Abel Gance (Parte I) : Experimentalismo e Cinema Social

One of the most important figures in the development of cinema as an art, Abel Gance was born on October 25, 1889, in Paris, France. Until his death in Paris on November 10, 1981, at the age of 92, the director’s account of his background as a child of the well-to-do French bourgeoisie was accepted as accurate. Subsequent research revealed that Gance was the illegitimate son of Abel Flamant, a prosperous Jewish physician, and Françoise Pèrethon, who was of the working class. The stigma of being illegitimate, part-Jewish, and proletarian in a France where anti-Semitic and class prejudices still persisted, despite the revolutionary heritage, may help explain the rebellious, anti-aristocratic sentiments that would color much of his film work. Abel was raised by his maternal grandparents in the village of Commentry until he was eight. When his mother married Adolphe Gance, a chauffeur and mechanic who later became a taxi driver, Abel moved to Paris to live with them. Although he adopted his stepfather’s surname, his natural father continued to provide for him and gave him the benefit of an excellent education despite Abel’s proletarian childhood. Given this stimulus, the youth began reading omnivorously and developed literary and theatrical ambitions at odds with his father’s desire that he should take up the law.

Although he worked for a time in a law office, by the time he was 19, Gance had become an actor on the stage and in 1909 began working in the new medium of cinema as an actor and scriptwriter. In 1911, with the help of friends, Gance formed a production company and directed his first film, La Digue (ou pour sauver la Hollande), a one-reel costume drama. His early sense of isolation from society first found cinematic expression in his second film, Le Nègre blanc (1912), an anti-racist story about a black child mistreated by white children. He followed this with several other successful short narrative films noted for their rich lighting and décor. As with all of his silent features and a majority of his sound films, Gance also wrote the scripts. Yet he had not lost sight of his theatrical ambitions and authored Victoire de Samothrace, a play intended to star Sarah Bernhardt. But the outbreak of the First World War prevented its production and Gance returned to filmmaking with the startling short, La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915). Working for the first time with cameraman Léonce-Henry Burel, Gance employed mirrors for the distorted effects in this avant-garde comedy about a mad doctor who is able to transform people’s appearances through a special powder he has invented. In embryonic form, the film, however playfully, marks Gance’s first excursion into the conception of a visionary able to transform reality and can also be read as an allegory of the cinema’s special magical properties. Gance's next films were feature-length thrillers for Film d’Art in 1916, in which he introduced into French cinema the kind of editing style that had been developed in America by D. W. Griffith. And in some of them, like Barberousse (1916), he began devising his own technical innovations, including huge close-ups, low-angled close-ups, tracking shots, wipes, and the triptych effect.

In 1917, inspired by the French success of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat, Gance turned to society dramas in which the narrative centered on human emotions and psychological conflicts. The first of these works made for Film d'Art was Le Droit à la vie, followed by Mater Dolorosa, the story of a woman’s troubled marriage to a doctor. With its striking chiaroscuro photography, Mater Dolorosa scored a major box-office success, both in France and other countries, including the United States. The series of society dramas culminated with a masterpiece, La Dixième Symphonie (1918), in which a composer’s marital problems inspire him to write a symphony expressing his sufferings. Establishing the director as the new artistic leader of the French cinema, the narrative enabled him to comment on the nature of genius. The shots of enraptured listeners during the first performance of the composer’s new symphony illustrate Gance’s belief in the transformative power of art.