La Roue (1923)
Directed by Abel Gance

Film Review

"Creation is a Great Wheel, which does not move without crushing someone."  It is with this quote from Victor Hugo that Abel Gance begins a film that would revolutionise cinema in the mid-1920s and establish him as one of the leading pioneers of the cinematic art, but not without an immense personal loss.  Throughout the making of La Roue Gance was constantly preoccupied with the health of his beloved common-law wife Ida Danis, to the extent that he altered the script so that he could use locations that would be most beneficial to her.  Most of the film was shot on location, first on a specially constructed set built on busy railway tracks at Saint-Roch just outside Nice, then on the snow-covered slopes of Mont-Blanc, 2000 metres above sea level.  On the day filming was completed, Danis finally succumbed to the tuberculosis she had long been suffering from, leaving Gance disconsolate as he began the arduous process of editing his longest and most ambitious film.  The other casualty was the film's lead actor, Séverin-Mars, who, weakened by the exhausting 16 month shooting schedule, died from a heart attack not long after finishing the film.  He was just 48.

"A tragedy for modern times" is how Gance promoted La Roue, although he could equally have described it as an intimate, realist melodrama painted on a canvas of epic proportions.  No one who watches the film can fail to be taken aback by the sheer scale of Gance's ambition.  His subsequent historical epic Napoléon (1927) is often cited as his masterpiece, a tour de force chock-full of jaw-dropping set-pieces, but La Roue has a far greater claim to be a cinematic landmark, introducing techniques that would have a wide-ranging and lasting impact on the medium of film.  Daringly experimentally and yet masterfully executed, it is a film that builds upon the foundation lain by the earlier pioneers - most notably D.W. Griffith - and extends the vocabulary of cinema in just about every domain - lighting, camerawork, use of metaphor, use of the close-up, shot composition, narrative construction and, most importantly, editing.

Two years before the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein wrote his famous treatise on montage, Abel Gance was already putting many of his theories into practice, using editing not simply as a means of joining frames of film together, but as a mode of artistic expression, heightening the drama and intensifying the viewing experience.  Released in 1923 to a rapturous response across Europe, La Roue was soon to become one of the most influential films ever made, and countless directors - from Vsevolod Pudovkin to Akira Kurosawa, not forgetting Eisenstein - drew inspiration from it.  Having watched the film Jean Cocteau was forced to remark: "There is cinema before and after La Roue, just as there is painting before and after Picasso."

It was the massive success of his first major film, J'Accuse (1919), a powerful anti-war drama, that gave Gance the confidence to embark on a far greater cinematic adventure.  Inspired by a Pierre Hamp's novel Le Rail, he began writing the script for the film that was initially titled La Rose du rail in December 1919.  Little did he know then that it would be three years before the film was screened for the first time.  It was a project that consumed Gance like no other and it was his pioneering spirit, his relentless drive to create something new, that made it possible.  Léonce-Henri Burel, Gance's main cinematographer, stated that so many tests were carried out in the course of shooting the film that it would be impossible to list them all.  At no stage of its production was La Roue a conventional film.  For Gance and his equally committed technicians, it was a frenzied laboratory of free thought, where creativity was rampant and innovation blazed like a furnace.

When Gance had finally completed editing La Roue it ran to 32 reels, with a duration of eight hours.  This original version was screened on three consecutive Thursdays, beginning on 14th December 1922, at the Gaumont Place in Paris.  Realising that it would be impossible to market the film in this form, its distributors compelled Gance to reduce it to 12 reels with a runtime of three hours.  This was the version that was most widely seen, but it was still too long for the English distributors, who released a further cut-down version that came in at just under two hours.  The failure of this version at the British box office partly explains why the film was never released in the United States.  With the original eight hour version now lost, various attempts have been made to restore the film.  The most thorough restoration so far was undertaken by Lobster Films in 2006, which, by combining French and Russian negatives, runs to four hours and 22 minutes.  This is currently available on a DVD issued by Flicker Alley, and is the basis for this review.

La Roue begins with a scene straight out of a disaster movie, a train crash that appears even more horrific by virtue of the way it is edited.  It's a spectacular start to what is one of the most visually imaginative films ever made and it whets the spectator's appetite for the visual extravaganza that is to come.  The image of the implacable locomotive surging forward on a fixed track is one that is repeated several times in the film and it becomes a potent visual metaphor for a human life governed by irresistible forces.  In each case, Gance's use of 'accelerated editing' accentuates the drama and creates an alarming impression of time suddenly speeding up, which conveys a sense of fatalistic helplessness, like falling through empty space.  In all this, 'the wheel' of the film's title begins to acquire multiple meanings - first a symbol of man's technological progress (one that hastens the pace of his life without improving its quality), then an allusion to a cruel Medieval instrument of torture, finally a metaphor for life itself - a closed circle endlessly renewing itself.

