La dixième symphonie

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.

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.

Abel Gance was always a Titan,one of the most ambitious directors France has ever known."La Dixième Symphonie" was as demanding a film as anything the pioneer made.He asked a young musician Michel-Maurice Levy to compose an original score for his film.But at the time ,there was no dolby system and all that paraphernalia and most of the movie theaters were not equipped to play the music with a full orchestra.Hence the failure.Other innovation: these are not black and white but monochromatic pictures (sometimes blue,orange,sometimes even two or three colors).

As for the story it's melodrama.As a writer,Gance was not a genius .Even his much-admired "la Roue" is full bore melodrama.Woman leaves wicked husband after killing his wicked sister -the hubby told the police it was a suicide after receiving a whole lot of dough-.She gets married again with a musician whose daughter falls in love with....well,you've guessed it,her mother-in-law's former husband.In order to save her stepdaughter from misfortune,she tells her new husband his daughter's fiancé is her lover.You get the picture! "I'm going to sublimate my sufferings ,I'm going to make it a symphony" the artists says out of despair.The symphony is performed ,and the musician gets a standing ovation and the critical acclaim.Now he is famous.(The musical sequence lasts about ten minutes).

I'm not sure that today's audience can relate to this Gance's work.It's a curio,but it's not among his most successful achievements.

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/

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.