La roue

This stunning 1923 silent film was restored by David Shepard and others in a print that runs nearly 4 hours and 30 minutes. The original film, directed by Abel Gance, was about twice that length, never released in the US except in a severely cut down print of about 2 hours.

The story, a "tragedy of modern times," is seemingly a simple one. Aman named Sisif (Séverin-Mars) rescues a baby girl in a train wreck and raises her as his own along with his son. She's known as a "rose of the rails" since the family lives in a squalid house by the railroad where Sisif is an engineer. As the years pass the girl, named Norma, grows to adulthood. Things get uneasy when Sisif realizes that he is in love with Norma (Ivy Close), and things turn to tragedy when his son Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) also loves her ... but believes she is his sister. Sisif plots to marry her off to a wealthy man to escape the impending disaster.

After Norma is unhappily married off, Sisif is injured in an accident and banished to a small mountain railway near Mont Blanc. He lives there with his son on the edge of a glacier but even in their isolation they cannot escape tragedy ... of their love of Norma.

The film is high art, operatic, Greek tragedy, and must be approached as such. The visuals are stunning. The composition and sets includes the smallest of details, and Gance uses close-ups, iris shots, fades, and rapid editing (borrowed from D.W. Griffith's masterpieces) to make this one of the most beautiful films ever made. The current version also includes tinting to enhance the emotional pitch of the film.

The performance of Séverin-Mars won't be to every taste, but his old-school acting style is similar to that of Emil Jannings. Without dialog, all he has are his body language and face. Shots are held to emphasize the emotional plight of the aging man. And you can see every thought he has in his face.

The other great performance is by Ivy Close, a British actress who also worked in European silent films. She resembles Norma Shearer and as with Séverin-Mars, her face shows every moment of joy and sadness. There's a stunning scene toward the end when she's asked to go to a village dance. She runs to powder her face and sees a gray hair, a line on her forehead. She's growing old. La Roue, the wheel of life, is turning, and Norma is growing old.

This superb restoration is accompanied by a beautiful and haunting score by Robert Israel, itself a symphonic work of great power. Séverin-Mars died soon after filming was completed in 1921. Gance did not complete and release the film until 1923. Ivy Close made a few more silent films in the late 1920s and retired from the screen.

This may be a film you only watch once in your lifetime, but you will never forget it.

La Roue / The Wheel (1923) : Brief Review -

Abel Gance's visionary and mind-shattering take on disturbed relationships. La Roue is not a film for everyone so be careful before watching it and make sure whether you can handle it or not. I will give you 2 big reasons for it. One is, it's a long film about 7 hours and second, it shows relationships in disturbing ways which might just shatter your mind. A railway engineer adopts a young girl orphaned by a train crash. Years later when she starts getting suitors, he feels like falling in Love with her. The same happens with her brother too which is actually a very terrible and mind shaking idea at first place. Later the father recovers from the delusions but then grapples with whether or not to tell her the truth about her parentage. Firstly, i wanna salute the writer and the director for taking this concept to make a movie on it because however wrong it seems, it still has reasonable causes to believe it. Just imagine loving your beautiful sister or your daughter and the same when you realise she is not in with your blood relations and suddenly the meaning of that Love changes. Such an Astounding Idea it was. I was sold here only, i just had to see it getting through with it till the end formally. Séverin-Mars, Ivy Close and G. Gravone gives super performances and Magnier in supporting role also gets it right. Abel Gance (assisted by Cendrars) uses then-revolutionary lighting techniques, and rapid scene changes and cuts in this grand scale presentation. I must admit that Gance was truly a visionary director and La Roue is his third film after J'Accuse (1919) and Napoleon (1927) which has left me stunned. Overall, a Grand Classic which uses the philosophy of Wheel to show the different meanings of Relationship and Love.

RATING - 8/10*

By - #samthebestest

Director Jean Cocteau said: "There is cinema before and after 'La Roue' ("The Wheel") as there is painting before and after Picasso." So influential was French director Abel Gance's February 1923's "The Wheel," that it has been carefully studied frame by frame ever since its release. Famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa claimed the movie made a huge impression on him before he became interested in working in the film business. Today its importance towards cinema's impact merits an inclusion into the "1001 Movies To See Before You Die" reference book.

What makes "The Wheel" so interesting is Gance's use of lighting and unconventional editing to unveil the emotions and tensions of the movie's characters. Right from the start he purposely designed his film to undergo a series of quick cuts, beginning with a two-train crash. The multi-casualty accident heightens the tragedy where our protagonist, Sisif, a train engineer, ends up with Norma, a little girl whose mother died. "The Wheel" also contains an inordinate amount of multiple exposures, thrusting the narrative forward through a dizzingly series of events within several decades. Even its title symbolizes that every life in the movie is a dramatic example of a cycle of lives who are part of a rotation of a wheel that constantly repeats itself every generation.

