Great French film director Abel Gance (1889-1981) was also a producer, writer and actor. He is best known for his three silent masterpieces: J'accuse/I Accuse (1919), La Roue/The Wheel (1923), and the monumental Napoléon (1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 473. Photo: Abel Gance himself as Saint-Just in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no 109. Maryse Dauvray as Edith Laurin, after being raped by a German soldier, in J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard. Gabriel de Gravone in La Roue/The Wheel (Abel Gance, 1923).
Albert Dieudonné in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927). German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 84/1. Photo: Ufa.
Director/actor Abel Gance on the cover of the French film journal Mon Ciné, 253, V, 23 December 1926. Gance is groomed as the character he played in his film Napoléon (1927), that of Saint-Just, one of the leading men of the French Terror.
Abel Gance was born Abel Eugène Alexandre Péréthon in Paris in 1889. He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy 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 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 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 a friendship with the actor Victor Francen. While in Brussels, Gance wrote his first film scenarios, which he sold to director Léonce Perret. Back in Paris in 1909, he acted in his first film, Molière (Léonce Perret, 1909).
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 overcame the disease. With some friends, he established a production company, Le Film Français, and began directing his own films in 1911. His first effort was La Digue/The Dam (Abel Gance, 1911), a historical film which featured the first screen appearance of Pierre Renoir. The film was never released.
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 from the army on medical grounds and in 1915 he started writing and directing for a new film company, Film d'Art. He soon caused controversy with La Folie du docteur Tube/The Madness of Dr. Tube (Abel Gance, 1915), in which a scientist (Albert Dieudonné) takes a white powder, and then hallucinates. Gance and his cameraman Léonce-Henry Burel created the arresting hallucinations with distorting mirrors. According to Wikipedia, the producers were outraged and refused to show the film. A print of the film survives and Gance 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. His subjects moved steadily away from simple action films towards psychological melodramas, such as Mater dolorosa/The Torture of Silence (Abel Gance, 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/The Tenth Symphony (Abel Gance, 1918), 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 at last drafted into the Army, in its Service Cinématographique. It deepened his preoccupation with the impact of the war and the depression which was caused by the deaths of many of his friends. He was discharged shortly after due to mustard gas poisoning.
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Romuald Joubé in J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Séverin-Mars in J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Romuald Joubé and Maryse Dauvray in J'accuse/I Accuse Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: publicity still for J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Edith (Marise Dauvray), Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé) and little Angele (Angèle Guys) towards the end of J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: publicity still for J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
When Abel Gance parted company with Film d'Art over a shortage of funds, Charles Pathé stepped in and produced his next film, J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919) with Romuald Joubé and Séverin-Mars. Gance juxtaposed a romantic drama with the background of the waste and suffering of World War I. He re-enlisted himself in the Service Cinématographique to be able to film some scenes on a real battlefield at the front. The film's powerful depiction of wartime horrors, and particularly its climactic sequence of the ‘return of the dead’, made it an international success, and confirmed Gance as one of the most important directors in Europe.
James Travers at French Films: "Abel Gance’s powerful anti-war film still has the power to move and shock. Through the intimate microcosm of two soldiers united on the battlefield, Gance shows the horror and absurdity of war for all its worth. The question he poses is: if two rivals in love can settle their differences in peace, why cannot political leaders?"
In 1920 he developed his next project, La Roue/The Wheel (Abel Gance, 1923), 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. His leading man and friend Séverin-Mars was also seriously ill - and died soon after the completion of the film. Nevertheless, Gance brought an unprecedented level of energy and imagination to the technical realisation of his film. The story is about a father (Séverin-Mars) and his son (Gabriel de Gravone) who both fall for the lovely adopted Norma (Ivy Close). This love triangle is set firstly against the dark and grimy background of locomotives and railway yards, and then among the snow-covered landscapes of the Alps. Gance employed elaborate editing techniques and innovative use of rapid cutting which made the film highly influential among other contemporary directors. The film cost 3 million French francs and took five years to complete, an extraordinarily risky venture at the time, and a major cause of anxiety for the film’s production company, Pathé. The finished film was originally in 32 reels and ran for nearly 9 hours, but it was subsequently edited down for distribution and these shorter versions have survived.
Gance had a brief change of pace with Au secours/Help! (Abel Gance, 1924), a short haunted house comedy with Max Linder, which he filmed in only three days. Then he embarked on his greatest project, a six-part life of Napoléon Bonaparte. 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. Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927), featuring Albert Dieudonné, is full of experimental techniques, combining rapid cutting, hand-held cameras, superimposition of images, and, most famously, his wide-screen sequences.
