Alfred Dreyfus (inset) walks from the courtroom at Rennes, with the military guard lined up with their backs against him because of the disgrace that he represented. This and other frame grabs taken from the Biograph series of Dreyfus trial scene films, with kind permission of the Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.

This series looks at the ways in which the early motion picture recorded and influenced the lives of some significant individuals. We have started with Alfred Dreyfus, and in part one we saw how Georges Méliès documented the ‘Dreyfus affair’ by creating a multi-part drama that demonstrated great fidelity to genuine incident and appearance. For part two, we look at the responses of other film companies to Dreyfus, which ranged from dramatic sketches to on-the-spot news coverage. Firstly, a recap of the Dreyfus story itself.

The Dreyfus affair
Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French officer, was arrested in October 1894 on suspicion of spying for Germany. A military court suspended him from the Army and on highly dubious evidence he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. In 1896 one Colonel Picquart found documents which seemed to offer convincing evidence of Dreyfus’ innocence and it became apparent that the guilty party was another French officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The military authorities under General Auguste Mercier ordered the matter hushed up, and Picquart was transfered to Tunis. But Dreyfus’ family continued to plead his cause, and a campaign led by the author Emile Zola (who wrote an open letter to the French president Émile Loubet famously entitled ‘J’accuse’) resulted in a fresh trial in 1899, which became a mockery through the Army’s refusal to admit that it could be in the wrong and the general anti-Jewish hysteria that abounded. Dreyfus was found guilty again (to the shock and disgust of world opinion), but President Loubet swiftly pardoned him. The case was reviewed in 1906 and Dreyfus found innocent. The whole affair saw France bitterly divided between Dreyfusards (generally liberals, Socialists, anti-clericals and intellectuals) and anti-Dreyfusards (generally Roman Catholics, monarchists, anti-Semites and nationalists). It became the major political crisis of the Third Republic, and seriously weakened the world view of France as a champion of liberal values.

Francis Doublier
It’s not certain whether Lumière cameraman Francis Doublier‘s tale of exhibiting films of the Dreyfus affair while he was touring Russia in 1898 is apocryphal or not, but it is such a good story – recounted several times in histories of documentary – that has to be included for the record. He told the story several times – this version comes from a lecture that he gave in 1941 at New York University, which was reproduced in 1956 in Image magazine:

The Dreyfus affair was still a source of great interest in those days, and out of it I worked up a little film-story which made me quite a bit of money. Piecing together a shot of some soldiers, one of a battleship, one of the Palais de Justice, and one of a tall gray-haired man, I called it “L’affaire Dreyfus.” People actually believed that this was a filming of the famous case, but one time after a showing a little old man came backstage and inquired of me whether it was an authentic filming of the case. I assured him that it was. The little old man then pointed out that the case had taken place in 1894, just one year before cameras were available. I then confessed my deception, and told him I had shown the pictures because business had been poor and we needed the money. Suffice to say, I never showed “L’affaire Dreyfus” again.

Whatever the precise truth, Doublier’s story reveals two fundamental truths about film – one, that it doesn’t matter what the image literally shows but what you say that it shows that counts; two, that audiences aren’t always quite a dumb as filmmakers like to believe that they are. Or at least some of them aren’t.

Biograph
Biograph is a name associated with D.W. Griffith, but the original company was the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and it made use of a 68mm filmstock which produced films of startling size and image quality. In term of product, it produced both comic sketches, often of a midly salacious nature for viewing through the peepshow Mutoscope, and films of actuality which tended to feature at prestige theatre screenings. It gained a high reputation for films of news, sport, travel and famous personages, particularly when one of its founders, William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, moved to Britain in 1897 to become filmmaker for the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Biograph diversified further, and the Société Française de Mutoscope et Biographe was formed in 1898. These two companies, and the American parent company, each produced Dreyfus-related films.

The Zola-Rochefort Duel, from The Wonders of the Biograph (1999/2000).

