The exclamatory urgency of the banner headline was worthy of a Hearst tabloid: J’Accuse…! On January 13, 1898, Émile Zola, the nation’s preeminent novelist, published an open letter to the president of the French Republic in L’Aurore, the Dreyfusard newspaper of his friend and future French prime minister George Clemenceau. The print medium was not as easily blocked. The magic Méliès worked was close enough to the real thing for the French government to shut down the show-the first, and Dreyfus-wise not the last, instance of motion picture censorship in French history. In another, a man slices his neck with a razor, blood gushing onto his shirt, filmed in a continuous take. In one striking setup, a crowd of courtroom spectators rushes toward the camera lens, peeling off frame right and left, in a swirl of tumult.
#Alfred dreyfus movie series
(The documentary-minded Lumière brothers, who may have seemed the more logical candidates for a film project drawn from real life, were missing in action.) In 1899, in a series of eleven one-minute shorts, Méliès restaged the pivotal incidents of a case whose final act had yet to be written. In the vanguard was a pioneer of French cinema, Georges Méliès, the famed conjuror of stop-motion fantasy.
#Alfred dreyfus movie professional
Opposition to the verdict percolated slowly, and the first resisters (so-called Dreyfusards) who questioned the official version did so at great professional and personal risk. Convicted of treason and ceremonially stripped of his honors, Dreyfus was shipped off to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, a penal colony just off the coast of French Guiana, to rot in oblivion. “The Army or Dreyfus!” demanded the military, an easy choice for most Frenchmen, who revered the army as a symbol of national pride, the unassailable embodiment of the French Republic. Forged documents, perjured testimony, and rigged tribunals delivered the desired outcome. He was a quirky sort, a bit of a martinet, and, better, a Jew, the perfect patsy for a frame-up that would keep suspicion away from the less “alien” elements of the French officer corps. “The Affair pervaded life at all hours and places.” The cause of the furor-or maybe the excuse for it-was an obscure artillery officer on the French General Staff, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who in 1894 was accused of spying for the Germans. “Rent by a moral passion that reopened past wounds, broke apart society, and consumed thought, energy, and honor, France plunged into one of the great commotions of history,” wrote historian Barbara Tuchman. More than a cause célèbre, l’affaire Dreyfus was an all-consuming fever that, for over a decade, gripped every level of French culture-toppling governments, tarnishing the military, and setting lawyers, journalists, and novelists at each other’s throats, and not just in prose. A partial list includes Richard Oswald’s Dreyfus (Germany, 1930), set against the last gasps of the Weimar Republic William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola (U.S., 1937), a coded attack on Nazism José Ferrer’s I Accuse! (U.K.–U.S., 1958), a posttraumatic commentary on McCarthyism and Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse) (France, 2019), a true crime story that will forever be filtered through a twitter hashtag. Across nations and time, each version-and there have been estimable German, British, American, Anglo-American, and French productions-has relitigated the Dreyfus case before a jury pool drawn from its own zeitgeist. Add to the mix that other ingredient essential to any mélange of film and history-Jews-and the appeal to successive generations of filmmakers is self-evident. The dramatic arc and the moral stakes-espionage, justice denied, public degradation, imprisonment, forensic work, calls to conscience, suicide, justice denied again, attempted murder, and finally, in the end reel, justice restored, sort of-bequeathed a ready-made scenario for the motion picture screen.
The Dreyfus Affair, which rocked the Third Republic of France between 18, has proven a congenial match for the medium whose on-site development it paralleled.
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