Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema

Paul Cuff Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema

Sounding out Utopia Paul Cuff Warwick University Coventry, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-38817-5 ISBN 978-3-319-38818-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-38818-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958116

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © Adrien Barrère, ‘Abel Gance: Cinéaste a explosion’, illustration in Fantasio (December 1930) (Author’s collection)

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland NOTE ON FORMATTING

REFERENCES I have used the Harvard system for citations within the text (author | year: volume/page). Square parentheses [ ] within a citation indicate a fi rst publication date. Please see the Bibliography and Filmography for a detailed explanation of source material.

EMPHASES All italicized emphases within quoted material appear in the original sources.

NAMES For the sake of agreement with original material, my text retains the native spelling of French names and titles.

TITLES To distinguish them from works of literature, titles of fi lm projects are formatted in small caps.

v vi NOTE ON FORMATTING

TRANSLATIONS Unless otherwise noted, all translations of French-language material are my own. For other foreign-language material, I have tried (wherever pos- sible) to use the most modern and reliable English editions available. CONTENTS

List of Figures xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Preface: The Sublime and the Ridiculous xv

Part I Overcoming the Past 1

Introduction 3

1 In the Shadow of War 5 Medium and Message 5 Accusations 8 Fate 15 Reclaiming History 17 Notes 20

2 Towards Utopia 21 Art as Religion 21 Utopian Narratives 30 Notes 39

vii viii CONTENTS

3 Prophets of the Future 41 Cinematic Messiahs 41 Embodying Revolution 45 Taking Action 53 Note 55

4 Cinema and the Life of Space 57 Citizens of Space 57 The Psychic Universe 61 Art and Metaphysics 67 Magic, Music, Light 72 Note 77

Summary 79

Part II Impossible Dreams 81

Introduction 83

5 Artistic Integrity and Industrial Change 85 Author and Industry 85 World Cinema 91 The Coming of Sound 98 Notes 104

6 A History of Incompletion 105 Leadership and Recruitment 105 Sacred Labour 110 Crises 115 Distribution 121 Reverberations 125 Notes 129

Summary 133 Note 135 CONTENTS ix

Part III The Marvel of Ruins 137

Introduction 139

7 Passion and Performance 143 Premonitions 143 Projecting the Voice 151 Rivals 154 Film as Testament 160 Notes 165

8 Fighting to be Heard 167 The Speed of Exchange 167 Voices of Authority 169 Resolutions 172 Note 176

9 The World on Fire 177 Absence and Excess 177 Orgies 182 The End 190 Epilogue 197 Note 198

Summary 199 Notes 204

Conclusion: ‘Why have I been only what I am?’ 205 The Burden of Reality 205 Alternative Histories 210 Looking to the Future 214

Filmography and Bibliography 217

Index 237

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1 Adrien Barrère, ‘Abel Gance: Cinéaste a explosion’, illustration in Fantasio (December 1930) (Author’s collection) xix Fig. 2 Jean-Adrien Mercier, poster for LA FIN DU MONDE (1930–31) (Courtesy of Gaumont) xxiii Fig. 3 Photograph of a truck advertizing LA FIN DU MONDE (1930?) (Author’s collection) xxiv Fig. 2.1 Reproduction of manuscript diagram by Abel Gance (1928) 26 Fig. 3.1 Front cover of Cinémagazine (January 1931) (Author’s collection) 46 Fig. 3.2 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 47 Fig. 5.1 Advertisement for J’ACCUSE, Kinematograph Weekly (22 April 1920) 87 Fig. 6.1 Advertisement for DAS ENDE DER WELT, Film-Kurier (Berlin) (9 August 1930) 119 Fig. 6.2 Advertisement for DAS ENDE DER WELT, Film-Kurier (Berlin) (11 April 1931) 123 Fig. 6.3 Advertisement fl yer for LA FIN DU MONDE (1931) (Author’s collection) 124 Fig. 7.1 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 147 Fig. 7.2 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 148 Fig. 7.3 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 149 Fig. 8.1 Image capture from AUTOUR DE LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Le Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée) 175

xi xii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.1 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 184 Fig. 9.2 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 187 Fig. 9.3 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 189 Fig. 9.4 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 190 Fig. 9.5 Image capture from LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Gaumont) 192 Fig. 9.6 Image capture from AUTOUR DE LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Le Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée) 193 Fig. 9.7 Image capture from AUTOUR DE LA FIN DU MONDE (Courtesy of Le Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée) 194 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My fi rst thanks must go to Kevin Brownlow, whose restoration of N APOLÉON is responsible for my continuing passion for the work of Abel Gance. I fi rst saw N APOLÉON at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 4 December 2004, and a great deal of my subsequent creative activity can be traced back to this event. As a student writing my undergraduate dissertation on Gance, I discovered that Brownlow was a tremendously forthcoming correspon- dent and source of information—and I shamelessly continued to exploit his generosity. During the writing of the present book, he allowed me access to his private collection of interview and press material on Gance. For this and for countless other instances of help and kindness, I offer him my deepest thanks. This book has its origins in a chapter of my PhD thesis written in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. My supervisor, Jon Burrows, patiently read through a large volume of material on L A FIN DU MONDE —even after it became clear that I would never fi t this material into my thesis. Thanks to his sagacity, this research has ultimately found its rightful place in a separate work. I also want to express my gratitude to the research culture and teaching environment at Warwick, where numerous friends, colleagues, peers, and students have enriched my thinking and my work. The archival research for this book could not have taken place without the aid of many people in person and via correspondence. I wish to thank the staff of the Bibliothèque du Film and Fort de Saint-Cyr fi lm archive of the Cinémathèque Française (Paris), the Arts du Spectacle department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), and the Národní Filmovy