The first Biograph film related to the Dreyfus affair was the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s The Zola-Rochefort Duel, made around June/July 1898. This was the year of Emile Zola’s polemical open letter ‘J’accuse’ which brought the Dreyfus injustice out into the open. Henri Rochefort was a journalist and a rabid anti-Dreyfusard. The film dramatises a duel with swords between the two men in a park. A Biograph catalogue record describes it this:

This is a replica of the famous duel with rapiers between Emile Zola, the novelist, and Henri Rochefort, the statesman. The duel takes place on the identical ground where the original fighting occurred, seconds and doctors being present as in the original combat. The picture gives a good idea of how a French affair of honor is conducted.

However, there was no duel fought between Zola and Rochefort in reality, so either the film is meant to be symbolic or it is based on a false news report.

The American Biograph at the Palace – an advertising film for Biograph films (which were billed in the UK as American Biograph) at the Palace Theatre, London, highlighting films of the Dreyfus trial. From Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise. (1999).

The following year, at the time of the trial, Biograph used all of its publishing muscle (the British company was managed by newspaper and magazine interests) to promote itself as the company with all that anyone needed to see relating to the story of the hour. It produced an advertising film in which a billsticker puts up posters advertising Dreyfus films to be seen at the Palace Theatre in London (Biograph’s showcase theatre). The British company also produced Amann, the Great Impersonator, in which quick-change artist Ludwig Amann poses before the camera as Zola and Dreyfus, while the American branch made two films staring Lafayette, ‘the great mimetic comedian’, entitled The Trial of Captain Dreyfus and Dreyfus Receiving His Sentence (these latter two films do not appear to exist, but the three British films do).

Crowds pouring out of the courtroom at Rennes, filmed by Biograph. Dreyfus trial scenes, Filmmuseum.

However, Biograph’s major contribution to the Dreyfus affair was made by its French branch. The Société Française de Mutoscope et Biographe produced a series of what are effectively news reports filmed outside the courtroom at Rennes during Dreyfus’ second trial over August-September 1899. Here we are taken away from the comic sketches and dramatic reconstructions to the startling reality. The series of films (which are held by the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam) are extraordinary to witness, not just because they document the actuality, but because they do so with a camera style that comes across as all too modern. This is the inquisitive news camera, eagerly gazing on history in the making, making us news voyeurs, as we urge the camera to give us whatever glimpse it can of the personalities involved.

Alfred Dreyfus, in hat and dark civilian clothes, accompanied by an official (with white trousers), walks in the prison yard at Rennes, filmed by the Biograph camera from a high vantage point. Dreyfus trial scenes, Filmmuseum.

The camera operator certainly tried his best (we don’t know his name; some sources credit Julius W. Orde, but he was a director of the French company, not a cameraman). The most remarkable achievement was to capture a few seconds of of Dreyfus exercising in his prison yard, filmed from a platform built on a overlooking roof. It is pure paparazzi, except that the operator was working with a camera which with all its batteries and accoutrements weighed over half a ton. The fleeting sight of the man of the hour became a huge coup for Biograph, its brevity only enhancing the sense of a precious image snatched by the ingenuity of the operator. This film captured the headlines, but a second film of Dreyfus – illustrated at the top of the post – was also obtained, just managing to show him (via a frantic panning shot) walking from the court room across the street with a guard all standing with their backs to him because of the dishonour he represented (there was supposed to be a practical side to it as well, because the guard would be looking out for assassination attempts rather than looking at Dreyfus). A third film in the Filmmuseum set has a similar line-up of guards but it is unclear whether Dreyfus passes through them.

Lucie Dreyfus (second left) and Mathieu (second right) leaving the prison at Rennes, filmed by the Biograph cameraman tracking left. Dreyfus trial scenes, Filmmuseum.

The other film among the Dreyfus set that attracted much interest was filmed of Dreyfus’s wife Lucie and his brother Mathieu walking from the prison, with the camera tracking left to follow them as they turn a corner. The camera feels invasive, but we are also struck by the ordinariness of the scene, as the subjects recede in to the distance and the indifferent passers-by drift past or glance at the oddness of the Biograph camera. The remaining surviving films from this set include shots outside the court, with notable figures coming and going – one appears to be General Mercier, the lead prosecution witness. The films really should receive careful analysis from experts in the field, because none of the footage is accidental; the cameraman was trying as far as he could to capture something of all of the notable names. Another shot shows someones leaving the courtoom and entering a carriage (possibly Lucie Dreyfus), while another shows people pouring out of the courtroom into the open air in such a clear and animated image that the years fall away and we are back there in Rennes in 1899.

