4 faces of Abel Gance, creator of Napoleon

The Holland Festival presents Abel Gance's restored film epic on Sunday Napoleon, with live orchestra. A rare event, for the first time in this form on mainland Europe. In 1927, Gance had performed with Napoleon delivered a groundbreaking and monumental piece of work that made unusual demands on the projection (three canvases) and went out into the world in a variety of severely shortened versions after the first performances.

Napoleon at Ziggo Dome promises to be spectacular, but who was That ambitious loner Abel Gance?

1. Pioneer

Abel Gance (1889-1981) was in many ways a self-made man. Quitting school at 14, he traded a clerical job for the theatre against his parents' wishes. He initially saw little in film, but when he did roll into it he emerged as an enthusiastic experimenter. He used riders and close-ups when that was still seen as a novelty. For the short comedy La folie du docteur Tube he distorted the image with laughing mirrors, five years before the expressionism of Robert Wiene in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari.

2. Iconoclast

Gance's work is often a mixture of traditional melodrama and visual avant-garde. Film historian Kevin Brownlow, the driving force behind the restoration of Napoleon, wrote of Gance: "With his silent films J'accuse, La Roue and Napoleon he exploited the possibilities of the film medium more than anyone else."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDSyEiQQoeE

For J'accuse he shot footage on the World War I battlefield. Footage that made a deep impression at the time. His fast-paced montages reportedly inspired Russian grandmaster Eisenstein. For Napoleon he tied the camera on the back of a horse. The camera was his instrument, and when he worked with multiple images, he saw a visual orchestra in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2ViW4lxmD0

3. Romantic

In the speech given by Gance at the start of filming for Napoleon held for his collaborators, he painted a vision of a Homeric and revolutionary enterprise. "This is a film through which we enter the temple of art through the great gate of history," he said.

Gance saw himself as the Victor Hugo of the silver screen. He also felt that Napoleon had received too little recognition, but lived long enough to witness Brownlow's restoration work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m5Q09eEqY

4. Survivor

Literally: as a young man, he recovered from tuberculosis - often fatal at the time. He also survived a mustard gas attack in the First World War.

Figuratively: the sound film was a new invention that he welcomed, but ultimately brought him no luck. His first sound film was the expensive science fiction production La Fin du monde (1931). When this flopped, Gance had to comply with the wishes of producers much more often than before. In the forty years that followed, he would make about 20 more films, but many of these he did just to make a living.

At the age of 92, he had another plan for an epic about Columbus, but died before he could realise it.

The film is a one-off visible in Amsterdam.