xiii xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Archiv (Prague). In France, many people shared with me their knowledge and their time—I want to thank Laurent Husson, Nelly Kaplan, Christine Leteux, Laure Marchaut, Georges Mourier, Sarah Ohana, and Elodie Tamayo. For reading various parts of this book and offering invaluable sugges- tions for improvement, I am very grateful to Kevin Brownlow, Wujung Ju, Erik Schelander, and Nicholas Viale. To the latter, I also owe lifelong gratitude for taking me to see N APOLÉON in the fi rst place. I offer special thanks to my mother, Anne Cuff, for translating the German press material on Gance. At Palgrave, Lina Aboujieb has been of immense help throughout the production of this book. I would also like to thank Charles Drazin for his very kind endorsement. Finally, Natalie Stone has provided me with all the love and encourage- ment that I could ever need to believe my work was worthwhile.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the fi rst opportunity. PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS

FALLEN EAGLES At the start of 1812, Napoléon Bonaparte had completed his overthrow of several hundred years of monarchical tradition and redrawn the map of Europe in the hope of establishing universal democracy; by the end of 1812, he was fl eeing incognito from the frozen hinterland of Russia in which he had lost an army of over 500,000 men. History has disregarded most of the many excuses the Emperor offered for this unprecedented military failure, but his summary of the change in fortune is still remembered: ‘It is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous’ (Pradt 1815: 215). Such is also the perceived gap between N APOLÉON, VU PAR ABEL GANCE (1927) and L A FIN DU MONDE (1930)—the last silent fi lm and the fi rst sound fi lm made by Abel Gance. The former was hailed as a masterpiece; the latter was a disaster so great that it nearly destroyed its maker’s career. Though his utopian projects for cinema enjoyed a decade of fi nancial and critical support, after 1930 Gance would never be granted signifi cant money or praise. The prophetic subjects of N APOLÉON and LA FIN DU MONDE encourage analogies that are all-too-easy to apply: Gance’s well-publicized fall from grace smacks of Napoleonic hubris, whilst his representation of the apocalypse echoes the industrial upheaval caused by sound. Perhaps the pithiest summary on this theme came from René Jolivet: ‘After the success of N APOLÉON , Gance’s Waterloo wasn’t long in coming’ (1931). Having collapsed under the weight of its own ambition, L A FIN DU MONDE was an ‘unparalleled disenchantment’ for a fi lmmaker with messianic pretensions

xv xvi PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS

(Vezyroglou 2000: 142). The cause of Gance’s sudden decline was the subject of much conjecture but little investigation. The director blamed his producers and was convinced that an industrial objection to originality led to his exile from artistic autonomy. Critics believed the fault lay with Gance for not reconciling his aesthetic style with the demands of sound cinema. Neither claim is wholly convincing. Censured by its distributors and disowned by its director, L A FIN DU MONDE still languishes in cultural obscurity. There has been no detailed analysis of the fi lm’s conception, production, and reception nor has there been an adequate explanation for its failure. To begin my re-evaluation of L A FIN DU MONDE , this preface will locate the fi lm within the context of Gance’s career and his critical reception.

BUILDING A REPUTATION In the 1910s, Gance established his fi lmmaking credentials with a series of cheap, skilfully made melodramas. Their increasing narrative and technical sophistication paved the way for his artistic breakthrough, J’ACCUSE! (1919), a critical and commercial sensation that brought Gance international fame. The extraordinary fi nancial success of J’ ACCUSE encouraged its author to take larger risks, testing not only the nerve of his producers but also their trust in his intuition. Gance’s next production proved to be an immense emotional and logistical challenge, whose budget and length far exceeded its contracted boundaries; by the time it premiered, L A ROUE (1922) was over 8 hours long. Though distribution problems lim- ited its success abroad, Gance’s peers hailed this blend of epic melodrama and revolutionary formal experimentation as ‘the formidable cinematic monument in whose shadow all French cinematic art lives and believes’ (Epstein 1925: 8–9). Gance’s subsequent project proved even more ambitious in scope and egregious in length. In 1923, he planned to make six fi lms that would span the life and career of Napoléon. Production began on the fi rst part in 1925, but by the time shooting had fi nished in 1926 Gance had consumed the budget for the entire series and used over 400,000 metres of celluloid. The premiere of N APOLÉON took place at the Théâtre de l’Opéra in April 1927. This version was 4 hours long and incorporated two ‘Polyvision’ sequences, where three images were projected side-by-side to form the largest cinematic canvas ever seen. An alternate edition of 9 hours was premiered at the Apollo in May; though it included neither of the triptych PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xvii sequences, its breathtaking use of mobile camerawork and rapid cutting united commercial narrative fi lmmaking and avant-garde techniques. As I have outlined elsewhere, reviews of N APOLÉON mixed praise with condemnation—disparagement of an ‘excessive’ form and ‘Romantic’ content was held in check by laudatory appreciation of its stylistic brilliance (see Cuff 2013). Many of Gance’s supporters argued that the ‘errors and deformities’ of his work were intrinsic to its exuberant originality:

Gance is clearly the greatest fi lmmaker in France. His work possesses a scale and, moreover, a magnetic power, an authority, a nervous magic that con- stantly makes me think of [Richard] Wagner. You emerge from his fi lms somewhat overwhelmed and rather lost, and I completely understand those who don’t like this sensation. Critics end up sourly searching for reasons to reproach him: they complain that the bride is too beautiful. Of course, but such beauty is so rare! (Miomandre 1927: 707)

Such views on Gance were already well established. As early as 1922, Léon Moussinac defi ned the fi lmmaker’s work by its ‘rich disorder’:

The outstanding feature of Gance’s fi lms is their abundance: abundance of new ideas, abundance of banal trivialities, abundance of bad taste. I love this beautifully-crafted mess, and I admire Gance when he allows himself to run free like wildfi re – at once a disastrous incendiary and a beacon for everything around him. Whenever he tries to impose discipline, he obstructs himself; when he gives in to imprudent advice, Gance impoverishes his art. (1922a: 786–7)

Jean Arroy felt the need to explain Gance as ‘a blind force of nature’, incapable of committing mistakes half-heartedly: ‘The quality of genius is to go to the depths of error as well as to the heights of truth. He exceeds his goals, he never knows his limits’ (1927: 9). It is highly signifi cant that even his most sincere supporters recognized that the higher Gance fl ew, the more likely he was to fall. The lofty enthusiasm with which Gance was praised by some of his friends already bordered on self-parody. The director was celebrated by some as one of ‘the race of the Christopher Columbuses of human endeavour’ whose every fi lm marked ‘a great leap into the future’ (Les Spectacles 1927: 7). For André Robert, Gance’s only ‘error’ was to have been ‘born many years before his time’; the fi lmmaker’s spirit belonged xviii PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS to the future because he was ‘an apostle of the new age’ (1931: 4–5). Evy Friedrich called Gance ‘a new Prometheus’, condemned by ignorant enemies for possessing ‘too much genius’: ‘mankind doesn’t recognize the benefactor who brings light to humanity’ (1931: 14). Arroy’s literary portrait of the artist from 1927 is couched in terms of mystical obses- sion. Gance is described as a supernatural creative ‘fl ame’ at the heart of a ‘cathedral of light’, the ‘stained-glass rose’ of a church window, a ‘dis- charger of radioactivity’, an emanator of ‘psychic energy’, an ‘unleasher of enthusiastic inundation’, an ‘annihilator of inertia’, an ‘explosive intellectual’, a ‘radiator of exceptional mental electricity’, a ‘conqueror of the screens of the world’ who marches at the head of ‘cohorts of light’. Such is the ‘passionate hurricane’ that Gance provokes in him, it is no wonder that Arroy worries his account would ‘betray’ the bounds of mere friend- ship. The artist’s preternaturally youthful face is a ‘torch of vehement pas- sions’ and induces in his disciple ‘a smouldering fever’: Arroy professes to be ‘infl icted’ with ‘dangerous wounds of love’ (1927: 5–11). Hardly less suggestively, Georges Buraud also spoke of the ‘gentle but profound stirring’ he felt when in the presence of Gance. For him, the artist is an ‘apparition’, a ‘great queen bee’ around whom ideas seek fertilization, and a ‘romantic archangel’ whose ‘immense white wings are nailed to a lumi- nous cross’ (Buraud 1928). In the popular press, the fi lmmaker was even the object of astrological interest: ‘It is certain that the importance of the Ninth House in Gance’s horoscope has a relationship with his tendencies to reform and transform the art of cinema.’ In this way, Russian esotericist Alexandre Volguine credited Gance’s innovative camera placement and invention of Polyvision to the Ninth House being ‘that of spiritual works, of vision and ecstasy, of subjective or superior states of mind, and of elevated tendencies of the brain’. (1929: 164) Other journalists couldn’t take this kind of reverence—or Gance’s work—at all seriously. One magazine issued a satirical ‘Cinema Statute’ whose eighth article reads: ‘The board of health, or even the local doctor, may suspend or cancel any screening of a fi lm by Abel Gance when at least half the audience complains of neuralgia or nervous spasms.’ (Herbert 1928: 26). In December 1930, Fantasio published a caricature of Gance by Adrien Barrère (Fig. 1 ) alongside a droll biography. Its pseudonymous author coolly sketches the problematic nature of the fi lmmaker’s reputation: ‘Gance has much charm […] the charm of dynamite. It pleases him to captivate those around him; yet over and over again everyone PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xix