The other valuable thing about the Biograph films of the trial is that we know something of their reception. Of the court yard scene, a British theatre reviewer (from an unidentified journal clipping) wrote:

Out … comes Captain Dreyfus in civilian attire escorted by an official. Before the pair have walked five yards towards us the official espies the camera [it is not clear if this is the case], and at once hurries his charge out of sight again through the nearer door. Captain Dreyfus, who has come out for daily exercise, does not get much, for he is not in our sight for more than five seconds. The Biograph kindly repeats the view, not as an encore, but in consideration of its brevity. Without being an artistic success, it is likely to remain for some time the view that will excite the most interest. Last night it was received in ominous silence, but was heralded and succeeded by loud cheers.

This account (part of a longer review) shows how such films could be viewed both ironically and straightforwardly, while exciting a range of emotions in the general audience. Other reports reveal the sympathies of the British audience – film of Dreyfus’ lawyer Labori was cheered, while film of General Mercier was roundly booed (this also indicates that the films had live commentary from someone explaining who was to be seen going in or out of the courtroom).

Pathé
While Georges Méliès’s L’affaire Dreyfus (discussed in part one) is relatively well-known, the L’affaire Dreyfus series produced by Pathé is less-discussed, chiefly because only one part of an original eight items survives. However it was quite similar in method to Méliès’s films, using dramatisation to document the reality and breaking up the the story into dramatic tableaux which could either be viewed singly or as a complete set. In this case we know the name of the actor who played Dreyfus – Jean Liezer. These are the titles of the individual episodes:

• Arrestation, aveux du colonel Henry
• Au mont Valérien: suicide du Colonel Henry
• Dreyfus dans sa cellule à Rennes
• Entrée au conseil de guerre
• Audience au conseil de guerre
• Sortie du conseil de guerre
• Prison militaire de Rennes, rue Duhamel
• Avenue de la Gare à Rennes

Each episode was 20 metres in length. To judge from the one episode that survives (at the BFI National Archive), Dreyfus dans sa cellule à Rennes, the style was more restrained than that adopted by Méliès (though Pathé like Méliès showed the bloody suicide of Colonel Henry). It place emphasis on producing a pseudo-realistic of the personalities and places involved, with a greater concentration on the events surrounding the second trial (conseil de guerre). The extant film (no still available to illustrate, unfortunately) shows the guards with their backs to those entering the courtroom. Were the whole series to survive, one suspects that it would be a comparable work to that of Méliès, in its keen attention to detail if not in dramatic verve.

Frames from L’affaire Dreyfus (1908), directed by Lucien Nonguet, from Dreyfus à l’écran film programme, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, 2008

What does survive, however, is a second Pathé film, made nine years after the trial and two years after Dreyfus was finally found innocent. This is a longer work (370 metres) and a single, multi-scene film, directed by Lucien Nonguet and produced by Ferdinand Zecca. However, from the frame stills (I’ve not seen the film myself) the mise-en-scène seems remarkably similar to the 1899 films, the emphasis still being on documenting the look of key incidents through close replication of people and locations (compare the trial scene, to the right of the above frames, with the trial scene filmed by Méliès, illustrated in part one). The major difference comes through an additional character – this L’affaire Dreyfus features Esterhazy, the man who produced the document betraying French miitary secrets to the Germans that Dreyfus was accused of having written. His guilt is made clear from the opening scene, turning a series of unfortunate incidents in something with tragic impetus.

