Dynamo director Abel Gance (1889-1981) a Parisian filmmaker and producer who would earn highest praise from one of his contemporaries; Impressionist director Louis Delluc. Abel Gance formed the vanguard of experimental filmmaking and released a significant one-reel experimental silent short in 1915; La folie du Docteur Tube (The Madness of Doctor Tube). Gance and cameraman Leonce-Henry Burel, who was the director's right hand man throughout the entire silent period, would utilize distorting mirror technique to such fantastic effect that a bewildered Louis Nalpas (head honcho of Le Film d'Art), considered that whatever the film's content, it simply wasn't wartime entertainment, and emphatically refused to release it.
A somewhat deflated Gance would bide his time turning out middle-of-the-road melodramas until he would recoup his producers' confidences. In 1917 he was granted a golden opportunity to direct his first major feature film, Mater Dolorosa (The Torture of Silence) starring Emmy Lynn. The content of the film was comparatively mawkish to Gance's earlier canon and on a superficial level, a simple tearjerker, and while films of this caliber were the call of their day, Mater Dolorosa still does manage to transcend the genre with its richly mounted and exquisite photography by Burel. Mater Dolorosa is undeniably the work of a director completely enmeshed in his material, caring deeply for his characters and believing with full conviction in his medium.
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| Emmy Lynn experiencing a wardrobe malfunction in Mater Dolorosa (1917) |
Mater Dolorosa and its successor La dixieme symphonie (The Tenth Symphony,1918) were acclaimed in the critical and commercial sense. Gance's dear friend Severin-Mars played opposite mainstay Emmy Lynn. Mars' presence was a crucial one in the two masterpieces that would follow.
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| This piano is haunted - from the impressionistic La dixieme symphonie (1918) |
During the production of La dixieme symphonie, an ambitious Gance was busy planning his great pacifist film J'Accuse (I Accuse, 1918). Gance at the time was temporarily mobilized into the Section Cinematographique of the French army, but would shortly after be discharged due to poor health. When Charles Pathe - who despite having significant monetary difficulties at Le Film d'Art - gave Gance the green light to proceed with his project - and cost was absolutely no object, Gance would rejoin the Section Cinematographique to film at the front lines. With the making of J'Accuse, the two sides of Abel Gance collaborated for the first time; the filmmaker who provided spectacular crowd scenes, revealing close-ups and even a rarely utilized split-screen effect that foreshadowed 1927's Napoleon; and the visionary writer who would team with French-Swiss modernist novelist Blaise Cendrars who had the misfortune of losing a limb in the war and had been privy to all the horrors, supplied a script startling in its intensity and scope.
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| La Roue the day.... |
In La Roue (The Wheel,1923) a love story is the framework for much wider concerns. Sisif (Mars) an engine driver, and his son Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) are both besotted by Norma (Ivy Close), a girl whom Sisif rescued from a train accident - now orphaned she is taken in by Sisif, who raises her as his own daughter. Assuming Elie a brother-figure, Norma marries another man and the desperation of Sisif and Elie leads to tragic results. But the railway is the true heart and soul of the film. Gance would construct Sisif's house among the marshaling yards in Nice, and the smoke, dust and din are an ever present background. Much of the drama takes place on Sisif's engine and Gance utilizes rapid cutting as he never did before, invoking a musical rhythm that is reinforced by Arthur Honegger's astute score. The film is now a symbolist work of poetry with the imagery of the wheel a dominating force. In its climax, as Sisif quietly succumbs in a remote hut in the mountains, the villages below form a round dance - the last and final symbol - and it is clear that the wheel of the title - is indeed the wheel of Fate, that Sisif's suffering has from its very beginning moved toward this imminent and ordained end.
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| Portrait of the artist as an old man - Abel Gance (1889-1981) |