Fig. 1 A satirical portrait of Gance from 1930: the fi lmmaker as benedictory dynamite xx PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS says: “Abel Gance is impossible”.’ When producers demand he temper his ambition to suit the requirements of the studio, ‘Gance is resolute: “You must take me as I am, possessed of uncertain blessings and defi nite defects.”’ The fi lmmaker’s ‘ample spirit and decadent whims are well- known’ and ‘no sacrifi ce is too much to reach his ideal’—regardless of expenditure or the ‘endless leagues of celluloid’ he consumes (Bing 1930: 217). Reporting a meeting between Gance and Fritz Lang in Berlin, the columnist transforms these artists’ excessive spending into an absurd kind of one-upmanship. Gance proudly boasts to his colleague that he had used fi ve times as much celluloid for N APOLÉON as Lang had for F RAU IM MOND (1929). An executive from Universum Film AG (UFA) then tells Lang that Gance ‘possesses more genius than you because he squanders more money’. If Gance has an aura of religiosity, his is a ‘faith strong enough to break open bank vaults’ (ibid.). Gance’s philosophy was alien to such cynicism, as well as unswayed by purely material arguments—he considered art’s utopian mission to be the ‘transmutation of universal pessimism’ (1930g: 81). Cinema was a tran- scendent language with a profoundly important social function: fi lmmakers were ambassadors for pacifi sm. Their medium was not only a means of global communication, but also a modern religion whose expressive power surpassed all earlier vessels of spiritual truth. The fi nancial success Gance had achieved with his fi lms of the previous decade fed his enthusiasm and strengthened his convictions in the 1920s. He spoke of N APOLÉON not just as a fi lm, but as an act of dedication to his faith:

I’ve given Napoléon my soul, my heart, my life, my health. I have neglected nothing to make our country’s most beautiful fi lm. I have surpassed the limits of devotion to an enterprise which is steadily sapping my lifeblood through excessive work. (1925a)

Yet the response of Gance’s distributors, Gaumont-Metro-Goldwyn (GMG), to the result of this monumental effort had been the worst possi- ble insult. GMG were horrifi ed by the impossible technical demands made by the Opéra version of NAPOLÉON and by the sheer length of the Apollo version. Numerous special screenings of N APOLÉON took place throughout 1927, but GMG reneged on giving the fi lm a general release. In 1928, they compounded matters by issuing a bastardized edition of N APOLÉON that had been signifi cantly reduced in length and entirely re-edited. Outraged by their lack of consultation, the director took GMG to court and sued PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xxi them successfully for damages. This was a serious manifestation of hostility towards Gance’s cinema and he never forgave the French fi lm industry for their lack of faith in his artistic instincts. Regardless of this evidence that his grandiose schemes would bring him into confl ict with the people he relied upon for funding, Gance’s religious zeal for cinema continued to intensify. The period between the release of NAPOLÉON in 1927 and his engagement on LA FIN DU MONDE in 1929 marked the high point of Gance’s artistic and political ambitions as a fi lmmaker. His greatest project was to be L ES GRANDS INITIÉS , a series of epic fi lms portraying the life of various prophets from world religions that would be funded by a cinematic wing of the League of Nations. Designed as a pacifi st monument to cultural understanding and political international- ism, L ES GRANDS INITIÉS would be crowned by two fi lms: L A FIN DU MONDE and L’A NNUNCIATION . Unable to persuade the League to back his plans, Gance eventually found funding for L A FIN DU MONDE from the company L’Écran d’Art, headed by Russian producer Vassili Ivanoff. The fi lm was to have been on the grandest of scales, its narrative depicting mankind’s spiritual salvation in the face of planetary extinction from a colliding comet. Gance’s contemporaries reacted with a mixture of bemusement and fascination as he expounded the virtues of this gigantic scheme in the press. The Christmas 1929 edition of Pour Vous even satirized his project in an elaborate ‘review’ set in the year 1960, when the Apocalypse fi nally takes place. God is called ‘the Great Director’ and orders ‘the fi nal set- tling of accounts’: ‘Knowing the horrifi ed reluctance with which people from the fi lm industry submit to any form of accounting, it is with them that He begins.’ Gance is the fi rst to be summoned, and he immediately reprimands God for calling him ‘Monsieur’; with an air of ‘dignity’ he tells the Almighty to address him as ‘Master’. God bows before Gance and obliges, but informs him that he has committed ‘numerous historical crimes’. The greatest of these is to have called his fi lm L A FIN DU MONDE , as this title is God’s ‘intellectual property’—as recorded in Genesis 3:19. Whilst a chorus of angels urges Him to get going with the Apocalypse, God is fl ummoxed by Gance’s verbose riposte:

ABEL GANCE How funny you are!

THE GREAT DIRECTOR What’s that you say? xxii PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS

ABEL GANCE I mean you make me want to burst out laughing. And in spite of everything, I would laugh if I didn’t have a degree of respect for your age, my dear fellow. You own The End of the World ? Not at all: I accuse you of artistic plagiarism. You can’t plead ignorance: this was a fi lm I started barely 30 years ago. All the newspapers announced it, posters for it were plac- arded throughout the world, airplanes wrote its title in the clouds… You mean I needed to fi nish it? Oh, it won’t take more than 20 or 25 years – a mere 100,000,000F or so… But now – without telling a soul, without so much as a press release – you start cutting the grass under my feet!

CHORUS Pick up your steps, quicken your gait! Get to the camera, don’t be late! Eternity cannot wait!

THE GREAT DIRECTOR This is outrageous…

ABEL GANCE I haven’t fi nished. The fact is that if your end of the world had been any good, I’d forgive you. But it’s terrible! Yes, you have lots of extras… Big deal! It doesn’t cost you anything! But the rest? What a shambles! Where is your shot variation? Not even one instance of superimposi- tion! No technique! No rhythm! No atmosphere! I’m telling you, it’s infantile. You should have told me that you wanted to produce an “end of the world”, my dear fellow – we could collaborate. On a point of prin- ciple, I don’t much like it – but… I suppose I could make an exception. Naturally, my name would have to come fi rst on the credits.

