French cinema's great maximalist — J'accuse raised the dead of the war, and Napoléon strapped cameras to horses and split the screen in three before the talkies arrived.
Abel Gance made around fifty films in sixty years and is remembered for one. Napoléon has eclipsed everything on either side of it: the wartime melodramas that first made his name, the two silent films the avant-garde actually studied, J'accuse and La Roue, the sound features of the 1930s, the three-screen experiments of his old age. Behind all of it sits a second body of work that was never shot. His archive holds more than two hundred abandoned projects, roughly four times the number he finished.
He is in these pages as the filmmaker who treated the apparatus as part of the writing. Cameras went onto horses and onto pendulums because a scene asked for it, and when one screen would not hold an ending he had three built.
He was born in Paris on 25 October 1889 and registered as Abel Eugène Alexandre Perthon, the son of Françoise Perthon. His father, a physician named Abel Flamant, did not marry her. The boy spent his first years with his grandparents at Commentry, a coal town in the Allier. By the time he returned to Paris his mother had married a mechanic named Adolphe Gance, whose name he took.
He left school in his teens, clerked in a solicitor's office, and from eighteen worked as a stage actor, including a season in Brussels. Scenarios sold to the studios got him inside the industry, and he directed his first film, La Digue, in 1911. Tuberculosis then interrupted everything and he was sent away to recover.
La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915) was an experiment with distorting lenses that his producers refused to release. Mater Dolorosa (1917) and La Dixième Symphonie (1918) were melodramas built on close-ups and superimposition, and they sold.
J'accuse, shot between August 1918 and March 1919 with Charles Pathé's money, borrowed the title of Zola's Dreyfus letter and turned it on the war. Its closing sequence has the dead rise from the battlefield and walk home to be counted by the living. Gance filmed it in the south of France using some two thousand soldiers on leave from Verdun, due back at the front within days. He said afterwards that most of them were killed within weeks of returning. The figure is his, repeated in interviews for the rest of his life, and there is no way to check it.
He was recovering from Spanish influenza at Nice when he started the next film. La Roue was shot between November 1919 and February 1922 at Nice, Chamonix, Arcachon and in Paris, loosely after Pierre Hamp's railway novel Le Rail. An engine driver raises a girl pulled from a wreck; the story is melodrama, and the machinery is the part Gance films with real attention. Its rapid cutting is what the avant-garde took from him.
Illness ran through the production. Ida Danis, his companion, was dying of tuberculosis for most of it, and Séverin-Mars, who played the driver, died in 1921 before the film was done. Gance dedicated it to Danis and went to New York rather than finish the edit himself.
Blaise Cendrars, who had lost an arm at the front in 1915, assisted him on both films. He helped assemble the accelerating train montage and brought in the composer Arthur Honegger.
The version released across ten Paris cinemas on 16 February 1923 ran past 10,000 meters, about eight hours in a prologue and four parts. The Gaumont-Palace showed it with a musical program of 115 pieces by 56 composers, arranged by Paul Fosse and Honegger. That program outlasted much of the footage: when the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, the Cinémathèque française and the Cinémathèque suisse rebuilt the film between 2016 and 2019, they used the music as evidence for the order of the cutting.
Napoléon was announced in 1923 as the first of six films and consumed the resources of all six. Shooting ran twenty months from January 1925. The Opéra version premiered at the Palais Garnier on 7 April 1927 and finished in Polyvision, three projectors throwing three strips of film side by side.
The film has its own page here. What matters to the life is the timing: sound arrived within two years and made the whole apparatus unaffordable, so the most ambitious production in European cinema was obsolete almost immediately. Gance was thirty-seven at the premiere and had another fifty years to work.
He adapted quickly and unevenly. La Fin du monde (1931), a science-fiction spectacle he starred in himself, failed badly enough to cost him control of his own productions. What followed was largely assignment work, some of it very good: a remake of Mater Dolorosa in 1932, Lucrèce Borgia in 1935, and Un grand amour de Beethoven in 1936, which stages the onset of the composer's deafness by taking the sound away.
Twice in this decade he went back to his own material. In 1935 he recut and rescored the Napoleon footage as Napoléon Bonaparte. In 1938 he remade J'accuse, reusing some of the 1919 film inside a new one. With another war approaching, the dead rise a second time, now to warn rather than to accuse.
Paradis perdu was released in 1940. Vénus aveugle followed in 1941, premiered at Vichy and dedicated to Pétain. In June of that year the Vichy administration registered Gance as Jewish on account of his father, despite his Catholic baptism. He directed Le Capitaine Fracasse in 1943, left France for Spain that summer, and returned in October 1945.
Henri Langlois introduced him to Nelly Kaplan, an Argentine film writer in her early twenties who had come to Paris in 1953. She started as his assistant on La Tour de Nesle in 1954, his first film in color, and became his collaborator for the next decade.
Magirama opened at Studio 28 in December 1956: a program of shorts projected on three screens, reviving the Polyvision idea thirty years on and this time with no story to carry it. Austerlitz (1960) returned to Bonaparte with an international cast. Cyrano et d'Artagnan (1964) was written in alexandrines. After that the work moved to television, and in 1971 he assembled the Napoleon material a third time as Bonaparte et la Révolution.
