In the middle of the film J'Accuse, there is a scene at a music recital, and the camera lingers on a group of attentive listeners. In the middle of this group is a figure with a large grey moustache, dressed in the uniform of a member of the French Academy. He looks at the musicians intently, and then slightly raises his head. This person is portrayed by the film's director, Roman Polanski, at the very centre of the frame, at the centre of the film and the centre of events.
Obviously the film came out with a lot of controversy, a few days before the premiere a woman claimed she had been raped violently by Polanski in the 1970s. This is now normal for his life, that claims such as these are given huge media attention, while no real way is allowed for denial except for him to say that he didn't do it. These claims are always made beyond a time period where they can be investigated, and lead to a situation where the mud sticks, no matter what ever anyone says. Polanski also received a lot of media attention when he said that he could identify with the events of the film in a personal way, and again his statements were ignored. And, if you are wondering why he is wearing the ornate outfit in this scene, it is because he is a member of the French Academy, which is one of the highest accolades you can be accorded in France.
The film is visually stunning and with locations such as Les Invalides and L'École Militaire that is hardly surprising, the costumes, lighting and acting are equally superb, some scenes are reminiscent of a Tissot painting, while others reference early photography. But for me the most stunning scene of all is when Colonel Picard enters the office of Alphonse Bertillon, the policeman who formulated the first main forensic investigations into crime and criminals. I watched J'Accuse in the UCG cinema in the boulevard St Germain on Monday of this week, and when Picquart stepped into the room I gasped - audibly - as I had seen that room earlier in the day.
I travelled into the misty wintery mess of Paris that at the moment is strike bound, the grève illimitée where many transport workers are striking and have been for well over a month. Getting around the city is slow, sometimes aggressive and very tiring. However I only had limited time left to visit an exhibition at the Archives Nationale - outside the city limits, so even more painful to travel to - before the exhibition ended, and it was an exhibition dedicated to the work of Alphonse Bertillon. When I was much younger I wrote my MA thesis on how anarchists were shown in the media during the period 1880 to 1910, and I looked at cartoons, illustrated newspapers and novels about anarchists. I have continued my involvement with this subject, and when I found out about the exhibition I decided I had to see it.
I have never fitted into life very well. When I was a child I knew we were different as a family, but couldn't quite work out why, maybe it was because my dad was Irish, but I knew that our house, our looks, our set up, our way of doing things was unlike our neighbours or the people I went to school with. It was only many years later that I realised that it wasn't just that we were Irish, but Irish Traveller, and settled, living in a house, at that. I wasn't English, I wasn't Irish, I wasn't Traveller, I wasn't settled. I've never really worked out how I feel about being comfortable in society, in a house, in a caravan, delivering a paper at an academic conference. I belong in all of those places and in none of them. When I also discovered anarchism, it felt as though it was an identity that I could fit into, as it was the politics of the outcast, and of the many people Bertillon catalogued in his records, a high number of them were anarchists, and not just anarchists, but either survivors of the Paris Commune, or children of murdered communards.
The exhibition was stunning, with set ups of equipment used to photograph, fingerprint and catalogue the population of criminals and later a wider proportion of the Paris population, who were probably innocent of any crime. When you see photographs of maybe twenty or thirty different types of ears or hairlines or noses or chins or eyebrows or anything else, along side a chair for photographing people, you recognise so much stuff from elsewhere, the elsewhere being Auschwitz, where Roman Polanski's mother (who at the time was pregnant) was murdered. The chair for taking photos of prisoners is below :
At the top of the chair is a metal band for holding the prisoner's head in a straight position, and below you can see the similar piece of metal used to hold the heads of prisoners in the Auschwitz camp :
I have thought hard about including this photo, as the prisoner has relations somewhere, but it comes from the Auschwitz Memorial page on Twitter, where they hope to personalise such a huge, faceless experience and bring home to people the individuals, like Polanski's mother, involved. This is a photograph of Anton Frydrych, who was murdered when he was just 42.
