Gance laid the bridge to something greater

Between La Roue and his more well known and refined Napoleon, Abel Gance proved to be one of cinemas greatest innovators during the earlier days of the silent era, very much pushing the limits in his productions of what was thought to be impractical, even more so than D.W. Griffith or Victor Sjöström. Here we see montage, unique lighting techniques, on-location shooting, superimposition and time-lapse that pre-date the works of Sergei Eisenstein, usually crowned as the king of the montage - a title very much deserved as he truly refined it better than anyone else in Strike and Battleship Potemkin. However, Gance laid the bridge to something greater. Very much like Carl Perkins to The Beatles and Hill Street Blues to Twin Peaks.

For it’s time, La Roue must have been an absolute marvel to witness. Supposedly the original reel from 1923 ran in between 7-9 hours and the recent 2019 reconstruction of the film bumped up the 4 and a half hour runtime (the cut I watched) an extra two hours and it was very evident during my viewing over how much is omitted, which is what slightly brings down my rating here. Some of the continuity of shots is a bit all over the place and there’s some scenes you can tell went on for longer in the original reels but abruptly fade out to black here. There really needs to be a better and more available restoration for this film, because out of allllllll the films in the 1001 movies book, this is hands down the most difficult movie I’ve tried to hunt down. Lucky I was able to find a scarce DVD copy online a while back.

One thing that absolutely shocked me is the sheer complexity of this story. There’s one title card in particular about an hour in that is so jaw-dropping, it justifies everything that happened beforehand. A lot of allusions to greek tragedy, with the main character Sisif, who is easily one of the most fascinatingly complex and broken characters I’ve ever witnessed in film, being modelled after Sisyphus and some of the “incestuous” elements, if you can really call it that, being modelled after Oedipus Rex.

Films from the silent era always knows how to get my emotions rolling more than any other period and as I expected, La Roue is yet another outstanding and richly moving work. Glad I finally saw this, been meaning to for so long and because of its unavailability, I never thought I’d see the day.