The Big Screen (20 page)

Feuillade is too little known today, whereas Abel Gance is still a famous name. But when you hear people acknowledge Gance—a little vaguely—you guess they haven't seen the work or grasped the scale of his achievement. Gance is not even a large figure; he is a monster. He is so much bolder and more ambitious than, say, Cecil B. DeMille, and he is as French, as overwhelming, and sometimes as regrettable, as Victor Hugo.

Only weeks short of the age of ninety, Gance, who was born in 1889 in Paris, attended the 1979 Telluride Film Festival (at nine thousand feet), in Colorado, for the splendid revival of his 1927 epic,
Napoléon
. Gance had nearly died as a young man from tuberculosis and, later, from the 1919 influenza, but the thin air of Colorado was wine to his soul, as stimulating as five hours of film; of course his own desired version of
Napoléon
would have been far longer.

Gance was the bastard son of a distinguished doctor, Abel Flamant. (“Gance” was his stepfather's name.) He was urged to pursue a legal career but gave that up to be an actor, and thus, at much the same time as Griffith in America, he seems to have realized that actors were putty in the hands of those managers who might be called “directors.” Surviving great poverty and then tuberculosis, he made his first film,
La Digue
, in 1911 and then wrote a five-hour play,
Victory of Samothrace
, which Sarah Bernhardt had said she would have opened but for the outbreak of war.

Abel Gance was so physically depleted that he was not taken by the French army until 1918, but his service was shocking enough to inspire
J'Accuse
, a nearly three-hour antiwar tirade, with magnificent footage from the front itself and a shamelessly melodramatic story to back it up. No one ever accused Gance of subtlety; no melodramatic excess ever deterred him. But
J'Accuse
is from the appalling world of war experience, whereas Griffith's
Hearts of the World
is a distant reverie. In deliberately coopting the tradition of Zola and Hugo, Gance was asserting a vital French belief: that film grew out of the theater and literature, without compromise or concession. It was part of national culture from the outset.

J'Accuse
(which opened in April 1919) was an international sensation, sufficient to get Gance invited to America. He met Griffith and rejected an offer to work in Hollywood at several thousand dollars a week. Instead, he returned to France to make
La Roue
(1923), a love story about railroad workers, and probably his best picture. In the same year, Gance directed a comedy,
Au Secours!
(1924), with Max Linder, a dandyish comedian who had a large American following in advance of Chaplin. Indeed, Linder thought he had been exploited and then abandoned by the American film business. But he had other disadvantages: he was the victim of a gas attack on the Western Front, and then he had double pneumonia. He and his wife killed themselves in 1925 (he was only forty-one), and in French history, Linder is marked as a tragic victim of American crassness.

So what should Gance do to honor film and France (and himself) but make an attempt on the life of Bonaparte? On the set, Gance makes Griffith seem shy and introspective. There is a story that when one big military scene was to be filmed, in which the army of extras was supposed to cry out, “Vive Napoléon!” they actually yelled “Vive Abel Gance!” It reminds one of the folklore from
Spartacus
(1960), when every slave defies Roman investigation by shouting out, “I am Spartacus!,” but some said, “I am Kirk Douglas [the producer and star],” with as much irony as respect.

Gance began with a six-part outline that would carry Bonaparte from birth through the period of the Revolution to the Italian campaign of 1801. He meant to go further, of course. What he shot amounted to at least a six-hour film and it cost over 18 million francs (despite enormous complaint from his bankers). In June 1924, on the eve of shooting, he spoke to the cast and crew with a fervor that might have come from Bonaparte himself. It is an early example of monomania as the natural condition of filmmaking:

The “they” Gance sought to command included two hundred technicians, forty stars, and six thousand extras. He built a section of Paris, but he also went as far as Toulon and Corsica to find the authentic locations. He pioneered rapid cutting and extended shots. He moved the camera in ways not tried before. He had first-person shots. He threw the camera as if it was a snowball. He even created a thing called PolyVision for very spectacular scenes, which was three screens, side by side, with a central site of action and sidebars of complementary or illustrative material. Anything he could think of he would try, which extended to persuading his actors that they were the people they were playing. One observer believed that Gance could have succeeded where Bonaparte failed! Not everyone admired this self-display or the melodrama of rhetoric.

It is also said that Gance read every book ever written on Bonaparte. That may be so, but the film itself leaves more feeling of Gance's seething, exuberant megalomania with this “art-form of the future.”

Napoléon
does not survive in its entirety. There are no more than five and a half hours. It was restored (thanks in great part to an Englishman, Kevin Brownlow), and it was supplied with scores, one by Carmine Coppola, another by Carl Davis. The latter is far superior, but the former was part of Francis Coppola's decision to rerelease the picture in America. And so it survives to this day, and many sequences (especially those with Bonaparte as a boy) are still remarkable and appealing.

