Conclusion: 'Why Have I Been Only What I Am?'
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CONCLUSION: ‘WHY HAVE I BEEN ONLY WHAT I AM?’ THE BURDEN OF REALITY In November 1924, Gance looked to the imminent production of NAPOLÉON as a kind of cross whose weight he had to bear: ‘Will my shoul- ders be strong enough?’ (1924–27). Ironically, it was the success of his last silent fi lm that proved to be Gance’s ‘main handicap’ in 1929: the ‘great stature’ he had earned allowed him to ‘speed ahead into unknown territory’ without adequate preparation (Williams 1992: 164). Though he acknowledged both the profound industrial reorganization within French cinema and the aesthetic changes brought about by sound, Gance believed he could surpass such diffi culties through pure enthusiasm. Despite the obvious warning signs visible in his contract negotiations, he approached LA FIN DU MONDE with a religious sense of his cinematic and personal destiny. Gance placed tremendous moral importance on his own artistic freedom, viewing men like Vassili Ivanoff as unbelievers whose philistinism posed a threat to human progress. In pursuit of utopia, he rejected all compromise. His project exceeded the limits of money, time, and technol- ogy—as well as the patience of his producer. Gance submitted a fi lm so expansive that it was guaranteed to be reduced and so expensive that it was doomed to commercial failure. He ‘spent far too much of other people’s wealth’ in chasing his dreams (Brownlow [1983] 2004: xi), and L A FIN DU MONDE cost his wife her happiness and Ivanoff his life. The critics who viewed this fi lm as Gance’s Waterloo echoed the language of numerous 19th-century interpretations of this battle as © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 205 P. Cuff, Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-38818-2 206 ABEL GANCE AND THE END OF SILENT CINEMA Napoléon’s Golgotha. Proclaiming to the world his fears, Gance’s cru- cifi xion in the opening scene of LA FIN DU MONDE provides an image of self-fulfi lling prophecy. The production confi rmed all his worst fears and prejudices about the fi lm industry, views which spilled out in numerous interviews in subsequent years. Whilst its maker looked back upon LA FIN DU MONDE and saw a masterpiece trapped inside a catastrophe, audi- ences today can only imagine what Gance’s original conception would have resembled—or the cinematic series of L ES GRANDS INITIÉS for which it was designed as an epilogue. As with so many of his fi lms, we receive LA FIN DU MONDE second-hand—the ‘original’ text having undergone count- less amendments during the intervening years. Gance himself contributed to the dismemberment of his own work, scavenging from the remains of NAPOLÉON and LA FIN DU MONDE for his future projects: It is as if he wanted to punish the world for its lack of understanding, and for the despair into which the cinema has plunged him. Like an unhappy child, is he tearing the inside out of a favourite toy just to see how it works, or to capture the secret of its origin? (Kaplan 1994: 43) Following the demise of his mammoth socio-cinematic projects at the end of the 1920s, Gance’s utopia receded beyond the horizon once more—the ‘Annunciation of the New Age’ would have to wait. Gance slowly rebuilt his personal and professional life in the wake of LA FIN DU MONDE : he ceased using cocaine in 1931, remarried in 1933, and had directed 13 more fi lms by the end of the decade. However, dur- ing this time the historical context in which he worked had undergone irrevocable changes. The failure of his plans for a European fi lm syndicate, followed by the bankruptcy of the Société Générale de Films in 1933, left Gance dependent on an industry whose radical downsizing offered scant opportunity for the scale of fi lm-making he wished to pursue. A ‘new generation of small producers operating in the 1930s’ hadn’t the funds to support ‘such ambitious projects’ (King 1984b: 4). If cinema could no longer accommodate his material needs, the political world of the 1930s was even less inclined to support his ideology. When an American astronomer predicted that the Earth would enter a ‘cosmic snowstorm’ in 1933 and risk celestial collision, one French newspaper refl ected that this might ‘simplify various international prob- lems’ but certainly wouldn’t solve them. ‘Before becoming extinct, will we decide to form the “United States of the World”, as Gance does in his CONCLUSION: ‘WHY HAVE I BEEN ONLY WHAT I AM?’ 207 famous fi lm? We doubt it.’ (Tivoly 1933: 3) The gap between idealist fan- tasy and political reality grew ever greater during the 1930s. In December 1930, Berlin’s Mozartsaal cinema hosted the fi rst German exhibition of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT . Nationalists deemed this adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s pacifi st novel to be ‘an attack on the German soldier, a portrayal of defeatism and cowardice’—the work of Jewish pro- paganda (Kelly 1998: 122). Under the direction of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi saboteurs disrupted its premiere by releasing stink bombs and white mice into the audience. In April 1931, Munich was deemed the best German city in which to premiere DAS ENDE DER WELT ; two years later, it was being called the ‘capital city’ of Nazism by the party that had been founded there. Schomburg’s warmongering and control of state media in L A FIN DU MONDE would be tame by the standards set by Goebbels and Hitler in the coming years. Unlike Gance’s failed pacifi sm, theirs was a utopian project embraced with cultish fervour by many millions. For Philip Jenkins, the ‘most dangerous consequence’ of the Great War on religious ideologies was that it made them ‘metastasize into new and sinister forms’. Gance’s silent J’ACCUSE provides an eerie forerunner of events to come: As they watched Europe’s new nightmares unfold in the 1920s and 1930s, with the continental drift toward Fascism, Nazism, and racial extermination, perspective religious leaders should have heard countless echoes from their own rhetoric of the holy war and holy nation. Ghosts marched. (Jenkins 2014: 191) It was in response to these rising extremes that Gance produced his sound remake of J’ACCUSE in 1938. Once more he begged for peace, this time by resurrecting the horrifying images of the last confl ict. In con- trast to the poet of 1919, the Jean Diaz of 1938 is a scientist. Another surrogate fi lm-maker, this character tries to convince the world through the supernatural power of imagery: in the fi lm’s fi nale he summons the dead from Douaumont cemetery. Here, both on-screen and off-screen spectators experience the raising of the dead as a mass hallucination. We see Diaz calling upon the massed rows of crosses, which eventually dis- solve and become the bodies of the fallen. They rise and begin to march towards us. ‘Fill your eyes with this horror!’ Diaz exclaims as Gance cuts to extreme close-ups of disfi gured veterans—the ‘ gueules cassées ’. This confrontation with the horrifi c legacy of war, the literal human face of suffering, is supremely moving. Diaz’s address is no longer diegetic, no 208 ABEL GANCE AND THE END OF SILENT CINEMA longer to the terrifi ed men and women of Douaumont within the fi lm; his authorial voice-over unites with Gance’s imagery to confront us —to challenge the viewers of today as it did those of 1938. By abandoning the pretence of a self-contained fi lmic world, J’ACCUSE reaches out to bring its resurrection to every theatre and every nation in which it is shown. Gance emphasized that cinema was ‘an instrument whose distribution is the best placed to serve the eternal cause of Peace’: the age of mechanical repro- duction enabled the worldwide promulgation of a fi lm’s spiritual message. J’ACCUSE was designed ‘to force the viewer to remember and to refl ect’ on the tragedy of war (Renault-Decker 1938 cited in Icart 1983: 302). The director announced that his fi lm was ‘an act of faith’ and openly accused those whose fealty lay with nationalism and political extremes rather than with the higher calling of European fraternity (Gance 1938). Inevitably, Gance couldn’t produce a cinematic experience so emotively persuasive that it convinced international audiences of the necessity for peace. The reliably nasty Lucien Rebatet described J’ACCUSE as ‘an orgy of drivel’; the critic ‘escaped’ from the cinema feeling he’d been ‘blasted by wave after wave of imbecility and dementia’ (Vinneuil 1938: 4). His review describes the original ending of J’ACCUSE (now lost) in which the dead oversee the renouncement of war and mankind’s declaration of the ‘Universal Republic’. That Rebatet wholeheartedly mocked Gance’s ‘reviewed and corrected’ version of the League of Nations is indicative of the political climate in Europe. For the Right, the fi lm-maker’s continuing pacifi sm proved that he was a ‘cretin’ whose brain is ‘jam-packed with the most insane clichés of our era’ (ibid.: 4). Those with power to distribute Gance’s fi lms were no more sympathetic. Just as he couldn’t get Mussolini to show NAPOLÉON uncensored in fascist Italy, so he failed to get J’ACCUSE viewed by Hitler or Goebbels and released in Nazi Germany. Though Gance mobilized his acquaintance with Gabriele D’Annunzio and Leni Riefenstahl in these countries, their artistic clout was no guarantee of political infl uence.