Photograph of Dreyfus leaving the courtroom at Rennes, showing the guard with their backs turned. Taken from the Dreyfus Rehabilitated site, http://www.dreyfus.culture.fr

Envoi
The 1909 film was the last to be made of the Dreyfus case until 1930. In 1915 the French banned any dramatic representation of the Dreyfus case from being made, and when Richard Oswald’s 1930 feature film Dreyfus was made, France still refused to allow it to be screened. But for the silent period, it was documenting history in the making that was important. The young medium used every means at its disposal to record the news story of 1899 (for some, the news story of the century) and to turn it into profitable entertainment. It employed both dramatic reconstruction and actuality, pushing the boundaries of the medium’s expression in each case, and demonstrating the power of motion pictures to capture the moment in a form that no other medium could quite emulate. Cinema brought you face to face with life itself.

Though it may be something of an inappropriate speculation, given Dreyfus’s Jewish faith, there is something of the Christian Stations of the Cross in the early Dreyfus films. Each illustrates the key stages in the victim’s noble passage to the point where false justice is executed through a series of tableaux. In each the victim is noble, passive, and wronged. The narrative does not develop in a form that is understandable to anyone new to the story, but instead represents passages of suffering told through tableaux that the faithful will recognise as having special meaning. It is interesting that the main multi-scene film narratives made in the 1890s are the two L’affaire Dreyfus films, assorted lives of Christ (by Lumière, Pathé and others), and Méliès’ Cendrillion (1899), or Cinderella – another episodic tale of suffering and redemption.

But what of Alfred Dreyfus himself? He is not recorded as being aware of the films that were made of him, and of course they were only a trivial distraction in the context of the issues that raged around him, issues of patriotism, religion, race and social order. Dreyfus was pardoned soon after the farce of the second trial, and was finally pronounced innocent in 1906. Despite the way it had treated him, he rejoined the Army, but retired on grounds of ill-health in 1907. However, he joined the Army once more in 1914 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel (he had had hopes of eventually becoming a general before the catastrophe of 1894). He was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1918, and died in 1935.

Information on Biograph, including the filming and exhibiting of Biograph films, can be found in two sources in particular: Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897-1915 (1999) and Mark van den Tempel and Luke McKernan (eds.), The Wonders of the Biograph, special issue of Griffithiana, nos. 66/70, 1999/2000). Although more has been discovered since it was written (not least the Biograph trial films), Stephen Bottomore’s article ‘Dreyfus and Documentary’, Sight and Sound (Autumn 1984) is still the best source for learning about the relationship between the Dreyfus affair and early film. Stephen also covers still photography, making it clear just what a media scramble the whole Affair was.

For extensive background information on the Dreyfus affair, the personalities and the issues involved, see the generally excellent Dreyfus Rehabiliated website. Unfortunately its section on the films of the affair is muddled. For a concise and informative book acount, see Eric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics. For an atmospheric eye-witness account of the second trial itself, read G.W. Steevens’ The Tragedy of Dreyfus (1899), available from the Internet Archive.

The Biograph and Pathé films are not available online or on DVD.

The third and final part of this account will be a filmography.

L’affaire Dreyfus: la dictée du bordereau – the first part of Georges Méliès’ 1899 film series. October 1894 – Dreyfus (seated) gives a sample of his handwriting and is accused by Colonel Du Paty de Clam (left) of being the author of the Bordereau

I’m starting up a new series here at the Bioscope. It is going to document the ways in which the early motion picture recorded and influenced the lives of some significant individuals. Public lives from 1896 onwards started to be different to a significant degree because they began to be led in front of motion picture cameras, which could record them in reality or reconstitute them dramatically as entertainment. Each post in the series will investigate an individual of significance to social, cultural or political history and try to see them particularly in the light of the cinema. Each post will include a filmography including both non-fiction and fiction films. I don’t know whether any of the subjects will be actors or filmmakers – maybe so. But the series starts with a French soldier, victim of one of the most notorious cases of miscarriage of justice in history, Alfred Dreyfus.

