Detour

I have somehow managed, until the age of sixty-one, to avoid the subject of the film noir. At the outset, I feel obliged to say that I am not a fan. The origin of the term and its elaborate definition is, of course, entirely French. They were discovered and applied by American critics long after the genre had disappeared. I don't want to go into what defines film noir, as codified by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their "seminal" book Panorama du film noir Américain 1941–1953, but over my lifetime I've seen a good number of films now classified as film noir, whether I knew it or not. The problem with such classifications (which is really what "auteurism" is all about) is that they fail to make the films to which they are applied any better than they were before the concept was invented. The films were unremarkable - and unpretentious -, cheaply-made B-movies when they were first released, and no amount of puffery has made them any better.

One could argue that there are better examples of film noir, made with more money, bigger stars and higher production values, but that is beside the point. Detour (1945) is cited as one of the most perfect examples of the genre precisely because it was made cheaply and in a hurry, with a no-name cast, by an Austrian-born director who arrived in Hollywood with F. W. Murnau and who refused to leave. Edgar G. Ulmer's career as a director went on a lengthy detour of its own because of his dalliance with another director's wife. That director was the nephew of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, and they blackballed Ulmer's chances of ever taking part in a major production. By the time Detour was made, he had become a fixture of skidrow production companies, one of which was called Producer's Releasing Corporation, whose acronym became better known as Pretty Rotten Crap.

Prior to watching my copy of Detour, I watched the introduction to the film that aired on TCM's Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Muller. Believe me, such an introduction, while attempting to entice viewers who aren't fans of such a film, was almost enough to talk me out of watching it at all. Muller spoke about the film's schlock elements like they were cardinal virtues and how, once he had first heard about Detour when he was a teenager, he eagerly awaited seeing it, before home video or cable channels existed, on some late night TV broadcast. This kind of obsessive fandom was harmless as long as it wasn't taken too seriously. But then postwar French film critics, who were doing everything they could to trash the generation of French film directors who might have had any connection whatever to the defeat of France in 1940 and the four year German occupation, and who alternatively attempted - unsuccessfully, I believe - to elevate American pulp literature and movies to a level of High Seriousness, seized on the deceptively more adult, and more cynical crime melodramas of the Forties and Fifties. By now, thanks to the intervention of French film criticism (which includes the auteur dogma), American university students can write a PhD thesis on some of the worst Hollywood melodramas of the film noir era that turns them into profound cultural documents like Winesburg, Ohio or The Great Gatsby.

Al (Tom Neal) is a hitchhiker who stops at a greasy spoon in Reno. When a trucker puts a nickel in a jukebox and it plays the song, "I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me" (played by Artie Shaw), Al lapses into reverie of when he was a piano player in a New York club where he and a singer named Sue (Claudia Drake) were in love and planned to get married. Out of nowhere, Sue announces she's going to California, leaving poor Al to play solo at the club. Again out of nowhere (the film has an unhealthy disrespect for plot), Al decides to hitchhike across the country to be closer to Sue. He makes it as far as the Arizona desert where he's given a ride by a well-dressed guy named Haskell (Edmund MacDonald) in a convertible. Haskell tells him about a woman he gave a ride to not long before who left bloody scratches on his hand. And he keeps having to pop little pills every now and then. After stopping at a roadside diner, Al takes over the driving while Haskell sleeps. When it begins to rain, Al needs some help putting up the convertible top, but Haskell doesn't respond. Because he's dead. So, in the driving rain, Al does what anyone else would do - he takes Haskell's wallet and his driver's licence in case he gets stopped by a cop (licences didn't have photos on them in those days), changes clothes with the corpse, hides it in the brush by the side of the road and keeps on driving to LA. Just as his plan to take his masquerade only as far as San Bernardino is underway, enter Vera (Ann Savage) - the same she-devil who scratched Haskell's hand. Al gives her a lift and within minutes she recognizes the car as Haskell's. Al confesses to robbing him when he found out he was dead, and Vera decides to blackmail him all the way to LA. After a few utterly predictable twists, the movie returns us to poor Al in the Reno diner, whose voice-over narration takes us up to the abrupt conclusion to this mercifully short (68 minutes!) thriller.