When I first went into the exhibition I was excited - I had managed to get one of the few metros running that day and had an easy journey. The building was easy to find, and I went in with my researcher hat on, excited to see what they had. Very quickly my researcher hat fell off, looking at the ways people just like myself were coded, examined, classified, coded some more and found guilty. The handprints of the Bonnot Gang were heartbreaking in a way I can't quantify, and the endless photos of criminals - or just members of the public - were very reminiscent of the daily photos of prisoners of Auschwitz. The attempts at identifying criminals, which originated with Cesare Lombroso (whose work I discussed in my MA thesis) and which influenced Bertillon hugely, took on a feeling of mania, that if only we can look at the way a person's eyebrows are, or the shape of the tip of their nose, or how long their forearm is, then they are an enemy.
Bertillon got it wrong, of course. The only reason Colonel Picquart visits him in the film is that Bertillon was an expert witness at Dreyfus's trial, and part of his conviction lay with Bertillon's graphology. The writing was near enough identical to Dreyfus's, near enough for him to be found guilty, but once Picquart has seen the handwriting of the person who really wrote the letters, it is clear that Dreyfus did not write them. Here in the film, plainly using the original chair, and the head measuring device and the camera that I had seen that morning, fact and film and Polanski's life merged into one. Not only had his Jewish mother been classified in the same nightmarish way that Dreyfus had, Polanski had sent off handwriting examples of someone he noticed had similar writing to that found at the murder scene of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and some of his friends, in a desperate attempt to identify her killers.
My family were regularly hauled through the media in 2011 when Dale Farm, then the largest traveller site in Europe, and owned by my cousins, was being evicted. One newspaper said my cousin Margaret should be forcibly sterilised, as she let her daughter have a fake tan as part of her preparations for making her First Holy Communion. Another commentator said that my family should be crucified along the side of the arterial road in Essex, as a warning to other Travellers, so that they didn't try and make their home in the county. I had a long conversation with a black woman on Twitter who told me that I had bags of white privilege as I could 'blend in' and enjoy the benefits of being white. When I asked her how, as the ethnic minority who were at the bottom of every league table for indicators of progress, such as health, education, wealth, representation in the prison population, and how on earth could they know how to 'blend in' with middle class society, she told me I was interpreting the statistics to suit my own arguments and said at length that I was a racist and couldn't understand how black people feel in their oppression. It's also worth noting that in the UK, the only ethnic minority that has a government policy - ie where we can live, where we can't live, how many of us can live somewhere, in what conditions - are gypsies and travellers.
J'Accuse begins with Dreyfus being stripped of his epaulettes, his badges, buttons and his sword being broken, the pile of these things lying at his feet on the ground. Dreyfus protests his innocence, on one side of him the abusive crowd, on the other the silent ranks of the French military. Throughout the film there are scenes of book burning, anti Semitic graffiti and smashing of windows of Jewish businesses; there are scenes of Dreyfus being escorted to his trial as a baying crowd is held back, or looking out of a prison window, or sometimes just protesting his innocence. Roman Polanski had experienced all of those events (once having to go to a court hearing on the anniversary of the death of his wife and son). The original 1978 charge of 'underage sex' is now described as 'raping a child' - language changes, and Gramsci said that if you want to change what people think, change the language they use, and well, hasn't he been proved right. The underage girl is now a supporter of Polanski, and wants the charges dropped, at the same time as firmly saying that women should not be branded as permanent victims. Concurrently women come up with stories about him that prove to be fabrications once they are looked into, while he protests his innocence of the subsequent accusations.
Ravachol, the anarchist bomber, was featured in the exhibition - his police card is above. He did all sorts of dreadful things, but also looked after his aged mother and gave money to the poor. We are none of us good or bad, angels or demons, but many of us find that by a mistake or a twist of history or just something else, we find ourselves being the enemy. We can lamely protest our innocence - Ravachol never thought to, he held up his hands and said yes, I did this, just as Polanski did in 1978 - but the only thing that people remember is the detritus, the pile of our buttons and our broken swords on the ground. If this happens to you, then just pray that there is someone like Picquart who will stand up for you - because most people won't.
Comments
Post a Comment