J'accuse

Description

J’accuse (I Accuse)

J’Accuse is the greatest anti-war film in history. Pay attention to the release date. It would seem that society has become civilized: the Dark Ages and the First World War are behind us. Technological progress is carrying humanity straight into space, giving us the chance to discover and explore new worlds.

But instead, humanity chooses a different path. The technological revolution leads not to the flourishing of civilization, but to its decline. New technologies are used not to cure diseases or fight hunger and poverty, but to create new, previously unimaginable ways of killing people en masse.

Then the Second World War begins. Even more people die than in the First. Surely now humanity will come to its senses and turn its gaze to space? Yes — for a while. And then again madness, the thirst for power, stupidity and dementia take over, leading to climate change and regions unfit for life. And once again we stand on the threshold of a new world war.

Everything invented and created over the past hundred years has again been adapted for new ways of mass killing. It has become even easier to kill — without regret, without the realization that this is someone’s life. For the average person, aiming a weapon at someone standing right in front of them is not the same as sitting hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from the fighting and simply pressing a button.

It’s just like playing a video game and killing drawn monsters. Yes, now a human life is no different from a pixel monster — just as easy to destroy while sitting in a gamer chair in front of a big screen, gamepad in hand.

With this text I wanted to say that in more than a hundred years, humanity has not changed at all. It is just as easy to manipulate, just as easy to feed millions of people into the grinder for someone’s greedy goals. And throughout this hundred years, there have always been people with the nerve to step out of the herd and say: “People, what the fuck is wrong with you? What are you doing?”

But no one hears them. No one wants to hear. At best, propaganda dismisses them as insane outsiders — dreamers not of this world. And at the same time, the line between good and evil is erased. People gradually stop seeing the difference between these two opposite concepts.

And then there are those who make anti-war films; some even receive prestigious awards. The intellectual part of society recognizes the film as a masterpiece exposing the dark underbelly of the modern world. But it changes nothing — it’s just another film. Watched and forgotten. And, unfortunately, J’Accuse is also one of those films that failed to reach society.

A grim reality

I deliberately won’t talk about the plot, but there is one thing you should know before watching. In the scene where the dead soldiers rise from their graves, the extras were real French soldiers who had fought in the First World War — men who knew that in a few weeks they would return to the front, and that most of them would die.

Nineteen years later, director Abel Gance once again said: “I accuse!” (J’accuse) — and remade his own film on the eve of the Second World War. And again society was deaf and blind. As a result, tens of millions of lives perished for the sake of the thirst for power and the ambitions of the few at the top.

And more than a hundred years after the first film’s release, I too want to say: I accuse…