La Dixième symphonie (1918)
Directed by Abel Gance

Film Review

After the success of Mater dolorosa (1917), Abel Gance immediately began work on a similar marital melodrama, La Dixième symphonie, with the alluring Emmy Lynn once again cast in the lead role as the victimised heroine.  It was the last film that Gance completed for Film d'Art, the company where he had cut his teeth as a director and emerged as one of the great pioneers of the new medium of cinema.  After a short spell working for the Service Cinématographique in the French Army, Gance would then go on to make the film which would bring him international renown, J'Accuse (1919), followed by his grandest and most ambitious melodrama, La Roue (1923).  The progressive evolution in technique across these early Gance films is striking, revealing an increasing degree of sophistication, inventiveness and daring that would culminate in the director's greatest film, Napoléon (1927).

Although La Dixième symphonie feels modest compared with Gance's subsequent cinematic achievements it surpasses the vast majority of melodramas made at its time.  The plot isn't much to write home about, just the usual hopelessly contrived soap-style nonsense involving the usual stock characters acting pretty much as we would expect them to in a film of this period.  Some unexpected bursts of humour (rare for Gance) pep up an otherwise predictable narrative, the scenes with André Lefaur's eccentric marquis (the unlikeliest suitor for a sweet little ingénue) offering a welcome break from the over-egged confrontation scenes involving the principals.  Like Douglas Sirk in the 1950s, Gance elevates melodrama to a higher plain and gives it far more psychological realism and artistry than audiences of the time might have expected.

The film's highpoint is a protracted musical break from the narrative in which the titular tenth symphony is presented to us.  With music specially written for the film by Michel-Maurice Levy, Gance offers his first cinematic bombshell, a panoramic ballet featuring a dancing water nymph.  For his later Napoléon, Gance would create a far grander wide-screen effect with his 'Polyvision' process, which projected separate images on three adjacent screens to create a single picture.  In La Dixième symphonie, he employs a far simpler, but still remarkably effective, ploy to achieve the same end, simply by sandwiching the wide-screen image between patterned top and bottom borders within a conventional single-screen set-up.  More than thirty years before wide-screen cinema took off and became the de facto industry standard, Abel Gance was already exploiting its artistic possibilities.

Gance's inventiveness manifests itself throughout the film in other ways, doubtless with considerable input from his faithful cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel, who would achieve miracles on his subsequent masterpieces.  The lighting is particularly impressive and gives an expressive depth and mood to each shot that almost renders the inter-titles superfluous.  Gance's trademark visual metaphor is put to good use here, with the fate of the heroine symbolised by a little bird trapped in the hand of her vile tormentor.  Another Gance gimmick, superimposition, is used liberally, to lend an aura of mystique and fatalism to the proceedings.  The editing is not as elaborate as it would become on Gance's later films, but it is faultlessly executed, so that the film, whilst offering few narrative surprises, proceeds at a suitably brisk pace and has no difficulty holding the spectator's attention.

The film's most obvious shortcoming lies on the acting front.  By today's standards, the performances are laughably melodramatic (for want of a better word), and Emmy Lynn seems to spend the entire film rolling her eyes, doing double takes or looking like a pathetic rabbit trapped in a cage with a dozen ravenous tigers.  Whilst the theatricality extends to most of the cast, the two male leads - Séverin-Mars and Jean Toulout - at least bring some semblance of reality to their performances.  Toulout makes a superbly oily villain, the kind best suited for pantomime, and you can hardly watch the film without hissing whenever he shows up (Gance presumably had this in mind when he cast him as the villain in his comedy short Au secours! (1924)).  Toulout has a darkly humorous quality that makes him strangely likeable, although in the scene where he attempts to rape the heroine he is utterly groteque.  Séverin-Mars has an equally strong presence as the tormented artist, a strange character who seems to be far more preoccupied with his music than the prospect that (a) his wife is having an affair with another man and (b) his daughter is about to wed an outright scoundrel.  Gance so admired Séverin-Mars that he later cast him as the lead in his next two films, J'Accuse and La Roue, although it was the latter film that sent the actor to an early grave.  Given that Séverin-Mars's character is supposedly modelled on Beethoven (who failed to complete his 10th symphonic work) there's a curious irony that the actor should die not long after appearing in a film entitled The Tenth Symphony...

Film Synopsis

The wealthy Eve Dinant soon regrets becoming the mistress of a totally depraved adventurer, Fred Ryce.  When the latter's sister threatens her Eve kills her in self-defence.  To save herself and her honour, she then gives Ryce a large sum of money, insisting that he never speaks of the crime again and stays away from her.  A year later, Eve is happily married to a well-known composer, Enric Damor, who is struggling with his tenth symphony.  To her horror, Eve discovers that her stepdaughter Claire has fallen in love with Fred Ryce and intends to marry him.  When Eve acts to prevent the marriage, Ryce furnishes her husband with a letter which hints that she is having an affair.  Rather than reveal the truth, Eve confesses that she has been an unfaithful wife, thereby providing Damor with the inspiration he needs to finish his next great musical composition.  Realising that Ryce will stop at nothing to marry Claire, Eve decides that he must be exposed, even if it means sacrificing herself...