Once, when François Truffaut adapted the David Goodis pulp thriller Down There in 1960, a trash novel was transformed into a refreshingly personal, idiosyncratic work of film art. When Truffaut was asked by Charles Thomas Samuels "[Why do] you usually adapt trash novels to the screen?" his response was clever in a Cahiers du Cinema way: "I have never used a trash novel or a book I did not admire. Writers like David Goodis and William Irish have special value, and they have no counterparts in France. Here detective story writers are rotten, whereas in America writers as great as Hemingway work in that field ... So you see, I don't film trash." The fact is, Truffaut used trash as a jumping off point for a brilliant film.

Truffaut, as the originator of the auteur policy, insisted that a film's underlying material was less important than its treatment in the hands of a true film auteur. So, ostensibly, they can create something that demonstrates, in Truffaut's words, "a personal vision of life or of cinema." Detour poses the question: did Edgar G. Ulmer triumph over the severe limitations of his material or was he defeated by them? Detour has cheapness stamped all over it. About 80% of it was shot in a studio, including the many "process shots" of the actors in a car driving down a highway that's projected onto a screen from behind (so that what's in front of the screen doesn't cast a shadow on it). Among Detour's many gaffes is seeing two actors, both wearing big hats (de riguer in 1945) breezing down a highway in a convertible with its top down. (In one scene, Tom Neal is driving at night, struggling to stay awake, while Edmund Macdonald sleeps with his hat resting over his face.) Or Neal hitchhiking and then climbing into the driver's side of a truck or riding beside a driver with the wheel on the right side of the car. The film had to be reversed to maintain continuity and make it look like Al was going in the right direction - right to left (west), according to the superimposed map. All of the elements of the film that were already formulaic in 1945 seem especially tired under Edgar G. Ulmer's direction. So, how could something so cut-rate as Detour wind up with such a following of devoted fans? 

In his negative review of Sydney Pollock's film version of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Stanley Kauffmann examined the curious history of the novel's publication history:

"When the book was published, it had a fair sale, but when it was subsequently published in France, it was a critical and commercial sensation, and Horace McCoy not very well known here became an outstanding American writer there. My own impression is that his French success was one more example of old-style inverse anti-Americanism. To praise what was second-rate and brutal about America, like facile gangster films, was a way of patronizing." (1)

I recall a college professor in the late 1970s trying to explain how Jerry Lewis, generally regarded as the worst sort of movie fool, was revered by French critics. He said that, to the French, Lewis's bumbling idiot character was seen as the quintessential American: uncouth, uncoordinated, incoherent - always smashing into things and screaming. That was how the French saw Americans.

In his beautiful memoir, My Last Sigh, Luis Buñuel wrote:

"While we're making the list of bêtes noires, I must state my hatred of pedantry and jargon. Sometimes I weep with laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du Cinema, for example. As the honorary president of the Centre de Capacitación Cinematografica in Mexico City, I once went to visit the school and was introduced to several professors, including a young man in a suit and tie who blushed a good deal. When I asked him what he taught, he replied, 'The Semiology of the Clonic Image.' I could have murdered him on the spot. By the way, when this kind of jargon (a typically Parisian phenomenon) works its way into the educational system, it wreaks absolute havoc in underdeveloped countries. It's the clearest sign, in my opinion, of cultural colonialism."

If a movie could be made by a machine, it would look something like Detour. Everything is perfunctory, from Tom Neal's painted-on five o'clock shadow to the impenetrable Manhattan fog outside the Break O' Dawn club to Ann Savage mugging hysterically to live up to her made-up name. Nothing reminds me more that Hollywood was a movie assembly line - what D. W. Griffith, without a trace of irony, once called "a Detroit of the mind." In this respect, Detour is rather terrifying. Remove every element of original thought or conscientious craft from filmmaking and you'll wind up with something like it. It is industrial grade entertainment, made for an audience that, by 1945, would go to the movies no matter what was playing. Producers knew it. Detour is the result. What perplexes me is the awful obviousness of this. I've heard the phrase "it's so bad it's good" used in connection with many things over the years, always to things that have no practical use. Because who would buy a bad television, a bad washing machine, or a bad automobile unless it was a defective lemon advertised as a good one? In that case people would get their money back or call the police. Not so with innumerable bad movies like Detour now being held up as masterpieces. It was Pretty Rotten Crap in 1945, and now it's a Pretty Rotten Classic. In 1992, Detour was selected as one of 100 American films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". A 4K restoration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences premiered in Los Angeles at the TCM Festival in April 2018, and a Blu-Ray and DVD of the film was released in March 2019 from the Criterion Collection. The French are having a good laugh.


