It is a name that is now forgotten by most people. However, the author of a body of work that is certainly uneven, but crowned with incredible aesthetic brilliance and some notable masterpieces, Abel Gance is one of the greatest French filmmakers, and certainly one of the most atypical. Born on October 25, 1889 and died on November 10, 1981, in Paris, self-taught, he directed around fifty films, short and feature-length, over a period from 1911 to 1964. A student at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris, he first went into law, quickly branched off into theater, then had a brief career as an actor in the cinema where, in 1909, he notably played Molière in the film of the same name by Léonce Perret. However, it was a last resort for someone who dreamed of being, first and foremost and at the very least, a poet.
Read the review: Article reserved for our subscribers “Napoleon” by Abel Gance, the resurrected epic poem of a visionary filmmaker
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Describing himself as a “slave hired to do work”he convinces himself that this medium is a “extraordinary dream-making machine”. Here he is seized by the cinematic aura, of which he will soon become one of the most lyrical demiurges. In 1911, at the age of 22, he founded his own production company, shooting a large number of short films. In 1912, he already signed in Ciné-journal a manifesto entitled “What is cinema?” A sixth art.” With Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, he embodies a sort of first “New Wave”, which – between cinematic theory and practice – appeals to the artistic vocation of cinema.
Gance has a properly Christ-like conception of both his personal vocation and of cinema itself. Both, revealing its mysteries through a gift of clairvoyance, work in a word to save the world, often at the cost of sacrifice. Exaltation of genius. Sacralization of the artist. Sincere belief in the restorative virtue of cinema on men. Insatiable taste for experimentation and provocation. Constant challenge to sponsors. Perhaps Jean-Luc Godard will have remembered this.
Staggering inventiveness
To get to the point, we can distinguish two eras. The first, which covers the silent period, is that of masterpieces. We named J’accuse (1919), Wheel (1923), Napoleon (1927). The first, shot in the shadow of the mass graves of the First World War, crosses melodrama (two men, a brute and a poet, fight over the same woman before sharing the terror of the front), documentary and zombie film. The second, a sort of hinge between Griffith and Eisenstein, recreates the art of melodrama (a railway worker who adopted an orphan after a train accident gradually falls in love with her) and naturalist drama, diffracting them in an experimental film montage. The third is a pure epic sung to the glory of a man in whom the values of the French Revolution are embodied. A staggering technical inventiveness, an incomparable visual power, unheard-of audacities, both narrative and plastic, characterize these three inhabited and visionary films, which give substance to the dream of a total cinema. It is each time the call for the resurrection of a new world.
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