Abel Gance | La Roue (The Wheel) / 1923

as the wheel turns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abel Gance (screenwriter and director) La Roue (The Wheel) / 1923

 

Director Abel Gance’s original La Roue was 32 reels in length, shown over a period of three days, running for a total of 7 ½ hours (some claim it is closer to 9 hours long). For the British showing, it was collapsed by the director himself into 2 hours, obviously focusing on it sentimental story, and for years this is the version most critics saw, the original having long been lost. The most recent recreation of the film by Eric Lange and David Shepard (released in DVD by Flicker Alley) runs about 4 ½ hours, and varies highly in quality. But at least we could now see Gance’s great experimental work in a way that is closer to the way in which it was intended to be seen.

     The seven hour original has been restored by Janus films and is now in the Criterion Collection.

    The story, if melodramatic, is hardly important. The great train engineer, Sisif (Severine-Mars, who died before the film was released) returns to work at the very moment a train crashes into another. Thinking quickly, he closes down the other lines only to find that one line is still open with a third train soon barreling into the station. Singlehandedly, he lifts an axel allowing the line to be close and saving the day.

    He also discovers a small child among the ruble, whose mother apparently died in the accident.

    Taking up the girl, which he names Norma (Ivy Close) home, he places her in bed beside his son, Elie (Gabriel de Gravone), whose mother died birthing him. Years later, the children, living in a small stone house in the middle of the Nice tracks, have grown up, both feeling deep love for one another, without knowing that they are not related.

    Elie, trying to ignore his incestuous feelings, puts most of his energy into violin making, while also attempting to find a varnish close to the one created by the great Cremona violin makers. Norma busies herself with house cleaning and caring for her pet goat.

     Sisif also has developed unnatural feelings for his young charge, and finds it difficult to contain himself, insisting that she stop wearing short dresses and silk stockings, and demanding that the brother and sister no longer spend time together.

     The first engineer has also taken to heavy drinking in order to wash away his perverse thoughts; he wears a mask of coal dust each evening so that she might not read his real feelings upon his face.

     In the hothouse of repressed desires, the beautiful Ivy, confused by the changes in nearly everyone’s behavior, determines finally to accept the proposal of a wealthy railway man, Hersan (Pierre Magnier) for whom Sisif has been creating railway innovations, which Hersan pretends are his own handiwork. At first Sisif refuses, but, having told Hersan of his feelings for his daughter, he’s blackmailed into allowing the marriage. He even agrees to take her, via train, to the marriage, but in his drunkenness and self-pit almost crashes the train, until his stoker—himself a heavy drinker—slows the train and brings it to a successful destination.

   This, leading to Sisif’s second reprimand, removes him from duty, as he is sent to run the funicular at Mont Blanc. There, he meets up again with his daughter on a visit from what she conveys is an unhappy relationship with Hersan, who in the meantime has discovered her own feelings for Elie (involving a letter she discovers in the interior of one of his violins, when Herson attempts to destroy it). Meeting up with them together, Herson attempts to kill Elie. The young violin maker succeeds in fatally wounding his assailant, but nonetheless spends several frames hanging from a cliff until he falls to his death within a glacier.

     Sisif, blaming Norma for her intrusion into their lives, once again sends her packing, although she quietly returns, which Sisif, now suffering from blindness, does not even notice until in a moment of rapprochement, he discovers her presence, accepting her aid and love. By film’s end, he sends her off to dance in a group “ring dance,” while closing his eyes in acceptance of his death.

     Pure melodrama, even given its archetypal motifs. As the acting, yes, Norma Desmond, these figures all have great faces, but their overly emotive gestures cannot be explained away as anything but bad acting.

     What is great about La Roue is Gance’s absolute joy in trying out every cinematic trick he might have imagined—most of which today have become standard procedures of filmmaking and editing, but which, in 1923 had never or seldom been seen on screen.

     Given the title, The Wheel, meaning both the wheels of the locomotives and the ancient torture device, symbolizing the changes of fate, Gance explores every possible image of roundness, from his endless cinematic iris closing in transitions, his insistent close-ups of the moving energy of locomotive wheels, and the final ring dance. Time and again, images are enclosed in circular friezes, like cut-outs from some ancient scrap-book.

     But even more innovative is how he uses the vast screen, allowing full images for his narrative that appear far more epic than the domestic drama that he is telling. Fully conceived comic sketches suddenly turn into brooding symbolic framings, where even the characters comment on the iconic looks of their fellow beings.

     The original train wreck is far better than Cecil B. DeMille’s of The Greatest Show on Earth. Time and again, Gance’s film images are pared down to be transformed from narrative significance to symbolic abstraction. Despite its melodramatic contrivances, the film is a feast for the eyes. At moments, as numerous critics have noted, it appears the Gance simply cannot and will not control himself as he juices up scenes with bright red, blues, and greens, overlays of images, imbibing on distortions and blurs as he trots his figures out of camera range.

    Of course, not all of these highly experimental cinematic devices work: and, as critic Dave Kehr argues, they are perhaps not even appropriate to a single film. But the very energy they and its creator (along with his brilliant poetic assistant Blaise Cendrars) exude cannot be dismissed. Even the intertitles, quoting major poets and writers such as Baudelaire, Hugo, and Cendrars, cant’s seem to contain themselves. The wheel turns and turns with utter abandonment, throwing out everything before it and after. As Jean Cocteau remarked: “There is cinema before and after La Roue, as there is painting before and after Picasso.

     Perhaps the best way to think of Gance’s La Roue is not to experience it as a coherent movie, but as a series of cinematic pyro-technics. Gance clearly took a simple story and explored it with whatever arsenal he had in his head. If today it seems sometimes banal and outdated it is only because every filmmaker after him stole those ideas and embellished them so thoroughly that they became standard methods of filmmaking.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).