Abel Gance and Charles Pathé: Correspondence, 1918-1955

Hello again, and welcome to life after Pordenone. After the hectic schedule, it has taken me a while to find my blogging feet once more. (Additional context: we are also redoing the kitchen.) As today is Abel Gance’s 133^rd birthday, it seems fitting to post something on a Gancian theme. What follows is a kind of review of a recent(-ish) book. I had intended to submit a proper review of it to an academic journal last year, but for various reasons this never happened. I use the opportunity of this anniversary, and of this blog’s more informal setting, to resurrect it for your reading pleasure.

Abel Gance-Charles Pathé: Correspondance, 1918-1955, ed. Elodie Tamayo (Paris: Gallimard, 2021)

In 1918, Abel Gance was flush with the commercial success of a series of short, commercial feature films made for the Film d’Art company under the aegis of Louis Nalpas. But the war was in its fourth year, and Gance was dreaming of bigger projects. Enter the largest name in the French film industry: Charles Pathé. Pathé’s name was the leading brand of French film. By 1918, he employed thousands of staff and had offices across the world—not to mention laboratories, studios, theatres…

“On January 21 in Nice, I see Charles Pathé”, writes Gance in his journal. “Conversation of an hour and a half. Great affability. Main points: certainty of my cinematographic future. I am at the top of the list of European directors.” Pathé tells him: “My house is always open to your talent” (qtd in Ede 2020, 9-10). What follows is the correspondence detailed in Tamayo’s edited volume.

Of the 210 letters contained in the book, 132 of them are written by Gance. His letters are generally longer—sometimes hugely so—than those from Pathé. As François Ede observes, Pathé’s letters to Gance bear “the mark of paternal affection with which he surrounds his protégé” (2020, 19). Gance always signs off with the phrase “all my devotion” or “my unfailing and profound devotion”. The words are those of disciple, or earnest child; they are also trying to make a bargain, to invoke pity or aid. Tamayo breaks down the correspondence into three broad sections, and to make things simple I will follow suit:

(Dés)espoirs de la fin de guerre: 1918-1919

As Tamayo explains in her introduction, in March 1918 Gance founded Films Abel Gance, and Pathé gave him carte blanche to pursue his projects (19). That month, Gance writes that his conversations with Pathé are “for me an unheard-of attraction not of utopian dreams, but of solid anticipations. They are for me, and I insist, decisive moments where the social future of the cinema has played its first card. […] My will reaches out towards a gigantic goal” (37). It’s the kind of thing one would write in a private diary, but Gance shares it with Pathé. As he would do throughout his life and work, Gance peppers his early letters with literary and philosophic quotations as a means of sharing, imploring, showing-off. In letters to Pathé, we encounter lines from François de Malherbe and William of Orange, just as Gance would later quote Schuré and Nietzsche in the hope of persuading other financiers to give him money. But Gance doesn’t hide behind his quotations; they are an invitation to see into his inner life, to link a singular goal to wider cultural ones. Pathé is attracted by Gance’s ambition, but ever practical. Their letters proceed to discuss the nature of nitrate, the possibilities of colorization, of tinting methods, of camera speed and lighting (39-41).

March 1918. Films Abel Gance embarks on its first project: Soleil Noir, subsequently renamed Ecce Homo. Gance sends the familiar reassuring boasts to Pathé: “We will obtain immeasurable results with Soleil Noir. The era of cinema will begin” (43). Everything he says, he means in earnest; he underlines his assertions, quite literally on the page, with key phrases emphasized for Pathé. Even when the production of Ecce Homo breaks down later in the spring of 1918, he pursues the next (La Fin du Monde) with equal conviction: assuring Pathé that when he speaks of another unparalleled success, he says so “with absolute certainty” (44-45). La Fin du Monde will be in ten episodes of 1200m (a total of ten hours on screen), the first overestimation of a project that will take another dozen years to realize and that will ultimately destroy his career in 1930-31.

