Albert Capellani

Biography: life and films

The man that cinema forgot

'The missing link between Lumière and Renoir.' This is how the French film critic Philippe Azoury sums up Albert Capellani's relationship to cinema in his article promoting the Cinématèque française's 2013 retrospective of his work. It is certainly true that Capellani is something of a forgotten hero, a phenomenal trailblazer who had a huge impact on the development of the Seventh Art but who is all too easily overlooked in even the most authoritative accounts of cinema history. Whilst the achievements of his contemporaries (Georges Méliès, Ferdinand Zecca, Alice Guy, Louis Feuillade) have been widely recognised, the name Capellani was scarcely ever mentioned - until very recently. It is only within the last decade or two that this most remarkable of early cineastes has begun to receive the attention and acclaim he is due. In addition to extending and refining the techniques of filmmaking when the industry was still in its dawdling infancy, Albert Capellini pioneered the extended film narrative and thereby played a crucial part in the establishment of the feature as the most popular format in cinema.

With his fiery red hair, ebullient personality and boundless enthusiasm, Capellani was a force of nature, a jovial yet modest man who was greatly loved and respected by everyone he worked with. Before turning to filmmaking, he had a brief career as a stage actor and theatre manager, experience that equipped him with skills that would prove invaluable to him as a film director. In the course of his nine-year stint at Pathé-Frères, Albert Capellani made over a hundred films (mostly shorts) and rapidly gained a reputation as one of the world's leading cineastes. The range and quality of his output was virtually unrivalled, as was his flair for innovation. Capellani's relocation to America in 1915 came at a time when that country was poised to achieve global dominance in the film industry, allowing him to thrive as a leading light in cinema for another seven years. By the time sound cinema arrived in the late 1920s, Capellani had retired into obscurity and this humble giant of cinematic innovation would soon be forgotten. It wasn't until seventy years had passed that the enormity of Capellani's contribution to cinema began to be appreciated. Just how could such a titanic force in film evolution have faded from view for so long?

Unifying time and space

The eldest of five children, Albert Capellani was born into a comfortable middleclass family in Paris on 23rd August 1874. His two youngest siblings died in infancy; his youngest surviving brother Maurice would be killed in action at the age of 20 in the first year of WWI. Albert and his surviving brother Paul, three years his junior, were encouraged in their artistic interests from an early age by their father, a successful banker, and doting mother. After studying drama at the Paris Conservatoire, under the esteemed thespian Charles Le Bargy, the Capellani brothers both opted for a career in the theatre. Albert started out as an actor at the Théâtre Libre in Paris, under the direction of André Antoine (a man who would achieve eminence as a film director in later years), before taking up a position as a stage manager at the Firmin Gémier from 1895 to 1904. He was then engaged for two years as administrator at the Alhambra Music Hall. Through his years in the theatre, Capellani formed close relationships with a wide range of actors, many of whom he would recruit for his more prestigious film productions in later years.

Although cinema was something of a novelty at the time, Capellani was fascinated by the new medium and gladly gave up his rewarding theatre life to begin work as a filmmaker under the supervision of the internationally renowned Ferdinand Zecca at Pathé-Frères, the world's leading film production company. Capellani's first films for Pathé were all shorts, varying in length from 5 to 15 minutes and consisting mainly of slice-of-life dramatic scenes and colourful fantasies. His early short dramas (Drame passionnel, Mortelle Idylle, L'Âge du coeur, La Femme du lutteur) were in the tradition of Grand Guignol melodrama, love triangles that typically ended with one of the protagonists dying in a horrible manner (either stabbed or shot). As early as 1906 (Pauvre mère and La Fille du sonneur), Capellani was showing a move towards a more realistic and humane form of drama, with increasing use of exterior location filming. Meanwhile, his inspired (and often deliriously trippy) interpretations of familiar fairytales gave him plenty of scope for experimenting with special effects, refining techniques (stop-motion photography and superimposition) invented by Georges Méliès over the previous half-decade. Capellani's fantasy films are among his weirdest and most entertaining, including such delightful oddities as Aladin et la lampe mystérieuse (1906), Le Pied de mouton (1907) and La Légende de Polichinelle (1907), the latter featuring Max Linder (soon to become a world famous superstar).

In these early offerings, from 1905 to 1908, Capellani's work shows a steady progression from films constructed as a series of separate tableaux to those made up of neatly dovetailing scenes composed and sewn together in a way that achieves the smooth narrative flow of modern cinema. The idea that a film should have a cohesive unity across time and space, be a single organic entity spanning four dimensions rather than just a succession of brief snapshots strung together, was something that seemed to have preoccupied Capellani greatly throughout his early years as a film pioneer. This he achieved by finding ingenious ways to link successive shots so that they flowed naturally from one to another, through editing, camera positioning and meticulous choreography of movement within the frame. Continuity editing - a crucial concept in modern cinema - was largely invented by Albert Capellani. It was another famous Albert - Herr Einstein - who unified time and space in his 1905 paper on the Theory of Special Relativity. Capellani achieved the same objective in cinema just a few years later. To quote the inventor of spacetime Hermann Minkowski: 'Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.' What is modern cinema but an expression of the relativistic principle on celluloid?