As to the whole thing, its video life is probably not something Gance would have countenanced.
Napoléon
demands epic scale and a live orchestra. It cries out for the biggest screen available—yet it is hard to imagine
Napoléon
will often see that light again. It coincides nearly with von Stroheim's
Greed
—a superior film made for a Hollywood studio and “rationalized” into submission, so that the excised footage no longer exists.
Napoléon
was also made for a private production company, one that had taken an absurd financial risk that was not rewarded at the time. The film opened in Paris at the Opéra on April 7, 1927. It was so unwieldy that it played only in European capitals. M-G-M bought it for America and cut it drastically, refusing to show the PolyVision part of the picture.

Napoléon
was “too long” for public taste or physical survival. Yet in France, most of the grand enterprise survived, and Gance lived to see the restored version. It played at Telluride first at an open-air screen, with Gance watching from his hotel window. He died two years later, certain that he was right, a figure in history. But as François Truffaut once observed, “Gance does not
possess
genius, he
is possessed
by genius.”

René Clair was a Parisian, from Les Halles, born in 1898, the son of a soap merchant. As a child, he fell in love with puppet theater, and that controlling attitude toward performance never left him. He wrote poetry and he was wounded in the Great War (as an ambulance driver), but he rejected soap for journalism, acting, and then an eagerness to try making films. In 1924 he made two short films—
Paris Qui Dort
and
Entr'acte
—that are the mood of slapstick comedy seen through the eye of an elegant, witty, and polite surrealist of the 1920s, aware of modern art and intrigued by the many ways in which cinematography can be used to help comedy: double exposure, slow-motion, reverse action, and so on. It's an approach that overlooks film as a new version of reality in favor of a fresh, jazzy treatment of graphic expression.

Clair was interested in making comedies for smart people. In 1927 he took the Eugène Labiche and Marc Michel play
The Italian Straw Hat
and delivered what Pauline Kael would call “simply one of the funniest films ever made and one of the most elegant as well.” The farce was not a hit in France, but it quickly became a model all over the film society world for what wit could do. Clair was talked of in company with Lubitsch, and if Lubitsch was tougher, Clair was a master of gentle elegance and wry satire. Moreover, within just a few years, he managed the transition to sound with an inventive ease that was unsurpassed.

In rapid succession he made
Sous les Toits de Paris
(1930),
Le Million
(1931), and
À Nous la Liberté
(1931) and was regarded as one of the outstanding directors in the world. Clair loved Paris, but his taste was to re-create it on sets. (The Russian Lazare Meerson was his top art director.) He was a patron of meticulous art direction, and he excelled at the orchestration of music, sound effects, and talk and a very pretty, pearly black-and-white look usually achieved by Georges Périnal. His characters were puppet-like, not deeply examined, but seen with great affection and charm.

The historian Gerald Mast would say of Clair,

That point may be sound, but Chaplin “borrowed” from
À Nous la Liberté
to make
Modern Times
, and Clair's lightness can be penetrating. His greatest horror was to be heavy-handed. His greatest vulnerability was his unshakable belief in comedy and his dread of solemnity as France turned very earnest about its own sinking fate.

So Clair left France and went first to England, for
The Ghost Goes West
(1935), and then to Hollywood, where he lived throughout the war. His pictures there were uneven—
The Flame of New Orleans
(1941),
I Married a Witch
(1942),
It Happened Tomorrow
(1944),
And Then There Were None
(1945)—and the critic Manny Farber believed that Clair had lost his touch and his creative self in America. Of course, departure did not endear him to the French. While he went back to Paris after the war and made several more films, he came under steady attack as part of the old guard, bourgeois, and precious, from the
Cahiers du Cinéma
critics of the 1950s.

To say the least, he is a subject for reappraisal (if that demanding discipline is available any longer in film studies). Still, he was the first director elected to the Académie Française. When he published the script of
Les Belles de Nuit
(1952), he wrote a foreword that expressed his determined urge to entertain and to avoid offering himself as a Gance-like monument: “We willingly admit that we've tried to amuse you by relating in this film an imaginary adventure that doesn't attempt to prove anything, that doesn't support any thesis, and that is, in a word, as perfectly useless as a nightingale or a flower.” It could be Preston Sturges speaking, or Jacques Tati, who was so affected by Clair—and their vogue is still assured. “Perfectly useless” cinema goes against the grain of state cinema and of “important” films made in many free-enterprise situations. But it should not be forgotten, or dismissed as being as lightweight as it feels.