J'accuse

This film by Abel Gance was lost for many years but has now been restored from a number of sources and made available for viewing by the Nederlands Museum. Gance's later silent spectacular Napoleon is rightly revered for its innovation and inventiveness - but is the same true of his war epic, J'accuse?

In three parts, this film is first a conventional love triangle between the tiresome and bullied Edith, her drunken husband Francois, and dreaming poet Jean. But when the great war strikes, it will affect them all in ways they can't imagine.

With some great images, especially in parts one and two, and for the most part, restrained acting, J'accuse is a powerful plea against the waste of war. For a film made ninety years ago, it has a modern feel with numerous close-ups, overlays, and other camera tricks. Although a bit ponderous in places it does not flag and is still extremely watchable, and relevant in a world where war has not yet become a thing of the past.

J'accuse deserves to be regarded highly, and shows Gance to have been a skilled and ahead-of-time filmmaker in the silent era.

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...

A truly underrated gem if ever there was one, J'Accuse, which comes from now renowned film-maker Abel Gance, is a striking, powerful and deeply moving wartime drama that packs punches, dances with the roses and howls at the moon all in the course of 160 minutes. Now known for works that came in the decade following the first World War, Gance establishes himself here in 1919 as a director willing to learn from his peers and do one better. Indeed, audiences at the time were more than firmly on his side. "Your name in England is, at present, more famous than Griffith's", an anecdote that rings true after watching J'Accuse in its most readily complete form available today thanks to the brilliant work in collaboration by Flicker Alley, Turner Classic Movies and Lobster Films in doing a terrific job restoring the film to its rightful, stylised beauty on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Set, produced and featuring actual footage shot on battlefields of World War I, Gance's seminal work here strives to do many things at once and while there are plenty who will argue he tries too much (or at least doesn't leave enough on the cutting room floor), I argue that with a few minor exceptions, J'Accuse is successful in its quest to marry poetry with war and terror with beauty, with a horizon that never seems to show itself. Sure, it's certainly guilty of being a bit overly-lofty at times. And yes, cutting back and forth between the film's two heavily-contrasted plots can be jarring, but I hardly think this was out of step with Gance's intentions. The film's theme essentially boils down to the blind getting in the way of each other and those lucky enough to have eyes thinking it best to ignore said unfortunates in order to get on with their own problems or indulgences in peace. By applying the juxtaposition of a serene, idyllic French countryside love-triangle against the harsh, cold grasp of war and death, the director sets up his idea, carries it forward and succeeds in bringing it to a very affecting close.

I would be amiss in failing to mention two other key players in J'Accuse's success however, and those are cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel and the Robert Israel Orchestra who were commissioned for the restoration's soundtrack. Burel takes Gance's direction and runs with it. The battlefields are gloomy and frightening, the French countryside bright and warm to the eyes. Furthermore, whether it was under Burel's direction or not is unclear but, the film's various intertitle designs and abstract live-action imagery (the most striking perhaps occurring early on when family members prepare to leave their loved ones) make a profound emotional impact and showcase tonal photography techniques and styles not even Griffith had dreamed up yet, much of which is still utilised today in movies favouring mood and atmosphere. Lastly, the Robert Israel Orchestra punctuate Burel's photography with melancholic sweeping piano keys and piercing, wounded strings to round out one of the finest and most striking examples of silent-era cinema at its best.

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.