Abel Gance Biography: Pioneering French Director and Silent Film Innovator
Discover the biography of Abel Gance, a key figure in French film history. Learn about his groundbreaking work and his enduring influence on the art of cinema.
Born in Paris on October 25, 1889, Abel Gance is considered one of the pioneers of silent cinema. The illegitimate son of a doctor, he was raised by his grandparents. At the age of 8, he began living with his mother and her new husband. In 1909, he began his career as an actor and screenwriter. In 1911, he founded his own company, which he began directing.
He interrupted his career during the First World War, but after it ended, he returned to cinema, with films such as La Folie du Docteur Tube. From 1917 onwards, Gance’s interest focused on social dramas, with films such as Lhe Droit à a vie and Mater Dolorosa, both from 1917. His most interesting work from this period is La Dixième symphonie (1918), in which a composer sublimates his personal sufferings into a transcendental work of art.
After the end of the war, Gance released J’accuse! (I Accuse) in 1919, a scathing allegation against the organized slaughter that World War I had caused. The film was a huge success both in France and abroad. Gance traveled to the United States to show the film to an audience that included Griffith himself and the sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish.
Gance’s next work, The Wheel (La Roue), premiered in 1923. It was a monumental production, with 32 reels, which had to be shown in three successive screenings. After a strange horror comedy in collaboration with the French comedian Max Linder, Au secours! (1924), Gance made his most important work: the monumental Napoleon (1927), one of the great classics of silent cinema.
Gance’s career did not stop with the arrival of talkies. In 1931, Gance released his first talking film, The End of the World, a science fiction film in which an astronomer, played by Gance himself, discovers that a comet is about to collide with the Earth. It was not very successful. In 1934, he added dialogue to a new production of Napoleon. An important work from this period is Lucrezia Borgia (1935), set in Renaissance Italy and inspired by the lives of Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia. The latter is the counter-figure of Gance’s Napoleon, as he feels only an insatiable desire for power and lacks the lofty revolutionary ideals that Gance lent to the Corsican.
His career is particularly notable for his ambitious productions Austerlitz (1960), about the battle of the same name, and Cyrano et d’Artagnan (1963). Gance later directed two historical films for French television, Marie Tudor (1966) and Valmy (1967). Several of his projects remained unrealized: in addition to his unfinished saga about the biography of Napoleon, he had proposed shooting an epic production about the life of Christ that would have been called The Divine Tragedy, but he did not get funding. Another project about the life of Cristóbal Colón was canceled due to the outbreak of World War II. Abel Gance died on November 10, 1981, at the age of 92.
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