Biography: life and films
The sublime artistry and wild, almost insane, flair for experimentation that earned Gance his reputation as a world-class cineaste in the 1920s are scarcely detectable in his sound films. Like Erich von Stroheim, Gance was a latter-day Icarus who flew too close to the sun of creative excess and paid the price for his folly by becoming a servant of mediocrity. When the cold commercial realities of filmmaking sent him crashing back down to Earth, there he would remain for the rest of his life, making mundane films, as he put it, 'not in order to live but in order not to die'. For one magical decade, Gance showed us how flexible and fantastic an artform cinema could be, but in doing so he made a bonfire of his future prospects and ended up dragging his way through the remainder of his career like one of the zombie phantoms in J'Accuse, a sad and ineffectual shadow of his former self.
Gance's contradictoriness is manifested as much in his personal life as it is in his art. Throughout his life, he was a committed pacifist (he remade J'Accuse in 1938 in the vain hope of averting a second world war), but in his most famous film Napoléon (1927) he positively revels in the bloody military achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte. Gance's flagrant adoration of the future French emperor, together with his admiration for Maréchal Pétain at the time of the Nazi Occupation, earned him a reputation as a Fascist sympathiser. It is not only his moral system that is inconsistent. He also went out of his way to promote his bourgeois origins, whereas in fact his upbringing had been extremely modest and his education far from brilliant.
He was born Abel Eugène Alexandre Péréthon on 25th October 1889, in Paris, France. Born outside wedlock to a working class woman named Françoise Péréthon, he was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Commentry, in the Auvergne region of central France. At the age of eight, he returned to live with his mother, now married to a mechanic Adolphe Gance, who gave him his surname. After leaving school at 14, he began work as a solicitor's clerk but chucked this after a few years when he decided that his real vocation lay in the theatre. The young Abel Gance had no time for the cinema, in fact he was contemptuous of it and considered theatre a far superior form of art. Unable to subsist on his meagre earnings as a stage actor, he began writing film scripts, which led the director Léonce Perret to give him his first screen role in Molière (1909). With some friends, Gance founded a film company, Le Film Français, for which he directed his first films, beginning with the period drama La Digue (1911).
Gance's poor health (he had recently recovered from a life-threatening bout of tuberculosis) precluded him from serving in the First World War. In 1915, he began working for Film d'Art, a film production company that was committed to making quality productions, mostly historical pieces intended to inform and educate. This is where he came into contact with Léonce-Henri Burel, the gifted cinematographer and camera operator who worked on several of his subsequent films. Gance shocked his new employers with his experimental short La Folie du docteur Tube (1915), in which he demonstrated his penchant for experimentation with some zany visual effects. The lead actor in this film, Albert Dieudonné, would take the central role in Gance's subsequent films Le Périscope (1916), Le Fou de la falaise (1916) and, most famously, Napoléon (1927).
After some initial failures, Gance repaid Film d'Art's trust in him with a series of commercially successful psychological melodramas that included Mater dolorosa (1917) and La Dixième symphonie (1918). The director had sufficient creative freedom to develop and refine new filmmaking techniques, including superimposition, camera motion, close-ups, split screen and even widescreen. He also began experimenting with editing, originating the rhythmic and accelerated montage techniques that he would employ so brilliantly on La Roue and Napoléon. Film d'Art and Abel Gance eventually parted company after the latter had accumulated massive debts whilst making Ecco Homo. The Pathé brothers agreed to bail the director out in return for his agreement to direct a film for them. That film was J'Accuse (1919), Gance's first magnum opus (it cost half a million francs to make, a colossal sum at the time) and the one that brought him international renown. A tribute to the sacrifice of those who had died in the First World War, but with a hard-to-miss anti-war subtext, J'Accuse owes its realism to footage that Gance shot on actual battlefields in the latter months of the war. The film not only brought its director considerable prestige, it also won him a contract from MGM to work in Hollywood, but he declined.
Gance's next film was even more ambitious. 'A tragedy for modern times' is how he described the epic melodrama that was La Roue (1923). It was certainly a challenging production, made more difficult by the fact that the director's partner Ida Danis was succumbing to tuberculosis at the time. This is what resulted in the dramatic change in location midway through the filming, from the busy railway yards just outside Nice to the fresher climes of Mont-Blanc. Gance's grief over Danis's demise was compounded by the death of his lead actor Séverin-Mars not long after filming had been completed. The director consoled himself by immediately marrying his beloved Ida's sister, Marguerite.
La Roue is not only one of Gance's most ambitious films, it is also one of his most influential. It is particularly noted for its inspired use of accelerated montage, notably in the nerve-racking sequence depicting the train crash at the start of the film. The film originally ran to eight hours, but it had to be cut back drastically (to under three hours) for it to be exploited commercially. Then came Gance's weirdest commission ever, from the legendary comic actor Max Linder. The story goes that Linder bet Gance he couldn't make a film in three days. The director accepted the challenge and the result is his funniest film, Au Secours! (1924) - an irresistible parody of the 'Old Dark House' horror movie, made well before the genre had established itself.
