, Francois (Severin-Mars) and Jean (Romuald Joube), both in love with the same woman but she is married to the much older Francois but has an affair with Jean. This is very impressive film from French director Gance but I think it falls short compared to his two classic epics that would follow this one. I think this films biggest problem is its running time, which seems a tad bit too long especially a few of the talking scenes, which run on and on. On the technical side this film is nearly flawless with Gance taking the influence of Griffith and really pushing it to a new level. The most impressive thing in the film are the amazing war scenes, which are downright brilliant and they really make you feel as if you are a part of the action. The scenes with the men in the trenches contain some great atmosphere and the sense of dread runs throughout these scenes. The most famous sequence in the film, and in film history, is the "March of the Dead" sequence, which takes nearly twenty-minutes and comes towards the end of the movie. This is certainly one of the most eerie and haunting sequences in film history and the main reason this anti-war film is still remembered today. The way Gance points the finger at the folks who weren't in the war and either living it up having fun or making money off the war, comes off very creepy and the message is certainly right there on the screen. The effects used to show the dead walking are very well done and the atmosphere here is so thick that you'll feel as if you can feel them walking towards you. The performances are all very good with Mars and Joube really sticking out. As I said, I think the film runs a tad bit too long but this is still a very impressive film with one of the greatest sequences in film history.

I wish that we could read a comment from at least one of the 91 persons who gave a "1" rating to this silent film masterpiece. What were these 91 thinking? Do they hate all silents? Did they object to the length? If "J'Accuse!" is a "1," why did they suffer through its almost three-hour duration? If they gave up watching after 10 minutes, why bother to vote and muck up the weighted average, now standing at an absurd 6.4? Thank you, Turner Classic Movies, for making "J'Accuse" available to a wide audience. That network is most capably helping fill the void left by the shutting down of most of America's repertory film theaters.

With the French losing almost one and a half million soldiers during the Great War, some of France's citizens deliberated whether the great cost in lives was worth the loses. Included in that group was Abel Gance, who wrote and directed the first anti-war movie in cinema, April 1919's "J'Accuse." The film, graphically displaying the carnage that took place over four years in his home country, was an instant classic and was heralded worldwide as accurately describing what shocks civilization sustained from 1914-1918.

A bout with tuberculosis decided Gance's fate in the war when, after being drafted into the French Army, he was shortly discharged for the illness. During the tail end of the war, after hearing the sad stories from his friends on the Western Front, he yearned to produce a movie about the trials they went through--as well as those of civilians far behind the battle lines. He received funding from Pathe, which became surprised at Gance's astronomical final production costs. But in the end, the box office success throughout continental Europe as well as D. W. Griffith's, who had viewed the film and was so impressed by it, control of its lucrative United States distribution, the film studio made an enormous profit from "J'Accuse."

To give the movie its authenticity, Gance re-enlisted in the French Army in its Section Cinématographique and filmed portions of the September 1918 Battle of Saint-Mihiel with the United States Army. His footage interweaves with other portions in the last third of "J'Accuse," which focuses on the front lines of the war.

As critics have pointed out, the first two-thirds play out as a melodrama, introducing the main protagonists, two men vying for the love of Edith, who is married to one of them, an abusive, jealous husband. The poet, who can be Gance in disguise, is the other, a pacifist who has been discharged from service due to illness. Ask if "J'Accuse' is more a pacifist film than an anti-war one, Gance replied, "I'm not interested in politics... But I am against war, because war is futile. Ten or twenty years afterward, one reflects that millions have died and all for nothing. One has found friends among one's old enemies, and enemies among one's friends." The two love interests of Edith end up comrades on the front when the poet re-enlists. Several sequences in that last third of the movie stick in viewers' minds: the soldiers, during a lull, write letters to loved ones at home (these are actual letters written by battle-hardened soldiers); the phantom of death walking among the soldiers preparing for an assault; and the recreated hand-to-hand encounters between the two opposing armies.

The "J'Accuse's" highlight, and the one studied in film schools today, is the "March of the Dead" sequence towards the film's conclusion. Gance was able to get two thousand French soldiers on leave to volunteer their time in acting as corpses from the battles rising from the ground. In what can be technically termed as the first depiction of zombies walking among the living (except these dead aren't the flesh-eating ones), "L'Accuse" shows the soldiers walking to the local village where they judge whether their death was worth their ultimate sacrifice. Hearing about a few scattered profiteers who unscrupulously made large sums of money from the war, these soldiers deliberate on the villagers' fates. Gance noted that out of the 2,000 soldiers in the film returning to the front, 80% became casualties in the last months of the war.

Film historians claim Gance's "J. Accuse" was 10 years ahead of his time with his unique lighting illustrating the French Impressionistic moods of delving deep into the emotions of the movie's characters, and his use of mobile camera movements. The financial success of the 1919 film allowed the director to produce even more ambitious movies in the future such as 1923's "La Roue" and 1927's "Napoleon." Gance even made an later talking film called "L'Accuse" in 1938, warning on the tensions developing as a prelude to World War Two.