Within this revolving wheel there are four principal characters, whose destinies are tragically linked by the cruel plot rotations of melodrama.  Of these, the most important is a middle-aged railway worker, Sisif, who serves as the personification of human suffering.  He owes his strange name to Sisyphus, a figure in Greek mythology who was condemned by the gods to endlessly push a rock up a hill.  Sisif's life is an endless series of personal disasters, which carry more than an echo of Émile Zola's hereditary fatalism.  Zola's novel La Bête humaine (later made into a film by Jean Renoir which appears to have been strongly influenced by La Roue) is an obvious source of inspiration for the film, with Sisif characterised as a fundamentally decent man who is at the mercy of impulses he cannot control, which include an aggressive sexual drive targeted at his adopted daughter Norma.

In one scene, in which the railway worker confesses his incestuous yearnings to a rival, Gance includes a blatantly Freudian shot of the young woman on a swing, the erotic effect heightened as the camera draws closer to her tightly stockinged legs.  Contrast this with another scene in which Sisif's son Elie imagines himself in a long distant century with Norma, his supposed sister, painted as his ideal soul mate.  Whereas Elie's incestuous cravings are tempered and fashioned as an innocent fairytale, those of his father are grotesquely carnal.  At once, we catch a glimpse of the terrible force that will propel all four of the protagonists to their doom - the force being the motor in the engine of life itself, the reproductive instinct.

When Sisif is forced to surrender Norma to his rival, he transfers his feelings of possessiveness to his locomotive (in fact two locomotives, which both acquire her name).  The Freudian symbolism goes into overdrive when Sisif attempts to destroy Norma II after his sight is impaired in an accident.  Sisif (miraculously) survives the inevitable crash and in the film's most eerily lyrical passage he is seen clinging to the debris, which is strewn with broken flowers.  This is the only moment in the film when Sisif appears to be at peace, in what looks oddly like the tender aftermath of an excessively passionate love scene.  It is a rare but significant pause in the drama, the lull before the storm that is yet to come.

Equipped with a solid frame and remarkably expressive face, Séverin-Mars (whom Gance had previously employed on J'Accuse) has a commanding presence as the ill-fated Sisif.  Played by a younger or less physically imposing actor, Sisif could so easily have appeared pathetic and self-pitying.  Séverin-Mars gives the character a nobility and down-to-earth reality that makes him far more interesting and sympathetic.  He is every inch the modern Sisyphus, a man slowly worn down by adversity but never surrendering to it - an impression that is reinforced by the film's most striking sequence depicting the now blind Sisif hauling a huge cross up the side of a mountain.  There is a quiet, persistent heroism about Séverin-Mars' Sisif that is genuinely stirring, and which sets him apart from the other male characters in the drama - the wishy-washy son who lives in a fantasy world and the bullying rival who gets what he wants by threats and skulduggery.

The adopted daughter Norma (beautifully played by English actress Ivy Close, the mother of director and screenwriter Ronald Neame) has her own share of misfortune but Fate is kinder to her.  In the film's hauntingly poetic closing scenes, Sisif and Norma both find a blessed release by yielding to the natural world and accepting what it offers.  Whereas Sisif dies, his soul transported to who knows where, Norma appears reborn, dancing to a happier tune within a new wheel of life.  Prior to this moment of transcendence, nature has appeared throughout the film as a cruel and unforgiving adversary, something to be feared and resisted.  Elie's horrific death is still fresh in our minds as we see Gance repaint the natural world in a very different hue - beneficent and welcoming.  What begins as a melodrama anchored in the grim reality of a bleakly industrialised landscape ends as a contemplative poem that conjures up the vista of a pagan paradise.  Is this unexpected coda, depicting a happy union 'twixt man and nature, an echo of the past or a vision of the future?  Perhaps they are the same thing, the same point on the circumference of a wheel that turns forever...

Film Synopsis

Sisif, a widowed railway worker, rescues a young girl named Norma from the wreckage of a train crash.  Realising her mother died in the crash, Sisif decides to bring the girl up as his own, along with his son Elie, whose mother died bringing him into the world.  Fifteen years later, the children have grown up and lead a happy but modest existence with Sisif.  By now Elie, who has aspirations of becoming a world famous violin maker, is devotedly attached to Norma and fantasises about her.  Sisif also has intense feelings for his adopted daughter, feelings of desire that disgust him so much that he decides she must leave him before his passions become uncontrollable.  The opportunity comes when a senior engineer Hersan asks his permission to marry Norma.  At first Sisif refuses but gives in when Hersan threatens to tell Norma that she is not his daughter.  Fearing that she has become a burden to her father, Norma agrees to marry Hersan, but soon finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage with a man she despises.  The loss of Norma is more than Sisif can bear.   One accident and suicide attempt later, the railway worker has partially lost his sight and is demoted to working on a funicular railway on Mont-Blanc.  He lives a miserable existence in a mountain shack with his son Elie, who continues to perfect the violin varnish that will make him rich and famous.  A chance meeting with Norma at Chamonix reawakens Elie's love for his stepsister and he gives her a violin with a love letter inside.  When he realises he has a rival, Hersan is overcome with jealousy and lures Elie out into the mountains to fight.  In the struggle, Hersan is mortally wounded by his own pistol and Elie plunges to his death down a glacier.  The news that his son is dead is more than Sisif can bear and he drives away his daughter, convinced that she was the cause of his death.  Now blind and alone, Sisif must patiently wait out the end of his days...