Abel Gance

Abel Gance was born Abel Eugène Alexandre Péréthon in Paris on 25 October 1889, and died on 10 November 1981. A French film director, producer, writer, and actor, he was an innovator in montage theory and practice, and is most famous for three silent films: J'accuse (1919), La Roue (1923), and Napoléon (1927).

Early life

His mother, Françoise Péréthon, was working-class, and his father, Abel Flamant, was a prosperous doctor; Gance was illegitimate. He used his mother’s surname until age eight, when he was raised by her parents in the mining town of Commentry. He then returned to Paris to live with his mother, who had married Adolphe Gance, a chauffeur and mechanic, and Abel took his stepfather’s name. Though he later invented a story of a brilliant education and middle-class roots, Gance actually left school at fourteen.

His lifelong passion for literature and art came largely from self-teaching. He first worked as a clerk in a solicitor’s office, then turned to theatre acting. At eighteen, he got a season’s contract at Brussels’ Royal Park Theatre, where he befriended actor Victor Francen and writer Blaise Cendrars.

Silent films

While in Brussels, Gance wrote his first film scenarios and sold them to Léonce Perret. Back in Paris in 1909, he acted in Perret’s Molière, his first film.

At the time, he considered cinema “infantile and stupid” and only took film work out of poverty, but he kept writing scenarios, often selling them to Gaumont. During this period he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then often fatal, but recovered after a retreat in Vittel. With friends, he founded a production company, Le Film Français, and directed his first film in 1911: La Digue (ou Pour sauver la Hollande), a historical film featuring Pierre Renoir’s first screen appearance.

Gance tried to stay connected to theatre, writing a five-hour tragedy, Victoire de Samothrace, hoping Sarah Bernhardt would star. His refusal to cut it blocked production. Rejected from the army for medical reasons at the outbreak of World War I, he began writing and directing for a new company, Film d’Art, in 1915. He caused controversy with La Folie du docteur Tube, a comic fantasy using distorting mirrors for striking visual effects; producers were outraged and refused to release it.

Still, Gance worked 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. His subjects shifted from simple action films to psychological melodramas, such as Mater dolorosa (1917), starring Emmy Lynn as a neglected wife who has an affair with her husband’s brother. It was a commercial hit, followed by La Dixième Symphonie, another marital drama with Lynn, where Gance’s mastery of lighting, composition, and editing was paired with literary and artistic references that some critics found pretentious.

In 1917, Gance was drafted into the army’s Service Cinématographique, a brief and futile episode that deepened his preoccupation with the war and depression over friends’ deaths. After leaving Film d’Art due to funding shortages, Charles Pathé backed his next film, J'accuse (1919), which confronted the waste and suffering of war. Gance re-enlisted in the Service Cinématographique to film scenes on a real battlefield at the front. The film had a powerful impact and received international distribution.

In 1920, while recovering from Spanish flu in Nice, Gance developed La Roue. Its progress was deeply affected by the knowledge that his companion Ida Danis was dying of tuberculosis, and his leading man and friend Séverin-Mars was also seriously ill (he died soon after the film’s completion). Nonetheless, Gance brought unprecedented energy and imagination to the technical realization of the story, set first in dark railway yards and then in Alpine snowscapes.

He used elaborate editing and rapid cutting, making the film highly influential among other directors. The original ran nearly nine hours in 32 reels, but was edited down for distribution. A modern reconstruction from five versions runs about four and a half hours on DVD; a restored version nearly seven hours long was shown at the 2019 Lumière Film Festival.

In 1921, Gance visited America to promote J'accuse. During his five-month stay, he met D. W. Griffith, whom he admired, and was offered a contract with MGM to work in Hollywood, but he declined.

After a brief change of pace with Au Secours! (1924), a comic film with Max Linder, Gance began his greatest project: a six-part life of Napoléon. Only the first part was completed, covering Bonaparte’s early life through the Revolution to the invasion of Italy, but even this occupied a vast canvas with meticulous detail.