Das Rad

An intimate, sprawling epicn, nearly unreviewable, it veers wildly from brilliance to hypnotic ennui, dulling the senses.

Impressive train wreck opens this five hour (originally nine hours) meditation on a small family living and working in train yards, beginning in 1923 France, and the next several decades.

Experimental in the extreme: narrative structure (and largely, coherence) is dismissed from minute one. Many scenes appear as though the cinematographer was hypnotically drawn to something, and just filmed it endlessly. An editor should have cut this footage down tremendously, but the editor appears to be suffering the same malady.

Surreal set designs and lighting, backlighting to produce silhouettes, actors walking in and out of focus as they walk in the frame, and quick-cut editing give this an impressive, hallucinatory feeling, like a very long, meandering hallucination, with circular lenses and shapes to impart on the audience the father's failing eyesight.

Entire reels of film roll through, where I am left with a sense of "What am I watching, and why is it taking so long for something to happen?" Free form filmmaking, partially engrossing, but one can't help but wonder if a LOT of editing would have improved this by adding a bit of coherency? Yet would that have cost the film its hypnotic, hallucinatory feel?

This stunning 1923 silent film was restored by David Shepard and others in a print that runs nearly 4 hours and 30 minutes. The original film, directed by Abel Gance, was about twice that length, never released in the US except in a severely cut down print of about 2 hours.

The story, a "tragedy of modern times," is seemingly a simple one. Aman named Sisif (Séverin-Mars) rescues a baby girl in a train wreck and raises her as his own along with his son. She's known as a "rose of the rails" since the family lives in a squalid house by the railroad where Sisif is an engineer. As the years pass the girl, named Norma, grows to adulthood. Things get uneasy when Sisif realizes that he is in love with Norma (Ivy Close), and things turn to tragedy when his son Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) also loves her ... but believes she is his sister. Sisif plots to marry her off to a wealthy man to escape the impending disaster.

After Norma is unhappily married off, Sisif is injured in an accident and banished to a small mountain railway near Mont Blanc. He lives there with his son on the edge of a glacier but even in their isolation they cannot escape tragedy ... of their love of Norma.

The film is high art, operatic, Greek tragedy, and must be approached as such. The visuals are stunning. The composition and sets includes the smallest of details, and Gance uses close-ups, iris shots, fades, and rapid editing (borrowed from D.W. Griffith's masterpieces) to make this one of the most beautiful films ever made. The current version also includes tinting to enhance the emotional pitch of the film.

The performance of Séverin-Mars won't be to every taste, but his old-school acting style is similar to that of Emil Jannings. Without dialog, all he has are his body language and face. Shots are held to emphasize the emotional plight of the aging man. And you can see every thought he has in his face.

The other great performance is by Ivy Close, a British actress who also worked in European silent films. She resembles Norma Shearer and as with Séverin-Mars, her face shows every moment of joy and sadness. There's a stunning scene toward the end when she's asked to go to a village dance. She runs to powder her face and sees a gray hair, a line on her forehead. She's growing old. La Roue, the wheel of life, is turning, and Norma is growing old.

This superb restoration is accompanied by a beautiful and haunting score by Robert Israel, itself a symphonic work of great power. Séverin-Mars died soon after filming was completed in 1921. Gance did not complete and release the film until 1923. Ivy Close made a few more silent films in the late 1920s and retired from the screen.

This may be a film you only watch once in your lifetime, but you will never forget it.

Gance seems overwhelmed by the theme of humanity crushed by incredible suffering, and some of the symbolism may seem heavy-handed, but this film deserves to be listed among the greats for its wonderful cinematography, the strong contrasts between the first parts portrayal of trains and the second parts moving to the beautiful, impassive scenery of the high Alps.

I have always been an admirer of Gance's Napoleon, but his J'accuse turned me off. La Roue has restored my desire to see the others: La fin de monde, Beethoven, and Austerlitz.

As for the suffering, this was made in 1921 in the aftermath of WW I, which is sufficient to account for Gance's obsession with the theme.

Okay, as I am discovering, the name of Abel Gance as has reached us through a long and troubled historiography is mostly in the contours of a European DW Griffith; the broad historic scopes, the elaborate film language. But whereas Griffith's pioneering efforts were narrowed by a set of Victorian ideals about a world where good and evil are clearly defined and the prevalent Western thinking that has traditionally regarded the struggle between these two fractions in rational, linear terms as the forward struggle of human thought to achieve enlightenment from the forces of darkness - the forces of production or state morals for Griffith - Gance foresaw deeper: objects cast their shadow here, human beings have interior dimensions, and the darkness no longer threatens from outside but is recast inside the human character.

This is the film that Kurosawa fondly remembered as one of the first to impress him. So, a film that resonated within Japanese culture of the time, a culture that has increasingly sought out and adopted - long before the westerns of John Ford - Western perspectives in their traditionally abstract eye.

