"J'Accuse" (I accuse) are the first words spoken by the prosecutor in every French court case, and Gance assumed a staunch prosecutorial stance in his indictment of war. Initially, his film tells the story of a standard love triangle involving François Laurin, a poet named Jean Diaz, and Édith, the daughter Maria Lazare, a veteran "soldier of 1870" in a Provençal village. The film opens with a village festival, and Édith is gazing through a window at Jean. But Jean's mother warns him that Édith is married. François, her husband, is introduced with a dead deer lying on a table beside him as he laughs and drinks, the deer's blood collecting in a pool on the floor. He tries to force his dog to drink it. Then he notices Édith looking out of the window at Jean. The arrival of Édith's father prevents François from becoming violent. But Maria Lazare is consumed by memories of military glory, with his Legion d'honneur on the wall with his military regalia, and a map of Alsace-Lorraine on the opposite wall. François broods alone, the dead deer at his feet, as the revellers dance in the street beyond.
At home with his mother, Jean writes and then recites to her his "Ode to the Sun," and instead of the words, Gance gives us ecstatic images of the beauty of the sun-lit world - a visual poem evoking Jean's words. Finally, the ghostly figure of Édith haunts these images. The earthly Édith, however, must endure the leering attentions of François. François is all body In contrast to Jean's all soul.
When the war is declared on August 2, 1914, the men cheer, the women weep. A little girl runs to announce to her friends, "C'est la guerre!" A little boy asks her, "what is 'war'?" "I don't know," she answers. As the bells ring out, Gance cuts to a dance of death - skeletons dancing around a central figure of death. Every young man in the placid town enlists, including François. (They were also enlisting in similar numbers in England, Germany, Austria and Italy, oblivious of the prolonged disaster all of them would experience.) Only Jean, preoccupied by his sunlit poetry of "Pacifiques," resists the call to arms. Finding a love letter from Jean to Édith, François threatens to shoot him if she doesn't leave the town and go to live with his parents in Lorraine. With Édith gone from the village, Jean looks at photographs of war's destruction, of houses reduced to rubble, and of dead soldiers lying in a trench. The word J'ACCUSE appears above Jean's head as he looks directly into the camera.
With François at the front, Maria Lazare and his old cronies plot out on a map the reported movements of the war. When he receives word that his daughter has been captured by the advancing German army, he collapses. Word spreads in the village, and Jean, swearing vengeance on Édith's captors to her father, decides to enlist.
Meanwhile, at the front, when François receives a letter informing him of Édith's fate, in a rage he charges the German line alone and takes an entire squad of them captive. Gance manages to capture, in just a few shots, the squalor and dangers faced by French soldiers, as well as their proximity to the enemy.
As Fate (and Abel Gance) will have it, Jean's first command, upon his commission as lieutenant, is François's unit. Their initial antagonism toward each other is changed to comradeship when Jean completes a dangerous mission that he was ordered to delegate to François. And they realize how much they both love Édith. As battles rage around them, they swap stories of her. (In one startling shot, a soldier falls and his muddy boots alight on François's shoulder, but François ignores them as he and Jean reminisce about Édith.) A title presents a quote from a "lettre d'un soldat": Sache qu'il y aura toujours de la beauté sur terre et que l'homme n'aura jamais assez de méchanceté pour la Supprimer. [Know that there will always beauty on earth and that man will never have enough malice to suppress it.] An optimistic wish that Gance follows with the Botticelli triptych "La Primavera", but the dancing skeletons appear again and, like the nursery rhyme, they all fall down. So ends the "Première Époch" of J'Accuse.
Although there were film units sent to document the war on both sides of the conflict, there exists very little film evidence of the actual conditions at the front and, understandably, no footage depicting actual battles except from a great distance. The reason for this scarcity of a documentary record of life in the trenches is simple: the authorities did not want to disturb civilian morale by showing them the terrible conditions being endured by the common soldier. The stories that the soldiers were taking home with them when they went on leave from the front were probably difficult for civilians to fully grasp. So censors were careful not to allow newsreel cameramen to get too close to the front or be too explicit with their images of actual warfare. This deliberate censorship would also be used in the next war, even when civilians were directly targeted by military attacks. It wasn't until Vietnam that American television networks felt some civic duty in showing the true horrors of the war to the public, but only because the war was so unpopular and, ultimately, deemed unwinnable. Perhaps the Great War wouldn't have lasted as long as it did if civilians had been shown the truth about the fighting in the trenches.
Four years pass. Jean has taken ill at the front and François receives a letter informing Jean that his mother is confined to her bed and he must return home at once. Jean arrives by train in his village, and Gance gives us a marvelous tracking shot, following Jean as he strolls uneasily toward home. He pauses to take in a view of his beloved village. When he arrives at his mother's bedside, she asks him to recite to her his "Ode to the Sun." But while he ecstatically recites the words and Gance repeats the same images from the earlier scene to evoke Jean's words, his mother dies.
Maria Lazare receives a letter from none other than Édith announcing her return that very night. When he goes to Jean's mother's house in the rain to tell her the news, he finds Jean there and they embrace. Édith arrives, soaked by the rain, but before the men can react to her return, she opens her cloak to reveal a small child. She recounts how, when she was captured in Lorraine, she was raped by the German soldiers. Gance shows us Édith, cowering in fear as the shadows of spike-helmeted Germans on the wall advance toward her. It is a measure, I think, of the change in anti-German sentiment in 1918 that Gance refrained from showing us anything more of Édith's rape. Such scenes were common in American films of the period. Erich von Stroheim made his name playing leering, murderous "Huns," raping a nun and tossing a baby out of a window when its cries interrupt his tearing the woman's clothes off. But Gance was being only slightly more subtle.
