J'Accuse

Abel Gance made J'Accuse in 1919. It is one of the director's typically grandiloquent, pompous, overbearing, overlong, and fantastically beautiful and accomplished films. Gance is unable to film anything without making the staging portentous and memorable. He is the film equivalent to Mahler -- his pictures are episodic, incredibly histrionic (even hysterical) and they are long. J'Accuse is basically a melodrama involving a romantic triangle -- just before World War I, a gentle waif is married to a brutish husband. The brutish husband stalks around with a shot-gun and blasts innocent sparrows out of trees; one extended scene involves him seated at his dining room table with a deer that he has murdered lying across his lap and, then, on the floor. The brute's wife is in love with a poet who writes verse in the over-wrought style of Chateaubriand and Lamartine -- we see some of his poems from a book called The Pacifists animated: young lissome lovers frolicking by the shores of melancholy seas with the sun always dipping slowly into the waves. The husband knows about the poet and threatens him. But before the domestic melodrama can erupt into adultery and violence, war is announced and the two men march off to fight the Germans -- of course, they end up in the trenches together and the brute, who has a gentle side, is mortally wounded and dies clutching the hand of his rival. Everything in the film is delineated at great length and in copious, novelistic detail -- scenes go on and on, with anguished close-ups intercut with luminous landscapes and symbolic inserts of childdren and animals. Viewed in 15 minute episodes, you are likely to conclude that the movie is the greatest film ever made -- Gance shoots everything with enormous ingenuity and unremitting lyricism, but it's just too damned much. We get a suffering woman filmed in a flare of light that represents the Cross of Lorraine, huge battlefield images with superimposed dancing skeletons, a symbolic Gaul with a Teutonic-looking winged helmet who leads the troops over the top, men drowning in oceans of mud, three-year old children incongruously playing at firing squads, all sorts of torchlight processions and dances in the chiaroscuro of huge bonfires; in one startling sequence, a bunch of men wearing grotesque gas masks engage in a merry jig in the trenches. In the film’s famous climax, an army of the dead rise from their battlefield graves and march into the small village where the peace-time action is set – the dead assail the living and demand to know whether they have died in vain. All of this is spectacular, horrific, and more than a little tedious. (Gance was to restage this scene in a remake – actually a re-imagining of the entire film – also called J’Accuse shot in sound in the thirties: in that film, he uses thousands of war veterans, including hundreds of men with disfigured faces for the visionary climax of that picture – in that film, the bedraggled corpses in the thousands march through the Arc de Triumph.) The silent film’s titles are long and aggressively freighted with metaphor and symbol. Gance's antiquated symbolism and his lurid melodrama seems Victorian -- he's like D.W. Griffith, but far more profuse and agitated in his mise-en-scene. Gance's famous silent films, La Roue, Napoleon, and J'Accuse are like acid trips -- at first, you're thrilled and invigorated, but, then, the phantasmagoria gets too relentless and pretty soon you are just longing for the experience to end.