But the more obvious stuff before we get there, how the film must have equally well impressed the early Soviet filmmakers. There may not be crowds animating, acting out rigorous ideals - not history as in Griffith, but present action, history in the making - but there is a shift; the Shakespearian tragedy, and thus the cleansing, high-minded catharsis, now transferred to the working class, so that the new Oedipus, the new Lear or Sissyphus, the new king punished with divine madness becomes the insignificant railroad engineer - named Sisif no less - with the perennially greasy, coalblack face. It is now the lowly and disenchanted whose life agonies can be imbued, and given voice to, with the majesty of a world ruler; hence the ruled world, the kingly dominion, is reordered as the private life of organized anxieties.

So, this part of the film should bode well with a contemporary audience, who can also better acquiesce to the idea of a film that runs for 4 1/2 hours. But there is stuff that matters more, I believe.

See here. Sisif's house is situated where the tracks converge and disperse from again, so at the navel of the soul. At regular intervals fates depart from there - some of them the desperate attempts to destroy the self, others harboring omens or disaster.

But once up in the exile of the mountains, the house - now the hermitage, the temple of atonement - is where the tracks lead and stop. There is no going further, and there are some amazing shots of snowed mountain peaks captured from a moving train that you will want to see. Here, the protagonists must struggle with a karma that is not possible to extricate without the dissolution of the self that is the essence of spiritual transformation.

The poignant image that unifies vision; wheels, wheels turning fates in the incessant cycle of life-renewing destruction. The Soviets appropriated this image - as well as the rapid-fire montage pioneered here by Gance - as a representation of social mechanisms at work; but here the image is properly internal, in-sight into abstract soul.

The heartfelt denouement is about the last - and hence, first - turn of the wheel, the cosmic round of succession of an impermanent, transient universe. It's all pretty obvious at this point, which maybe derails the more powerful metaphors into a typically classical story end.

So this is probably why the film spoke with clarity to the Japanese, whose world is not linear but vivid impressions from a bird's eye. At the end, a circle of young girls and boys dance away in the shadow of the mountain; like in so many Japanese landscape paintings where idyllic everyday pleasures among the cherry-blossomed trees unfold beneath the distant horizon of Mt. Fuji.

Gance shows how the final release from the round can only begin with the acceptance of suffering. It is a Buddhist image, whereby this darkness recast inside the human character is finally understood to be no different from light.

We may encounter it in a jodo temple as the bodhisattva Kannon-Avalokitesvara, who reconciles both male and female form - and so all human disparity - in singular, unbound mercy; the name in her female form, poignantly as ever with the Japanese rendered into picture language, means 'Observing the Sounds (or Cries) of the World'. So, not the person who observes, but the act, the living process of the round - filled with the cries of suffering - as it comes into being and goes again.

Asides into meditation. But the film is boss as is.

Abel Gance is not a filmmaker who thinks small. There is something to be said for a master filmmaker (for Gance clearly is a master) pursuing his vision at all cost. In subject matter, La Roue possess similar qualities to early 20th Century realist novels. Frank Norris comes to mind. Of course Norris's novel McTeague was the subject of another grand visionary director, Erich Von Stroheim.

Sisif, an engineer, a "man of the rails," finds an orphaned child after a railroad crash. He takes this child, Norma, home to raise as his own, alongside his son Elie. Fifteen years pass, Norma grows into a beautiful, free-spirited woman. Sisif begins to look at his adopted daughter in a way that is very unfatherly, nor is he alone in his desire. Elie, Sisif's son, seems to have feelings for his "sister," feelings Norma shares. Uncontrolled passions lead to tragedy until the (somewhat) optimistic ending. The film's first half takes place either in the family home surrounded by rails or around the railyards. The background of the railroad, with its grime and smoke, does add to the ambiance of the film. The second half is largely set in the snow covered alps. Both halves possess a realism due to the locations.

There are sections in La Roue that rank among the best in silent cinema. My favorite is the sequence where Norma leaves for Paris, a sequence about halfway through the film. She says goodbye to her home in a series of beautifully poetic shots. Then, she boards a train driven by her "father." En route, a fit of jealousy consumes Sisif. He plans to crash the train. What follows is a series of fast edits that are as advanced as anything used by the Russians from this time period. It is hard not to be awed by the sequence. Nor, is this the only one. La Roue has about half a dozen such eye-popping moments. It also features a moving finale that seems earned.

It should also be noted that La Roue, even in the shortened cut that remains, runs four hours and twenty minutes. It cannot be watched casually! I spent one whole day with Flicker Alley's DVD, homebound due to an aching leg and a reeling stomach. Others may not have the infirmity (and the patience) for that type of commitment. I can understand. The running time, even shortened, is overly generous for the story told. There are sections that drag. A certain repetitious quality hurts the film (one character tries three separate times to kill himself with a train). La Roue is not an epic like Lawrence of Arabia, or, rather, La Roue is an intimate epic, about people, about desire, and about despair. Most certainly the story did not need the indulgent running time, but I'm glad the film exists just as an example of a filmmaker going for broke. I even felt my day was well spent, even if the idea of watching La Roue in its entirety a second time seems more like combat than entertainment.