J'accuse!

Wow! This movie would be a masterpiece if it was made in 2019, never mind 1919. Felt like I was watching "Birth of a Nation" but without all the KKK propaganda. Amazingly, the dead soldiers were played by actual French soldiers while on leave during WWI, most of whom actually did die in the following weeks of the war.

The first three quarters of it are boring and bland--almost completely worthless, in fact. The last part, however, is quite impressive. I hear that a 20's edit of it cut out about forty minutes, if you can get your hands on that it'd be more worth while. There are a few technically astonishing parts with double exposures and the like, but nothing to make up for a drearily un-entertaining majority.

With this film, Gance stepped forth and proclaimed himself a grand Romantic auteur, with all the excesses and grotesqueries that implies, right down to a poet-protagonist prone to fevered declamations, giving voice to increasingly mad and desperate hopes. Reigning in all the themes and emotions he tries to set running at once would be rather much for anyone, but he does present things vigorously, with the groundbreaking montage techniques that proved such an influence on the upcoming generation.

Bazı sahneleri savaş alanında çekmiş yönetmen. gerçek görüntüler varmış içinde. tolstoy romanlarına benziyor biraz. süre sessiz çekilmiyor tabii.

mad war and madness

"Fertile to a fault." - Fernando F. Croce

Pretty impressive, especially for its time, but longer than it needs to be. It really has some interesting stuff toward the end, with the graveyard/dead soldiers scenes. The actual war stuff is often pretty, especially when they go silhouettes in tinted scenes but is not as impressive as other antiwar movies that would come relatively shortly after, like The Big Parade. Good.

Subtle as a brick to the face i.e the rethreading of the movie title in the narrative over a dozen times gets a bit grating and the visuals, such as different ways of showing crosses, lays bare the messages of the film. It is done so spectacularly well however that it didn't bother me much. The famous ending alone is so impressive that it is without question one of the very best films of the 1910s and the film has tons of impressive scenes like that.

The visual style and inventiveness make this a great film, even with a not-so-great story. Gance is definitely highly underrated.