It wasn't just the connection between time and space that interested Albert Capellani in his efforts to create the illusion of a genuinely four-dimensional object. He was equally determined to make full use of the three-dimensional nature of space, something that his contemporaries rarely attempted. Capellani was one of the first film directors to experiment with depth of field, combining action at different distances from the camera to create some interesting dynamics within a single shot, thereby reducing the need for editing. Like most early filmmakers, Capellani eschewed the close-up, but on the few occasions he does use it (for instance for the scene in Pauvre mère where a grieving mother projects her memory of her lost daughter onto another little girl) the effect is powerful. Camera movement is also used incredibly sparingly, and this is perhaps the one glaring lacuna in Capellani's cinema. This is indeed ironic as it was Capellani who first showed how effective camera motion could be in his 1908 masterpiece L'Arlésienne, which employs a 40 second slow pan across a city skyline to dazzling effect.

Pathé's golden boy

It wasn't only the exterior four-dimensional reality that Capellani wanted to explore. Just as important is the inner psychological reality, the subjective experience of the conscious mind. The truth of human experience is what drama is always seeking to get to, and to achieve this in his films Capellani knew that he needed to move away from the simplistic and stylised form of acting adopted for the earliest films (mostly from actors with no formal drama training) towards a much more naturalistic form of expression. One of the most striking features of Capellani's films from 1905 to 1913 is how radically and how rapidly the acting style matures from the histrionics of Grand Guignol to something remarkably close to modern screen acting. Having once worked as an actor, Capellani was well placed to work with professionally trained actors and help them develop a more realistic kind of performance that suited his increasingly naturalistic approach to filmmaking.

Capellani's past managerial experience also served him in good stead, allowing him to have a tight rein on budgets and hence make the best use of the limited resources available to him. Charles Pathé had such a high level of confidence in him that he was practically given a free hand. Whilst Capellani's output at Pathé was prolific he maintained a consistently high level of quality on all of his films. He also had a keen eye for talent and coached many young new directors such as George Denola, Georges Monca, Michel Carré and Henri Estievant. It was through her association with Capellani that the music hall star Mistinguett became a successful screen actress, revealing her talent in some of his most celebrated films - notably Les Misérables (1913) and La Glu (1914).

Such was the scale of Capellani's success that in 1908, with around 30 short films to his name, Charles Pathé promoted him to the position of artistic director of a newly created subsidiary, the SCAGL (la Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres). Capellaini's remit was to oversee and contribute to the adaptation of works of literature (predominantly the French classics) - quality productions that would significantly enhance Pathé's reputation in the industry at a time when rival firms (in particular Gaumont and the recently created Le Film d'Art) were starting to pose a serious competitive threat. In addition to his administrative duties at SCAGL, Capellani was extraordinarily prolific as a film director, delivering over 70 titles in just six years, covering an impressively wide range of adaptations of plays and books, including grand period pieces such as Walter Scott's Quentin Durward (1910) and Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (1912).

The arrival of the feature

As Capellani's confidence and ambition grew over the period 1908-1914, so did the length and sophistication of his literary adaptations. His first film for SCAGL was L'Arlésienne (1908), adapted from a play by Alphonse Daudet. Running to 18 minutes, this movingly lyrical account of an amour fou represented a significant step forward in the development of cinematic story telling, with most of the film shot on location in the French city of Arles and the neighbouring countryside. This, along with Le Film d'Art's L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise, made 1908 a decisive year in film history. Cinema was no longer a mere fairground amusement. It had become an art form in its own right, as respectable as literature and the theatre. Capellani's early successes for SCAGL led him to attempt progressively grander projects, including his concise but totally enthralling adaptations of Émile Zola's L'Assommoir (1909) and Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1911).

The extent to which Albert Capellani influenced the rapid refinement of filmmaking technique between 1905 and 1914 is hard to quantify, but there is no doubt that he played a very significant part in this. At this time, French silent films were widely distributed around the world and they enjoyed particular success in the United States, where the burgeoning public appetite for 'moving pictures' was far from being met by local film producers. It is highly probable that Capellani's films would have been seen by devotees of the new medium who would, within a few years, go on to become America's leading filmmakers. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Europeans were too preoccupied with the business of killing each other to bother with the fad of filmmaking, and so it was with considerable ease that America came to dominate the film industry - building on the foundational work of the French pioneers, among whom Albert Capellani was arguably the most influential.

One matter that is beyond dispute is Capellani's part in the seismic transition from the short film to the feature, which is mostly attributable to the immense global success of the director's magnum opus - a full-length adaptation of Victor Hugo's classic novel Les Misérables. Originally released in January 1913 as a series of four short films, this epic drama (which ran to 162 minutes) became France's first ever feature film and sounded an immediate death knell for the court métrage. There had never been a film that had such a worldwide impact as Les Misérables. It brought international renown for its director but, more significantly, it established the feature or long métrage as the pre-eminent format in popular cinema. Capellani's subsequent films for SCAGL were no less ambitious, the high points being lavish feature-length versions of Zola's Germinal (1913) and Alexandre Dumas's Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge (1914).

Go West, young man

Work on another cinematic chef d'oeuvre, Quatre-vingt-treize, was interrupted by the start of WWI, which saw the 41-year-old Capellani caught up the offensive against Germany along with most of his colleagues at Pathé. Invalided out of the army after being wounded in action, Capellani was unable to resume his filmmaking in France as the industry had largely closed down for the duration of the war. In 1915, he took the brave step of relocating to America with his wife and three young children, hopeful that he might be able to make his mark on American cinema at the time when it was just beginning to overtake France and become the industry's world leader. Capellani originally settled in Fort Lee, New Jersey, working for the World Film Corporation on a series of theatrical adaptations that included Camille (based in Alexandre Dumas fils's La Dame aux Camélias). At the newly constructed Paragon studio, he oversaw work by many of his compatriots from France - notably Maurice Tourneur and Émile Chautard - whilst working with such talented performers as Alice Brady and Clara Kimball Young on his 1916 films - La Vie de Bohème, The Common Law and The Foolish Virgin.

From 1917 to 1919, Capellani lent his talents to Metro Pictures Corporation, beginning with an inspired adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. This was followed by what are generally considered the best of his twenty-five American films - Eye for Eye, Red Lantern and Out of the Fog. The popularity of these films was such that they turned their Russian-born lead actress Alla Nazimova into a major movie star at the age of 39. Capellani then hooked up with Pathé Exchange and founded his own film production company - Albert Capellani Productions - at the old Solax Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which had been built by another important French film pioneer, Alice Guy-Blaché, in 1910.

Capellani's career as a film producer was short-lived and included just seven titles, of which he directed only three - Oh Boy! (an adaptation of a popular musical, showcasing June Caprice), The Virtous Model and The Fortune Teller. His company went out of business in 1920 after a fire destroyed his studio's recently upgraded laboratory. After this catastrophe, Capellani joined the staff of Cosmopolitan Productions, owned by the media magnate William Randolphe Hearst (the inspiration for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane). It was for this company that he directed his last four films, the first being an impressive adaptation of Winston Churchill's polemical bestseller The Inside of the Cup. Capellani made his last film The Young Diana in 1922, a melodrama vehicle for Hearst's wife, Marion Davies.

An undeserved obscurity

The strain of his hectic life in America soon took its toll on the director, who was now pretty well depleted as he neared his sixth decade. His health rapidly failing, Capellani gave up work and returned to France in 1924, confident that after a brief rest he would be sufficiently recovered to resume his filmmaking activities. Unfortunately, by this time the French film industry had moved on considerably and Capellani was not well-placed to make a come-back. His next seven years were spent in frustrating inactivity, his health progressively deteriorating and his dream of returning to America coming to nothing. Capellani's final battle was against the worsening diabetes that would ultimately claim his life. He died in Paris on 26th September 1931, aged 57.

By the 1930s, with the passing of the silent era, Albert Capellani's extraordinary contribution to cinema was all but forgotten. Sound cinema was the 'in thing' and there was next to no public interest in what had gone before. Capellani's son Roger picked up the baton, directing and producing around twenty films in the 1930s, but his promising career was cut short when he died during the evacuation of Dunkirk in May 1940. This tragedy contributed to Albert Capellani's further decline into obscurity, as his family were unable to submit themselves to interviews that might have helped to raise the director's profile. Capellani's grip on posterity was not helped by his brother Paul's dramatic decision to cut his ties to both his family and the film business in 1931, devoting the rest of his life to his first love - sculpting.

Whilst, in the following decades, film historians and scholars went to town praising the achievements of those other great pioneers of silent cinema - D.W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein - the man who may well have had an even greater influence on the development of cinema was totally forgotten. It was not until the 2000s that Capellani's oeuvre began to be appreciated once more, boosted by Cinema Ritrovato's major retrospective of the director's films in 2010 and 2011 and by the publication in 2013 of Christine Leteux's long overdue biography Albert Capellani: Cinéaste du romanesque. With Capellani's films now more widely available than ever, it is becoming glaringly apparent that this is a director of genuinely exceptional abilities - not just a massively prodigious innovator but also a true artistic behemoth, assuredly one of the most important figures in the history of cinema.

Filmography

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