Restored Anti-War Classic

First of all, some welcome news for area moviemakers. The Forx Film Fest has extended its submission deadline until next week, so if you can get a copy of your movie to the Empire Arts Center (415 DeMers Avenue in Grand Forks) by next Monday or Tuesday, you can still enter it in this year’s Forx Film fest (now less than a month away). Entry fees are $15 for students and $20 for all others. Go to http://www.empireartscenter.com to download an entry form.

The Forx Film Fest runs November 7th through 9th this year, and two days later is the 90th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War.
November 11th would be an ideal day to watch one of the most moving anti-war pictures ever made, French filmmaker Abel Gance’s first version (he made two) of his epic “J’Accuse,” which was just released to DVD last month from Flicker Alley Video.

Gance started to shoot “J’Accuse” during the final year of World War I and finished it in 1919. Anyone not familiar with silent films, and even many who are, might wonder how a movie almost 90 years old could have any emotional power on a viewer today, especially one nearly three hours long. If they watched the first hour of “J’Accuse” they might still be wondering, as it is largely a heavy-handed romantic triangle melodrama with often overwrought performances.

After the war begins, however, and the two bitter rivals eventually become close battle comrades, the story becomes more interesting and the acting becomes a bit more subdued. Then in Part Two (50 minutes) and especially Part Three (52 minutes), the genius of the director, the complexity of his characters, and the scope of his cinematic vision become apparent. Sections alternate between the battlefront and the home front.

Each man discovers that the woman they both love has had a child, not by his rival but after being raped by an enemy soldier shortly after the war began. As the child grows up, she’s taunted by other children and made to be the enemy when they play soldiers. Then come soldiers’ poignant letters to home (real ones), a climactic battle (again real), death, and shell-shock, before the incredibly dramatic finale.

Abel Gance was a young playwright and filmmaker with health problems who found himself in the French army during World War I, and saw nine of his ten best friends killed in a short period. He came up with an idea that if all the war dead ever came back to their homelands to see if their deaths had served a purpose, the war would stop immediately from the guilt of the survivors who did not fight. (The film’s title is French for “I Accuse.”)

Gance wrote a script, found funding, and managed to get assigned back to the front so he could shoot battle scenes, amazingly with army cooperation. Not only was he able to incorporate some genuine combat footage into his anti-war film, but he was allowed to use 2,000 soldiers on an eight-day leave to play the army of dead who come back to life at the end to accuse the living. The power of that scene becomes truly overwhelming when one realizes that the majority of the men on screen would be killed within a few weeks after the scene was shot, and moreover that the men themselves knew it.

Besides the audacity of making an epic anti-war film during the war and while in the army, Gance also experimented with ultra fast-paced editing at times, techniques later adopted by Russian and avant-garde filmmakers. This unusually modern-looking editing style and long running time was refined by Gance in future epic films like “La Roue” (1921, also on DVD from Flicker Alley) and “Napoleon” (1927, currently being suppressed by Francis Ford Coppola, who funded a theatrical revival of an abridged version in the 1970s).

Flicker Alley’s double-disc DVD of “J’Accuse” has a beautiful, high-bitrate transfer of the film, assembled from a variety of sources but largely in very good condition. The film’s newly composed orchestra score by Robert Israel complements the visuals superbly and squeezes every last bit of emotion out of the performances. The original French title cards are included with optional English subtitles, unlike the version prepared for last spring’s showing on Turner Classic Movies, which replaced all the French intertitles with English ones. Parts One and Two are on the first disc and Part Three is on the second, along with two bonus shorts made during the war.

Bonus films give contemporary glimpses at life around the time the feature was made. First is a peculiar half-hour short, “Paris During the War” (1915) with surreally comic appearances by various French celebrities. There’s also an interesting 15-minute documentary, “Fighting the War” (1916), made by filmmaker Donald C. Thompson on the front lines. There’s also a nice 20-page booklet with credits and three essays on “J’Accuse,” one giving background, one comparing it with Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” and one discussing the film’s reconstruction.