#226: J’Accuse (1938)
Abel Gance turns grief over one war into a passionate plea to stop the next
This review was originally posted to Twitter on February 2nd, 2020
Initial release: October 30, 1938
Director: Abel Gance
Zombies. Not just shambling undead, but walking political messages. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a commentary on race relations, its sequel about consumerism. Abel Gance’s 1919 epic J’Accuse! was explicitly an anti-war film… and so is its sequel of the same name.
1932’s White Zombie is thought to be the first zombie movie, and in some ways it is. (It’s also got some bad racial messaging that we can’t ignore, but that’s neither here nor there.) But in the 1919 version of J’Accuse! the dead of the Great War return home to see if their sacrifices were worth it, the film being Abel Gance’s argument that France’s civilians were unappreciative of the war effort. Like nearly all silent film that hasn’t been rescued from the nazis or just catching fire, J’Accuse! is somewhat of an obscure film today, and its sharp anti-war message is somewhat tempered by also being nationalistic propaganda, so few people actually know about it. But by 1938, war was brewing yet again. Everyone knew in 1919 that the upheavals of the early 20th century weren’t over yet, but nobody knew just how bad it would get. Released on the eve of world war II, J’Accuse! ’38 was an impassioned plea to stop the war before it started.
The film opens on November 10th, 1918, the day before the Armistice and the end of the war. Jean Diaz and Francois Laurin are serving together on the front line. Their rivalry for the affections of Francois’ wife is on hold for the war, but Francois is suspicious of Jean. This presents a condensation of the plot of the original film, which was largely a mawkish romance — the characters have the same names and the same roles, albeit played differently. The 1938 film opens with the romantic rivalry plotline already in progress.
That night, High Command randomly selects Francois’ unit for a weekly patrol; Jean is the only one who’s ever survived any of these patrols, and he volunteers to replace a man (who has four kids at home) on said patrol. Save for Jean, all are among the last men to die in the war. Jean returns home with a piece of shrapnel in his head. He’d made a vow to Francois to abandon his affair with Francois’ wife Edith, and despite Edith’s dismay — and his own — he cannot tell her why he’s ending the affair. He keeps in touch but maintains his distance. He gets a decent job working for a local glassworks. Still brooding over the war, he eventually relocates to Verdun to be close to his fallen comrades and to work on his research. In a moving scene, he finds his comrades’ graves and makes a vow to end war forever.
As the headlines begin to get shriller and shriller and another war seems increasingly likely, Jean starts to become more unhinged as he realizes that he might not be able to keep his promise to his dead friends — and the shrapnel in his head isn’t helping, either. At the end of the film, war is seemingly imminent. Jean, filled with determination, goes to the war cemeteries of Verdun, and, amidst a strange, even supernatural storm, invokes the war dead, calling for them to raise up and show the world how their deaths were in vain.
And so, in this shocking finale, directly recalling the end of the 1919 film, the dead walk, marching to their homes and villages, shocking the world, and the machinery of war grinds to a halt. The league of nations declares: “war is dead!”
And yet… as impassioned as this film is, Gance himself knew he wasn’t likely to stop the war with just one movie. The film opens with a note from Gance, dedicating the film “to the war dead of tomorrow, who laugh at this film without recognizing in it their own image.”
And okay, let’s be real here: Gance might be accused of being a nationalist, even a proto-fascist. J’Accuse! 1919 certainly has a nationalist vibe to it, and it’s hard to really explain away his veneration of Napoleon in his unfinished biopic series. And yet Gance was by far one of the most innovative film makers of his day, using a variety of tricks, going so far as to invent an early form of widescreen (using three cameras) that he called Polyvision. More to the point, he had a sharp eye for using clever editing to really make a profound message; early in the film, off-duty French soldiers gather in a bar to listen to a local singer, Flo; as she sings, each line is punctuated by stock footage of artillery cannons firing.
This is a film rife with symbolism; in the early part of the film, a white dove lies dead on a fountain where a crucifix had been knocked over and now rests upside down. Artillery fire knocks the head of Christ loose, and the dove falls into the bloody waters of the fountain. One might even argue that he lays the symbolism on a little thick; but as they used to say on TV Tropes, some anvils need to be dropped, and in 1938 there was little room for subtlety. (This also explains why the romantic plot of the original was moved into the background.) The final act is the most ambitious; if Gance were to do a straight horror film, he would have brought some interesting talent to the genre, as Jean invokes the war dead to rise from their graves. Gance even goes so far as to use veterans with shocking facial mutilations as extras.
Using superimposition techniques (similar to the original’s dancing skeletons) the film focuses on these war wounded, using them as examples of the horrors of war, and the evils it commits upon human bodies — and, as we see with jean’s bout of madness, upon human minds as well. Jean is played masterfully by Victor Francen, who brings rugged good looks for his age (he was 50 at the time of the film’s production) and a moody, expressionistic performance, in contrast to his 1919 counterpart Romauld Joubé who took a more romantic tack on the character.
The middle act is the weakest, mostly melodrama with a lot of close-ups, but it still gives us powerful images such as Jean visiting his dead friends, panning shots of the cemeteries, and Jean’s madness as he realizes war is imminent and his inventions have been stolen for war.
Gance’s later career was mostly sound remakes of successful silent films, but few are as poignant as J’Accuse! — both films seem as bookends to the interwar period. The original says “never again,” and 20 years later, that message is “not again.” It’s a commentary on how war always seems inevitable, because humanity keeps forgetting the mistakes it makes that leads to such paroxysms of violence. Thus, the tragedy of war seems infinite, doomed to be repeated over and over again. It’s a powerful message, even today.
And so, with Gance’s inimitable visual style, some quality acting (especially on Francen’s part), the surprise inclusion of some horror and science fiction elements, Gance has crafted a powerful anti-war film whose message continues to resonate today, over 80 years later.
