J'Accuse · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The men who rise out of the ground in the last act of J'Accuse are not extras. They are French soldiers on leave from the front, lent to Gance in the hundreds, who wore their own uniforms, lay down in the dirt, got up when he asked, walked toward the camera, and then went back. Gance said in old age that many of them were killed in the fighting that followed. The number is his, not a muster roll, and should be held loosely. The rest can't be: those are real soldiers, filmed in the middle of the war that was killing them, playing their own deaths, for an audience in 1919 made largely of survivors and the bereaved.

Everything worth saying about this film runs through that shot.

Gance got there on borrowed parts, openly borrowed. The accelerating cross-cut of The Birth of a Nation. The four converging strands of Intolerance, whose shots shorten as they close. The tableau and declamation of L'Assassinat du duc de Guise, which is where Séverin-Mars's big playing comes from, and the moral neatness of the triangle plot with it. Deleuze names the architecture under the Griffith debt: organic montage, the American kind, where parallel lines converge and the cut tightens so that an act can arrive in time to change a situation. The last-minute rescue is its emblem. Someone perceives trouble, someone acts, the trouble resolves. Deleuze calls that whole grammar the movement-image, and in 1916 it wasn't one style among others. It was what a film was. So Gance builds the machine at full power: a poet, a woman, her brutal husband, a sunlit village in the Midi.

Then he runs it into the trenches and the parts stop meshing. The village is painterly, sun used as an active compositional element, foliage framing the shot. The front is flat and grey and cluttered, smoke and wire and earth, the view constantly blocked. He cuts between the two registers without transition, and the shock of the cut is the argument.

Then the cutting shortens. Six frames, then four, then two, struck against each other until you stop reading pictures and start taking rhythm. Deleuze filed this under the French school's quantitative montage: cinema going after a mathematical sublime, stacking up more movement than perception can hold. Gance aims it at combat and at Jean Diaz's mental collapse, and the effect is exact. It takes away your ability to place yourself in space. That loss is the film's subject, performed on you rather than described. Deleuze has a name for what the front becomes under this treatment. Any-space-whatever: space that has quit being a stage for action and broken into disconnected fragments holding a feeling instead of a geography. He dates it to the rubble of the next war. It is here in 1919, assembled out of smoke and cutting rather than ruins.

Once space stops supporting action, action stops working. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image, characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they perceive, and he dates that to 1945 as well. Watch what happens to Diaz. He is a poet, the war offers him nothing that would count as doing something, and he goes mad. Gance gives the collapse the same accelerated montage he gave the battlefield, which is a way of saying the mind and the front are one event. Diaz stops being an agent and becomes what Deleuze, writing about postwar cinema, calls a voyant: a seer, someone whose only remaining capacity is to look. In a movement-image film that man has failed. Here, looking turns out to be the last working organ the film has.

This is what the lens buys, and it's worth arguing for, because the standard complaint about J'Accuse is that you sit through an hour of provincial melodrama to reach the famous part. True, and not a defect. The melodrama has to stand at full strength so the war can grind it into something it cannot contain. The breaking is the film.

Which leaves Gance holding a situation with no available act. His answer is the thing nobody else in 1919 does. He drops narrative and delivers a vision.

Every frame implies space past its edges, the next room, the road out of shot; Deleuze calls that the relative out-of-field. He describes a second kind, an absolute one, where the frame opens onto something located nowhere, that no pan could reach. The dead of France are that, and every war film keeps them there permanently. Gance walks them into the shot. Superimposition is his instrument for consciousness everywhere else in the film, the dead layered over the living, memory ghosting a present image, and he could easily have made the risen army a transparency. He doesn't. They come on the ground, in daylight, on orthochromatic stock that blows the sky to white and darkens their faces toward charcoal.

They arrive as one body. Deleuze's word for a crowd rendered as a single affective unit is the dividual: one feeling distributed across many people, not many people each having one. The question the army brings home, whether the deaths were justified, is asked by nobody in particular and by all of them at once. Civilization (1916) had staged the war dead as accusers already, a resurrected Christ marching a warmaking king past the corpses. Gance takes that moral machine, removes the Christ and the king, and aims it somewhere far worse: the dead go home, to their own village, to the people who survived them. That is the whole meaning of the borrowed title. Zola accused France from inside France.

The film's most disturbing gesture is quieter. In September 1918 Gance filmed the Saint-Mihiel offensive with the army's own film unit, and cut fragments of it into the fiction, so that photographed corpses sit in shots adjacent to photographed actors. Bazin would later build his whole case for cinema on precisely what makes this unbearable: the photograph carries the being of what it recorded, it testifies that this was there. You can watch an actor suffer. There is nothing to be done with the corpse. And the same splice is the film's unresolved contradiction, since the truth-guarantee of actuality footage is being used to underwrite a melodrama, in a film made with the cooperation of the army it accuses, with atrocity propaganda inside it. It doesn't reconcile. Gance's assistant through all of it was Blaise Cendrars, who had left his right arm at Champagne in 1915.

Then the close-ups, held longer than French practice of the moment permitted. A hand. A mouth. Eyes. A dead man's face. For Deleuze a close-up is not a magnified detail but an affection-image, feeling registered and not yet discharged into action, and its purest form is an immobile face expressing a single quality, a qualisign. Hold a dead face past any narrative use and the quality has nowhere to discharge, because the man in the frame can't act on it. It comes out of the screen instead. Deleuze took from Eisenstein a name for cinema built this way: the spiritual automaton, film that doesn't depict thought but strikes the nervous system until thought happens without consent. Gance is after that eight years before the three screens of Napoléon. The title is a verb, first person, aimed. The dead ask the living, and in 1919 the living were in the room.

What he drafted here he perfected next door. The accelerated cutting becomes La Roue (1923), the film European editing theory formed itself around; the hunger for an image bigger and more assaultive than the frame becomes Polyvision in Napoléon (1927). Léonce-Henri Burel, who shot this, was still working thirty years later, for Bresson, on Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket and The Trial of Joan of Arc, the pictorialism burned off and the discipline left standing: a human face, clear, in a plain frame, carrying the film. Griffith championed J'Accuse into American release in a shortened cut, which is a strange circuit, given that Gance had taken Griffith's grammar and used it to film that grammar failing.

Deleuze puts the great break at 1945 because it took a second war to make the failure of action permanent. This film says it in 1919, in the middle of the first, and Europe went and did the thing again. Watch it with one instruction: every time the cutting starts to accelerate, the story has run out of moves. Follow the acceleration and it puts you in the same two places each time. A face that cannot act. Then the dead, walking.