THE GREAT DIRECTOR Master, you can’t possibly be serious.

ABEL GANCE I could make one concession. Maybe the poster could read: “ The End of the World , a fi lm by God the Father, supervised by Abel Gance.” (Pour Vous 1929: 8)

JUDGEMENT This fi ctional account is vivid evidence of how Gance was perceived by those in the industry—and it proved remarkably pertinent. The fi lmmaker’s radical plans for the use of Polyvision and a symphonic orchestration of sound in LA FIN DU MONDE foundered on endless technical diffi culties. After a rancorous production that swallowed-up huge amounts of time PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xxiii and money, the resulting footage was taken out of Gance’s hands and drastically reshaped. L A FIN DU MONDE was released in two versions, one in French and another in German, but both were hopelessly fl awed. Despite ceding his contractual rights to Ivanoff, Gance was still culpable for the end product—and because he played a major character within the fi lm he couldn’t hide his involvement. As illustrated in Jean-Adrien Mercier’s poster for L A FIN DU MONDE , the director was effectively the face of the fi lm (Fig. 2 ). Though a second poster features his co-star Victor Francen, Gance is given greater prominence within Mercier’s fi rst design: he stares up at the heavens, his enormous head looming over the anonymous crowd below. The fi lm was even publicized with the slogan: ‘La Fin du Monde, vue, entendue, et interpretée par Abel Gance’ (Fig. 3 ). As director, tech- nician, and actor, Gance had labelled himself triply responsible for what proved to be ‘the defi nitive catastrophe’ (Huet 1931: 5). There followed a ‘wave of reprobation’ in the press, a veritable ‘war against the man who made L A FIN DU MONDE ’ (Lartisan 1931: 1). Critics were united in admonishing the poor quality of the sound, which was the primary reason many found Gance’s fi lm close to unwatchable. L A FIN DU MONDE was as formally imperfect as N APOLÉON had been masterful:

Fig. 2 Gance as the face of LA FIN DU MONDE xxiv PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS

Fig. 3 Coming soon: ‘The End of the World, seen, heard, and performed by Abel Gance’

One would like to get past this failure and stick up for the technical skill of the inventor of rapid montage and the triple screen […] But it’s impossible […] Every aspect of the sound is disastrous. Its least defect is to be badly recorded and several scenes are inaudible. More than merely failing to supplement the images, the dialogue often ruins them completely. (Marion 1931: 64–5)

Complaints focused on the content of the script as well as its technical ren- dering. The fi lm could only offer ‘banal dialogue’ and this ‘microphone fodder’ detracted from the drama (L’Illustration 1931). LA FIN DU MONDE was not a ‘talking fi lm’ but a ‘babbling fi lm’ (Bost 1931: 233). Gance’s fi lm aroused similar reactions when released as D AS ENDE DER WELT in Germany. The alternate soundtrack evidently did nothing to alleviate the over-emphatic delivery of the fi lm’s dialogue: the Berlin press was per- plexed by the ‘unusual pathos’ evident in the actors’ performances, which PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xxv seemed ‘exaggerated by the German synchronization’ (K.G.L. 1931). Any praise for the fi lm’s visual quality was tempered by confusion at the van- dalized narrative. Critics hinted at their seasickness by describing Gance’s fi lmmaking as ‘kaleidoscopic’ (Le Soir 1931), or else expressed amused baffl ement over sequences which had ‘all the hair-raising qualities of a fi rst rate lobster supper nightmare’ (Chicago Tribune 1931). Beyond its endless technical issues, critics had fundamental problems with the subject matter of L A FIN DU MONDE . Its narrative was derided as ‘swimming in nonsense’, and its ideology classed as ‘ridiculous twad- dle’: ‘Seldom have so many stupidities been piled up with so much con- scientiousness’ (Fayard 1931). Critics’ reaction against this ‘completely imbecilic’ plot was intensifi ed by their distaste for the ‘theatrical religiosity which encumbers all Gance’s fi lms’ (Marion 1931: 64). Even those who admired the pacifi st intentions of LA FIN DU MONDE said Gance’s realization rendered them ‘ridiculous’—there were ‘an inexhaustible supply of scenes that make one laugh or grit one’s teeth’ (Soupault 1931: 180). Many had been forced to stifl e laughter at Gance’s intense earnestness: ‘the fi lm endeavours to reach the sublime with a persistency which rapidly becomes comic’ (Marion 1931: 65). The character he played in the fi lm was ‘swathed in pretensions, unintelligible sufferings, and symbolic doves’ (Delaprée 1930: 9). Siegfried Kracauer compared D AS ENDE DER WELT to Lang’s M ETROPOLIS (1927) in a way that was hardly complimentary to either fi lmmaker: ‘the French have their kitsch as we have ours’ (1931: 512). Other German reviewers reported that Gance’s ‘conglomeration’ of high Romanticism and melodrama ‘left the audiences in Berlin as cold as those in all the other major European cities’. The fi lm was taken as proof that a certain kind of ‘monumentalist cinema’ was now extinct: ‘Subject- matter like that of E NDE DER WELT is nowadays much more diffi cult to express in images than during the era of the silent fi lm.’ (Aros 1931) As with the Romantic era whose spirit he was seen to embody, Gance’s fi lmmaking was deemed to be ‘an undisciplined, irrational force, more imaginative than logical’ (Lartisan 1931: 1). L A FIN DU MONDE offered some writers proof that his reputation was undeserved: N APOLÉON had made ‘concessions to the most detestable patriotic platitudes’ and his fi rst sound fi lm was the ultimate example of how Gance ‘refused to take control of himself’ (Le Monde 1931). The inconsistencies in L A FIN DU MONDE were considered the result of its author’s innate disorderliness rather than that of studio interference. Gance may have blamed his producer for butchering the fi lm but its faults ‘were undeniably his’; there was xxvi PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS

‘little in this grotesque melodrama of the qualities which had outweighed the immense mistakes of this director’ in his previous work (Bardèche and Brasillach 1935: 348–9). L A FIN DU MONDE was an ill-conceived ‘faux- mêlée’ of ‘symbolism, romanticism, realism, false idealism, theatricality, and cinematic thought’ (Vincent 1931: 6). Gance had sometimes been favourably compared to Victor Hugo in the past, but the reviews of L A FIN DU MONDE used the analogy as an insult; this modern director was writing screenplays that belonged to the world of 1848 (Morienval 1931: 612). Similarly, André Doderet wrote that Gance’s brand of Hugolian drama was painfully retrograde:

The kind of Romanticism that declaims itself with such impassioned words has been dead a long time. Film needn’t resurrect it under the pretext of regenerating that era’s notion of sublimity. Between vulgarity and the sublime, there is room for many masterpieces, provided they stay clear of both poles […] We have sonorized fi lms and we have talking fi lms, we don’t need orotund fi lms. (1931: 6)

More than a shift in cultural taste, the reception of L A FIN DU MONDE points towards a change in the political climate of Europe. Though the fi lm carried a message of universal fraternity, the left-wing press expressed no sympathy for Gance’s work. A Communist newspaper editor who saw DAS ENDE DER WELT in Switzerland failed to sympathize with the fi lmmaker’s condemnation of war because its pacifi st stance was ‘diametrically opposed to his own perspective’ ( Film-Kurier 1931a: 2). Despite feeling that ‘a newer, better Danton speaks’ through the fi lm, some German reviewers feared that the Marxist intelligentsia so prevalent in Berlin would nevertheless ‘turn up their noses’ at Gance because ‘this Abel has Christianity’ (Jäger 1931: 2). By far the most personal and disturbing attacks on Gance came from France’s vitriolic right-wing publication L’Action Française :

[ LA FIN DU MONDE demonstrates] the correlation between mental indigence and the platitudes of imagery and dialogue […] No grandeur can, or will ever be able to, free itself from the cowardly bleating about the fraternity of mankind, of classes and countries, nor of the pretentious verbiage, nor of the primitive notions about social equality. (Gelas 1931: 4) PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xxvii

Beyond rejecting his liberalist ideology, the paper’s subsequent review launches headlong into anti-Semitism:

Abel Gance is the type of elderly adolescent who goes through life with the dreams of a schoolboy. People of this kind, when they do not have genius, are pathetically ridiculous. But can one really be intolerant of them? We hardly dare to add that Gance is a Jew, which would nevertheless clarify the issue. More than one Israelite would quite rightly be offended at being placed in the same category as this raving primitive. But Gance’s mes- sianism is of too puerile a form for us to compare it to the destructive urges and revolutionary currents that accompany the wandering race. (Vinneuil 1931: 4)

This poisonous article was the pseudonymous product of Lucien Rebatet, whom fellow fascist Robert Brasillach called ‘the best fi lm critic in the whole of the French press’ (1941: 130). It is evidence of a racist discourse that became increasingly vociferous in the 1930s, and which achieved national promulgation following the German occupation of France in 1940. The only voices to counter this barrage of disapprobation were those who knew that L A FIN DU MONDE had been taken out of Gance’s hands. Alexandre Arnoux said that he ‘didn’t have the feeling of being in the presence of a work by Gance’; true ‘contact’ was impossible when the artist’s unruly creative power was ‘obscured’ by a ‘cloud’ of censorship. LA FIN DU MONDE had been pushed ‘from the sublime to the sensible’ (Arnoux 1931: 10). If the fi lm couldn’t be defended on a formal level because of its ‘numerous mutilations’, or on a narrative level due to its ‘puerile philosophy’, its moral value might be reclaimed: ‘[Gance] puts his art in the service of his mind and his soul, and wants to use all his abili- ties as a fi lmmaker for the benefi t of mankind. It is this which makes his fi lms great’ (Lang 1931: 9). Ernst Jäger wrote that D AS ENDE DER WELT ‘is a pious, human, monumental fi lm’ that ‘deserves to be indulged and promoted’ (1931: 2)—but not enough people agreed. LA FIN DU MONDE was a watershed in the evaluation of Gance’s fi lms. Whereas NAPOLÉON ’s stylistic daring had been admired even by those who disliked its perceived content, contemporary critics denounced both the form and content of L A FIN DU MONDE . Gance had been viewed as a kind of ‘sorcerer’ and N APOLÉON as a transformation of reality into a series of xxviii PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS hallucinatory ‘visions’ (Miomandre 1928: 215). The critical response to LA FIN DU MONDE signifi ed that its author’s magic had worn off: ‘Gance the poet had become a prattler’ (King 1984b: 51). Having been robbed of this suspension of disbelief, hostility towards Gance’s message was no longer restrained: critics now rejected the Romantic ideology that was at the very core of his fi lmmaking. To do so was, as Arnoux pointed out, to ‘de-Gancify Gance’ (1931: 10). Only seven years after the acclaimed release of NAPOLÉON , Pierre Rambeau felt obliged to defend him for the benefi t of younger viewers and urged them to see his silent work. In defi n- ing him as one of ‘the last Romantics of the cinema’ (Rambeau 1934: 11), the inescapable implication was that Gance had been outmoded.