May 1918. Here is Gance writing to Pathé to argue for the absolute control of his film La Dixième symphonie in exhibition. It has had a special score written to accompany it, and Gance insists the film “must be seen and heard in its entirety with music of Maurice-Lévy” (46). (The score has never been performed since, though a few seconds of a piano part were played on French radio in 1955, while Gance and Maurice-Lévy reminisced about their collaboration.) Gance writes the way a youth writes to impress his peers, his teachers. He boasts that he has “something of Nietzsche’s will in my veins” (47), but he abandons Ecce Homo. Three hours of rushes survive. The pictorial quality is astonishing, printed from the original camera negative. But it’s left behind, together with a debt of 50,000F; Pathé pays it off and gives Gance the green light for yet another wild scheme: a triptych of films on the war (50n).

June 1918. Gance is shooting near Nice, near Marseille (59). He is filled with inner belief. He tells Pathé that in him “I have found the most formidable force capable of disseminating my thoughts throughout the world, [and that] you believe you have found in me a writer for the eyes” (64-65). But Gance has an eye on the practical as well as the philosophical. He sends Pathé a letter the size of a manual on technical specs that he wants from studios, from technicians; he specifies the space he needs, even the voltage of electronic circuits he wants (67-72). Mid-production on J’accuse, Gance is still monitoring the exhibition of La Dixième symphonie, once more begging that the original score be shown during screenings: the film was conceived “as a particular attempt to ally music with the screen” (70); Pathé obliges (74).

August 1918. Gance is besotted with the cinema. From the sun-soaked landscapes around Marseille, he sends Pathé his vision:

The cinema is a miraculous beacon, more powerful than the other arts that are nearing the end of their lives by extenuation. I am inexpressibly moved to think that one day I will be able to speak the same language at the same time to all my friends across the universe. […] To you I will owe this wonderful diffusion. I hope to thank you for bringing back to cinema a spiritual prestige that it still lacks and that will make it the most prodigious instrument of internationalization in the future. (71)

Pathé is pulling strings, mobilizing his contacts. He enables Gance to inspect and use footage from the Army Cinematographic Corps (75-77). By October 1918, Gance finishes the exteriors for J’accuse on the Côte d’Azur (82).

November 1918. Gance puts words into Pathé’s mouth: “You sense that I have a clear vision of the future of cinematography and the result of our collaboration can only result in excellent things for our nascent Art” (84). He spells out the need to realign the way artists and industrialists work together: “There are effectively not enough links between directors and producers in France. Often one speaks commercially, industrially, and technically—but almost never spiritually. This, I repeat, is the foundational sin in France” (84). The war ends. In December, Gance finishes shooting J’accuse (87). But the notion of the “foundational sin” of cinema’s mercantilism nags at Gance, and in later years the sense of betrayal will dominate his mindset.

When J’accuse! is released in the spring of 1919, Gance sends Pathé a long letter discussing—and complaining, and demanding—conditions for its success, for the success of European cinema in the market dominated by America (97-102). But his concerns are also turned upon France itself. In May 1919, Gance despairs how D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is being received in France: “Intolerance has absolutely no success here. The film provokes a scandal; we laugh and whistle. Decidedly, the French do not yet understand the best cinema.” (112) This, too, is the seed of a despondency that will grip Gance by the end of the 1920s: that even the public might turn upon its cultural benefactors. What’s more, Pathé writes and explains how difficult it is to get J’accuse picked up by distributors in the USA: he predicts a long delay before the film is released there (113-18). (Later, he reports that the reaction of the board of Pathé Exchange to a preview screening of J’accuse was negative (158).) Gance wanted his film shown abroad, but worried over how J’accuse was being exhibited. In 1920, he complains about the English translator of intertitles for J’accuse, Sir Max Pemberton. “No-one must touch J’accuse except me” Gance demands (188-89). (A few of Pemberton’s lines survive in contemporary trade adverts for the UK release of J’accuse. When TCM broadcast the film in a new restoration in 2007, new English-language titles were made for the American television version. I suggested that, since the original French titles were not being used for the broadcast, they use the surviving UK titles from 1920. This was fine for the broadcast, but much to my regret, Pemberton’s purple prose still inhabits the final few minutes of the DVD subtitles under the superior French originals: Diaz’s tirade against the sun remains as distorted in English as it was in 1920.)