Abel Gance achieved them with a system he called Polyvision, by using triple cameras (and projectors) to create a spectacular panoramic effect. In the climactic finale, he created a widescreen image of a French flag with the outer two film panels tinted blue and red. The original version of Napoléon ran for 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. The length was reduced still further for French and European distribution, and it became even shorter when it was shown in America. This was not the end of the film's career, however. Gance re-used material from it in later films, and the triumphant restoration of the silent film in the 1980s confirmed it as his most famous work. James Travers: "Napoléon is both a stunningly visual work of cinema and a poetically beautiful telling of the life of France’s most famous general."
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 59. Photo: Film Abel Gance. Séverin-Mars in La Roue/The Wheel (Abel Gance, 1923).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 224. Photo: G.L. Manuel Frères. Gabriel de Gravone.
Italian postcard by G.B. Falci Editore, Milano, no. 320. Photoi: S.A.G. Leoni. Gina Manès as Josephine de Beauharnais in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 456. Photo: Vladimir Roudenko as the young Napoléon in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, Paris, no. 458. Annabella as Violine in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 459. Gina Manès as Joséphine de Beauharnais in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Editions Cinémagazine, no. 460. Nicolas Koline as Tristan Fleuri in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Imp. Catala Frères, Paris. Photo: Socété Générale de Films, Paris. Acho Chakatouny as Pozzo di Borgo in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
Abel Gance embraced the arrival of sound with enthusiasm and his first production was La Fin du monde/End of the World (Abel Gance, 1931) starring Victor Francen and Gance himself. This was an expensive Science-Fiction film about a comet hurling toward Earth on a collision course and the different reactions to people on the impending disaster. Gance had edited it to a running time of just over three hours. When the backers felt that the film was becoming far too long, they took production control away from Gance and cut the film to a shorter length. The result was a critical and commercial disaster.
Thereafter the creative independence that Gance had enjoyed in the previous decade was seriously curtailed. He continued to be a busy filmmaker throughout the 1930s, but he characterised most of the films made during this period as ones that he did ‘not to live, but in order not to die’. In 1932 he tried to demonstrate his credentials as a reliable and efficient director by filming a remake of Mater dolorosa which he completed within 18 days and within budget. Among the other 'commercial' works that followed were Lucrèce Borgia/Lucretia Borgia (Abel Gance, 1935) with Edwige Feuillère, and Un Grand Amour de Beethoven/Beethoven's Great Love (1937), with Harry Baur as the composer.
One of the more personal projects that he was able to undertake was a new version of J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1939) starring Victor Francen, not so much a remake of his 1919 film as a continuation of it. Gance conceived it as a warning against the new war that he saw impending. In the upheaval following the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940, Gance went to the Free Zone in the south. He arranged a contract to make a film, Vénus aveugle/Blind Venus (Abel Gance, 1941) featuring Viviane Romance, at the Victorine studios in Nice. He saw it as an allegory of the current state of France and a message of hope directed to the ordinary French people in their time of misfortune. At this period Gance was among those who saw Philippe Pétain as the means of the country's salvation, and in September 1941 Vénus aveugle had its first screening in Vichy, preceded by a speech in which Gance paid tribute to Pétain. On the other hand, even before its première, the film became the object of an attack from the collaborationist and anti-Semitic newspaper Aujourd'hui, which insinuated that the freedoms of film-making in the unoccupied zone in the south of France were being exploited by Jews: the producer Jean-Jacques Mecatti, Viviane Romance, and Gance himself were singled out for derisive references to their Jewish connections.
After completing one more film, Le Capitaine Fracasse/Captain Fracasse (Abel Gance, 1943) with Fernand Gravey, Gance went to Spain in August 1943, citing growing hostility from the German authorities in France. He remained there until October 1945. After the war, his difficulties in getting support for his projects increased and he made few films. The historical melodrama La Tour de Nesle/Tower of Nesle (Abel Gance, 1954) with Silvana Pampanini and Pierre Brasseur was his first film in colour. It provoked some revival of interest in his work, and François Truffaut named Gance "a neglected auteur of genius". Gance returned to the Napoleonic spectacle with Austerlitz/The Battle of Austerlitz (Abel Gance, 1960) starring Pierre Mondy as Napoleon. He made a further historical pageant in Cyrano et D'Artagnan/Cyrano and D'Artagnan (Abel Gance, 1963) starring José Ferrer and Jean-Pierre Cassel, and then moved into television for his final works, also on historical subjects.