The Dreyfus affair
Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a Jewish French officer, was arrested in October 1894 on suspicion of spying for Germany. A military court suspended him from the Army and on highly dubious evidence he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. In 1896 one Colonel Picquart found documents which seemed to offer convincing evidence of Dreyfus’ innocence and it became apparent that the guilty party was another French officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The military authorities under General Auguste Mercier ordered the matter hushed up, and Picquart was transfered to Tunis. But Dreyfus’ family continued to plead his cause, and a campaign led by the author Emile Zola (who wrote an open letter to the French president Émile Loubet famously entitled ‘J’accuse’) resulted in a fresh trial in 1899, which became a mockery through the Army’s refusal to admit that it could be in the wrong and the general anti-Jewish hysteria that abounded. Dreyfus was found guilty again (to the shock and disgust of world opinion), but President Loubet swiftly pardoned him. The case was reviewed in 1906 and Dreyfus found innocent. The whole affair saw France bitterly divided between Dreyfusards (generally liberals, Socialists, anti-clericals and intellectuals) and anti-Dreyfusards (generally Roman Catholics, monarchists, anti-Semites and nationalists). It became the major political crisis of the Third Republic, and seriously weakened the world view of France as a champion of liberal values.

L’affaire Dreyfus: L’île du diable. April 1895 – Dreyfus (seated) within the palisade on Devil’s Island, where a guard brings him a letter from his wife but is forbidden to speak to him. Dreyfus was imprisoned on the island for over four years.

The Dreyfus affair was debated across the world. It filled the newspapers, and the second trial at Rennes in 1899 witnessed a media frenzy of a kind we are all too familiar with today. Eager to participate in that frenzy and take advantage of one of the first news stories of worldwide interest to come into its view was the motion picture camera. Films were made of the Dreyfus affair because they were excellent business, but also – in one significant case – because they enabled the filmmaker to express his dedication to the Dreyfus cause. The motion picture industry responded with newsfilm, dramatic reconstructions and sketches, so that the Affair served as a demonstration of everything that the young medium could do to capture the semblance of reality.

L’affaire Dreyfus: Mise aux fers de Dreyfus. 6 September 1896 – Dreyfus is placed in irons inside his cell on Devil’s Island. He was shackled to his bed for a period between September-October 1896 after a false report of an escape attempt.

Four companies produced films on the Affair while it was ongoing: Star-Film (i.e. Georges Méliès), Pathé Frères, the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company and its sister company the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France. There’s a lot to cover so the latter three will be covered in a second post, with a full filmography in a third post. Here we will tackle the contribution by Georges Méliès.

Star-Film
George Méliès is said to have picked up his strong Dreyfusard feelings from discussions with his cousin Adolphe. It is heartening to know that France’s great creative filmmaker in the early years of cinema chose the right side. He set about making his Dreyfus films with an eye to commercial opportunity but also as a means to express his personal sympathies – probably the first time that film had ever been used in this way. His approach was radical – he would make a multi-part news narrative, tracing the Dreyfus story from his original imprisonment in 1894 to the second trial in 1899. At a time when films were almost entirely single-shot narratives of less than a minute in length, Méliès produced a 15-minute, eleven-part chronological series of documentary fidelity and great cinematic invention (strictly speaking it was twelve parts, as one scene covers two catalogue numbers in the Star-Film catalogue). Filming took place August-September 1899, while the trial was taking place, at his studios at Montreuil, Paris.

L’affaire Dreyfus: Suicide du Colonel Henry. 31 August 1898 – Colonel Joseph Henry, who discovered the ‘bordereau’ that incriminated Dreyfus but who later forged documents in an attempt to compromise the Dreyfus-supporting Colonel Picquard, cuts his throat with a razor while in prison in Paris.

Méliès did not consider filming actuality – he got nearer to his idea of the truth through dramatic recreation. He took great care to replicate locations, using newspaper illustrations and photographs as reference, and employing performers who looked like the leading players in the real-life drama. An unnamed blacksmith played Dreyfus because of a physical similarity, while Méliès himself played Dreyfus’ bearded lawyer, Fernand Labori. The choice of tableaux indicate Méliès’s sympathies while showing both his commercial sense and artistic imagination. The series (nine parts of the original eleven survive today at the BFI National Archive and are illustrated throughout this post) starts with Dreyfus being accused of writing the Bordereau, the notorious document that betrayed French military secrets to the Germans. The scene in which Dreyfus was dishonourably discharged from the French army by having his sword symbolically broken is lost, so next comes Dreyfus imprisoned on Devil’s Island, followed by a scene in his cell in which he is placed in leg-irons, punishment for a supposed escape attempt. Méliès’s Dreyfusard sympathies are already made clear. The scene then switches to France to show Colonel Henry in prison, the man whose zealous loyalty led him to forge documents intended to compromise Dreyfus supporter Colonel Picquard, spectacularly cutting his throat with a razor blade. It’s the point where Méliès meets Tarantino; probably the first blood to be seen shed in cinema history.