"The Wheel" is a story revolving around the widower Severin-Mars, as the engineer, who raises the little girl, acted as a grown-up by Ivy Close, along with his son, Elie. The aging engineer becomes attracted to Norma, as well as Elie. Conflicts abound. The film's second half abruptly shifts to the Alps, where the three, as well as Norma's husband, end up in a topsy-turvy meshing of dramatics. The decision to film in the Alps, not in Gance's original script, was made because the director's wife, Marguerite, came down with tuberculosis and the doctor recommended the mountains to help alleviate her symptoms.

Gance's use of several innovative cinematic features also are presented in "The Wheel." Included is one of the first examples of a swish (or whip) pan where the camera quickly pans and transitions to a new scene at a point where Sisif is relating about Elie's death. Gance also introduces to French cinema a precursor to Sergei Eisenstein's more definitive examples of 'intellectual montage.' In "The Wheel," Gance shows a train laboriously climbing up the Mont-Blanc mountain side, then he cuts to a snail, showing how slow the train in moving.

Gance always saw himself as "the Victor Hugo of the screen," and as with the famous French writer, the director loved long, long productions. "The Wheel" at first was 32-reels, clocking in at over eight hours. The most common length of the movie on today's DVD's is four and a half hours long. The production was so long that actor Severin-Mars died of a heart attack soon after his parts were filmed. Despite looking old for his age, he was only 48 when stricken. His leads in "The Wheel" as well as Gance's earlier 1918 "The Tenth Symphony" was a powerful presence on the screen.

This was also Ivy Close's last movie in a major role. Voted by the Daily Mirror as the World's Beautiful Woman in 1908, the English actress beat out 1,500 contestants. She married filmmaker Elwin Neame and was one of the first film stars to begin a movie production company, in 1914. She left cinema after "The Wheel" when her husband wanted her to stay home to raise their kids, only to see him die shortly after in a motorcycle crash. She appeared in secondary parts in two movies in the late 1920's before talkies ended her 44-film career. Her son Ronald Neame, a producer, worked alongside director David Lean to create his classic 1945 'Brief Encounter' and 1946 'Great Expectations,' while her great grandson, Gareth Neame, was responsible in bringing the worldwide phenomenon television series, 'Downton Abbey,' to the airwaves in 2010.

Abel Gance is not a filmmaker who thinks small. There is something to be said for a master filmmaker (for Gance clearly is a master) pursuing his vision at all cost. In subject matter, La Roue possess similar qualities to early 20th Century realist novels. Frank Norris comes to mind. Of course Norris's novel McTeague was the subject of another grand visionary director, Erich Von Stroheim.

Sisif, an engineer, a "man of the rails," finds an orphaned child after a railroad crash. He takes this child, Norma, home to raise as his own, alongside his son Elie. Fifteen years pass, Norma grows into a beautiful, free-spirited woman. Sisif begins to look at his adopted daughter in a way that is very unfatherly, nor is he alone in his desire. Elie, Sisif's son, seems to have feelings for his "sister," feelings Norma shares. Uncontrolled passions lead to tragedy until the (somewhat) optimistic ending. The film's first half takes place either in the family home surrounded by rails or around the railyards. The background of the railroad, with its grime and smoke, does add to the ambiance of the film. The second half is largely set in the snow covered alps. Both halves possess a realism due to the locations.

There are sections in La Roue that rank among the best in silent cinema. My favorite is the sequence where Norma leaves for Paris, a sequence about halfway through the film. She says goodbye to her home in a series of beautifully poetic shots. Then, she boards a train driven by her "father." En route, a fit of jealousy consumes Sisif. He plans to crash the train. What follows is a series of fast edits that are as advanced as anything used by the Russians from this time period. It is hard not to be awed by the sequence. Nor, is this the only one. La Roue has about half a dozen such eye-popping moments. It also features a moving finale that seems earned.

It should also be noted that La Roue, even in the shortened cut that remains, runs four hours and twenty minutes. It cannot be watched casually! I spent one whole day with Flicker Alley's DVD, homebound due to an aching leg and a reeling stomach. Others may not have the infirmity (and the patience) for that type of commitment. I can understand. The running time, even shortened, is overly generous for the story told. There are sections that drag. A certain repetitious quality hurts the film (one character tries three separate times to kill himself with a train). La Roue is not an epic like Lawrence of Arabia, or, rather, La Roue is an intimate epic, about people, about desire, and about despair. Most certainly the story did not need the indulgent running time, but I'm glad the film exists just as an example of a filmmaker going for broke. I even felt my day was well spent, even if the idea of watching La Roue in its entirety a second time seems more like combat than entertainment.

Gance seems overwhelmed by the theme of humanity crushed by incredible suffering, and some of the symbolism may seem heavy-handed, but this film deserves to be listed among the greats for its wonderful cinematography, the strong contrasts between the first parts portrayal of trains and the second parts moving to the beautiful, impassive scenery of the high Alps.

I have always been an admirer of Gance's Napoleon, but his J'accuse turned me off. La Roue has restored my desire to see the others: La fin de monde, Beethoven, and Austerlitz.

As for the suffering, this was made in 1921 in the aftermath of WW I, which is sufficient to account for Gance's obsession with the theme.