Abel Gance

Abel Gance was a French film director producer writer and actor A pioneer in the theory and practice of montage he is best known for three major silent films Jaccuse 1919 La Roue 1923 and Napoléon 1927 He was born in Paris in 1889 In 1909 he acted in his first film He also wrote scenarios and often sold them to Gaumont During this period he was diagnosed with tuberculosis fatal at the time but he recovered In 1911 with some friends he established a production company Le Film Français and began directing his own films With the outbreak of WW I rejected by the army on medical grounds he started writing and directing for a new film company Film dArt until 1918 making over a dozen successful films Charles Pathé underwrote his next film Jaccuse 1919 in which Gance confronted the waste and suffering which the war had brought In 1920 he developed La Roue He brought an unprecedented level of energy and imagination to the technical realization of his story employing elaborate editing techniques and innovative use of rapid cutting which made the film highly influential The finished film ran for nearly nine hours but was edited down for distribution In 1921 Gance visited America to promote Jaccuse He met D W Griffith whom he had long admired He was also offered a contract with MGM but turned it down He then embarked on his greatest project a sixpart life of Napoléon Only the first part was completed tracing his early life through the Revolution 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 handheld cameras superimposition of images and in widescreen 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 ran for around 6 hours A shortened version received a triumphant première at the Paris Opéra in April 1927 Throughout his life he kept returning to Napoléon editing his footage and as a result the original 1927 film was lost from view for decades The dedicated work of the film historian Kevin Brownlow produced a fivehour version still incomplete but fuller than anyone had seen since the 1920s It was presented at the Telluride Film Festival in 1979 and the occasion brought a belated triumph to Gances career and made his name known to a worldwide audience In the assessment of Kevin Brownlow Abel Gance made a fuller use of the medium than anyone before or since As well as his multiscreen ventures with Polyvision he explored the use of superimposition of images extreme closeups fast rhythmic editing and he made the camera mobile in unorthodox ways handheld mounted on wires or a pendulum or even strapped to a horse He also made early experiments with the addition of sound to film and with filming in color and in 3D There were few aspects of film technique that he did not seek to incorporate in his work and his influence was acknowledged by contemporaries and later by the French New Wave filmmakers