Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Abel Gance’s anti-war film J’accuse may not offer audiences a pocketful of posies, but it does pack a punch, pointing an accusatory finger at those who supported the waste of human life that was World War I.
J’accuse is a story of love, sacrifice, and loss. The film fades in on a still peaceful France, a haven of gaity and frivolity. Jean Diaz (Romuald Joube) cannot bring himself to join in the merriment because he is too busy pining away for Edith (Maryse Dauvray), their love deferred by her abusive husband Francois (Severin-Mars). This story line remains mawkish and predictable until the unpredictable happens, the descent of WWI. Jean and Francois are both sent to the front, and eventually placed in the same unit. In the trenches, Jean learns that Francois really does love Edith as much as he does, and chooses to sacrifice himself on a dangerous reconnaissance mission assigned to Francois. Jean returns victorious, and when Francois learns the truth they form a bond from their mutual position and love for Edith. In the end Francois dies in battle and Jean goes mad, culminating in his warning to those back home that their dead will haunt them if their sacrifice was in vain. Jean dies cursing the deceitful sun, his former poetic muse of beauty and light, now his darkness.
My interest in this film is primarily its complex imagery and juxtapositions, assembled in a somewhat abstract style before the rules of continuity were fully formed. One of the most haunting images is the reoccurrence of skeletons dancing in a ring, making the war seem like a game of death. Another is the way similar images are reused to create a more striking revelation, like the window Jean admires Edith through at the beginning of the film, seemingly insignificant and yet the pattern in the panes of glass are later associated with the cross (sacrifice). Repetition is used in this same way for thematic concerns, the main idea being “J’accuse,” or “I accuse.” In one scene, Jean teaches Edith’s daughter Angele (the result of Edith being raped by a German soldier, the crime represented by a mass of menacing shadows) how to write J’accuse in chalk, moving her hand as one with his in this claim. At the end of the film when Jean has gone mad, Angele takes his hand as he did hers to try to spark his memory, again writing J’accuse for the men who no longer could. The most famous portion of the film is when the war dead return to their living to see if they were worthy of their sacrifice. Many in this sequence were actually soldiers on leave who would soon die at the front, blurring the line between filmic and actual reality, the images of these men left to haunt future audiences. This film also has a historical importance as actual war footage is used in some of the battle sequences.
Joube and Mars are both good as competing lovers because they have interesting characters to work with. Jean because of his fall from innocence, Francois because of his depth, at first seeming like a cardboard villain that turns into a man who deeply loves his wife but is plagued with jealousy and an inability to communicate his feelings. Dauvray is not given much to do because her role is primarily as an object of affection. In my opinion the best performances in the film are actually Maxime Desjardins as Maria Lazare, Edith’s father and Mancini as Jean’s mother. In a heartbreaking scene where Mancini says goodbye to her son, she is left to hold his cello (a representation of his artistic and sensitive character) in her arms as she weeps, the instrument covered by one of Jean’s coats.
This only provides a rough sketch for this 3 hour tour de force, therefore I recommend viewing it for its powerful indictment of the crime of war and waste 11 years before the groundbreaking All Quiet on the Western Front, which also relies on a distinction between pre and post, home and war front. Gance later remade the film in 1938 to warn the French, about to enter another conflict, with ghosts of the past.
I accuse.
