Thanks very, very much to those who offered to send me their dvd-rs of this Gance-a-rama, though right now I've so much stuff to see & read it might have to wait awhile before I get to Abel's babies. I'm glad that I watched
Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite &
J'Accuse, though I just had to get forty winks by the time that
La Roue came on.
I found the
Brownlow documentary about
Gance to be quite touching and a lot of fun, especially since catching a glimpse or two of the rather camera shy (and very young)
Kevin Brownlow is always fun.
Gance seemed to revel in telling about his ideas and struggles, and, though it had been forty years since the events culminating in his wife's death and the making of
La Roue, the two were clearly still a tender wound for him. I loved the behind the scenes footage of the making of
Napoleon and all the technical innovations that the director used to capture the emotional truth of the convention scenes, the pillow fight, and the snowball fight. This made me want to see
Napoleon again, since that masterpiece seems to be such a heady distillation of many of the director's ideas and his most audience-friendly work.
J'Accuse (1919) had a strong visual impact on me (I swear I dreamt of skeletons dancing ring around the rosy last night). It struck me that, as Gagman & Ollie mentioned,
Gance was a bit like
Von Stroheim, in love with moviemaking as a form of personal artistic expression and someone whose love of gadgetry may have overwhelmed his storytelling technique at times. Maybe he needed an editor or a strong hand like
Thalberg to make his grand vision practical (and profitable?) and a bit more concise. It did seem as though some of the points the filmmaker made in
J'Accuse were a bit repetitious, but perhaps I'm looking at the movie from too much of a 21st century window and the film served as an epiphany for the French audiences viewing it just after the end of the wanton destruction of an entire generation. While I'm aware that there were those who recognized the artistic value of
J'Accuse at the time of its release and it was a box office smash, did the average French filmgoer find it too painful? How was the film received in the other Allied nations and in Germany & Russia by general audiences? I'd love to know how the contemporary audiences reacted.
The scenes that affected me the most were those that depicted the apparent heartless brutality of
Francois, (
Séverin-Mars) which gradually emerged as his "coping" mechanism to mask his deep love for (or was it possession of?) of poor, benighted
Edith (
Maryse Dauvray). I particularly like the moment on the train to the front, when
Francois tenderly fingered her comb and a bit of lace that was hers. At first I thought that Francois was going to be a stock villain, but the way that his character became more subtly shaded as the movie went on was very effective.
By the end of the film, my sympathy was largely with his character. Francois was one of those people destined to go unloved and because he hadn't experienced love, he couldn't express his own tenderness adequately, though the closest he would come seemed to be in the alliance he formed with his perceived enemy,
Jean (
Romuald Joubé). I realize that male friendships were viewed as sometimes "purer" than that of a relationship between a man and a woman, but do you think we were supposed to see an element of homosexuality in their bond--or am I again looking at something with jaded 21st century eyes? I also kept hoping that Edith might ditch all three guys (dad, hubby and lover) and hit the bricks, but that again is probably modern poppycock. In the context of her times, was Edith's refusal to kill herself before or after her forced submission to the Germans and her even more bold love for her baby (
Angele Guy who was darling) was the only act of rebellion that she could be expected to make, or not? The most powerful sequence by far was the climactic rising of the dead asking if their sacrifice had been worth it. That whole part of the movie would have been a masterpiece in itself, though I doubt if it would have had the same emotional impact without all that had occurred previously.
I can't help but wonder if others think
Abel Gance was as successful at capturing quiet moments between people as he was when photographing spectacles? One more question: why did Edith & Jean, who were obviously so compatible
not marry? Could it be because Jean Diaz's family was Jewish? I noticed that there was a candelabra in the Diaz household that might have been a menorah and that no priest attended Mama Diaz when she was ill and dying.
During the film, I also noticed that Edith's militaristic father kept eyeing his map of Alsace-Lorraine, which had been lost to the Germans in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War. It dawned on me that without that event driving my grandfather's family from the former French province, I wouldn't even exist. Not of worldwide significance, I grant you. But of some importance to this rather bleary-eyed viewer.