(1) Stanley Kauffman, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
(2) Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, translated by Abigail Israel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

Breech Birth

Lillian & Dorothy Gish

For the past few years, a political movement has been gaining momentum in the world that is best known as "populism," but which could be more accurately described as "illiberalism." One of the major driving forces behind the movement has been a strong reaction against political correctness, an aggressive kind of radical liberalism that takes liberal values to altogether absurd lengths.

The May 4 issue of the Toledo Blade ran the following story:

"BOWLING GREEN — The longstanding Gish Theater is no more. Bowling Green State University trustees Friday afternoon voted 7-0 to remove the Gish name from the campus theater following student calls to do so, according to a university spokesman. For more than 40 years, the theater has honored actresses Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Members of the college’s Black Student Union questioned the theater's name because Lillian Gish is particularly well-known for starring in The Birth of a Nation. The film is a 1915 D.W. Griffith-directed silent-movie tribute to the Ku Klux Klan that is credited for reviving the white supremacist group. It also found that while the Gish sisters 'do not appear to have been advocates for racist or exclusionary practices or perspectives,' the content and historical impact of an actor’s work should be taken into account. The task force also stated it could not find documentation that Lillian Gish ever denounced the themes of the film or distanced herself from the director or his views."

According to the university spokesman, “We struggled with historical issues in today’s time and I think that, at the end of the day, that's what universities are all about ... As a public university we engage in these discussions and debate. While not everyone will agree with this decision, I know, this is what makes strong democracy. We listen to each other, learn from each other and move forward.” (1)

Oh, how they must have struggled! It is a well-worn fact that the pioneering D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915) tells the story of the Civil War from the slave-owner's side and has a powerful propagandistic aspect. As I put it ten years ago on this blog, "The case for the movie as a motion picture landmark is secure, but its content is compromised by its distortions of both history and morality in the portrayal of a 'heroic' antebellum South filled with cheerful slaves and slave owners cavorting in a bucolic paradise, destroyed by the greed and envy of Yankees. The heroes of Griffith's movie are the Ku Klux Klan, riding to the rescue in the film's last reel ... When it was released it was a sensational hit, and made Griffith a fortune. This was due largely to the riots the film's screening provoked and the refusal of some major cities to show it simply in the interests of public order. It also inspired lynchings, an activity that usually needed no provocation in many places in America. It was attacked in the press and Griffith was labelled as a racist. In response, Griffith was inspired to make his next blockbuster, the extravagant and simple-minded Intolerance (1916). Lillian Gish continually defended 'Mister Griffith,' as she called him against the charge of racism. But the film tells a very different story."

Lillian Gish needn't have bothered trying to defend Griffith. It shouldn't have come as a great surprise that the first American film to argue, convincingly, for the artistic potential of the film medium should have been such an electric reminder of America's Original Sin. Griffith was a major artist of the 20th century, but the stories that he decided the new medium should tell were at least 50 years old when the film that practically invented Hollywood was made. The Birth of a Nation stands like some monument to an outdated understanding of why the Civil War was fought. And, like so many other such monuments, like the one for Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, its legitimacy as a historical statement is being questioned. I have already expressed my own opinion on the subject of monuments to Confederate heroes. They stand not as reminders of our sins, but as rebukes to the outcome of what many Southerners still call the War Between the States, a war that, for them, hasn't concluded.

The Birth of a Nation is, if you will, a magnificent work of propaganda - comparable to Leni Riefenstahl's love poems to Hitler, Olympiad 1936 and Triumph of the Will. When Griffith died so ignominiously in Hollywood in 1948, James Agee, himself a Southerner, got carried away enough to write this about him:

"Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength ... There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else." As generous and well-intended as some of Agee's words sound, he was incapable, in 1948, of seeing just how far we have come from Griffith's attitudes in the seventy years since.

