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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
