J'accuse

Abel Gance's epic anti-war statement, J'accuse, was the first great pacifist film, to put alongside such classics as The Big Parade and All Quiet on the Western Front. It was also the first major statement in artistic terms condemning the insanity of WWI, and it remains a potently angry indictment of mindless military ambition and aggression. Gance himself, who had experienced the loss of many friends in the War and witnessed its futility at first hand, called it a 'modern tragedy... a human cry against the bellicose din of armies'. Like Gance's other masterpieces, La Roue and Napoléon, it was boldly experimental and innovative, and was a huge box-office success, in Britain and North America as well as France. This new, colour-tinted restoration by the Netherlands Film Museum, in collaboration with Lobster Films, is therefore both timely (when would it not be?) and welcome, drawing upon six different print sources from archives around the world. The story concerns a pacifist poet, Jean, in love with Edith, who is married to François. Both men join the army. Edith is captured and raped by German soldiers, deported and has a child. François is killed, while Jean, shell-shocked and driven insane, evokes the ghosts of the war dead in a climactic sequence of unique visual impact, heightened by the appalling irony that 80% of the soldier-extras enlisted lost their lives days later at Verdun. A film of lasting power and relevance.

Clyde Jeavons