Abel Gance

French filmmaker

• Born: October 25, 1889
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: November 10, 1981
• Place of death: Paris, France

Gance was the first French filmmaker to recognize and realize the full spectacular effect of the cinema, by means of new techniques of editing and montage and by inventions that advanced the art and scope of the cinema.

Early Life

Abel Gance (gawns) was born in Paris to Adolphe and Françoise Perthon Gance. He was educated first at the Collège du Chantilly and later at the Collège Chaptal in Paris. At the age of eighteen, he became an actor at the Théâtre du Parc in Brussels, then a playwright. By 1909, he had made his debut as a film actor in Léonce Perret’s Molière and was selling scenarios to Gaumont. In between he was afflicted with tuberculosis, from which he eventually recovered.

Very early, Gance became involved with a group of artists and critics who believed that cinema was an important means of artistic expression, not merely a form of bastardized melodrama and commercial entertainment. His circle of friends included the art historian Élie Faure, the cineast and critic Jean Epstein, and the journalist and editor Ricciotto Canudo, who founded Montjoie in 1913 as a journal of “French cultural imperialism,” and in 1922 the Gazette des Sept Arts, behind which stood the Friends of the Seventh Art, a group of poets, painters, architects, musicians, and filmmakers.

Gance was particularly influenced by Canudo and his theory of the seven arts, which defined cinema as “the total art towards which the other arts, since the beginning, have always tended.” This vision of what Gance and his friends believed was the destiny of the cinema helped to shape Gance’s most ambitious film projects and is most clearly evident in his greatest films J’Accuse! (1919), La Roue (1923), and the epic Napoléon (1927).

Life’s Work

By 1911, Gance had recovered sufficiently from his bout with tuberculosis to form a film production company and directed his first film, La Digue. During the next several years, he alternated his work between stage and screen and wrote a play entitled Victoire de Samothrace, which would have been produced with Sarah Bernhardt had war not broken out. By 1915, Gance was experimenting in cinema with subjective camera techniques and images filmed through distorting mirrors in La Folie du Docteur Tube, which became an avant-garde landmark in France.

Gance was mobilized into the Service Cinématographie de l’Armée but was ultimately exempted from service at the front during World War I because of his still fragile health. By September of 1917, he was successfully directing films for the Film d’Art Company and had made Mater Dolorosa, which was both a critical and a commercial success. Considered the most promising young director in France, he then made his celebrated antiwar film J’Accuse! in 1918, with its impassioned rhetorical plea for peace.

As he approached his next project, Gance had met and fallen in love with Ida Danis, a secretary at the Film d’Art Company, and divorced his wife, Mathilde, to live with her while working on La Roue , an extravagantly ambitious and innovative melodrama involving a love triangle, with a poetic railway worker as its hero. Both Gance and Danis were afflicted by an influenza epidemic during this time. Gance recovered sufficiently to complete filming his picture, but Danis, seriously ill with pulmonary tuberculosis, died in April of 1921, the day that the shooting of La Roue was completed. Séverin Mars, his star actor and closest friend, also died, and the bereaved Gance, unable to concentrate on his work, sailed to the United States, leaving the editing of La Roue uncompleted.

While in the United States, Gance met D. W. Griffith (who had seen and admired J’Accuse!) and was offered but declined a Hollywood contract to direct for Metro. Instead, Gance returned to France to complete La Roue, rejuvenated by his American travels. His final editing of La Roue was marked with genius as he organized the images to punctuate the emotional currents of this epic melodrama. The rapid-cutting techniques of La Roue were dazzling and unique, and the picture was studied closely in the Soviet Union, anticipating the creative montage style later developed by Sergei Eisenstein.

La Roue also established Gance’s reputation as an extravagant, epic filmmaker. No record survives of the exact length of the film initially premiered at the Gaumont Palace in December of 1922, but the version announced for the Paris release of 1923 was nearly nine hours long (thirty-six reels). The version actually released in February of 1923 was thirty-one reels; a much shorter fourteen-reel version that ran to three and a half hours was distributed abroad, and the film survives only in this shortened version.

The extravagance of La Roue was soon to be matched and surpassed, however, by Gance’s next major project, his epic Napoléon of 1927, which was to mark the high point of a career that would dwindle over the next three decades, not in the number, but in the quality, of films made. Gance was a true pioneer who was destined to outlive his own period of brilliant innovation. Fortunately, Gance lived long enough to weather the storm of his own fallen reputation and saw the great revival of interest in his work that was to come during the 1980’s.

Therefore, when he died on November 10, 1981, at home after nine days of treatment in a Boulogne hospital, Gance was not exactly forgotten. For a number of years during the 1960’s, his films were not readily available and were hardly ever shown. Although he was demonstrably one of the true pioneers of the cinema, his masterpiece, Napoléon, had disappeared from view and had not been seen properly presented since its spectacular premiere at the Paris Opéra in 1927. Meanwhile, his other innovative silent features, J’Accuse! and La Roue, were all but forgotten, even by presumably qualified film historians, as were his best talking pictures, in particular his Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936; The Life and Loves of Beethoven ) and his 1937 remake of his pacifist classic, J’Accuse!

His reputation was revived, however, during the 1970’s, largely because of the respect that Gance inspired among other more contemporary filmmakers. François Truffaut, for example, called Gance’s Napoléon “an unassailable monument.” In 1972, the filmmaker Claude Lelouch helped Gance to produce Bonaparte et la Revolution , an archival oddity, assembled from Gance’s silent masterpiece, intercut with dubbed footage from Gance’s 1934 sound remake of Napoléon and newly shot footage; this film was a strange pastiche that offered glimpses of Gance’s original genius and set the stage for the glorious later revival of the silent Napoléon in London and New York, properly presented with triple-screen projection and a live orchestra. The New York revival was promoted by Francis Ford Coppola and proved to be an astonishing commercial success.