Throughout his life, Gance kept returning to Napoléon, often editing his own footage into shorter versions, adding a soundtrack, and sometimes filming new material, and as a result, the original 1927 film was lost from view for decades. After various attempts at reconstruction, the dedicated work of the film historian Kevin Brownlow produced a five-hour version of the film, still incomplete but fuller than anyone had seen since the 1920s. This version was presented at the Telluride Film Festival in August 1979, with the frail 89-year-old director in attendance. The occasion brought a belated triumph to Gance's career, and subsequent performances and further restoration made his name known to a worldwide audience. Abel Gance married three times: in 1912 to Mathilde Thizeau; in 1922 to Marguerite Danis (sister of Ida); in 1933 to Marie-Odette Vérité (Sylvie Grenade), who died in 1978. Gance died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1981 at the age of 92. He still had plans to make an epic film about Christopher Columbus.
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 461. Edmond Van Daële as Robespierre in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 462. Photo: Max Maxudian as Barras in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 468. Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon in Napoléon/Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 469. Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon in Napoléon/Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 471. Daniel Mendaille as Louis Fréron in Napoléon/Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard for Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 472. Alex Bernard as General Dupommier in Napoléon/ Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 474. Photo: Lipnitzky. Albert Dieudonné in Napoléon (Abel Gance. 1927). The postcard is a pastiche of the famous portrait of Bonaparte at Arcole, 1796, by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros.
French postcard by Viny, no. 99. Photo: Vedis Films. Grace Moore in Louise (Abel Gance, 1939). Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 2080/1, 1939-1940. Photo: Raymond Voinquel. Grace Moore in Louise (Abel Gance, 1939). Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
Italian card by Cineteca Bologna to promote the FIAF Film Restoration Summer School 2024. Photo: at the set of Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927). The screening of the new reconstruction Napoléon, as seen by Abel Gance at Cinema Modernissimo, was one of the highlights of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. Napoléon as seen by Abel Gance was in May 2024 the opening of Cannes Classics. The reconstruction of the monumental film by the Cinémathèque Française took 15 years.
Sources: James Travers (French Films), Wikipedia, AllMovie and IMDb.
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 473. Photo: Abel Gance himself as Saint-Just in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no 109. Maryse Dauvray as Edith Laurin, after being raped by a German soldier, in J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard. Gabriel de Gravone in La Roue/The Wheel (Abel Gance, 1923).
Albert Dieudonné in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927). German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 84/1. Photo: Ufa.
Director/actor Abel Gance on the cover of the French film journal Mon Ciné, 253, V, 23 December 1926. Gance is groomed as the character he played in his film Napoléon (1927), that of Saint-Just, one of the leading men of the French Terror.
Love of literature and art
Abel Gance was born Abel Eugène Alexandre Péréthon in Paris in 1889. He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy 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 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 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 a friendship with the actor Victor Francen. While in Brussels, Gance wrote his first film scenarios, which he sold to director Léonce Perret. Back in Paris in 1909, he acted in his first film, Molière (Léonce Perret, 1909).
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 overcame the disease. With some friends, he established a production company, Le Film Français, and began directing his own films in 1911. His first effort was La Digue/The Dam (Abel Gance, 1911), a historical film which featured the first screen appearance of Pierre Renoir. The film was never released.
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 from the army on medical grounds and in 1915 he started writing and directing for a new film company, Film d'Art. He soon caused controversy with La Folie du docteur Tube/The Madness of Dr. Tube (Abel Gance, 1915), in which a scientist (Albert Dieudonné) takes a white powder, and then hallucinates. Gance and his cameraman Léonce-Henry Burel created the arresting hallucinations with distorting mirrors. According to Wikipedia, the producers were outraged and refused to show the film. A print of the film survives and Gance 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. His subjects moved steadily away from simple action films towards psychological melodramas, such as Mater dolorosa/The Torture of Silence (Abel Gance, 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/The Tenth Symphony (Abel Gance, 1918), 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 at last drafted into the Army, in its Service Cinématographique. It deepened his preoccupation with the impact of the war and the depression which was caused by the deaths of many of his friends. He was discharged shortly after due to mustard gas poisoning.
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Romuald Joubé in J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Séverin-Mars in J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Romuald Joubé and Maryse Dauvray in J'accuse/I Accuse Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: publicity still for J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: Edith (Marise Dauvray), Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé) and little Angele (Angèle Guys) towards the end of J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
French postcard by Sadag de France, Imp., Paris, no. 109. Photo: publicity still for J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919).
The horror and absurdity of war
When Abel Gance parted company with Film d'Art over a shortage of funds, Charles Pathé stepped in and produced his next film, J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919) with Romuald Joubé and Séverin-Mars. Gance juxtaposed a romantic drama with the background of the waste and suffering of World War I. He re-enlisted himself in the Service Cinématographique to be able to film some scenes on a real battlefield at the front. The film's powerful depiction of wartime horrors, and particularly its climactic sequence of the ‘return of the dead’, made it an international success, and confirmed Gance as one of the most important directors in Europe.
James Travers at French Films: "Abel Gance’s powerful anti-war film still has the power to move and shock. Through the intimate microcosm of two soldiers united on the battlefield, Gance shows the horror and absurdity of war for all its worth. The question he poses is: if two rivals in love can settle their differences in peace, why cannot political leaders?"
In 1920 he developed his next project, La Roue/The Wheel (Abel Gance, 1923), 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. His leading man and friend Séverin-Mars was also seriously ill - and died soon after the completion of the film. Nevertheless, Gance brought an unprecedented level of energy and imagination to the technical realisation of his film. The story is about a father (Séverin-Mars) and his son (Gabriel de Gravone) who both fall for the lovely adopted Norma (Ivy Close). This love triangle is set firstly against the dark and grimy background of locomotives and railway yards, and then among the snow-covered landscapes of the Alps. Gance employed elaborate editing techniques and innovative use of rapid cutting which made the film highly influential among other contemporary directors. The film cost 3 million French francs and took five years to complete, an extraordinarily risky venture at the time, and a major cause of anxiety for the film’s production company, Pathé. The finished film was originally in 32 reels and ran for nearly 9 hours, but it was subsequently edited down for distribution and these shorter versions have survived.
Gance had a brief change of pace with Au secours/Help! (Abel Gance, 1924), a short haunted house comedy with Max Linder, which he filmed in only three days. Then he embarked on his greatest project, a six-part life of Napoléon Bonaparte. 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. Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927), featuring Albert Dieudonné, is full of experimental techniques, combining rapid cutting, hand-held cameras, superimposition of images, and, most famously, his wide-screen sequences.
Abel Gance achieved them with a system he called Polyvision, by using triple cameras (and projectors) to create a spectacular panoramic effect. In the climactic finale, he created a widescreen image of a French flag with the outer two film panels tinted blue and red. The original version of Napoléon ran for 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. The length was reduced still further for French and European distribution, and it became even shorter when it was shown in America. This was not the end of the film's career, however. Gance re-used material from it in later films, and the triumphant restoration of the silent film in the 1980s confirmed it as his most famous work. James Travers: "Napoléon is both a stunningly visual work of cinema and a poetically beautiful telling of the life of France’s most famous general."
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 59. Photo: Film Abel Gance. Séverin-Mars in La Roue/The Wheel (Abel Gance, 1923).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 224. Photo: G.L. Manuel Frères. Gabriel de Gravone.
Italian postcard by G.B. Falci Editore, Milano, no. 320. Photoi: S.A.G. Leoni. Gina Manès as Josephine de Beauharnais in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 456. Photo: Vladimir Roudenko as the young Napoléon in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, Paris, no. 458. Annabella as Violine in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 459. Gina Manès as Joséphine de Beauharnais in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Editions Cinémagazine, no. 460. Nicolas Koline as Tristan Fleuri in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Imp. Catala Frères, Paris. Photo: Socété Générale de Films, Paris. Acho Chakatouny as Pozzo di Borgo in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
A critical and commercial disaster
Abel Gance embraced the arrival of sound with enthusiasm and his first production was La Fin du monde/End of the World (Abel Gance, 1931) starring Victor Francen and Gance himself. This was an expensive Science-Fiction film about a comet hurling toward Earth on a collision course and the different reactions to people on the impending disaster. Gance had edited it to a running time of just over three hours. When the backers felt that the film was becoming far too long, they took production control away from Gance and cut the film to a shorter length. The result was a critical and commercial disaster.
Thereafter the creative independence that Gance had enjoyed in the previous decade was seriously curtailed. He continued to be a busy filmmaker throughout the 1930s, but he characterised most of the films made during this period as ones that he did ‘not to live, but in order not to die’. In 1932 he tried to demonstrate his credentials as a reliable and efficient director by filming a remake of Mater dolorosa which he completed within 18 days and within budget. Among the other 'commercial' works that followed were Lucrèce Borgia/Lucretia Borgia (Abel Gance, 1935) with Edwige Feuillère, and Un Grand Amour de Beethoven/Beethoven's Great Love (1937), with Harry Baur as the composer.
One of the more personal projects that he was able to undertake was a new version of J'accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance, 1939) starring Victor Francen, not so much a remake of his 1919 film as a continuation of it. Gance conceived it as a warning against the new war that he saw impending. In the upheaval following the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940, Gance went to the Free Zone in the south. He arranged a contract to make a film, Vénus aveugle/Blind Venus (Abel Gance, 1941) featuring Viviane Romance, at the Victorine studios in Nice. He saw it as an allegory of the current state of France and a message of hope directed to the ordinary French people in their time of misfortune. At this period Gance was among those who saw Philippe Pétain as the means of the country's salvation, and in September 1941 Vénus aveugle had its first screening in Vichy, preceded by a speech in which Gance paid tribute to Pétain. On the other hand, even before its première, the film became the object of an attack from the collaborationist and anti-Semitic newspaper Aujourd'hui, which insinuated that the freedoms of film-making in the unoccupied zone in the south of France were being exploited by Jews: the producer Jean-Jacques Mecatti, Viviane Romance, and Gance himself were singled out for derisive references to their Jewish connections.
After completing one more film, Le Capitaine Fracasse/Captain Fracasse (Abel Gance, 1943) with Fernand Gravey, Gance went to Spain in August 1943, citing growing hostility from the German authorities in France. He remained there until October 1945. After the war, his difficulties in getting support for his projects increased and he made few films. The historical melodrama La Tour de Nesle/Tower of Nesle (Abel Gance, 1954) with Silvana Pampanini and Pierre Brasseur was his first film in colour. It provoked some revival of interest in his work, and François Truffaut named Gance "a neglected auteur of genius". Gance returned to the Napoleonic spectacle with Austerlitz/The Battle of Austerlitz (Abel Gance, 1960) starring Pierre Mondy as Napoleon. He made a further historical pageant in Cyrano et D'Artagnan/Cyrano and D'Artagnan (Abel Gance, 1963) starring José Ferrer and Jean-Pierre Cassel, and then moved into television for his final works, also on historical subjects.
Throughout his life, Gance kept returning to Napoléon, often editing his own footage into shorter versions, adding a soundtrack, and sometimes filming new material, and as a result, the original 1927 film was lost from view for decades. After various attempts at reconstruction, the dedicated work of the film historian Kevin Brownlow produced a five-hour version of the film, still incomplete but fuller than anyone had seen since the 1920s. This version was presented at the Telluride Film Festival in August 1979, with the frail 89-year-old director in attendance. The occasion brought a belated triumph to Gance's career, and subsequent performances and further restoration made his name known to a worldwide audience. Abel Gance married three times: in 1912 to Mathilde Thizeau; in 1922 to Marguerite Danis (sister of Ida); in 1933 to Marie-Odette Vérité (Sylvie Grenade), who died in 1978. Gance died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1981 at the age of 92. He still had plans to make an epic film about Christopher Columbus.
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 461. Edmond Van Daële as Robespierre in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 462. Photo: Max Maxudian as Barras in Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 468. Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon in Napoléon/Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 469. Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon in Napoléon/Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 471. Daniel Mendaille as Louis Fréron in Napoléon/Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard for Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 472. Alex Bernard as General Dupommier in Napoléon/ Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927).
French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, no. 474. Photo: Lipnitzky. Albert Dieudonné in Napoléon (Abel Gance. 1927). The postcard is a pastiche of the famous portrait of Bonaparte at Arcole, 1796, by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros.
French postcard by Viny, no. 99. Photo: Vedis Films. Grace Moore in Louise (Abel Gance, 1939). Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 2080/1, 1939-1940. Photo: Raymond Voinquel. Grace Moore in Louise (Abel Gance, 1939). Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
Italian card by Cineteca Bologna to promote the FIAF Film Restoration Summer School 2024. Photo: at the set of Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927). The screening of the new reconstruction Napoléon, as seen by Abel Gance at Cinema Modernissimo, was one of the highlights of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. Napoléon as seen by Abel Gance was in May 2024 the opening of Cannes Classics. The reconstruction of the monumental film by the Cinémathèque Française took 15 years.
Sources: James Travers (French Films), Wikipedia, AllMovie and IMDb.
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