Abel Gance was the major figure among directors in 1920s French film, and among the most ambitious visionaries of the silent cinema. Fueled by literary ambitions from childhood, Gance began working as an actor at the age of 19, with the ambition of breaking into playwriting. In 1909, Gance managed to get a job writing movie scenarios for Gaumont and, by 1911, was directing them. None of Gance’s earliest films survive, but his first viewable effort demonstrates that he was already pioneering the use of unusual visual effects. In the short La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915), Gance uses an anamorphic lens to illustrate the story of a mad doctor who uses a ray to twist everyday objects and people out of shape. Gance gained his first good notices from critics with Mater Dolorosa (1917), a genuine tragedy without a “happy ending,” relatively rare in French cinema of the day. With this film, Gance began to use editing and camerawork to project the interior thoughts of his characters.
The success of Mater Dolorosa precipitated a string of hits for Gance, including Barberousse (Red Beard, 1917), La Zone de la Mort (1917), and La Dixième Symphonie (The Tenth Symphony, 1918). In the midst of all this, Gance was mobilized to the front lines of the First World War, gassed, and nearly killed. On August 25, 1918, Gance returned to the front with a camera crew and began shooting his first major epic, an antiwar film entitled J’accuse! (1919). Gance takes a conventional love triangle and expands it into a grand tapestry that encompasses the evil horror of the “Great War,” utilizing the actual battlefront itself as a stage. J’accuse! was a huge success worldwide and made Gance’s reputation.
Between 1919 and 1921, Gance shot millions of meters of film, all on location, on his next project, La Roue. This was a highly convoluted mixture of the Oedipus and Sisyphus myths, centering on a love triangle between an aging railroad engineer, his young son, and the secretly adopted daughter/sister who grew up within their family. Just as Gance got started cutting La Roue, his own young wife died of tuberculosis. Much to the shock of Gance’s silent partner, producer Charles Pathé, Gance promptly got up and walked away from the film, leaving it behind in a rough cut some eight hours in length. Gance then traveled to America, basking in the attention surrounding J’accuse!, paying a visit to his idol, D.W. Griffith, and briefly entertaining the idea of working at United Artists. After four months, Gance returned to France to his furious producer.
Reports vary as to how long La Roue finally ran upon its appearance in 1922, but the “restored” 1980 version of 303 minutes seems close to the mark; it is most commonly seen today in the 1924 general-release version of 130 minutes. This version contains most of the essentials of this historically important film — Gance’s radical overlaying of moving images such as railroad tracks, rapid cutting, and mental/visual associations. In one scene in the instant before a character falls to his death from a cliff, his life flashes before his eyes (and the viewer’s) in single frames. Gance had discovered “Russian editing” before the Russians did. The immediate impact and immense popularity of La Roue was unprecedented for a film made in France. Nonetheless, it was a very expensive production; its long screen time and delayed production made it hard for La Roue to turn a profit. Gance’s backers began to wonder, even at this early stage, how much his artistic independence was going to cost them.
With his next film, all those concerns were temporarily delayed. Au secours! (Help!, 1923) was a low budget two-reel haunted-house comedy starring Max Linder. This film was a huge smash and played in French cinemas for years, and it would prove a last hurrah for the ill-fated Linder, who shortly thereafter died by his own hand. In 1924, Gance began to map out the production that would ultimately define his career, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance. This was a grand historical epic covering Napoléon’s career from childhood to the brink of the Italian campaign. While in historical terms Gance’s Napoléon would be presented with little depth or complexity, the result would be rich in visual effects never seen before, and in some cases not since. The screen would be divided into many parts during action scenes, and into “tryptichs” presaging wide-screen formats, called “Polyvision” by Gance. Cameras were mounted on horses, swings, sent plunging into crowds or seen taking in huge panoramic vistas. Gance’s editing was as razor-tight as ever, and the action onscreen constantly kept in motion. Napoléon was completed in 1927 and shown in the capitals of Europe to unanimous acclaim. It was also one of the longest films on record; early screenings are rumored to have run some six hours, although the 435-minute “restored” 1981 cut overseen by Kevin Brownlow is believed to be within a minute or two of the original length. By 1928, it was already reduced to 180 minutes. Despite its technical mastery and the sheer amount of audacious genius that went into making Napoléon, the long screen time worked against its profitability, as it could only be showed once a day. Very few theaters wanted to commit to showing a film of this length. Over time, increasingly more of Napoléon was whittled away, and in the end it was completely pulled apart for the benefit of stock-shot libraries. In its original form, it never turned a profit.
