Abel Gance
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Abel Gance (October 25, 1889 - November 10, 1981) was a world-renowned French film director, producer, writer, actor and editor best remembered for his work in silent film.
Gance was born illegitimate in Paris. His parents wanted him to become a lawyer, but he was attracted to the theatre from an early age. He made his stage debut as an actor in Brussels at the age of 19, and took his first film role in the 1909 film, Molière.
He continued acting and script-writing before forming his own production company in 1911. In the same year, he made his first film, La Digue, but it was unsuccessful. His five-hour play, Victoire de Samothrace, in which he was to appear with Sarah Bernhardt, was cancelled with the outbreak of World War I.
Due to ill health, Gance managed to avoid most of the war, and he returned to film making, this time with more success. In 1919, he achieved international recognition for his three hour epic J’Accuse, a powerful anti-war film which included location filming of battles shot towards the end of World War I. The film used experimental techniques which Gance would develop further in his next two major films, La Roue and Napoléon (1927). The success of this film was undermined by its length (6 hours) and the need for special film projection equipment to show the film, particularly the final segment of the film where the aspect ratio triples in size to show a staggering panorama of a battlefield.
Gance did not manage the transition from silent films to talkies successfully. Although he continued to make films for many decades, he never achieved the celebrity and acclaim he enjoyed in the silent era of the 1920s. He spent much of his time enhancing his previous silent films, notably making sound versions of his earlier masterpieces, J'Accuse and Napoléon.
In 1943, he fled from France to escape the Nazi occupation.
He resumed his film making career in 1960 with historical dramas such as Austerlitz. He died in 1981 of tuberculosis in Paris before he could fulfill his ambition of making an epic film about Christopher Columbus. He did, however, live to see the triumphant reception of the restored version of his silent epic Napoleon in 1980, and the accompanying restoration of his reputation as a pioneering filmaker.
