1923: Something NewLa roue (Abel Gance, 1923)Having just spent 273 minutes watching
La roue, I don't really want to spend too much additional time reviewing it, even though there's so much to say. If this were a verdict in the 1920s Bracket (how amazing will that be!), this would probably be a 2,000 word review accompanied by twenty to thirty screenshots. Better yet would be to record an audio commentary, analyzing in real-time the film's many, many virtues ... and many, many flaws. There'd be a fair amount of hyperbolic mockery on that commentary, and I'd read along to the intertitles with histrionic passion, capturing each and every exclamation point.
I've been eager to watch
La roue every since I caught the
opening scene on TCM years ago. Gance begins the film with a literal bang, and his filming of the train crash captures him at his best. The dynamic editing and cinematography remain impressive achievements, with Gance bringing tons of excitement to the screen with any number of pioneering techniques. I really wish
La roue were a pure action film —
Abel Gance's Under Siege or
Abel Gance's Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Those are films I could recommend without caveat.
Gance doesn't hide his aspirations towards Art, however, and that's where the flaws begin.
La roue is probably the most overwrought film I've ever seen. I should've known: it's right there in the title.
The Wheel — an allegory so all-encompassing that it spins me around and makes me carsick. The screenplay, in theme and scope, feels like the imitation of a great novel, Flaubert written in crayon.
Here's a taste of the story: Our
hero protagonist, Sisif, is an engineer on the railroad. In the wreckage of a crash, he finds a baby girl that he secretly decides to raise as his own daughter, because she's beautiful and his son needs a sister and the girl is pretty much an orphan anyway. The girl grows into a young woman without knowing her origins; Sisif isn't her kidnapper, just Papa. But, alas, Sisif falls in love — romantically — with his adopted daughter. That's his cross to bear, along with the guilt over taking her in the first place. (Late in the film, he literally bears a cross because Art demands that even anti-heroes be Christ-like.) Oh, and guess what? The boy and girl are also in love with each other, even though they think they're brother and sister. Quelle tragédie!
Sisif, as played by Séverin-Mars (who died during filming), isn't recognizable to me as a human character. If this were an animated movie, and Sisif was a grizzly bear, he'd make much more sense. Séverin-Mars is a master of wild gestures and crazy eyes, but his performance is bizarrely over-the-top, even by silent film standards. During some scenes, I just imagined Gance shouting at him during the take, "You stare at her, but not just at her! At every woman on the Wheel! And you see, all at once, all their joys and sorrows! Yes, feel the weight of their tears in your shoulders! It cowers you! The weight of the Wheel is too much! Yes!"
I'm not criticizing Séverin-Mars. His overwrought performance fits the surrounding film perfectly. Sisif is a character who tries to kill himself on two different occasions! — and both times with a train! I wished him success both times. After the first attempt, he receives a letter of reprimand from his bosses. After the second attempt, he receives a second letter, plus a demotion, but he's still allowed to drive trains. The railway labor union in France must be super powerful.
The cinematography, despite being distinctly cinematic, is almost painterly in its ambition. The results, on a shot-by-shot basis, are generally wonderful. Gance and cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel (I think he was the main contributor, among the listed DPs) do beautiful things with lighting and irises and mattes, obsessively controlling the focus of the audience's eyes. Like with most new techniques, though, there are some growing pains, and I don't think
La roue finds the right balance between the impressionistic beauty of a single shot and the overall impression created by a series of shots. As exciting as some of the rapid editing is, there's still something disconcerting about seeing ten shots in a three second span that all have
different lighting,
different matting,
and inconsistent cha
racter block
ing. There's not enough visual continuity. The film is like a preemptive "f—k you" to Bresson's
Notes on Cinematography.
So, there you have it.
La roue is a very impressive film and an exciting cinematic acheivement. But
La roue is also a pretty silly movie. Had I watched it when I was younger, I would have called it a masterpiece and assumed any possible flaws belonged to me as a viewer. I'm older than that now.
Grade: C+
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