Abel Gance

Abel Gance (born Abel Eugène Alexandre Péréthon; 25 October 1889 – 10 November 1981) was a French film director, producer, writer and actor.

Born in Paris in 1889, Abel Gance was the illegitimate son of a prosperous doctor, Abel Flamant, and a working-class mother, Françoise Péréthon (or Perthon).

Initially taking his mother's name, he was brought up until the age of eight by his maternal grandparents in the coal-mining town of Commentry in central France.

He then returned to Paris to rejoin his mother, who had by then married Adolphe Gance, a chauffeur and mechanic, whose name Abel then adopted.

Although he later fabricated the history of a brilliant school career and middle-class background, Gance left school at the age of 14, and the love of literature and art which sustained him throughout his life was in part the result of self-education.

He started working as a clerk in a solicitor's office, but after a couple of years he turned to acting in the theatre.

When he was 18, he was given a season's contract at the Théâtre Royal du Parc in Brussels, where he developed friendships with the actor Victor Francen and the writer Blaise Cendrars.

While in Brussels, Gance wrote his first film scenarios, which he sold to Léonce Perret.

Back in Paris in 1909, he acted in his first film, Perret's Molière.

At that stage, he regarded the cinema as "infantile and stupid" and was only drawn into film jobs by his poverty, but he nevertheless continued to write scenarios, and often sold them to Gaumont.

During this period he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, often fatal at that time, but after a period of retreat in Vittel he recovered.

With some friends, he established a production company, Le Film Français, and began directing his own films in 1911 with La Digue (ou Pour sauver la Hollande), a historical film which featured the first screen appearance of Pierre Renoir.

Gance tried to maintain a connection with the theatre and he finished writing a monumental tragedy entitled Victoire de Samothrace, in which he hoped that Sarah Bernhardt would star.

Its five-hour length, and Gance's refusal to cut it, proved to be a stumbling block.

With the outbreak of World War I, Gance was rejected by the army on medical grounds, and in 1915 he started writing and directing for a new film company, Le Film d'art.

He soon caused controversy with La Folie du docteur Tube, a comic fantasy in which he and his cameraman Léonce-Henri Burel created some arresting visual effects with distorting mirrors.

The producers were outraged and refused to show the film.

His subjects moved steadily away from simple action films towards psychological melodramas, such as Mater dolorosa (1917) starring Emmy Lynn as a neglected wife who has an affair with her husband's brother.

The film was a great commercial success, and it was followed by La Dixième Symphonie, another marital drama featuring Emmy Lynn.

Here Gance's mastery of lighting, composition and editing was accompanied by a range of literary and artistic references which some critics found pretentious and alienating.

In 1917, Gance was finally drafted into the army, in its Service Cinématographique, an episode which proved futile and short-lived, but it deepened his preoccupation with the impact of the war and the depression which was caused by the deaths of many of his friends.

Gance nevertheless continued working for Film d'Art until 1918, making over a dozen commercially successful films.

His experiments included tracking shots, extreme close-ups, low-angle shots, and split-screen images.

A pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, he is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse (1919), La Roue (1923), and Napoléon (1927).

When he parted company with Film d'Art over a shortage of funds, Charles Pathé stepped in to underwrite his next film, J'accuse (1919), in which Gance confronted the waste and suffering which the war had brought.

He re-enlisted in the Service Cinématographique in order to be able to film some scenes on a real battlefield at the front.

The film made a powerful impact and went on to have international distribution.

In 1920, Gance developed his next project, La Roue, while recuperating in Nice from Spanish flu, and its progress was deeply affected by the knowledge that his companion Ida Danis was dying of tuberculosis; furthermore, his leading man and friend Séverin-Mars was also seriously ill (and died soon after completion of the film).

Nevertheless, Gance brought an unprecedented level of energy and imagination to the technical realisation of his story, set firstly against the dark and grimy background of locomotives and railway yards, and then among the snow-covered landscapes of the Alps.

He employed elaborate editing techniques and innovative use of rapid cutting which made the film highly influential among other contemporary directors.

The finished film was originally in 32 reels and ran for nearly nine hours, but it was subsequently edited down for distribution.

In 1921, Gance visited America to promote J'accuse.

During his five-month stay he met D. W. Griffith, whom he had long admired.

He was also offered a contract with MGM to work in Hollywood, but he turned it down.

After a brief change of pace for Au Secours! (1924), a comic film with Max Linder, Gance embarked on his greatest project, a six-part life of Napoléon.

Only the first part was completed, tracing Bonaparte's early life, through the Revolution, and up to the invasion of Italy, but even this occupied a vast canvas with meticulously recreated historical scenes and scores of characters.

The film was full of experimental techniques, combining rapid cutting, hand-held cameras, superimposition of images, and, in wide-screen sequences, shot using a system he called Polyvision needing triple cameras (and projectors), achieved a spectacular panoramic effect, including a finale in which the outer two film panels were tinted blue and red, creating a widescreen image of a French flag.

The original version of the film ran for around 6 hours.

A shortened version received a triumphant première at the Paris Opéra in April 1927 before a distinguished audience that included the future General de Gaulle.

A modern reconstruction from five different versions, available on DVD, is nearly four and a half hours long, and an almost seven hours long restored version was shown at the 2019 Lumière Film Festival.