The larger body of work is in the archive. Gance's papers reached the Bibliothèque nationale de France in stages: nineteen working notebooks covering 1914 to 1928, early screenplays and his correspondence with Charles Pathé, bought at a Drouot auction in 1993; then, in 1995, the full personal archive donated by his friend Claude Lafaye. It runs to twenty linear meters.
It holds more than two hundred film projects he never made. Some are a few lines on a loose sheet. Others have screenplays, technical plans, and lists of the actors he wanted.
So a filmography of Abel Gance lists only the projects that found money.
Kevin Brownlow spent most of a lifetime reassembling Napoléon from scattered fragments, and the restoration reached audiences while Gance was still alive to see it. France gave him the first Grand Prix national du cinéma in 1974. In 1979, at eighty-nine, he attended a triptych screening at the Telluride Film Festival. He was given an honorary César in 1981 and died in Paris on 10 November that year, at ninety-two. He is buried at the Cimetière d'Auteuil.
One question the archives are still settling is how much of the equipment was actually his. Gance is credited with the Brachyscope, the Pictographe, Polyvision and Perspective Sonore, all developed alongside manufacturers such as André Debrie, and the Cinémathèque française has put the question of what he invented, adapted or commissioned to its own researchers under the heading of myth or reality.
A few scenes from Gance's working life, drawn for The Paris Atlas — illustrations, not photographs.
Born in Paris on 25 October and registered as Abel Perthon; raised for his first years by his grandparents at Commentry, in the Allier.
Directs his first film, La Digue, after several years as a stage actor and a seller of scenarios.
La Folie du Docteur Tube — distorting lenses and deformed images. The producers refuse to release it.
Shoots J'accuse, ending with the return of the dead, filmed with soldiers on leave from Verdun.
La Roue, shot at Nice, Chamonix, Arcachon and Paris. Ida Danis dies during the production, and Séverin-Mars in 1921.
La Roue opens in ten Paris cinemas on 16 February, over eight hours long, accompanied by 115 pieces of music arranged by Paul Fosse and Arthur Honegger.
Twenty months of shooting on Napoléon; the Opéra version premieres at the Palais Garnier on 7 April 1927 with the Polyvision triptych.
Film · in the catalogNapoléonLa Fin du monde, his first large sound production, fails and costs him control over his own projects.
Remakes J'accuse as another war approaches, reusing part of the 1919 film.
Vénus aveugle premieres at Vichy, dedicated to Pétain. That June the Vichy administration registers Gance as Jewish on account of his father.
Leaves France for Spain in the summer of 1943; returns in October 1945.
Magirama opens at Studio 28 — three-screen shorts made with Nelly Kaplan, thirty years after the Napoléon triptych.
His papers reach the Bibliothèque nationale de France: nineteen notebooks and the Pathé correspondence at auction in 1993, then Claude Lafaye's donation of the whole archive in 1995.
At eighty-nine, attends a triptych screening of the restored Napoléon at the Telluride Film Festival.
Receives an honorary César, and dies in Paris on 10 November at ninety-two. He is buried at the Cimetière d'Auteuil.
The BnF counts more than two hundred unrealized projects in his archive — about four times the films he completed.
Film
Gance's colossal biography of Bonaparte from schoolyard snowball fight to the Italian campaign — cameras strapped to horses, swung on pendulums, and thrown like snowballs, ending in Polyvision: three projectors opening the screen into a triptych. The most technically audacious film of the silent era, premiered at the Paris Opéra two years before the talkies made its inventions orphans.
Mentored · 1954–1964
Henri Langlois introduced them; she began as his assistant on La Tour de Nesle, co-directed the Magirama program, worked on Austerlitz and Cyrano et d'Artagnan, and went on to direct her own features.
Met · 1925–1926
Artaud played Marat during the twenty-month Napoléon shoot, opposite Gance's own Saint-Just. It is one of two screen roles that carried him into film history.
Met · 1918–1922
Cendrars was Gance's assistant on J'accuse — he also appears among the risen dead — and stayed through the three years of La Roue, where he cut with him and brought in Arthur Honegger.
A French filmmaker (1889–1981), the great maximalist of French silent cinema, known for the antiwar film J'accuse and the epic Napoléon.
Napoléon (1927), a silent epic famous for its technical daring — cameras strapped to horses, and a three-screen finale that split the image across three projectors, decades before widescreen.
His antiwar film, which raised the dead of the First World War on screen. The poet Blaise Cendrars was his assistant on it and appears among the risen dead.
Gance's three-projector widescreen process, used for the triptych finale of Napoléon — the image spread across three adjacent screens.
Blaise Cendrars assisted on J'accuse and stayed through the three years of La Roue; Antonin Artaud played Marat during the long Napoléon shoot; and he later mentored the director Nelly Kaplan.
Mentored · 1954–1964
Henri Langlois introduced them; she began as his assistant on La Tour de Nesle, co-directed the Magirama program, worked on Austerlitz and Cyrano et d'Artagnan, and went on to direct her own features.
Met · 1925–1926
Artaud played Marat during the twenty-month Napoléon shoot, opposite Gance's own Saint-Just. It is one of two screen roles that carried him into film history.
Met · 1918–1922
Cendrars was Gance's assistant on J'accuse — he also appears among the risen dead — and stayed through the three years of La Roue, where he cut with him and brought in Arthur Honegger.