French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

It is difficult to establish a direct link between “La maison des morts” and J’Accuse, since Apollinaire’s Alcools was not published until 1920, though the composition of its contents certainly predates or at least parallels the shooting of Gance’s film. This coincidence of theme, even of narrative content, certainly tends to support Winter’s idea that artists of the World War I era were in a desperate search for a new language of loss.

Pour les yeux: L’alchimie du Verbe

As we have just seen, poetry plays a central role in J’Accuse on both a diegetic and thematic level. However, silent film cannot capture the fullness of poetry, as the latter has an auditory, even musical dimension that becomes apparent only when recited. This is especially true of Jean’s poetry, a typified sort of nineteenth-century verse. Gance compensates for this shortcoming by translating Jean’s poetry visually. This is a precise instance of bricolage where the signifier (written verse) changes places with the signified (nature, the sun, and a female muse); the images that inspired Jean, that he recites, are re-represented imagistically in a brilliant kind of cinemato-poetic shell game.

This act of bricolage is more important than a sly solution to the problem of cinematically representing a single poem. Let us remember that Gance’s project here is to create a tragedy (that is, a work to be performed) for the eyes (a work for neither the stage nor the ears). The visual translation of Jean’s poetry spills over from the recitation sequence to the rest of the film, which often signifies in the same abstract manner, emphasizing the paradigmatic over the syntagmatic. It is in this way that Gance achieves the height of his activity as a bricoleur, borrowing elements from poetry (a written and spoken art form) to shape his cinematic work (a silent art of the moving image).