18. La Roue (1923) [The Wheel]
France 273m Silent BW
Director: Abel Gance
Producer: Abel Gance, Charles Pathé
Screenplay: Abel Gance
Photography: Gaston Brun, Marc Bujard, Léonce-Henri Burel, Maurice Duverger
Music: Arthur Honegger
Cast: Severin-Mars, Ivy Close, Pierre Magnier, Gabriel de Gravone, Max Maxudian, Georges Térof, Gil Clary
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Never before released in the United States, this monumental French film is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the whole history of cinema. Written and directed by Abel Gance (Napoleon, J’Accuse), three years in production, and for its time unprecedented in length and complexity of emotion, La Roue pushed the frontiers of film art beyond all previous efforts. Said Gance, “Cinema endows man with a new sense. It is the music of light. He listens with his eyes.”
Taken to its bare bones, the story deals with Sisif, a locomotive engineer who saves Norma, an infant girl, from a train wreck and raises her as his adopted daughter. Norma thinks Sisif’s son Elie is her brother, and when the two fall in love, she leaves to marry a virtual stranger. Sisif is also obsessed with her and the plot elaborates this triangular relationship. German director G. W. Pabst, an ardent admirer of La Roue, was encouraged by Gance’s example to undertake his own remarkable explorations of human psychology in such silent films as Secrets of a Soul, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.
Yet La Roue is even more remarkable for its cinematic accomplishment than for its story. The film was taken almost entirely on location. Sets were built along the railroad tracks in the yard at St. Roch, near Nice, and at an elevation of 13,000 feet on Mount Blanc. Gance pioneered a dazzlingly innovative style of rapid montage that revolutionized filmmaking around the world, especially in the works of Eisenstein and his contemporaries in the Soviet Union. Almost every sequence was experimental; as his cinematographer, L-H Burel recalled, “I’d never come to the end of it if I were to list all the tests we did, all the special effects I invented, and all the innovations we launched.” Like Intolerance and Citizen Kane, La Roue became a source book of cinematic invention that reverberated in countless other classic films over the decades. It was hailed by artists and intellectuals, who recognized it as a stunning advance in modern art. Said Akira Kurosawa, “The first film that really impressed me was La Roue.”
This new restoration with a running time of nearly four and a half hours, accompanied by Robert Israel’s symphonic score, is the fullest presentation of La Roue to reach the public since 1923. It at last allows audiences today to experience the amazing, poetic vision that Abel Gance brought to the world.
While we’re still patiently waiting for a U.S. DVD release of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), Flicker Alley has graced us instead with this 1923 Gance film, which is almost as good. Gance is known in the history books as a filmmaker of mixed skills; one writer called him “a genius without talent.”
And so Gance took this moldy, soapy story about a railroad man who adopts a young orphan girl and turned into a sprawling, half-mad, 4-1/2 hour masterpiece (and it was originally even longer). After a massive train wreck, Sisif (Séverin-Mars) finds the young Norma and takes her in, allowing both her and his son Elie to believe that they are blood brother and sister.
When Norma grows up, she becomes a dazzling creature (played by Ivy Close), with cascading ringlets of golden hair. Everyone falls in love with her, including a wealthy, crooked entrepreneur, Jacques de Hersan (Pierre Magnier), who takes Sisif’s inventions and passes them off as his own. Elie, now a violin maker, also falls for her.
Astonishingly, even old Sisif falls for her. But when Sisif tries to kill himself, Norma agrees to marry the rich man to try and appease everyone, but her selfless act leads to more tragedy. Gance called La Roue (a.k.a. The Wheel) his “black and white” epic, setting the first half in the railroad yards (black) and the second half in the snowy mountains (white).
Gance’s visual inventiveness comes through in almost every shot, specifically in his unique editing, which sometimes repeats shots, and sometimes uses rapid-fire cutting to increase tension or excitement. When Sisif tries to crash his own train by increasing the speed, the film’s rhythm builds to an intense frenzy. And when Sisif begins losing his vision, Gance responds by slowly fading the image up to pure white. This level of technical achievement was fairly rare for 1923, with perhaps the exception of Erich von Stroheim’s work in America. Even D.W. Griffith didn’t dare to turn such a wretched melodrama into an epic; he needed epic material to justify a film’s size and length. The little studio that could, Flicker Alley, has done another Criterion-worthy job with this DVD, remastering the film to a luminous digital finish and providing the best silent score I’ve heard in years (by Robert Israel). Extras include — believe it or not — behind the scenes footage!
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Information
Internet Movie Database (IMdb)
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RapidShare Links
http://rapidshare.com/files/225134956/Roue23-SMz.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/225134975/Roue23-SMz.part02.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/225276815/Roue23-SMz.part34.rar
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