It is a name today forgotten by most people. However, author of a work, 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 October 25, 1889 and died November 10, 1981, in Paris, self-taught, he directed around fifty films, short and feature films, over a period from 1911 to 1964. A student at the Chaptal high school in Paris, he directed first towards the law, quickly branched off towards the theater, then led 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 is a stopgap for someone who dreams of being, above all else and at the very least, a poet.
Describing himself as a “slave hired to do chores”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.
Amazing inventiveness
To get to the heart of the matter, we can distinguish two periods. The first, which covers the silent period, is that of the masterpieces. We have named I 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), the documentary and the film of zombie. The second, a sort of hinge between Griffith and Eisenstein, renews the art of the melodrama (a railway worker who adopted an orphan after a railway accident gradually falls in love with her) and the naturalist drama, by 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 stunning technical inventiveness, an incomparable visual power, incredible audacity, both narrative and visual, characterize these three inhabited and visionary films, which give substance to the dream of a total cinema. Each time it is the call for the resurrection of a new world.
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