CAIN AND ABEL

Any objective assessment of L A FIN DU MONDE continued to be hampered by Gance’s own response to the fi lm, which was at best misleading and at worst self-pitying. On its initial release, he refused to attend any screening of a work he regarded as ‘the greatest suffering of my life’ (Gance 1931h: 2). After exaggerating the amount of time he had spent working on L A FIN DU MONDE , and understating how much money he had spent, Gance told contemporary interviewers: ‘I put in enough effort for ten astonish- ing fi lms. I’ve had enough. I never want to see it again’ (ibid.). Avoiding any questions specifi c to LA FIN DU MONDE with the excuse that his words ‘would be taken badly’, he vented his anger by criticizing the state of cinema itself: ‘Cured of one disease, it goes and catches another’ (Gance 1931d). Reticent to mention Ivanoff by name, Gance instead launched numerous attacks on the commercialism that he felt all producers repre- sented: ‘another symptom of [cinema’s] morbidity [is its] mercantilism. The Philistines shout so loudly that one can no longer hear or understand anything. Disorder. Stupidity. Arrogance.’ (Ibid.) For Gance, L A FIN DU MONDE not only marked the point at which critics diagnosed his career to be ‘fi nished’ (1955a) but also signalled an irreversible change in the historical course of fi lm. Having been the most enthusiastic advocate for his art, the 1930s saw Gance indulge in unchar- acteristically gloomy predictions in which he linked his own persecution with the downfall of cinema:

The brilliant failure of L A FIN DU MONDE created the legend of an Abel Gance who ruins his producers. And the birth of this legend coincided with PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xxix

the decline of French fi lm; I became the madman of cinema, the outcast. (1936a: 2)

Gance felt that he was being punished for the crime of nonconformity. If he submitted a scenario to a producer, he claimed that they would offer him only projects they felt were ‘foolproof’ against his reputation: clearly the ‘phantom of the author of L A FIN DU MONDE ’ had ‘yet to be forgot- ten’ (ibid.). Though the 1930s were in fact ‘the most prolifi c stage in his career’ (King 1984b: 51), Gance viewed the commercial fi lms he went on to make as a form of purgatory: ‘it might be a gilded punishment, but it’s a punishment all the same.’ (1936a: 2) Conscious of his use of religious terminology when speaking about cinema, Gance once humorously apologized for the tendency to make himself ‘the victim’: ‘I am called Abel, after all.’ (1928e: 199) Yet in the wake of L A FIN DU MONDE , his interviews became increasingly prone to bathos. He described his critical mauling as a ‘burial’ and the hope of rehabilitation as a ‘resurrection’ (1936a: 2). This self-martyring tone did him no favours in the eyes of detractors. Some were outraged that Gance continually blamed producers for not allowing him to ‘show his talent’, despite the fact that he had already spent huge amounts of their money:

When it comes to Abel Gance, one cannot help but think that somewhere there must be a Cain Gance. This is because Abel gives constant voice to his complaints, as if he were being endlessly threatened by those around him. Every interview with the director of L A ROUE implies that the whole world longs to nail him to his art and that he is the most persecuted man in the fi lm industry. Bitterness taints his every word. (Bec et ongles 1933: 13)

As the number of fi lms he made dwindled through the 1940s and 1950s, Gance came to think of himself more and more as a member of the ‘living- dead’ (Daria 1959: 9). In his address at the memorial service for Jean Epstein at Cannes in 1953, he said: ‘I too have a mouth fi lled with earth […] I too have been killed by French Cinema; this is one dead man speaking to you about another!’ (1955b: 57–8) The passage of time never lessened the extreme pique Gance felt about LA FIN DU MONDE , though the intervening years added to his distortion of events whenever he retold them. In an interview with Charles Ford and René Jeanne, he gave the entirely bogus claim of having been forced to xxx PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS convert L A FIN DU MONDE from a silent to a sound fi lm ‘within a matter of days’ during the production (Gance 1955a). In subsequent decades, Gance added comic details to the story—claiming that Ivanoff had befriended a Russian janitor and together they were responsible for mak- ing a travesty of the fi lm’s montage (1963; 1974: 21). Thirty-four years after the fi lm premiered, Gance fi nally saw L A FIN DU MONDE and deemed it ‘a disaster’: ‘the whole fi lm is execrable; the actors’ performances—my own included—are ridiculous; the subject matter is improbable.’ (1964 cited in Icart 2002: 134) As ever, the problem of missing celluloid has proved a primary reason for a lack of critical interest in Gance’s fi lms of the 1930s. Even if Gance had not dismissed them as ‘bread-winning fi lms that I had to make—not to live, but in order not to die’ (1972), their incomplete physical status renders evaluation diffi cult. Films such as U N GRAND AMOUR DE BEETHOVEN (1936), J’ ACCUSE! (1938), and L A VÉNUS AVEUGLE (1941) were radically reduced in length before they received general release, often leaving Gance convinced that he was the victim of prejudicial censorship. In 1979, when a ‘complete’ print of B EETHOVEN was shown at Telluride, the 89-year-old Gance declared that it had been massacred and demanded the screening be cancelled: ‘he had not seen it in 40 years, and he remembered everything so differently that he did not want to believe it was his fi lm’ (Herzog 2009: 56).

