Word: abell
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...DIED. Abel Gance, 92, illustrious French film director who devised such techniques as multiple screens, double-printing and wide-angle lenses to create brilliant silent movies, including the 1927 masterpiece Napoléon; in Paris. A prolific film maker, Gance produced such classics as I Accuse and The Wheel. But his success ended with the advent of talkies. Shuttling between unemployment and obscure commercial movies, he complained: "I prostituted myself not to live but to avoid dying." Five decades later, one understanding producer, Francis Coppola, helped English Film Historian Kevin Brownlow present a reassembled copy of Napoleon, shown last January...
LIKE A REVELATION that appears of its own will out of nothing, Abel Gance's 1927 film Napoleon flickers into the screen and at once flies directly into the face of the current taste in art. Not "bleak" or "austere" or "minimal" like so much of what is now published, produced, painted or composed, Napoleon is exuberantly romantic. Modernism dictates that the artist's "message" be wrapped in puzzles and conundrums. Napoleon is explicit: "From now on I am the French Revolution," Bonaparte declares, and there are no secondary or tertiary meanings implicit in the statement. Symbolism here...
Napoleon [Metropolitan Center]: Abel Gance's long lost cinematic leviathan may well be the War and Peace of the screen. With four-and-a-half hours of film, a new score written and conducted by Francis Ford Coppola's father and played by a 60-piece orchestra, and a three-screen panoramic ending, it may be the biggest thing since The Seventh Seal--or may be even Edison, for crissake...
...statement of a man's life isolated in the flow of history, it stands as a testimony to Napoleon. As a tapestry of a bloody time begetting yet another, it is unparalleled. Now, as in 1927, Napoleon reflects the vision of an era, through the unique vision of Abel Gance.Mamaroneck, N.Y., 1921 Abel Gance congratulated by D.W. Griffith after the American premiere of J'accuse...
...When I began working on the score," Coppola continues, "I have two ideas I tried to integrate. Abel Gance was concerned with presenting a man, not a documentary. He wanted to involve his audience. So while I knew that the music had to be contemporary, I decided to rely on the Revolutionary and Romantic music from Napoleon's France...