French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

The Phantom of Apollinaire

While Jean is the film’s only diegetic poet, he shares this role in a hypertextual manner with another. ³⁵ The phantom of Apollinaire haunts J’Accuse in two ways. First, his memory inhabits the film’s revenant sequence. Blaise Cendrars, one of Gance’s cinematographers, was a good friend of Apollinaire, who died on November 9, 1918, just eight days before the shooting of the chilling sequence of the war-dead rising to their feet. Jay Winter recounts a fascinating anecdote of just how deeply the cinematographer was struck by the loss of his friend. ³⁶ After the post-funeral meal, Cendrars was unable to find the poet’s grave. Instead, he wandered about the Père Lachaise cemetery for much of an evening, eventually happening upon some gravediggers. Cendrars, apparently delirious with frustration and grief, imagined a clod of earth to resemble the head of his departed friend. The moment left an indelible mark upon him and greatly influenced his shooting of the revenant sequence. Furthermore, Apollinaire’s funeral took place on the same day as the military parades in Paris to celebrate the armistice. The parades were for Cendrars a bittersweet moment, one whose emotional resonance was so powerful that it led Gance in 1922 to add the celebrated split-screen image of the revenants and the armistice military parades, evoking the poet’s memory even more strongly.

Second, the parallels between J’Accuse and Apollinaire’s poem “La maison des morts” are remarkable. Both focus on a poet protagonist who brings the dead back to life. Both feature a country village to which the living dead return. Both represent the undead and their familiar, even domestic encounters with the living. Both include a celebratory farandole. There are important differences, of course. Apollinaire’s poem narrates a peaceful, even joyful meeting as lovers are reunited and parents revisit their progeny, while the encounter in J’Accuse is one of terror. Nonetheless, the ultimate message of both works, meaning created by the interaction of the living and the dead, has a common resonance: