La dixième symphonie

France's film industry, so vibrant before The Great War, was decimated by the time the war was winding down. The United States cinema, largely unaffected by the conflict, dominated during the mid- to late 1910s. For a few sophisticated French viewers, who had suffered the pangs of deprivations for four long years, those American films on the surface failed to express the full emotions and feelings of the movies' characters. These works displayed an objective unfolding of stories but without thoroughly examining the personal effects of the plots' events on the people involved. A select company of French filmmakers especially felt film should explore the psychological responses of those in the narrative by creating an entirely new format of illustrations within the frame, something movies was ideal in presenting.

Veteran movie director Abel Gance led the way in this new movement, labeled French Film Impressionism, by his release in November 1918 "The 10th Symphony," produced by the Film d'Art Studio. The groundbreaking feature follows the repercussions of a murder set forth by a hypnotic and evil man, Fred, who persuades his mistress, Eve, to kill his sister. The couple break up, only to find Eve in a new love relationship and marriage to a music composer. Meanwhile Fred coincidentally has his evil web of intrigue wrapped around the composer's daughter, who's passionately in love with Fred. Eve sees what Fred is capable of doing and wants to save the girl from a bleak future with him.

Gance, who also wrote the script, delivers this melodrama in a unique visual presentation, so different than what was seen on the screen before. His opening close-ups of the murder, using Rembrandt Lighting (key lighting with dark backgrounds), mise en scene symbolic images and iris closings set the stage for the aesthetics of remainder of the film.

Cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burelset captures the dreamy interior sets that intentionally serve to explore the inner psych of each character. Fred's evil captivity of Eve is symbolically shown by his hand squeezing a small innocent bird. Close-up images of statues within the rooms explain the motives and universal relationships of the major participants. This layered photographing, alongside the non-linear editing of the unfolding of events, illustrates the methods a writer/director could use to capture the subjectiveness of a story through the eyes of the movie's participants instead of coldly filming the objective plot without these new techniques.

The French Film Impressionism approach of Gance was refined through its popular phase from 1918 to 1929 by Gance himself as well as other adherents. They adopted much of Gance's methods in prioritizing aesthetically beautiful images to convey this sense of emotions, just as the French Impressionistic painters of Monet and Degas created deeper, multi-layered works on their canvasses. This aesthetic is still influential in today's films, especially the more psychological sophisticated ones attempting to look into the inner personalities and motivations of their characters.

Abel Gance' first mark on cinema. 'The Tenth Symphony', the first major impressionist film.

He explores human emotion and the human experience better than anyone had. Not to say it's a masterpiece though. An overly-ambitious, convoluted and repetitive narrative is the biggest turn off.

This can be made up for as you're captive to the never-before-seen technical tricks, but then the pacing and length don't do you any favours.

Every positive comes arm in arm with a negative.

Gance would go on to make some of the greatest, most revolutionary films in existence, this feels like the final hurdle before he fully embraces and (I dare say) masters his now iconic, stylish approach to filmmaking.

L understand why some modern viewers have a hard time engaging with silent films; I'd have said the same of myself at one time. It's a dire mistake to overlook the early years of cinema, though, for while some titles are naturally stronger than others, by and large the silent era is just as rich as all that followed the advent of talkies. Sometimes a picture may represent old-fashioned norms and values, or cultural notions that are outdated, yet more commonly the stories told are pretty well timeless. Especially in the very earliest years acting may have been characterized by exaggerated facial expression and body language, ported from the stage and compensating for lack of sound, rather than the more nuanced and natural comportment modern viewers are accustomed to. Yet that shift was already beginning in the 1910s and 20s, and even if it hadn't, performances were still highly commendable more than not. And so on, and so on. And so we have Abel Gance's 'La dixième symphonie,' or 'The tenth sympthony.' It may not immediately hit upon a stroke of genius in the same way some of its contemporaries did, including Gance's own 'J'accuse' in 1919, but by all means this is superbly well done, and well worth checking out if one has the opportunity. In fact, when all is said and done I rather believe it's just as excellent as most anything else one might find from the same timeframe, a great credit to all involved.

The cast strikes a dexterous balance between the more pronounced expressions that sometimes limit viewers' engagement, and the more subtle and life-like depth of feeling that would develop hereafter. Everyone gives a strong performance in my opinion, ably realizing their characters with their varied personalities and stark emotions; not to choose favorites, but I think Emmy Lynn especially stands out as beleaguered Eve Dinant. Were the picture more tightly centered on Eve it could easily have been slightly retooled as a psychological drama, and I believe Lynn quite illustrates the range and power befitting such prominence. This is hardly to count out co-stars like Séverin-Mars, Jean Toulout, or Elizabeth Nizan, all of whom show equal capability as far as I'm concerned. On a like note, though 'La dixième symphonie' may not be a grand opus like 'J'accuse' or later epic 'Napoleon,' Gance more than proves his strength as a director with this feature. Just as he built 1916's 'Les gaz mortels' with a taut vitality passing along earnest tension and suspension, here he orchestrates shots and scenes with a mind for maximizing the impact of any given moment, and as far as I'm concerned the result is effectively a drama that handily holds its own against any of its brethren. From the measured pacing of a scene, to shot composition, to his guidance of the cast, Gance shows why he was such a major figure in the film industry.

Granted, the tale Gance penned may not leap out as anything super special; as much as any narrative can be boiled down to its most rudimentary components, the story ideas here are rather tried and true. A woman is caught between the man she loves and a wicked person from her past who holds something over her, and drama ensues as that figure resurfaces and causes conflict. Be that as it may the plot is plentifully compelling in and of itself, and even if it weren't the movie is rich with detail in every capacity to make up for any deficiency. In his screenplay and in execution Gance pours considerable minutiae into each scene for us to fix our eyes upon. For that matter, from top to bottom 'La dixième symphonie' looks fantastic, including marvelously fetching sets and filming locations, and costume design. The hair and makeup are also wonderfully well done, helping each player to distinguish themselves and also accentuating the mood at any given time. There's even noteworthy, commendable care for lighting that lends to the ambience at any given time; while I find myself less certain that a few cutaways to a dancer in the latter half meaningfully serve the storytelling, the inclusions are well done in and of themselves, including modest effects, artful tinting and embellishment, and fine choreography performed by Ariane Hugon.

I don't necessarily think this is so brilliant and singular as to demand viewership, and it's probably not a title that will change the minds of anyone who has difficulty with the silent era. Nevertheless, this 1918 film is solid from start to finish, benefiting from terrific writing, direction, acting, and craftsmanship. It's more than suitably engrossing, entertaining, and satisfying throughout its ninety-odd minutes, and as events come to a head in the last act the proceedings reach an unexpected steady thrum of a fever pitch that's deeply gratifying. I may not agree that every choice made was the best one, yet subjective faults are far outweighed by the tremendous enduring value 'La dixième symphonie' otherwise represents, and any critiques just kind of fall away. Ultimately I had a splendid time watching, and I can only give this my heartiest recommendation; if you enjoy silent movies, this is very much worth exploring.

In La Dixieme symphonie, written and directed by Abel Gance in 1917 but not released until November 1918, music is central. The film is about the composing of a symphony that is performed in the movie theater, and at its high point the music takes precedence over the image.

Examining Gance's work in the context of avant-garde, Henri Langlois saw La dixieme symphonie as his first masterpiece. It is basically, though, a conventional melodrama. Enric Damor, a gifted composer, suspects his wife of having an affair with the man her step-daughter wants to marry (she is in fact being blackmailed by him). But this breakdown of family relationships provides a new source of inspiration - art produced through suffering - his tenth symphony, which he performs on the piano for an invited audience of friends and admirers.

A working note dated August 1917 suggests that Gance initially planned to use recorded sound but instead La dixieme symphonie became one of the first feature films to have a specially commissioned symphonic score, composed by Michel-Maurice Levy. The orchestra in the cinema thus reproduces what is supposedly being played within the film. The evident disparity here, between the piano in the image and the orchestral sound in the cinema, is aggravated by the fact that many cinema orchestras could not cope with a symphonic score. The disparity is quickly effaced, however, because what we actually see on the screen is less the performance of the symphony than a series of images that illustrate it. There are locating shots of Damor playing and of the entranced listeners, but the sequence consists principally of tinted images of a ballet dancer superimposed on an idyllic garden setting with a frieze of dancers, flowers, and bunches of grapes sat the top and bottom of the frame. The visual is thus an interpretation of the musical, breaking out from the narrative in which it is held. More precisely, music ceases to be simply the subject-matter of the film; it generates images that are presented as the visual equivalent of the musical.

The importance of La dixieme symphonie is that it achieved within mainstream cinema what was to become one of the great preoccupations of the avant-garde, the liberation of the image from the narrative and the theatrical. It was a move toward non-narrative form, toward the expressive and the rhythmical. The title itself is significant here. Damor is assimilated to Beethoven by superimposition's, but his composition is also subsumed into the film as extension of the Ninth. After the Choral, the Visual. The supreme orchestrator is not the composer but the director: the first image is of Damor with the death mask of Beethoven in superimposition, but the final one is of Abel Gance taking a bow, thanking the audience for their appreciation.

La dixieme symphonie illustrates, then, the extent to which cinema in its aspiration to be recognised as a popular art form was looking toward music as model and guarantee. They seemed to have a similar project, using rhythm, harmony, and tonal contrast as the basis of an appeal to feeling. Lyric poetry could also provide a parallel since it, too, played on the intuitive, but music seemed more appropriate and was more distanced from the literary. For Gance and many of his contemporaries in France, it opened out the possibility of a radically new theory of what cinema might become.

This frenchified film was made before the excellent "J'Accuse!", recently commented upon by this German Count in his modern diary; it is another great example of the use and innovation of film grammar and cinematographic technique by Herr Gance. This oeuvre is full of suggestions, allegories and flashbacks that improve the film in a prodigious way.

"La Dixième Symphonie" is the story of the obscure past and an uncertain future that is the lot of the heroine of the film. She is married to a composer, an admirer of the German Herr Beethoven's musical compositions (a token of his good taste, certainly). This composer misunderstands a tragic event in his wife's past, an event which comes back to torment all of them when the composer's daughter gets engaged. The knowledge the composer gains of his wife's sad experience becomes the inspiration for his new musical work. This makes the film an interesting meditation about art as catharsis and the thought that every artistic creation springs from the creator's special experiences. These real life episodes may be reflected in different artistic shows as music, literature or even non-stop Teutonic operas.

A special score was composed for the film in order to emphasize the story. Besides the score, Herr Gance use evocative shots of a dancer dancing in romantic landscapes while the composer struggles to make art out of his marital sufferings, another example of the originality and newness of Herr Gance film technique. "La Dixième Symphonie" is the confirmation of the French film director's creative genius, making him an unquestionable pioneer in film history

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must attend a musical soirée in which will be performed a musical score created by a countryman of this Teutonic aristocrat, Herr Ludwig van ( not Von like this German Count ) Beethoven's Ninth symphony ( not Tenth per that frenchified film director ).

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/