Per la patria

The only attempt to make a peace film during the war was in France, by the great Abel Gance...

'J'accuse' is almost as large in scope as 'Intolerance'. The director said that: 'It was intended to show that if war did not serve some purpose, then it was a terrible waste. If it had to be waged, then a man's death must achieve something.'

"J'accuse" is a triangle story of Edith (Marise Dauvray), her husband François Laurin (Severin-Mars) and Jean Diaz (Romould Joube), a poet who is in love with Edith... The three, however, are puppets in the hands of war...

Edith is taken captive and returns with a child... François and Jean... Well you have to see the film!

All this now seems excessively melodramatic and not entirely impartial, but visually "J'accuse" is an extremely powerful film and it certainly had an impact on contemporary audiences...

The film was remade by Abel Gance in 1937 in an attempt to warn against the impending World War II...

Before I start, I am a bit confused. If the newly restored version just debuted this year, how come there are reviews that predate this? Could it be that they saw an extremely abbreviated version? Could it also be that some have reviewed a movie they never actually saw (something that's happened with the first Marx Brothers film and many other lost films). All I know is that this movie was assumed lost until quite recently and you may want to keep this in mind--the reviews were based, at best, on an earlier and less complete version.

UPDATE: After talking it over with one of the earlier reviewers, I learned that there WERE other extremely truncated versions floating out there on VHS. I am glad this cleared up my confusion and thank goodness we now have the fully restored Flicker Alley version!

While writer/director Abel Gance made two films called J'ACCUSE, they are both very, very different even though they are about WWI. The 1938 version is much more watchable but dated stylistically for 1938 and the 1919 version is overlong and has a blurred message BUT it also was much more important historically speaking, as for 1919, it was an incredibly innovative film.

Unlike the 1938 version, a very significant portion of this film is set before WWI--perhaps too much, as it seemed unnecessary and tended to make the film a bit overlong (at nearly three hours). However, the battle scenes were very good and until THE BIG PARADE and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, they were probably the best on film. Also, since it was made mostly in 1918, there is no post-war section to the film--the war had literally just ended. The 1938 film is MOSTLY set in the intervening years--including 1938.

The overall message is that war is bad and pointless, which is the same messages as the later film, but since it was mostly filmed DURING the war, there also seemed to be a much stronger anti-German bias. In other words, while war was seen as evil, so were the raping and murdering Germans. It's natural that in the midst of the war that it be portrayed that way, but it's a shame this anti-German bias was in this film and not the 1938 one (since, in WWII, the Germans were actually "the bad guy"--in WWI the German people and soldiers were victims just like everyone else). So the film suffers from the "blame it all on the Germans" myth.

As I mentioned above, there were multiple messages in the film. Another important plot in the film involves friendship and love--and in that sense it is a much more conventional story. Personally, I felt this aspect of the film was the least important.

Overall, a spectacular and seminal work--though one that isn't as spectacular today since better war and anti-war films have followed. The biggest problems are the stagy style, too much melodrama and its length--but when the film debuted in 1919, it was STILL much better and more watchable than most films coming out in Europe and America.

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.

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.

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)?