Abel Gance - Sound Films

Sound Films

Gance embraced the arrival of sound with enthusiasm and his first production was La Fin du monde (1931), an expensive science-fiction film (first planned in 1913/14) about the imminent collision of a comet with the Earth. Gance himself played the leading role. The film was a critical and commercial disaster, and thereafter the creative independence which Gance had enjoyed in the previous decade was seriously curtailed.

Gance continued to be a busy film-maker throughout the 1930s, but he characterised most of the films made during this period as ones that he did "not in order to live, but in order not to die". In 1932 he tried to demonstrate his credentials as a reliable and efficient director by filming a remake of Mater dolorosa which he completed within 18 days and within budget. Among the other 'commercial' works that followed were Lucrèce Borgia (1935), with Edwige Feuillère, and Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1937), with Harry Baur. One of the more personal projects that he was able to undertake was a new version of J'accuse (1938), not so much a remake of his 1919 film as a continuation of it, and conceived as a warning against the new war that he saw impending.

After the invasion of France in 1940, Gance filmed a popular melodrama called Vénus aveugle, which he saw as an allegory of the current state of France and a message of hope directed to the ordinary French people in their time of misfortune. At this period Gance was among those who saw Philippe Pétain as the means of the country's salvation, and in September 1941 Vénus aveugle had its first screening in Vichy, preceded by a speech in which Gance paid tribute to Pétain.

After completing one more film, Le Capitaine Fracasse, Gance went to Spain in August 1943, citing growing hostility from the German authorities in France, and he remained there until October 1945.

After the war, his difficulties in getting support for his projects increased and he made few films. The historical melodrama La Tour de Nesle (1954) was his first film in colour, and it provoked some revival of interest in his work, with critics such as François Truffaut making the case for Gance as a neglected auteur of genius.

Gance returned to Napoleonic spectacle with Austerlitz (1960), and made a further historical pageant in Cyrano et d'Artagnan (1963), before moving into television for his final works, also on historical subjects.

Throughout his life Gance kept returning to Napoléon, often editing his own footage into shorter versions, adding a soundtrack, sometimes filming new material, and as a result the original 1927 film was lost from view for decades. After various attempts at reconstruction, the dedicated work of the film historian Kevin Brownlow produced a five-hour version of the film, still incomplete but fuller than anyone had seen since the 1920s. This version was presented at the Telluride Film Festival in August 1979, with the frail 89-year old director in attendance. The occasion brought a belated triumph to Gance's career, and subsequent performances and further restoration made his name known to a worldwide audience.

Abel Gance married three times: in 1912 to Mathilde Thizeau; in 1922 to Marguerite Danis (sister of Ida); in 1933 to Marie-Odette Vérité (Sylvie Grenade), who died in 1978. Gance died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1981 at the age of 92.