Abel Gance

Born in the French capital on October 25, 1889, Abel Gance was the illegitimate son of a wealthy doctor and a humble worker. He spent his childhood with his grandparents until his mother married a chauffeur and moved in with them. Since his real father helped him financially, he was able to afford a good education.

Passionate about cinema, he began as a screenwriter and actor, until he founded his production company in 1911, and directed his first film, La digue , a costumbrista drama. His second work is much more interesting From him Le négre blanc , a denunciation of racism starring a black child mistreated by whites.

Abel Gance was a faithful follower of David W. Griffith , his narrative insights, and his spectacular historical reconstructions. His influence is evident in titles such as I Accuse (1919) – which Gance managed to project onto Griffith himself – about World War I, and The Wheel , a spectacular blockbuster about a machinist in love with his adoptive daughter.

Shortly after Au secours! , a parody of horror films with the Frenchman Max Linder –the first great celluloid star– decided to carry out his most ambitious project, Napoleon , an exhaustive biography of the French emperor. A great admirer of the historical character, Gance sought enormous realism, and mass sequences that reconstructed historical facts with hair and marks, in the style of The Birth of a Nation . The great cost that the film was going to have made him decide to shoot until the Italian campaign, in 1796, and that the film was the first of a series of 6 titles, which due to lack of success he could not carry out.

The film is a milestone in the History of the Seventh Art for its innovative images. For example, Gance films a chase from a camera mounted on the back of a horse, shoots a handheld battle, etc. The final sequence takes the cake, shot in a panoramic system invented by himself, which was based on joining three screens and as many projectors. He called it Polyvision, and it is an illustrious predecessor of Cinerama and Cinemascope. Gance himself played the revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just in the film.

Although he did not connect with the public, and he was unable to film the sequels, he returned to Napoleon in 1960 with Austerlitz , which reconstructs the famous battle. And it is that Gance continued to be active with the advent of sound, directing several films, such as Lucrèce Borgia , Beethoven’s A Great Love and above all, Cyrano and D’artagnan , which brings together the famous characters of Rostand and Dumas. The filmmaker ––who had a decisive influence on the directors who followed– died on November 10, 1981 in Paris.