DISDAINFUL DISTANCE

Despite the importance of L A FIN DU MONDE as the fi rst sound work of a major director, scholars have treated the fi lm no better than Gance himself—renouncing it as a ‘cacophony of emphatic naiveties and socio-philosophical platitudes’ (Mitry 1967–80: IV/500). Subject to successive layers of obscurity and misinformation since the 1930s, its place in modern literature remains precarious. Even major studies of the director tend to avoid discussion of this work: the authors of the fi rst English-language study of Gance don’t even list LA FIN DU MONDE as one of his major fi lms (Kramer and Welsh 1978: 11). Though acknowledging its importance, Norman King dedicates little space to L A FIN DU MONDE or Gance’s related projects; excerpts from the fi lm’s screenplay and critical material are provided, but there is no textual analysis (1984b: 105–17, 164–5). Whilst offering little detailed PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS xxxi work on L A FIN DU MONDE , subsequent studies have at least provided more substantial surveys of Gance’s political and industrial ambitions of this period (Vezyroglou 2000), including the publication of lengthy extracts of archival documentation (Icart 2002: 101–10, 129–34). Whilst the production of NAPOLÉON has been covered in great detail (Brownlow [1983] 2004), the genesis of L A FIN DU MONDE has not received even a cursory history. Even less space has been dedicated to L A FIN DU MONDE in studies of the transition to sound—historians emphasize broader trends in industrial and technological change without examining Gance’s work in detail (e.g., O’Brien 2004). Some such studies repeat the mistake of taking Gance’s ex post facto comments about the fi lm’s production without appropriate scrutiny, repeating the myth of an ‘unwanted’ conversion to sound (Crisp 1997: 104). Literature dedicated exclusively to Gance tends to base its evaluation of L A FIN DU MONDE exclusively on his original scenario and not the fi lm as it survives (Jeanne and Ford 1963; Kramer and Welsh 1978: 67–72). Though Roger Icart’s biography of Gance offers a more balanced approach between intention and reality, it offers no detailed analysis of surviving material (1983: 203–32). Underlying much of this neglect is the assumption that Gance’s work of the sound era is of negligible critical value. Even prominent scholars in the fi eld of French cinema display an open and pronounced hostility towards Gance’s work. Without offering much evidence to substanti- ate his views, Colin Crisp summarily dismisses these fi lms as ‘atrocious’, ‘crassly conventional’, ‘grossly melodramatic’, and indicative of ‘the worst sort of cultural chauvinism’ (2002: 44, 375). No study has tried to trace the extant remains of Gance’s intentions for L A FIN DU MONDE and fully explore the formal experimentation still visible in his fi rst—and most ambitious—sound fi lm. By accepting distorted evidence and dismissing the surviving work as anathema, L A FIN DU MONDE has yet to be reconstituted into fi lm history. Regarded as a failed ‘promotional fi lm’ for an obsolete vision of cinema (Hagener 2007: 154), it has been feted with none of the restorative treat- ment that NAPOLÉON has inspired. Yet despite its lack of cultural status, the ruins of L A FIN DU MONDE are fascinating because they possess such ‘enormous potential’: the fi lm’s ‘images cry for completion, its sounds for a proper chance to speak’ (Kramer and Welsh 1978: 72). Regardless of the diffi culties in examining such a compromised work, L A FIN DU MONDE xxxii PREFACE: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS deserves a more complete evaluation to assess its importance within the context of Gance’s career and of cinema’s evolution. The increased availability of archival material now enables a more detailed and objective approach to Gance’s fi lm, a luxury not granted to earlier generations of scholars—even to those inclined to use it. For this study, I have been able to consult multiple drafts of the scenario and screenplay for L A FIN DU MONDE , as well as a great quantity of personal correspondence and production notes relating to the project. Equally, the surviving celluloid of the fi lm (and of related work) is more accessible for researchers than ever before. Taken together, this fresh evidence can provide vivid testament to Gance’s creative vision at the moment of cinema’s most traumatic period of transition.

BOOK STRUCTURE

The legacy of L A FIN DU MONDE ’s botched production and critical mauling has left three major aspects open to question: fi rst, the context of the fi lm’s conception and intellectual development; second, the reasons why the production went so disastrously wrong; third, its application of sound technology. This study aims to address each of these issues in turn. In Part I, I will examine the evolution of Gance’s cinematic and political plans that led to the writing of LA FIN DU MONDE (Chaps. 1 and 2 ), as well as its literary and philosophic background (Chaps. 3 and 4 ). In Part II, I offer a contextual reading of Gance’s position within the fi lm industry and his attitude towards sound technology (Chap. 5 ), followed by a detailed chronology of the fi lm’s production and distribution (Chap. 6 ). In Part III, I present an extensive textual analysis of the screenplay of L A FIN DU MONDE in conjunction with the fi lm as it survives (Chaps. 7 , 8 , and 9 ). I hope this book will revitalize critical attention on Gance’s career during the transition to sound, evaluating the extent of his ambition as well as the limitations of its realization.

Warwick University Paul Cuff Coventry, UK