Whilst touring America to promote J'Accuse in 1921, Abel Gance met D.W. Griffith and saw his monumental The Birth of a Nation (1915). This led Gance to conceive his 'grand projet' - a series of six films devoted to the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. With a wealthy German financier willing to underwrite this cinematic folly, Gance was on a creative high and set about realising some of the most impressive set-pieces ever conceived for the cinema. Superimposition and camera motion are used to dizzying effect to convey the hysteria and turbulence of the French Revolution, and also the ferocity and torment of military combat. Gance appears on screen in the role of a blood-thirsty revolutionary but the central role he gave to Albert Dieudonné, whose close-up portraits as Napoleon gave cinema one of its enduring icons.
When his backer went bankrupt, Gance had to massively reign in his ambitions, making one film instead of six, but he still manages to complete his chef d'oeuvre Napoléon with a spectacular finale. As Napoleon begins his military campaign in Italy, the film is suddenly split across three screens, with images from three synchronised projectors forming a panoramic triptych. This 'Polyvision' system never caught on - it required equipment and space that virtually no cinema on Earth had at the time - but it once again reveals Gance's formidable talent for innovation. The most complete version of Napoléon ran to almost nine and half hours, but, as happened with La Roue, a drastic abridgement was necessary for the film to be a commercial proposition. The film was mostly seen in a much shorter version (varying between two and seven hours in length), without the triptych finale. Napoléon had no chance of recouping its phenomenal production cost although it added to Gance's reputation as a great cineaste.
The arrival of sound gave Gance the opportunity to explore whole new vistas but once again he overstretched himself and his first sound film, was to be his Waterloo. A disaster movie in more ways than one, La Fin du monde (1931) was such a commercial failure that it brought a decisive end to Gance's dreams of being an independent filmmaker. As silent films were now consigned to history, his past achievements were soon forgotten and for the rest of his life he was pretty well confined to making commercial films of interest to a mainstream audience. Those pet projects of his, including lavish biographies of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish knight Ignace de Loyola, never came to fruition. Instead, he ended up knocking out a tacky remake of Mater dolorosa and muddling through such dreary dramas as Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre (1935).
Occasionally, Gance's erstwhile inspiration would flicker back into life - Lucrezia Borgia (1935) is the most stylish of his post-Napoléon historical dramas (famous for Edwige Feuillère going topless) and Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1937) redeems itself with some extraordinary use of sound. But, for the most part, the director's sound films are pretty missable, his only works of note being his re-edited sound version of Napoléon and his slightly bonkers remake of J'accuse!, which somehow combines anti-war film, melodrama and full-on zombie movie in one tidy two hour long package. There's not much point dwelling on Louise (1939), a ghastly adaptation of a dismal operetta, and Paradis perdu (1940), a lame melodrama that draws a futile comparison between WWI and France's present predicament.
It was at the start of the Nazi Occupation that Gance's inspiration briefly returned to him with Vénus aveugle (1940), a stark allegory of the prevailing situation in France that was intended to offer hope to the conquered nation. After the Liberation, the film would be condemned as pro-Pétainist propaganda, leaving no doubt that its director saw in Philippe Pétain, the puppet head of state, France's saviour. After this, Gance made one further film in occupied France - Le Capitaine Fracasse - before deciding to sit the rest of the war out in Spain.
On his return to France, Gance found it increasingly difficult to find anyone willing to back his films, although La Tour de Nesle (1954), his first colour film, led to a renewal of interest in his earlier work and a belated attempt to restore his forgotten masterpiece Napoléon by the Cinémathèque française. This is presumably what motivated Gance to return to the life of his military hero with Austerlitz (1960) - whilst the film drew a large audience (over three million spectators in France) it received mixed reviews. After making one more fictional work for the cinema, Cyrano et d'Artagnan (1963), Gance contributed two period films for French television, Marie Tudor (1966) and Valmy (1967) (with Serge Gainsbourg cast, surprisingly, as the Marquis de Sade), before signing off with Bonaparte et la révolution (1971), a documentary using footage lifted from Napoléon.
Abel Gance lived long enough to receive the acclaim that was duly his following the release of restored versions of Napoléon in the early 1980s. Not long after he received an honorary César, he died in Paris on 10th November 1981, aged 92. He is buried in the Cimetière d'Auteuil in Paris's 16th arrondissement, among such distinguished company as Charles Gounod and Pierre Zimmermann. Although he has fifty films to his name, it is sufficient that Gance is remembered for the one that brought cinema to life in a way that no other filmmaker has been able to, before or since. No one who has partaken of the visual banquet that is Napoléon can begrudge Gance his reputation as one of the giants of cinema.
© James Travers 2015
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