The Dreyfus Affair (1899)

Original title

L'affaire Dreyfus

Directed by

Georges Méliès

Genre

drama film, silent film

Country

France

Runtime

11 min

Rating

5.5 of 10 from 49 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a series of eleven short silent films that reconstruct events from the real-life Dreyfus affair. It shows Alfred Dreyfus's arrest, imprisonment, and trial for treason, as well as related incidents like a suicide and an attack on his lawyer. The films suggest Dreyfus was innocent and framed.

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What happens

The Dreyfus Affair (French: L'affaire Dreyfus), also known as Dreyfus Court-Martial, is an 1899 series of eleven short silent films by Georges Méliès. Each of the eleven one-minute installments reconstructs an event from the real-life Dreyfus affair, which was still in progress while the series was being made. The series follows the case from Alfred Dreyfus's arrest on suspicion of espionage, through his imprisonments on Devil's Island and in Rennes, to his trial and conviction for treason; related events are also included, including the suicide of a main Dreyfus accuser, an unknown gunman's attempt to murder Dreyfus's attorney, and a public conflict between pro- and anti-Dreyfus factions. The series was acted in a restrained, realistic style vastly unlike Méliès's better-known fantasy films; the scenes were staged and advertised to suggest accurately that Dreyfus was innocent of espionage and had been framed. The real-life Dreyfus Affair attracted immense attention both in France and in Britain, and numerous films were made in both countries about the case. Méliès's version was highly publicized, and later recollections and legends claim that it caused considerable interest and controversy at the time. It remains the most famous example of Méliès's staged reconstructions of current events ("reconstructed actualities"), and nine of the eleven installments are known with certainty to survive. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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