Abel Gance Films | Abel Gance Filmography | Abel Gance Biography | Abel Gance Career | Abel Gance Awards

Abel Gance's career as a director was long and flamboyant. He wrote his first scripts in 1909, turning to directing a couple of years later, and made his last feature, Cyrano et d'Artagnan, in 1964. As late as 1971 he re-edited a four-hour version of his Napoleon footage to make Bonaparte et la r?volution, and he lived long enough to see his work again reach wide audiences.

Gance's original aspirations were as a playwright, and throughout his life he treasured the manuscript of his verse tragedy La Victoire de Samothrace, written for Sarah Bernhardt and on the brink of production when the war broke out in 1914. If Gance's beginnings in the film industry he then despised were unremarkable, he showed his characteristic audacity and urge for experimentation with an early work, the unreleased La Folie du Docteur Tube, which made great use of distorting lenses, in 1916. He learned his craft in a dozen or more films during 1916 and 1917?the best remembered of which are Les Gaz mortels, Barberousse, and Mater dolorosa. He reached fresh heights with a somewhat pretentious and melodramatic study of a great and suffering composer, La Dixi?me Symphonie. Even more significant was his ambitious and eloquent antiwar drama, J'Accuse, released in 1919. These films established him as the leading French director of his generation and gave him a preeminence he was not to lose until the coming of sound.

The 1920s saw the release of just three Gance films. If Au secours!, a comedy starring his friend Max Linder, is something of a lighthearted interlude, the other two are towering landmarks of silent cinema. La Roue began as a simple melodramatic tale, but in the course of six months scripting and a year's location shooting, the project took on quite a new dimension. In the central figure of Sisif, Gance seems to have struggled to create an amalgam of Oedipus, Sisyphus, and Lear. Meanwhile portions of the film that were eventually cut apparently developed a social satire of such ferocity that the railway unions demanded its excision. The most expensive film as yet made in France, its production was again delayed when the death of Gance's wife caused him to abandon work and take a five month trip to the United States.

Like his previous work, La Roue had been conceived and shot in the pre-1914 style of French cinema, which was based on a conception of film as a series of long takes, each containing a significant section of the action, rather than as a succession of scenes made up of intercut shots of different lengths, taken from varying distances. But in Hollywood, where he met D.W. Griffith, Gance came into contact with the new American style of editing. Upon his return to France, Gance spent a whole year re-editing his film. On its release in 1923 La Roue proved to be one of the stunning films of the decade. Even in its shortened version?comprising a prologue and four parts?the film had a combined running time of nearly eight hours.

Gance's imagination and energy at this period seemed limitless. Almost immediately he plunged into an even vaster project whose title clearly reflects his personal approach, Napol?on va par Abel Gance. If La Roue was particularly remarkable for its editing (certain sequences are classic moments of French 1920s avant-garde experimentation), Napol?on attracted immediate attention for its incredibly mobile camerawork, created by a team under the direction of Jules Kruger. Napol?on thus emerges as a key masterpiece of French cinema at a time when visual experimentation took precedence over narrative and the disorganization of production offered filmmakers the chance to produce extravagant and ambitious personal works within the heart of the commercial industry. Gance's conception of himself as visionary filmmaker and of Napoleon as a master of his destiny points to the roots of Gance's style in the nineteenth century and his romantic view of the artist as hero. The scope of Gance's film, bursting into triple screen effects at the moment of Napoleon's climactic entry into Italy, remains staggering even today.

The 1920s in France was a period of considerable creative freedom. Given this atmosphere, a widespread urge to experiment with the full potential of the medium was apparent. If the freedom came from the lack of a tightly controlled studio system, the desire to explore new forms of filmic expression can be traced to a reaction against the situation imposed by Path? and Gaumont before 1914, when film was seen as a purely commercial product, underfinanced and devoid of artistic or personal expression. This had been the cinema in which Gance had made his debut, and he was one of those striving most forcefully in the 1920s both to increase the possibilities for personal expressiveness and to widen the technical scope of cinema. He pioneered new styles of cutting and camerawork, as well as widescreen and multiscreen techniques.

It is ironic, then, that the advent of the greatest technical innovation of the period left Gance stranded. The explanation for this lies less in the irrelevance of sound to his personal vision of the medium?he was pioneering a new stereophonic system with La Fin du monde as early as 1929?than the fact that new forms of tighter production control were implemented as a result of the greater costs associated with sound filmmaking.

The 1930s emerge as a sad era for a man accustomed to being in the forefront of the French film industry. Gance, whose mind had always teemed with new and original projects, was now reduced to remaking his old successes: sound versions of Mater dolorosa in 1932, Napol?on Bonaparte in 1934, and J'accuse in 1937. Otherwise, the projects he was allowed to make were largely adaptations of fashionable stage dramas or popular novels: Le Ma?tre de forges, Poliche, La Dame aux cam?lias, and Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre. In the late 1930s he was able to treat subjects in which his taste for grandly heroic figures is again apparent: Savonarola in Lucr?ce Borgia and the great composer?played by Harry Baur?in Un Grand Amour de Beethoven, but by 1942, when he made Le Capitaine Fracasse, Gance's career seemed to have come to an end.

Though a dozen years were to pass before he directed another feature film, Gance maintained his incredible level of energy. Refusing to be beaten, he continued his experiments with ?polyvision? which were to culminate in his Magirama spectacle. He eventually made three further features, all historical dramas in which his zest, if not the old towering imagination, is still apparent: La Tour de Nesle, Austerlitz, and Cyrano et d'Artagnan.

The French 1920s cinema of which Gance is the major figure has consistently been undervalued by film historians, largely because its rich experimentation with visual style and expressiveness was not accompanied by an similar concern with the development of film narrative. Gance's roots were in the nineteenth century romantic tradition, and despite his literary background, he, like his contemporaries, was willing to accept virtually any melodramatic story that would allow him to pursue his visual interests. For this reason French 1920s work has been marginalized in accounts of film history that see the growth of storytelling techniques as the central unifying factor. The rediscovery of Gance's Napol?on in the 1980s, though thanks largely to twenty years of effort by Kevin Brownlow, has made clear to the most skeptical the force and mastery achieved in the years preceding the advent of sound, and restored Gance?s reputation as a master of world cinema.?ROY ARMES