But why should Lillian Gish be held responsible for it? She was an actress who, like hundreds of others, appeared in the film, collected her fee, and moved on to her next project. (As much as I am appalled at the sheer waste of acting talent lavished on trash like the Harry Potter movies, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and the superhero movies, it's impossible to blame the actors, for whom they are nothing but [extremely] well paid gigs.) Gish was from Ohio, where Bowling Green State University is situated. Griffith was the son of a Confederate colonel who had a score to settle with the United States. Doubtless, Gish was utterly oblivious of Griffith's agenda in making The Birth of a Nation. He himself was incapable of seeing its broader implications and would never have dreamed how we react to it more than a century later. In 1969, Stanley Kauffman could write, "Trotsky's famous remark about Celine is that he 'walked into great literature as other men walk into their homes.' In aptness of genius, at least, the same can be said of Griffith and film. By now it's a commonplace that he gave the new medium its grammar; he also gave it many of its aspirations. What we see, first and fundamentally, in Griffith is a change of mind toward film that epitomizes - precedes - a huge cultural shift. At first he was ashamed of being associated with 'flickers'; he was a theatre actor and playwright, and he wanted to remain one. Within five years he had become oracular and evangelical on the subject of film ... The right man had come along at the right historical moment, and the result was a fury of creation that helped refashion the culture of the entire world." (3) All of this is just what any cinephile would say in any final assessment of Griffith's legacy to film. But the people who wanted Lillian Gish's name expunged from their campus were most definitely not cinephiles.

Needless to say, the BGSU spokesman was correct in admitting that not everyone agreed with their decision. Film historian Joseph McBride eloquently expressed his disdain for the decision in an essay published by Bright Lights Film Journal last Tuesday titled "Political Correctness Run Amok: Life and Lillian Gish at Bowling Green State University , Ohio." Expressing his understandable outrage at the decision, he wrote, "A university should be a place where the history of the arts is studied with care and perspective and the debate over artists’ legacies should be allowed to flourish, rather than a place where, as too often happens today, we try to obliterate from awareness the controversial aspects of our troubled history." (4)

Clearly, nobody has time for careful debate. Ours is an era of political intolerance, exacerbated by the election of a devisive and clumsy fool as president who seemed, during his campaign, to deliberately try to lose by spouting utterly stupid, sexist, racist statements, insulting every standard of civility. He continues to do so practically every day. And instead of provoking unanimous revulsion for him, tens of millions of Americans saw him as the Last White Hope and voted for him. As a reaction to his appeal to the lowest, commonest denomination, the rest of America is acting just as petulantly by demanding the immediate expulsion of every suggestion of disagreement or variation from the new draconian standards of correct behaving and correct thinking and correct expressing. As I suggested above, it is engendering a backlash that appears to be sweeping the world. It's getting to be difficult to imagine a positive outcome.

(1) Toledo Blade.
(2) James Agee.
(3) Stanley Kauffmann.
(4) Joseph McBride. McBride mentions in his essay that Quentin Tarantino denounced John Ford as a racist for his having appeared as a Ku Klux Klansman in The Birth of a Nation. This business of singling out actors for having appeared in a film that has fallen out of the Zeitgeist's favor reminds me of how Hitler went after actors who had appeared in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. One of them, Kurt Gerron, fled Germany to France, and thence to Holland. When the Nazis invaded, he and his family were taken first to Theresienstadt, where he was forced to make a film painting a cruelly false picture of life in the camp for foreign consumption. As soon as it was finished, Gerron and his family were shipped to Auschwitz and killed.

J'Accuse

In August 1918, pioneering French filmmaker Abel Gance was drafted into the French Army's Service Cinématographique. He had been rejected when war broke out for health reasons, due to a bout of tuberculosis before the war. A filmmaker since 1912, watching as, year after terrible year, beloved friends were killed in the trenches (the French army suffered more than a million killed or missing in action), Gance was anxious to express his hatred of war in a film. Charles Pathé agreed to finance the film that would eventually be released more than four months after the end of the war (on this day, one hundred years ago), as J'Accuse.

"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".