La Roue (review)

Of all the truly landmark silent films, Abel Gance's La Roue (1922) has until recently been the least widely seen. Like D. W. Griffith with Intolerance (1916), Gance shortened and reedited his own film at various points, and though the original version ran for a mammoth thirty-two reels (approximately seven to eight hours, depending on projection speed), La Roue circulated for most of the sound era in prints that were, at best, one-third as long. In the enthusiastic celebration included in the booklet accompanying this DVD release, William M. Drew describes the overwhelming response to the film at the time of its Gaumont-Palace premiere in December 1922, which culminated in thunderous applause and an encore repetition of the final reel. ¹ La Roue was distributed to regional cinemas and to other countries in versions of varying length and had a tremendous influence, not only on the key French directors of the period (everyone from Raymond Bernard and Jacques Feyder to Jean Epstein and Dmitri Kirsanoff), but also on such wide-ranging successors as Sergei Eisenstein, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Mário Peixoto, and even the Jean Renoir of La Bête humaine (1938). Gance conceived of cinema as a fusion of the arts, and, more than any of his previous films, La Roue reflects the modernist preoccupations of its era—with the interchange between circular forms and frames within frames (demarcated by internal objects like window panes as well as the creative use of masking) set off against diagonal movement in the distance at times suggesting an adaptation into cinema of the principles of post-Cubist art. Fernand Léger—who designed the poster reproduced on the cover of the DVD—spoke for many of his colleagues when he wrote, "With La Roue, Abel Gance has elevated the art of film to the plane of the plastic arts." ²

The most radical of Gance's many technical innovations, and the one most likely to strike audiences as modern nearly ninety years later, was the use of propulsive rhythms and metrical, frame-by-frame cutting to create perceptual paroxysms. To convey the experience of a moving train, for example, Gance alternates shots of the train itself with increasingly brief shots of pieces of the rail and of the surrounding landscape, gradually reducing the number of frames per shot until he is finally intercutting barely perceptible images. Gance uses variants of this technique several times throughout the film, but it is the opening scene that registers most strongly because it strikes the first-time viewer unprepared and is not set in between long periods of slow-building psychological tension. Shattering assumed patterns of spectatorship, this wholly disorienting sequence plunges the viewer into the midst of a cataclysmic situation and makes it clear that the normal rules of cinematic continuity do not apply to this outsized epic.

Regardless of how clearly they are grounded within the subjectivity of the characters, moments of heightened plasticity in La Roue are always amplified as thoroughly as possible. Several years after La Roue was released, Gance wrote an essay in which he declared that "The Era of the Image Has Arrived!," and his desire to utilize all the resources at his disposal to maximize sensory impact is abundantly evident throughout. ³ Like the Eisenstein of Strike (Stachka; 1924) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronyenosyets Potyomkin; 1925), Gance is willing to direct the spectator's emotions through shock cuts to a child, but unlike Eisenstein, Gance's editing is founded not on dialectical collision but on the explosive power of image clusters, what he called dynamite images. His goal was to chain images both horizontally and vertically, linking them in an ecstatic synthesis in which every constituent part would play a necessary role. Lines of motion are emphatically contrasted with one another, and superimpositions are used to suggest the nature of memory and to more fully integrate intertitles into the body of the film (rather than simply inserting text over a blank screen or a decorative art title, Gance repeatedly lays them over top of moving images), while the exploration...