Last Saturday -- December 12, 2009 -- was the actual North American premier of this wonderful film in its entirety at the winter edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The Nederlands Filmmuseum and Lobster Films' fine efforts have resulted in a restoration of the European release print as Abel Gance intended for the movie to be seen; indeed, as it was seen in France and Britian in 1919. They combined six different prints including one original camera negative and one print with original tinting to produce a truly stunning cinematic triumph. I, as many of you have, had seen the version edited for American release, but this print simply took my breath. It is rich and full. The additional material fully advances the narrative. Gance's strident message of the uselessness and futility of war comes to full flower and is even more disturbing than was evident from earlier,incomplete releases. The expanded performances of Severin-Mars, Marise Dauvray, and Romuald Joube fill in the previous gaps in the story. Young and pretty Angele Guys is all the more angelic in this version which includes the heartbreaking taunting she receives at the hands of playmates when they discover she is the bastard product of a German soldiers' gang rape. Gance's use of quick-cutting and montage presages that of Eisenstein and with this release it is even more apparent that Gance was certainly one of the handful of early pioneering geniuses of the cinema. All in all this restoration is truly wonderful. If you don't have the recently released DVD in your library, you do not have a complete collection of the greatest silent films. As I've written before on these pages, if you've never attended the San Francisco Silent Film Festival you are -- as our teachers used to say --only cheating yourself! It is very well run and held in the Castro Theater, a beautifully preserved movie palace. The Festival is indeed one of the premier film events in the world.
J'accuse!
(1919)
If you weren't in San Franciscon last Saturday, you've never seen J'Accuse
16 December 2009