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.

Paty de Clam demands a sample of Dreyfus's handwriting, to see if it matches the writing on the Bordereau (an anonymous letter to the German Embassy that has been discovered by French counterintelligence).

The table below gives each installment's chronological order (#), numbering in Star Film catalogs (SFC), English release titles for the US and UK, original French title, and length in meters (m), as well as the individual scene summaries from the catalog released on 1 November 1899 by the Warwick Trading Company, the only known British firm to sell all eleven installments of the series.

One story goes that Francis Doublier, a filmmaker working for the Lumière brothers, went so far in 1898 as to string together unconnected film clips, presenting the melange with a running spoken commentary claiming that he was showing Dreyfus, the courthouse where he was sentenced to Devil's Island, and the ship carrying him there.

[7] The French branch of the Biograph Company captured short clips of newsreel footage of the trial at Rennes, while its English counterpart released two fictional films inspired by the affair.

[12] The series is an elaborate example of Méliès's actualitiés reconstituées ("reconstructed actualities"), films in which current events were recreated in an evocative docudrama-like format.

[16] Méliès drew on both cinematic and theatrical special effects for the series: the lightning in Landing of Dreyfus at Quiberon was added to the scene using multiple exposure, while the rain and rocking motion of the boat were created with stage machinery.

[9] Images of characters reading and writing are pervasive throughout the series, serving as a constant reminder of the importance of various documents to the Dreyfus affair.

[14] In a 1930 article for the Paris magazine L'Œuvre, Lucien Wahl recollected that The Dreyfus Affair had caused riotous reactions in France, with Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards arguing noisily during screenings.

[30] Though these details were quickly taken up by film historians and reprinted, there is no evidence that the series was banned immediately on a national level; Méliès continued to sell it in his catalogues until 1906, seven years later.

[22] However, it is possible that some local French officials and exhibitors held a moratorium on Dreyfus-related films due to their controversial nature, as some British cinema owners are known to have done.

[33] The Dreyfus Affair remains the most famous of Méliès's reconstructed actualities, surpassing even his highly successful 1902 work in the genre, The Coronation of Edward VII.

[21] In a study of the Dreyfus affair, the cultural historian Venita Datta comments appreciatively on the dramatic power of Méliès's series, with the combat between Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard journalists "brilliantly played up".