Gance was convinced that his wide-screen “Polyvision” process represented the future of filmmaking. After making a short demonstrating the Polyvision principle, Gance embarked on another full-length Polyvision film, Le fin du monde (The End of the World, 1931). This was to have been a silent science-fiction film in which a comet would have been shown hurtling across three screens, slamming into the earth. With costs running out of control, producers L’Ecran d’Art pulled the plug on the film, added poorly dubbed sound, cut it from 93 to 55 minutes, and eliminated the Polyvision sequences. In 1933, Gance made, at his own expense, a synchronized sound version of Napoléon that made use of an audio technology he had patented with André Debrie called “Sound Perspective.” This was a multi-channel sound system that was capable of sending specific sounds into specific speakers within a movie theater, far more advanced than the three-channel stereophonic system Disney developed for Fantasia (“Fantasound”) six years later. But this sound version of Napoléon proved an expensive failure.
It is often said about Gance that he “never made the transition to sound film,” a curious statement about a director who continued to work on soundstages until 1963. Dialogue did tend to slow the pacing of his films down, sometimes to a veritable crawl, and his handling of talky scenes hearkens back to his early grounding in stage traditions. But Gance’s output after 1927 is dramatically different from what went before, being much more generally uneven in terms of quality. What changed was not so much the added technology of sound, but Gance’s relationship with his producers. They made it clear to Gance that they were not going to continue to make an exception for him in terms of budgets, and that he was expected to keep within his parameters whether or not it impacted the artistic outcome of the film. While Gance’s younger contemporaries, such as Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, flourished under tight budgets and short shooting schedules, Gance viewed it as a personal assault on his integrity as an artist. Unlike Erich Von Stroheim, who reached the same crossroads with Queen Kelly (1928) and proceeded to wear out his welcome with the failed Walking Down Broadway (1932), Gance decided to give his producers what he thought they wanted, and curtail his talent to fit their requirements.
Throughout the 1930s, Gance accepted a number of mediocre projects that really weren’t worthy of his time. There were a few exceptions; Lucrezia Borgia (1935) would easily earn an R-rating today through its frank depictions of sexuality, violence, and torture. Gance also remade several of his hit films from the silent period. The sound version of J’accuse! (1937) has a conclusion which is so effective that your hair will stand on end, that is, if you can make it through the grindingly slow first hour of exposition. Some other Gance efforts of the 1930s, however, are barely watchable — Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936) never gets off the ground, hampered by its leaden pacing, the overtly melodramatic acting of Harry Baur, and Gance’s own heavy-handed use of the “fate motive” of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at literally every dramatic turn of the story.
By 1943, Gance was forced to flee France in order to avoid the German occupation and its deadly Vichy government. This kept Gance out of the film industry altogether for more than a decade. When he returned, the situation was entirely different — the Cahiers du Cinéma group, with its notions of the “Nouvelle Vague,” were swiftly becoming a force to reckoned with in French Cinema. They viewed Gance’s deliberately pretentious historical dramas as a sort of right-wing fascism that was beneath contempt. Gance’s final historical epic, The Battle of Austerlitz (1960), came under particular fire from the Cahiers cinéastes, who practically accused Gance of making films that were Nazi-sympathetic. Under such circumstances, Gance decided to keep a low profile, working infrequently in films until he achieved his final edit of Napoléon, entitled Bonaparte et la Revolution (1971). Even this is a bit of a curiosity, given its added scenes, benign narration, and running time of less than a quarter of the original Napoléon’s screen time.
Behind the scenes, English film enthusiast Kevin Brownlow had begun by 1954 to assemble a collection of shots from Napoléon from a variety of sources ranging from Pathé Ciné-baby 9.5 mm prints to partial 35 mm Polyvision segments. Brownlow’s intention was to return Napoléon to its 1927 running time, and the results of his first efforts toward this end were shown at the New York Film Festival of 1964. The underground New York filmmakers realized that Gance’s single-frame cutting and other radical visual effects were right in line with their own work, and Gance’s reputation as an avant-gardist was gradually reaffirmed to him in English-speaking lands. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola engaged Brownlow to spearhead a major 70 mm format reconstruction of the complete Napoléon for general release, an unprecedented step in the recovery of silent era films. This was an immediate success, and a delight to Gance himself, who lived just long enough to witness the news of Napoléon’s revival and renewed worldwide acclaim.
In 2001, Kevin Brownlow introduced an “improved” reconstruction of Napoléon, and one by one Gance’s other films were being revived. In some cases it’s an uphill battle; Gance is about as bad as “bad” gets. Nonetheless, if Napoléon was the only film Abel Gance had ever made, he would still be regarded as one of the major French filmmakers of all time, and thus there is reason to believe that his other films may yield visual treasures yet unknown. After seeing J’accuse! and Gance’s treatment of the war, a subject that has perhaps suffered from clumsy interpretation more than any event, one instinctively knows there is something in this young French producer that is not ordinary. He thinks on a plane not usual in the best of motion picture circles, and he understands the spiritual power of the cinema. His idea is to portray on the screen what the eye cannot see — to put it more simply, to give people something to think about and not to have their mental labors performed for them.
—allmovie guide
