The Books of My Life: Abel Gance

Steven Philip Kramer’s and James Michael Welsh’s Abel Gance (Twayne Theatrical Arts Series, Boston: Twyane, 1978) was, on its publication, one of the first English language monographs on the work of the now famous French cinéaste Abel Gance. In the book Kramer and Welsh explore and analyse eight films directed by Gance between World War I and the 1970s, films which, as Gance puts it, he made without having to prostitute himself for commercial purposes, including his now famous 1927 silent film Napoléon.

Kramer and Welsh explore, drawing on Gance's art films and his voluminous writings, the leitmotifs, the contrasts of light and dark, the mottled surfaces, the visual rhythms, the compositional skills, the visual forms, and the themes of Gance’s art films. Gance, as Kramer and Welsh also note, was not only a gifted visually oriented poet of the cinema, he was also a technical innovator. Gance invented or was one of the first French directors, to use polyvision, perspective sound, photographe, close-ups, the horizontal wipe, and sound.

The most interesting chapter of Kramer’s and Welsh’s Abel Gance for me was the chapter of the book that put Gance into his cultural and intellectual contexts. Gance, Kramer and Welsh note, was influenced by Jacob Boehme, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Elie Faure, Henri Bergson, Abbott Suger, Édouard Schuré, and theosophy. Gance's artistically oriented films, Kramer and Welsh argue, are, like Gance himself, thanks, in part, to his influences, idealistic, mystical, and romantic, and grounded in Gance's belief in the spiritual unity of humankind, the unity of the world's religions, and the notion that great prophets had and could lead humans and the world toward ever greater spiritual evolution.

I have a couple of reservations about Abel Gance. Kramer and Welsh note that Gance, like Orson Welles, had many of his more artistic films cut by the money men to make them more commercially viable and was, again like Welles, unable to finish films that were close to his heart because they weren’t regarded as commercially viable by the money men. They note that Gance saw the French Revolution as both negative and positive. They note that Gance saw Bonaparte as one of those Nietzschean prophets struggling and suffering in order to help the world evolve. Beyond this, however, Kramer and Welsh do not really explore Gance’s economic and political contexts in the thorough way that they explored his cultural and intellectual contexts. Additionally, Kramer and Welsh tend to speak of Gance’s intellectual and artistic genius in the third person rather than in, what for me, would be the more accurate intersubjective first person. Beauty and value are, after all, in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder.