In advance of the American premiere of the fully restored edition of Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon in Oakland on March 24, Turner Classic Movies presents two of the auteur’s earlier films: J’Accuse (1919), which appropriates the cry leveled by Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair to decry the horrors of World War I, and La Roue (1923). These films—the sole silent films from the director currently available to American audiences (both are also available on DVD from Flicker Alley)—make clear that there was no director like Abel Gance in the silent era. One of the great technical innovators and visual artists of his time, Gance was a master conductor of the cinematic form. He transformed dramatic stories into emotional symphonies, and these two films are among the most stirring of the era.
Abel Gance began shooting J’Accuse, his harrowing anti-war drama, while the trench warfare of World War I was still grinding up soldiers on both sides of the battle. Such sentiments were certainly not encouraged by a government straining to support the war effort, but the time was ripe when it finally came months after it ended. France was devastated and the film is appropriately devastating, all but announcing its intentions in the opening titles, spelled out in the fallen bodies of soldiers dropping the ground as if in death. The story itself begins as a love triangle melodrama of star-crossed lovers ripped apart by war and transforms into a veritable love story between two men, comrades in arms brought together by battle and the mutual love of the same woman, but this is no romanticized portrait of courage and comradeship forged under fire.