L’affaire Dreyfus: Débarquement à Quiberon. 30 June 1899 – Dreyfus (the figure in civilian clothes in the centre) returns to France at Quiberon (where a storm rages) to face his second trial.

With the next scene the news realism takes over. Dreyfus is shown returning to France at the port of Quiberon, at night, in the middle of a storm. Lightning flashes, the performers are soaked in water, sailors on the boat bob up and down on the waters – it is as far as possible the scene as it had occured only a few weeks before Méliès started filming. We then see Dreyfus in jail, where he converses with his lawyers (including Méliès as Labori, giving himself the heroic defender role – was this series the first set of films in which named living people were portrayed by actors?) before meeting with his wife Lucie in a calculatedly pathetic scene.

L’affaire Dreyfus: Entrevue de Dreyfus et de sa femme à Rennes. 1 July 1899 – Dreyfus (furthest right) in prison at Rennes meets his wife Lucie for the first time in four years. Georges Méliès, playing the lawyer Labori, is the figure in the centre, with another Dreyfus lawyer, Edgar Demange, portrayed to the right.

Next follows what was an assassination attempt on Labori, Méliès going to the trouble of replicating the locale, next to a bridge crossing the river Vilaine at Rennes. Labori survived a shot in the back and is seen in the next scene in which Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard journalists come to blows. The scene appears symbolic, but reflects actual uproar that occurred at the court-house in Rennes on 14 August 1899 when news of the attack on Labori was reported, with a confrontation occuring between anti-Dreyfusard Arthur Myer of the Gaulois and Dreyfusard ‘Séverine’ (Caroline Rémy) of the Fonde, as the Star-Film catalogue relates. A New York Times report makes clear the connection between the two incidents. For film form enthusiasts the scene is most remarkable for the way the journalists all run at and past the camera, breaking the cinema screen’s fourth wall in revolutionary style. However there is some dramatic licence, because the injured Labori did not return to the trial for a week after the shooting.

L’affaire Dreyfus: Attentat contre M. Labori. 14 August 1899 – In the company of Colonel Picquart and M. Gast, Mayor of Rennes, Dreyfus’s lawyer Labori is shot in the back by a would-be assassin beside the river Vilaine at Rennes.

L’affaire Dreyfus: Bagarre entre journalistes. 14 August 1899 – rival news reporters fight one another during the court martial proceedings upon hearing the news of the attempted assassination of Labori.

The double-length court room scene is where Méliès took the greatest trouble in depicting the news as it was more or less happening. The catalogue description makes clear the minute attention to detail regarding personality, action and appearance (text from the English language version in the Warwick Trading Company catalogue):

A scene in the Lycée at Rennes, showing the military court-martial of Captain Dreyfus. The only occupants of the room at this time are Maître Demange and secretary. Other advocates and the stenographers now begin to arrive and the sergeant is seen announcing the arrival of Colonel Jouaust and other officers comprising the seven judges of the court-martial. The five duty judges are also seen in the background. On the left of the picture are seen Commander Cordier and Adjutant Coupois, with their stenographers and gendarmes. On the right are seen Maître Demange, Labori, and their secretaries. Colonel Jouaust orders the Sergeant of the Police to bring in Dreyfus. Dreyfus enters, saluting the court, followed by the Captain of the Gendarmerie, who is constantly with him. They take their appointed seats in front of the judges. Colonel Jouaust puts several questions to Dreyfus, to which he replies in a standing position. He then asks Adjutant Coupois to call the first witness, and General Mercier arrives. He states that his deposition is a lengthy one, and requests a chair, which is passed to him by a gendarme. In a sitting position he proceeds with his deposition. Animated discussion and cross-questioning is exchanged between Colonel Jouaust, General Mercier, and Maître Demange. Captain Dreyfus much excited gets up and vigorously protests against these proceedings. This scene, which is a most faithful portrayal of this proceeding, shows the absolute portraits of over thirty of the principal personages in this famous trial.

