La roue

Director Jean Cocteau said: "There is cinema before and after 'La Roue' ("The Wheel") as there is painting before and after Picasso." So influential was French director Abel Gance's February 1923's "The Wheel," that it has been carefully studied frame by frame ever since its release. Famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa claimed the movie made a huge impression on him before he became interested in working in the film business. Today its importance towards cinema's impact merits an inclusion into the "1001 Movies To See Before You Die" reference book.

What makes "The Wheel" so interesting is Gance's use of lighting and unconventional editing to unveil the emotions and tensions of the movie's characters. Right from the start he purposely designed his film to undergo a series of quick cuts, beginning with a two-train crash. The multi-casualty accident heightens the tragedy where our protagonist, Sisif, a train engineer, ends up with Norma, a little girl whose mother died. "The Wheel" also contains an inordinate amount of multiple exposures, thrusting the narrative forward through a dizzingly series of events within several decades. Even its title symbolizes that every life in the movie is a dramatic example of a cycle of lives who are part of a rotation of a wheel that constantly repeats itself every generation.

"The Wheel" is a story revolving around the widower Severin-Mars, as the engineer, who raises the little girl, acted as a grown-up by Ivy Close, along with his son, Elie. The aging engineer becomes attracted to Norma, as well as Elie. Conflicts abound. The film's second half abruptly shifts to the Alps, where the three, as well as Norma's husband, end up in a topsy-turvy meshing of dramatics. The decision to film in the Alps, not in Gance's original script, was made because the director's wife, Marguerite, came down with tuberculosis and the doctor recommended the mountains to help alleviate her symptoms.

Gance's use of several innovative cinematic features also are presented in "The Wheel." Included is one of the first examples of a swish (or whip) pan where the camera quickly pans and transitions to a new scene at a point where Sisif is relating about Elie's death. Gance also introduces to French cinema a precursor to Sergei Eisenstein's more definitive examples of 'intellectual montage.' In "The Wheel," Gance shows a train laboriously climbing up the Mont-Blanc mountain side, then he cuts to a snail, showing how slow the train in moving.

Gance always saw himself as "the Victor Hugo of the screen," and as with the famous French writer, the director loved long, long productions. "The Wheel" at first was 32-reels, clocking in at over eight hours. The most common length of the movie on today's DVD's is four and a half hours long. The production was so long that actor Severin-Mars died of a heart attack soon after his parts were filmed. Despite looking old for his age, he was only 48 when stricken. His leads in "The Wheel" as well as Gance's earlier 1918 "The Tenth Symphony" was a powerful presence on the screen.

This was also Ivy Close's last movie in a major role. Voted by the Daily Mirror as the World's Beautiful Woman in 1908, the English actress beat out 1,500 contestants. She married filmmaker Elwin Neame and was one of the first film stars to begin a movie production company, in 1914. She left cinema after "The Wheel" when her husband wanted her to stay home to raise their kids, only to see him die shortly after in a motorcycle crash. She appeared in secondary parts in two movies in the late 1920's before talkies ended her 44-film career. Her son Ronald Neame, a producer, worked alongside director David Lean to create his classic 1945 'Brief Encounter' and 1946 'Great Expectations,' while her great grandson, Gareth Neame, was responsible in bringing the worldwide phenomenon television series, 'Downton Abbey,' to the airwaves in 2010.

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.

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?

Roue, La (1923)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

French master Abel Gance's 260-minute epic tells the story of Sisif (Severin-Mars), a railroad worker who discovers a young girl named Norma after a horrible train wreck. Sisif takes the girl home to his young son Elie where he plans on raising them as brother and sister. Flash forward several years and Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) has started to fall in love with Norma (Ivy Close) even though he thinks she is his sister. At the same time Sisif has also fallen in love with her, which leads the two men down a road of tragedy. A lot of the epic films released after The Birth of a Nation dealt with epic themes, usually something to do with war, but that's not the case here as you would call this a film that deals in melodrama and character study. It's rather amazing that Gance would try to take this material and push it to over eight hours, which was the original running time. I was a little worried going into this version, running 260-minutes but it turned out to be a great beauty of a film. I really don't think the film ran too long and in fact, the running time goes by quite fast but the only thing I'd question is some of the stuff that we go through two or three times. This includes one character attempting suicide numerous times and I think this could have been handled in a different way. The legendary editing is the main highlight of this film as it goes in a maniac style way. There are numerous edits each second during certain scenes and I'm really not sure if it could be done better even with today's standards. Even though the editing is quite sharp and fast, it never gets in the way of the story trying to be told. Another fascinating aspect is when the main character starts to go blind. The director then turns the visuals on screen to an all white setting to where we're seeing things just like the character who is going blind. the final sequences of the film are quite beautiful and haunting and really puts everything we've seen before it into justice. I think for the most part that the performances are good but I think at times the director would have been wise to bring them down a little bit. Severin-Mars really steals the film as the love struck father who is slowly losing his mind, life and eyes due to the love his has for the girl he raised as his daughter. Close gives the weakest performance of the three but she still handles the screen quite well. La Roue is certainly a demanding film to sit through but at the end of the film I was quite happy to take the ride and this is certainly a film that every film buff should see at least once in their life.