Two gifted and dedicated filmmakers kept Gance’s reputation alive by directing documentary films that covered the artist’s career. Nelly Kaplan, herself a Gance protégé, made a short film in 1963 entitled Abel Gance, hier et demain . The British filmmaker, archivist, and television producer Kevin Brownlow made a longer documentary entitled The Charm of Dynamite (1968) that captured a sense of Gance’s enthusiasm, even in his advanced years, and his personal dynamism.

During an active filmmaking career that began in 1911, before Griffith had revolutionized the cinema with The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), and ended in 1971 with Bonaparte et la Revolution, Gance made many films, but his reputation depends mainly on six major features: J’Accuse! (two versions), La Roue, Napoléon, The Life and Loves of Beethoven, and Cyrano et d’Artagnan (1963). He made lesser films, but he made them “not to live, but in order not to die.” Even in his advanced years, Gance was still vibrant with ideas.

As early as 1915, Gance was experimenting with distorting lenses for visual effect in La Folie du Docteur Tube. Gance’s best work resulted, however, in grand spectacles of feeling that were at times overstated (as in the patriotic Napoléon) but always marked by dazzling visual pyrotechnics, as evident in La Roue, a melodrama built on the emotional anguish of a railway engineer determined to protect a young woman whom he loves. In completing La Roue, Gance revolutionized his montage approach and created a landmark of avant-garde experimentalism.

With Napoléon, Gance drew on French patriotism in romanticizing the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise to power. Because of its visual experimentalism, extending the flamboyant montage technique of La Roue, overlapping images, inventing a split-screen technique, and, finally, utilizing a triptych effect that blended images from three separate cameras, Gance created with Napoléon the core masterwork of early French cinema. Later, with The Life and Loves of Beethoven, Gance wedded images and music to portray the composer’s heroic efforts to overcome his hearing disability so as to continue his musical career. When properly inspired by elevated subjects and themes, Gance’s filmmaking was both distinctive and peerless.

Significance

Gance’s genius depended on his ability to recognize the spectacular potential of the cinema and to invent the means of realizing that potential Polyvision (in many forms, involving split frames, overlapping images, rapid-fire editing, and triple-screen projection), Perspective Sound, and the Pictographe (involving through-the-lens trickery). Gance’s editing techniques, moreover, were arguably as interesting and as effective in their own way as the more celebrated editing techniques of Eisenstein, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union. In a very real sense Gance was to French cinema what Griffith had been to the American cinema, a true pioneer and innovator.

Ultimately Gance was not forgotten. In 1973, Brownlow’s reconstructed version of Napoléon was shown at the American Film Institute’s Theater in Washington’s Kennedy Center. In 1974, Gance was awarded the International Grand Cinema Prize and earned the rank of Commander in the French Legion of Honor. Gance was also honored at the Telluride Film Festival of 1979, which he personally attended, and in 1981 Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that the Radio City premiere of the restored Napoléon would remain “the film event of the year,” as, indeed, it was. When Gance died in 1981, a delegation from the French ministry of culture was assigned to organize a memorial tribute. Also, by then the standard film history texts had been revised to give more careful attention to his many achievements and his flamboyant, expansive, innovative, and pioneering creative genius.

Bibliography

Blumer, R. H. “The Camera as Snowball: France 1918-1927.” Cinema Journal 9 (Spring, 1970): 31-39. This survey of silent French cinema includes a section entitled “Gance: Metaphor and Distortion,” considering the director’s innovations.

Brownlow, Kevin.“Napoleon”: Abel Gance’s Classic Film. New ed. London: Photoplay, 2004. Tells the story of Gance’s masterpiece, from original production details to the restoration and reconstruction of the five-hour film Brownlow reassembled, with Gance’s advice.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Parade’s Gone By . . . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. This book on silent cinema is dedicated to Gance. Chapter 46 presents a thorough account of Gance’s innovative work, providing the first full introduction to the director published in English.

Diamond, Hanna, and Simon Kitson, eds. Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France. New York: Berg, 2005. Includes an essay about Gance’s two versions of the film J’Accuse!

Gilliatt, Penelope. “The Current Cinema: Work of a Master.” The New Yorker, September 6, 1976, 71-75. A career survey tied to an extended review of Bonaparte and the Revolution, claiming that Gance “has been to cinema what Picasso was to painting.”

King, Norman. Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle. London: BFI, 1984. Concedes that Gance was “one of the great innovators” of the cinema and attempts to reassess Gance’s career and to put the spectacular enthusiasm for the reconstructed Napoléon into political perspective, analyzing the “seductiveness” of the film as a work of “reactionary innovation.”

Kramer, Steven Philip, and James Michael Welsh. Abel Gance. Boston: Twayne, 1978. The first book-length study of Gance’s career to have been published in English. The major films are discussed in detail. The book provides a chronology as well as a bibliography and filmography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Film as Incantation: An Interview with Abel Gance.” Film Comment 10 (March/April, 1974): 19-22. This interview represents the director’s last first-person explanation of his career to have appeared in English translation. He reveals a dedication to large themes and grand ideals and discusses his collapsed projects. A sense of his vision and charisma is captured here.

Lennig, Arthur. The Silent Voice: A Text. Troy, N.Y.: Walter Snyder, 1969. A chapter entitled “The French Film: Abel Gance” treats Napoléon and La Roue, featured at the New York Film Festival of 1967.

Pappas, Peter. “The Superimposition of Vision: Napoléon and the Meaning of Fascist Art.” Cinéaste 11 (Spring, 1981): 5-13. Pappas claims Napoléon represents “the apotheosis of distortion,” then goes on to criticize Gance on political grounds in this left-wing journal.