L’affaire Dreyfus: Le conseil de guerre en séance à Rennes. 12 August 1899 – The court room at Rennes, with the lead prosecution witness General Mercier (centre) making a showy entrance. Dreyfus, dressed in military uniform, is seated on the raised dais to the right.

L’affaire Dreyfus concluded with a now-lost scene showing Dreyfus being led away to prison once more. The set of films was produced with the intention of capturing audience attention immediately following the trial (which ended on 9 September 1899). The films could be bought as a complete set (lasting some 15 minutes) or individually, according to taste and pocket. Méliès’ granddaughter much later wrote that there were pitched battles in the theatres where the films were shown. Police had to separate Dreyfusards from anti-Dreyfusards, which supposedly led to the film being banned by the French government and that consequently no film was allowed to be shown about the Dreyfus affair until 1930. However, there is no concrete documentary evidence that I’m aware of for the film being banned, or even for the scuffles in theatres, and in any case the French ban on accounts of the Dreyfus affair was not made until 1915 (so, for example, Pathé made a film about Dreyfus in 1908). However, there must have been great uncertainty among some exhibitors about showing the film, as film historian Stephen Bottomore suggests that some British theatres chose not to screen the films because of the unseemly passions they might arouse, so one can hardly expect less of a reaction that this in France. Nevertheless the films were never removed from the Star-Film catalogue, and by remaining on sale one has to deduce that they were never banned, not in France or anywhere else.

In truth we don’t know much about the reception of Méliès’ films. We have commentaries, and we have concerns raised in some quarters about the dramatisation of actuality. “Where is this new kind of photo-faking to stop?” asked Photographic News, wringing its hands in mock despair. What we can gather from watching what survives today is that the news story gave the filmmaker the opportunity to produce a documentary (there can be no other word for it) using every valid filmic device at his disposal while expressing through the mise-en-scène his sympathy for Dreyfus the victim.

Unsurprisingly the films do not give us much of an idea of Dreyfus the man, but it is remarkable that they give us anything of him at all. Throughout the affair, and in all acounts that were made of it, Alfred Dreyfus was a cipher, a figure upon who one could unload one’s prejudices or sympathies. Dreyfus (shown left, in 1895) was not an unremarkable man. He had had a notable military career, and was recognised for his keen intelligence. He seems to have been something of an unpopular figure, however, standing out from his fellow officers by being neither one of the humbler sort (he was wealthier than most of them) nor an aristocrat. A perceived aloofness stood against him. During both trials he refused to play the pity card and put his faith in reason – a stubborn policy when surrounded by such rabid anti-Semitism and blind refusal from many to accept that the French military could do any wrong. But there was nobility in such a stance, and Méliès’ Dreyfus does at least give us some sense of his principled forebearance, and this at a time when films had not yet advanced to giving much sense of individual character in dramatic representations. Among the many ‘firsts’ that can be ascribed to L’affaire Dreyfus is surely the first human portrayal of someone on screen.

The Méliès L’affaire Dreyfus is available to view online on the Europa Film Treasures site and as part of the 5-DVD set issued by Flicker Alley, Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) (also the source of the frame grabs used here). For a filmic analysis, see Michael Brooke’s Georges Méliès blog.

For extensive background information on the Dreyfus affair, the personalities and the issues involved, see the excellent Dreyfus Rehabiliated website. Unfortunately its section on the films of the affair is muddled. For a concise and informative book acount, see Eric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics.

The essential account of the Dreyfus Affair and early film is Stephen Bottomore’s essay ‘Dreyfus and Documentary’, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1984, to which these posts are much indebted.

Part two will explore the dramatic records made by Pathé, at the time of the trial and later, and the extraordinary actuality films of the trial made by Biograph. Part three will be a Dreyfus filmography.