Usually his short films are magic shows, here and there some fairytale or sci-fi work, but this was a completely different approach. It's pretty long. it says 13 minutes here, although the version I saw was about eleven minutes long. In any case, it's among the longest films from this point and would be seen in our world as a three- or four-hour-film put into relation to running times of other films back then. Also it consists of several segments that almost stand for themselves and, I believe, have their own IMDb profile pages as well. While watching this film, you really need to make sure you see the intertitles, otherwise you're quickly lost and don't really understand what is going on here. The crime genre hasn't been popular in early film at all, so it's an okay distraction from the usual and here and there even interesting despite its flaws. The biggest may be the ending. There's really no value to the courtroom scene at all apart from the historical context. And strangely enough it seems to be also the longest sequence although much more understandable action is happening in the earlier ones. The film is packed with drama: We have a suicide, an assassination attempt and a brawl among other things. So even if Méliès does without the supernatural aspects here, it's still pretty spectacular. Unfortunately, I didn't find it as interesting as it could have been.
Review of L'affaire Dreyfus
