#123: J’Accuse! (1919)
Could this Great War melodrama be the first zombie film?
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 19, 2019.
Initial release: April 25, 1919
Director: Abel Gance
Film has been a thing for over a century, and war movies have been around about that long. Think back — how many World War II movies were made during the war? How about Vietnam? Or the Iraq War? Hollywood — and its counterparts around the world — have made movies commenting on ongoing conflicts for decades. But the Great War happened when modern film was in its infancy, transitioning in fits and starts from its roots as a novelty technology into a full-fledged art form; most surviving films about the Great War were all produced after the fact. But what about a movie made during the war? There are a few out there, most of them American-made (Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith both have entries into this small canon) but if it’s gritty authenticism you’re after, don’t worry, France’s most famous propagandist has got you covered — and his film is a truly brutal indictment of war.
Partially filmed in the closing months of the war, Gance, who was formerly part of the French army’s film division, re-enlisted for the sake of being able to get footage for the battle scenes. That’s right kids, that’s real war footage you’re seeing. Talk about suffering for art.
Gance in his youth was at the forefront of new film techniques, and J’Accuse! is consequently a rather eclectic film, using a mix of at-the-time advanced filmmaking techniques like rapid cuts, but also art pieces, the aforementioned war footage, poetry, and documentary-style quotations from anonymous soldiers to put together a grim commentary.
The bulk of the story is a rather mawkish romantic drama centering around the tumultuous relationships between a young woman, Edith, her abusive husband Francois, and her artistic lover Jean, and how the war affects them all. It’s long and meandering, though beautifully shot. The real draw of the film however is the climactic third act. It’s now 1918, and Jean, so shell-shocked he’s gone insane, returns home from the war telling of a vision he had where the dead rose from the battlefield and begun marching home. It sounds nuts, of course, and everyone just dismisses him, but you know how it is: everyone gangsta until the war dead show up at their door. It’s the kind of shocker scene that only a silent film could dream up, a prototypical zombie movie where instead of eating brains, they simply want to see if their sacrifices have been worth it. (For the most part, they haven’t — Gance was a propagandist, and this film is his rebuke towards the people of France for not being patriotic enough during the war.)
The film leans heavy on symbolic elements like this; Gance has clearly captured the mood of Europe in the aftermath of the war, and darkly powerful images like a battlefield full of gravemarkers do all the talking for this silent film.
As with most silent films of the era, there’s no real complete version of the film; the Lobster Film Studios restoration is perhaps the most definitive version available, with a brand new score by Robert Israel. Unfortunately, even this version is not easy to find.
At nearly three hours long this can feel like a slog — it lacks the stellar pacing of Gance’s later Napoleon biopic, which hardly at all feels five hours long — but stunning imagery and a quality performance by the cast help make up for it. While the film is certainly subtly nationalist for all its anti-war message, it’s hard to argue with its stark, almost nihilistic symbolism.
