From Méliès to Polanski: The Dreyfus Affair on Film (Preview)
by Thomas Doherty

The Dreyfus Affair, which rocked the Third Republic of France between 1894 and 1906, has proven a congenial match for the medium whose on-site development it paralleled. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. “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. “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. 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. Forged documents, perjured testimony, and rigged tribunals delivered the desired outcome. “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. 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.

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. In the vanguard was a pioneer of French cinema, Georges Méliès, the famed conjuror of stop-motion fantasy. (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 one striking setup, a crowd of courtroom spectators rushes toward the camera lens, peeling off frame right and left, in a swirl of tumult. In another, a man slices his neck with a razor, blood gushing onto his shirt, filmed in a continuous take. 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. 

The print medium was not as easily blocked. 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 exclamatory urgency of the banner headline was worthy of a Hearst tabloid: J’Accuse…!

In poetic cadences ringing with righteous indignation, Zola named names, ticking off the culprits in the conspiracy to frame Dreyfus. Called out in print, the j-accused were left with no option but to sue for libel. It backfired: the trial of Émile Zola propelled the Dreyfus case from a domestic firestorm into an international scandal. France—the birthplace of liberté, égalitié, and fraternité—became a byword for intolerance and injustice. 

Post-Zola, the clumsily patched together conspiracy quickly unraveled. Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry, a key investigator and custodian of evidence in the case, confessed that he forged documents that helped convict Dreyfus. That same night, in his jail cell, Henry sliced his throat. “Truth will cut,” gloated Clemenceau.

In 1899, Dreyfus was brought back to France for a second trial, exponentially more sensational than the first because the media—including the American press—were out in force. When the French again convicted Dreyfus, the chorus of condemnation crossed borders.

Desperate to find an exit ramp before the opening of the French Exposition of 1900, the French government offered Dreyfus a pardon, which meant admitting guilt, but which spared him continued imprisonment. Ultimately, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, the real spy, was exposed, and the French were forced to reinstate Dreyfus to his former rank and, by way of small restitution, award him the Legion of Honor. He served honorably in the Great War, guarding the ramparts of Paris against the enemy he was accused of spying for. He retired a Lt. Colonel and died in 1935, by no means forgotten.

Yet not until 1930 did a major motion picture cast a backward glance at the crime of the nineteenth century. The onset of synchronous sound in the film medium probably sparked the return of the repressed, facilitating the retelling of a complicated legal case whose re-enactment demanded thick exposition and stirring rhetoric. 

The Germans—not yet ironically—got there first. Bankrolled by Süd-Film, the German distribution outfit, and adapted by Heinz Goldberg and Fritz Wendhausen from the book by Bruno Weil, Dreyfus was a multi-courtroom drama directed by Richard Oswald, a founding father of the Germany film industry, credited with nearly 150 films. After Hitler came to power, Oswald suffered the fate of a generation of German-Jewish artists. He raced to keep a step ahead of the Nazis—first to Vienna, then Paris, next London—before, in 1940, joining the flood of refugees exiled in Hollywood. Like so many, his career never regained the luster of its Weimar glory.

An opening credits crawl teases “the greatest scandal of military justice at the turn of the century,” a legal crime that “outraged the entire world and split France into two camps.” Cinematic excitement is in short supply, however: the vaunted unchained camera let loose by Ufa seems bolted to the soundstage floor. Dreyfus is a horizontal, proscenium presentation, hobbled by static pacing and awkward pauses in the dialogue. Even by 1930 standards, the synchronized sound mix is subpar—the voices are tinny and the music is scratchy—but one ambient noise comes through clear as a bell: the footfall of jackboots in the distance.

Captain Dreyfus (Fritz Kortner) is a dedicated artillery officer and happy family man, blessed with a devoted wife Lucie (Grete Mosheim) and precocious son. None of this matters to the French General Staff who, upon discovering a mole in their midst, search the staff registration book for a likely suspect. The chief investigator looks first at the column for religion, ignores the long list of Catholics, and stops at the designation “Jüdisch.” His finger tracks left to the name—Captain Alfred Dreyfus. And who is he? “The only Jew on the General Staff,” replies an aide helpfully. Hauled into the war office and accused of treason, Dreyfus smells the frame-up and refuses to make things easy for everybody by shooting himself. He resolves to live so he can prove his innocence.

First, however, Dreyfus must endure a piece of stagecraft that every film version of the Dreyfus case will lovingly re-enact: a ritual of degradation on a military parade before a frothing mob of Frenchmen outside the gates. The convicted traitor stands stoically, ramrod straight, as the epaulets are torn from his shoulders, the buttons are ripped from his uniform, and his sword is broken. After the ceremonial castration, he is marched off to his fate shouting, “I am innocent!”

Led by Dreyfus’s loyal bother Matthieu (Erwin Kalser) and Lucie, the Dreyfusards rally. In their corner, fortunately, is the only man in the French military in possession of a working conscience, Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart (Albert Bassermann). “Whether Jew or Christian there is only one justice!” Picquart proclaims. 

On Devil’s Island, Dreyfus suffers in isolation, cut off from all emotional sustenance, but the prisoner has not been forgotten. Émile Zola (Heinrich George, later a prize show horse for Joseph Goebbels) sits in a Parisian café watching in despair as ruffians witlessly celebrate the exoneration of Major Esterhazy. He pleads with the crazy-eyed youths to light the way to a better world and not retreat into racial bigotry and blind militarism, but the punks pay no heed to the old man’s appeal to reason and decency. From inside the café, heard as off-screen sound, they belt out “La Marseillaise,” but the anthem might just as well be the Horst Wessel Song.

During Zola’s trial, Oswald again makes resonant use of off-screen sound: as the novelist appeals to the jury, a promilitary claque in the gallery screams insults and roars disapproval, nearly drowning him out. In 1930, Germans would have heard echoes of Nazi brownshirts howling their contempt at the Munich court during the trial of Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff for the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923…

To read the complete review, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Fall 2020 issue, or order a copy of this issue.

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 4