New York Times: La Roue

[silentfilm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/movie ... ref=slogin

New DVDs: ‘La Roue’
By DAVE KEHR
Published: May 6, 2008
LA ROUE

For sheer cinematic hubris, it is hard to equal Abel Gance’s 1927 “Napoléon,” which had its premiere in Paris as a six-hour film that required the use of three projectors placed side by side. These created Gance’s visionary triptych effects: three contrasting images in a row, or a single panoramic image that extended across all three screens, a technique that anticipated the Cinerama presentations of the 1950s.

But even “Napoléon” seems modest compared with Gance’s 1922 film “La Roue” (“The Wheel”), an intimate epic centered on four main characters that in its original Paris screenings was 32 reels, presented in four parts spread over three days. (In his book “French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929” the film historian Richard Abel writes that it lasted nine hours. Other sources have it at seven and a half.)

Gance had achieved a major critical and commercial success with his 1919 antiwar film, “J’Accuse,” which ran a relatively modest three hours. His financial backer, Charles Pathé, was prepared to follow his director on another extravagant project, this time inspired by the 19th-century social epics of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, and reflecting in equal measure Hugo’s dense, multigenerational plotting and Zola’s theories of biological predetermination. The result was a story that applied themes of incest and alcoholism to a sweeping narrative covering several decades and moving from the dark, grimy railroad yards of Nice to the blindingly white vistas of Mont Blanc.

The actor Séverin-Mars, the lead in “J’Accuse,” here plays Sisif, the champion engineer of the Nice to Paris line. During the spectacular train wreck that opens the film, Sisif rescues a baby from the twisted metal, the daughter of an English traveler who has been killed. Sisif, a widower, decides to raise the child as his own, and with the help of a 15-year flash-forward, she grows into Norma (Ivy Close), a perky blond gamine.

Norma has grown up believing that Sisif is her father, and that Elie (Gabriel de Gravone), Sisif’s sensitive, artistic-minded son, is her brother. Life is sweet — or at least as sweet as possible for the hard-working family, which lives in a narrow house between tracks in the Nice switchyard — until Zola’s biological fatalism raises its head.

Sisif and Elie each discovers that he is madly in love with the innocent Norma, and an atmosphere of guilt, jealousy and queasy sexual tension grips the small household. Elie takes to building sexually symbolic violins by hand, furiously searching for the secret formula for varnish used by the violinmakers of Cremona; Sisif takes to piloting his no-less-Freudian express train with increasing, and drunken, abandon. And Norma, baffled by the behavioral shifts of the men in her life, reluctantly agrees to take up with a wealthy railroad official, a solution that satisfies no one and that precipitates a devastating act of violence.

The complete version has long been lost, and in recent times “La Roue” has been seen only in the two-and-a-half-hour cut version Gance edited for wide distribution in 1924. The film has now been released on DVD by Flicker Alley in a print, assembled out of five different versions by the archivists Eric Lange and David Shepard, that runs for nearly four and a half hours.

That’s still a very long haul for a story that D. W. Griffith could have dispatched as a two-reeler. It is difficult to imagine what the missing hours might have contained. What we do know is that the film, at its original length, was a tremendous critical success in France, where it was received with extravagant praise. The poet and future filmmaker Jean Cocteau spoke for many of his contemporaries when he said, “There is cinema before and after ‘La Roue,’ as there is painting before and after Picasso.”

Today that reaction is hard to comprehend. The psychology of the central relationships seems crudely deterministic: Sisif and Elie are crushed by their incestuous impulses as if by asteroids dropping from the sky, and once stricken, they are powerless to resist, staggering along like zombies. The performances Gance draws from his actors leave little room for nuance. As Sisif, Séverin-Mars (who died of a heart attack before the film was released) seems constantly to be begging for audience sympathy with his watery eyes and furrowed brow; as Norma, Ms. Close (a popular English actress who was the mother of Ronald Neame, the director of “The Poseidon Adventure”) is a standard gamine of the period, frisking with her pet goat.

But “La Roue” still fascinates as a grab bag of experimental techniques, which do not all belong in the same movie, but which clearly dazzled audiences of the time with the formal possibilities of this still relatively new medium. Circular forms, drawn from the title image, appear with maddening regularity: in the charging wheels of Sisif’s locomotive, the faces of ominously ticking clocks, the ring dance of a band of happy peasants.

Gance here develops the accelerating editing style that he would push further in “Napoléon”: a train wreck is built from a shot 10 frames in length, followed by a shot of nine frames, working all the way down to a single, subliminal flash. And he imposes poetic metaphors, as when an overhead shot of a slow-moving train dissolves into an image of a snail, and back again. Gance allowed his actors to walk out of focus as they approached the camera (here, to suggest inebriation); Sisif’s increasing blindness is portrayed by images taken through distorting glass and by iris effects that slowly close down on the actor’s face, isolating him in a field of darkness.

In his creative frenzy Gance frequently mixes tonal and emotional registers and points of view. Some of the trick shots look down on the characters, passing editorial judgments from the director’s perspective; others are meant to portray the characters’ inner turmoil. As in “Napoléon,” his style is ecstatic and impressionistic at one moment, stiffly academic at another.

Perhaps some of the initial enthusiasm for “La Roue” was generated by the sense of absolute freedom — from all current standards of narrative structure and formal coherence — that Gance projects with practically every sequence. It would be for future generations of filmmakers, including Cocteau himself, to balance that freedom with a sense of discipline and restraint, shaping unbridled effusion into poetic expression. (Flicker Alley, $39.95, not rated)

[silentfilm]

http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/artic ... icle=22610

Wilmington on DVD: One of the greatest silent symphonies
La Roue, I'm Not There, and the films of Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin
Mike Wilmington on Friday 05/09/2008 11:12 am , (2) Recommendations

La Roue (A)
France; Abel Gance, 1922, Flicker Alley

Abel Gance, maker of the spectacular 1927 French epic Napoleon, was one of the great symphonic masters of the silent movie, and La Roue is one of his greatest symphonies.

It’s also a real cinematic event: the restoration of a legendary and once vastly influential film epic, released in France in 1922 at 7½ hours, ruinously cut to 2 hours or so for American audiences, and now restored to 4½ hours and much of its previous grandeur by Paris’ Lobster Film Studios, Eric Lange and David Shepard. It’s another beautiful job by Flicker Alley, and no true cinephile should miss it.

The story of La Roue (The Wheel) is, in many ways, pure silent-movie melodama, but done with such grace, style and deep feeling that it sweeps you up and thrills you, just as the silent melodramas of Gance's friend and admirer D.W. Griffith still do. Shot on location at the St. Roch railroad yards near Nice, conceived and written by Gance himself, it’s the Zola-esque story of a moody crack engineer (played by Gance's favorite actor of the period, Severin-Mars) rescues a little girl from a devastating train wreck and secretly adopts her; she grows into a beauty (played by American actress Ivy Close) who wins both Sisif’s heart and desire and also that of his sensitive violin-maker son Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) and the unscrupulous wealthy railroad man de Hershan (Pierre Mangier).

More train wreck and tragedy envelops them all, and the second half of the tale unfolds on the snow-capped peaks of Mount Blanc, where Sisif (whose name derives from the Sysiphus of Albert Camus’ favorite classic myth) is finally exiled.

Gance was both a classicist and a great film innovator, and La Roue is told in a blazingly brilliant style that blends stunning compositions and passionate acting with brilliantly accelerated editing techniques (in the action scenes), pounding volcanic cutting rhythms that went even further than Griffith’s and obviously were another major inspiration on Eisenstein and the Russians. La Roue, whose main admirers included the young Akira Kurosawa, is a cinematic masterpiece that we have never before seen with such power and complexity. It rends the emotions, drenches the eyes and quickens the heart. Among this release's major assets: a contemporary documentary by famed novelist Blaise Cendrars, who was present for some of the filming, and a new orchestral score by Robert Israel, to replace the long missing original score by Artur Honegger.

Bravo, Abel Gance! And bravo, Lobster Studio and Flicker Alley, for bringing most of this marvelous La Roue back from the dead. (Silent, with intertitles and new orchestral score. Extras: Blaise Cendrars documentary and booklet with William M. Drew and Robert Israel essays.)

[silentfilm]

Film writer Kristin Thompson has a blog entry on Flicker Alley's version of this film today at http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=3720.

[WaverBoy]

This bit from Kristin's blog entry is most intriguing:

The notes call this restoration “the fullest presentation of La Roue to reach the public since 1923,” which may or may not be true. I have seen a print of La roue of roughly the same length which has a significant number of scenes that aren’t present in the Flicker Alley release-and lacks several of the scenes included here. That was at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, though they don’t hold the original material on it; that’s in a French archive. That version runs 287 minutes at 18 frames per second; I can’t find an indication of projection speed on the DVD, though I would guess that it’s comparable.

So, perhaps an even more complete video version could be in the cards someday...