Released in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, Abel Gance's epic drama J'accuse (1919) was a worldwide sensation. In France, the press reported the raw emotions the film provoked in audiences: men and women were seen alternately weeping in grief and cheering with enthusiasm. The film skillfully combined an intimately “poignant” family melodrama with intense depictions of war's “rage and madness.” Gance's “sublime” and “terrifying visions” emerged from, and fed back into, a public imagination haunted by personal and national grief. Not only did the film offer a potent evocation of the recent past, but its stylistic daring heralded cinema's future involvement with Modernist experimentation. For many critics, J'accuse was the “unquestionable” pinnacle of European film production: its impact was like a “strident trumpet-blast” that signaled “the reawakening of French cinema.”

Straddling avant-garde and mainstream film practice, J'accuse embodies its director's dream of expressing a radical artistic vision within popular cinema. Gance's rapidly developing talents can be seen in the film's shift from melodrama to the epic, the tension between realism and expressionism, and the challenge to existing formal techniques. Alongside Broken Blossoms (1919) and Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), J'accuse was internationally recognized as one of the most ground-breaking productions of the immediate postwar period. It emulated the commercial scale of D. W. Griffith's film, as well as foreshadowing the break with aesthetic convention found in Robert Wiene's celebrated work. Its success across Europe and America propelled Gance to international fame and gave him the artistic and financial clout to make his two revolutionary masterpieces, La Roue (1922) and Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927).

In this chapter, I want to examine how the form and content of J'accuse are shaped by its cultural and ideological contexts. The immediate aftermath of the Great War was one of the key periods in the birth of Modernism, witnessing an explosion of new ideas and divergent approaches to art. Few ages “have been more multiple, more promiscuous in artistic style,” and J'accuse embodies exactly this sense of innovative energy.