French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

J’Accuse: New Uses for Old Verses

Let me explain how cinema and literature interact in the world of my thoughts […]. They clear the way for each other.

—Abel Gance

“Puisque les poètes se taisent, il nous faut de toutes pièces créer des tragédies pour les yeux.” The silent version of J’Accuse (1919) thus announces its project from the very beginning. This ambitious statement is not unproblematic, but I believe it is the key to understanding the film’s exceptional nature. How does Gance go about creating a “tragedy for the eyes”? Despite the assertion that his methods are created “from scratch,” he engages in a kind of bricolage, borrowing elements from various sources, in particular forms from nineteenth-century literature.

In this way, Gance engages the spectator on familiar ground while at the same time preparing us for a brilliant defamiliarization. He moves beyond melodrama to a redemptive myth that aims to make sense of the unprecedented brutality of World War I by focusing on the role of the individual in postwar society. How does this transposition happen? What forms and figures are present throughout J’Accuse that not only place the audience at ease with their familiarity but prepare us for a radical departure from the familiar?

The following analysis begins with a close examination of the film’s opening sequence and then uses its declaration of purpose as a guide. The word “tragédie” leads me to examine the interplay of the literary (i.e., familiar) and the cinematic; the film inscribes itself broadly in a theatric tradition, one that is also primarily in verse. With “les poètes,” it investigates the synergy of the written and the cinematic, seeking to fill a perceived void via a foregrounding of the written word. Finally, it synthesizes these ideas “pour les yeux,” visually foregrounding poetry as the paradigmatic nature of poetry overflows the diegesis to enter the film’s montage.

Opening Salvo

The title sequence of J’Accuse operates metonymically for the film as a whole, much as an overture would for an opera. Scores of soldiers