Abel Gance, hier et demain

Another short documentary on the films of Abel Gance, this half-hour program, "Abel Gance, Yesterday and Tomorrow," was made even before Kevin Brownlow's "The Charm of Dynamite" (1968). The same documentary director and Gance's assistant, Nelly Kaplan, went on to make a documentary on Gance's masterpiece "Napoléon" (1927), "Abel Gance and His Napoléon" (1985), as well as serving as second-unit director on his "Cyrano and d'Artagnan" (1964). So, undoubtedly, she knows what she was talking about, but more importantly this program is presented in Gance's own words, or whoever was providing the English-translated voiceover narration for the French filmmaker that I heard.

In the 1960s, the clips seen here would surely be even more valuable than they are today when some of Gance's best work is widely available, if not always in pristine restorations. In its short span, the brief doc does well enough, demonstrating that from the beginning, with an experimental one-reeler such as "La Folie du docteur Tube" (1915), with its shots by distorting lenses, he was an early filmmaker to theorize on the cinematic image--lighting, space and time--which continued through the multi-shot compositions, rapid montage, superimpositions, and the three-screen process so-called "Polyvision" of "Napoléon."

Expectedly, this being 1963, it's liable to some dated hyperbole, as well. Gance claiming that he and D. W. Griffith independently discovered the close-up and dolly shot is especially demonstrably false nowadays, as anyone can check YouTube to see early cinema instances of such techniques, from G. A. Smith making multi-shot films based around close-ups back in 1901, such as "As Seen Through a Telescope" (1900), or the exploitation of the dolly shot as a gimmick for facial-expression films such as "Photographing a Female Crook" (1904), which was produced by Griffith's future employer. "The Griffith of Europe," as Gance, as well as Ernst Lubitsch, by the way, was called at one time or another, was a great and historically important filmmaker without need to reach for such invented primacy claims. Restorations made available on home video in recent years of his greatest films, "J'Accuse!" (1919), "La Roue" (1923) and "Napoléon" make that evident.