Édith's father telegrams François the news of Édith's return, without mentioning the child. There is a celebration among the soldiers at the front, an almost frantic scene of dancing and drinking, as bombs continue to fly. François returns home and his discovery leads him to suspect that she (Angèle) is Jean's child. François and Jean fight, almost to the death, but Édith stops them with the truth. Gance repeats the shots of Édith cowering beneath the shadows of three German soldiers. The Deuxième Époch ends with François and Jean donning their uniforms - girding their loins - again for war, swearing revenge on the German race.
The last section of J'Accuse reveals Gance's ambitions - and his weaknesses - at their extremes. At the front, awaiting the last battle, Jean rouses his fellow soldiers with a tale similar to Arthur Machen's "Angel of Mons" in which a "Gaulois" (the mythical Gaul, not the cigarette), leads the victorious soldiers into No Man's Land. Back home, little Angèle is teased by the children of the village for her German heritage, made to wear a spiked helmet (which she throws into the fire). And Édith is shown to be the symbol of French womanhood, replete with the painfully obvious pose of Christ on the cross.
The soldiers are shown drafting their last letters to their loved ones. Gance quoted in the titles from actual letters from the front, and he employed as many as 5,000 soldiers who had come home to the Midi on leave. It is at this point in the film that Gance made his boldest move. By mixing staged scenes of his actors with shots he and his cameramen took of the actual battle of Saint-Mihiel (Saint Mihel in the titles), September 12-15, 1918, he juggled fact and fiction cleverly, without fully examining its moral implications. So scenes of men actually fighting and dying were used by Gance as a mere backdrop for his "epic" battle. Gance, who had seen war and its effects with his own eyes, knew that if it was to be presented truthfully, it could only be shown as a horrific chaos. There is an unfortunate shot, from Jean's perspective, invalided to the rear because of a head injury, in which the dancing skeletons are superimposed on images of soldiers charging in all directions. This could be taken as Jean's ravings or as Gance's heavy hand.
The battle over (Saint-Mihiel was only a partial victory), with François dying and Jean half mad, François, true to form, bids his "good old dog farewell". He hands over Jean's letters to Édith to the doctor, grips Jean's hand (in the next hospital bed) and dies.
Édith and Angèle are at home together, when Jean enters suddenly, his clothes dirty and tattered. He is fearful of something outside the door. He has sent letters to all the townsfolk telling them to come to his house at 10 o'clock that night because there is something important that they must know. When they arrive and gather around him in the firelight, Jean tells them the following story, accompanied by stark, nightmarish images:
I was on sentry duty on the battlefield. All your dead were there, all your cherished dead. Then a miracle happened: a soldier near me slowly rose to his feet under the moon. I started to run, terrified, but suddenly the dead man spoke. I heard him say, 'Comrades, we must know if we have been of any use! Let us go and judge whether the people are worthy of us, and our sacrifice! Rise up, all of you!' And the dead obeyed. I ran in front of them to forewarn you. They're on the march! They're coming! They will be here soon and you will have to answer for yourselves! They will return to their resting places with joy if their sacrifice has been to some purpose.
To the villagers' horror, they see the army of the dead, François and Maria Lazare among them, come forward. The villagers scatter or fall on their knees. Jean returns to his mother's empty house and finds his old book of poems, Les Pacifiques, and, laughing contemptuously, tears the pages out one by one. He stops when he gets to his "Ode to the Sun." He goes to the window, looks out at the sun, and recites a new poem in the shaft of light:
My name is Jean Diaz, but I have changed my Muse!
My dulcet name of yesterday has become 'J'accuse!'
And I accuse you, Sun,
Of having given light to this appalling age.
Silently, placidly, without reproach,
Like a hideous face with tongue cut out,
From your heights of blue, sadistically contorted,
You watch indifferently to the very end!
When his recitation is done, Jean falls dead to the floor, and the shaft of light fades to darkness.
This film, released in 1919, is easily the most mesmerizing film from the period that I have seen. The story, the acting, especially the magnificent Séverin-Mars, the often experimental cinematography by Gance's pioneering cohort Léonce-Henry Burel, and the editing, all contribute to an overpowering effect. It was a great success in France. But when Gance took his film to America, and even got the enthusiastic assistance of D. W. Griffith, the film wasn't shown intact to American audiences. The U.S. quite simply didn't suffer as France had suffered from four long years of war. To Americans, the war was a brief boondoggle. The Irving Berlin song "Over There" summed it up beautifully and glibly. The war lasted only a little more than one year for the Yanks, and they returned home to victory parades and patriotic celebrations. A happy ending was tacked onto Gance's film, and it still failed to impress audiences. It was unclear to Americans just what - or whom - Gance was accusing.
J'Accuse is a silent, black-and-white film that speaks directly to us across the century since it was made. Peter Jackson is making a splash with his colorized and sonorized reconstituted documentary film from World War One, claiming that his efforts somehow bring the soldiers in the old films "closer" to us. But what happens then? The actions of those dead men, and the era they lived in, is just as distant from us as ever. They don't approach us, as Gance's phantom army does, begging from us an answer, an explanation for their sacrifice. We can no longer comprehend them or their sacrifice. All we can do, really, is what Philip Larkin did in his poem "MCMXIV" - comment on how appallingly, and magnificently, innocent they were:
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
It may require an act of imagination that some of us aren't up to to make contact with the generation of a century ago. It isn't because of technological advances that audiences can't fully appreciate films like J'Accuse any more. It's because filmmakers have become incredibly lazy, and audiences are no longer capable of following a narrative that is the least bit unconventional. On this 100th anniversary of the Armistice, Gance's film is a more than fitting memorial to the age, and to the fallen of the "war to end all wars".
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