August 1919. Gance is convalescing in the Alps. In the winter of 1918-19, both he and his fiancée, Ida Danis, have caught bronchial illnesses, possibly tuberculosis—possibly from their time shooting J’accuse among the frontline troops. He is planning a film calling “Le Rail”, with which “we will reveal the new formula of cinematic art of which this [film] will be the starting point” (119). His thoughts turn to Griffith. He reflects on the trade strategy for the release of Broken Blossoms (1919), the first production marketed as a “super film” with a slow roll-out across the USA and beyond into Europe (120-21). Gance is concerned to protect his work from interference, from commercialism. He guides his films through production and beyond: “I always insist like a father who knows what’s best for his child” (126). How to protect the art of cinema? Gance wants to build a new cinema theatre for showing his own choice of films: opera films, avant-garde shorts, documentaries, scientific films (130-33). In September, he writes to Pathé about how cinema should advance itself. There should be programmes “to enhance and affirm the prestige of Film as an international language and instrument of scientific and social propaganda” (131). Gance is planning a version of Don Quixote with Frank Keenan in the lead; or else a project called Entre l’est et l’ouest, a film about reconciling the New World with the Old; or else a book of film theory, to be called Les Antennes de l’art muet; or else a meeting with President Wilson, to advance cinema in tandem with the League of Nations (136-39). Can Pathé oblige? Gance makes plans regardless. His projected “Grande Salle de l’Art Cinématographique” is envisioned in tremendous detail: he details the kind of frontage space he wants, mentions possible architectural candidates. Inside, he wants to create “luminous symphonies”: great, shifting kaleidoscopes of colour upon the screen, produced by a kind of light-producing keyboard, like an organ (145-52).

Pathé listens. He is a patient man, thus far. It is he who advises Gance to cast an English actor to ensure the commercial success of La Roue, as “Le Rail” is now called (142). He also arranges for Frank Keenan to agree to a gap in his working schedule to go to France and work with Gance on Don Quixote (162). But in response to the Grande Salle project, Pathé simply pleads exhaustion: his doctor has ordered him a total rest for one month. The Grande Salle idea is too ambitious, too enormous to contemplate. Pathé urges Gance to accept the new world market dominated by the USA (163-65). Writing from across the Atlantic in November 1919, he tells Gance: “To be seen with any clarity, the question of cinema must be seen from New York […] France, believe me, counts and will count for very little in the national film industry. […] The world market is here [in America] and can never be anywhere else” (164-65). Gance replied, saying he too senses the shift in the commercial landscape (166). But would he admit the consequences?

Puissances des années 1920: 1920-1926

As Tamayo highlights, the second part of the Gance-Pathé correspondence begins at a crucial historical juncture in the film industry in France. By 1918, Pathé was already aware that the Great War had fundamentally changed the film industry. In the years before the war, the French industry calculated that 90% of all films being shown in the world were French. Within a year of the outbreak of war, this figure had dropped to between 30% and 35%. By 1917, over 50% of films shown in Paris were American and by 1919 only 10-15% of films being shown in Paris were French. One study calculated that for every 5000 metres of French films being presented weekly in France, there were 25,000m of imported films, mostly American. The response of many industry moguls in France was to devour what was left of their own industry for short-term gains: buying cheap American imports in the hope of achieving profit. It cost between 0.18 to 0.35 centimes to export each metre of film to the US or the UK, whereas it cost only 0.02c to import one metre of film from America (Abel 1984: 10-13). This is the context in which Gance and Pathé begin to correspond.

When Gance embarked upon La Roue in 1919-20, Pathé had made the decision to cease producing films. In the space of a few months, Pathé’s company shifted identity: in September 1920, “Pathé” became Pathé-Cinéma, then in February 1921 Pathé-Cinéma became Pathé-Consortium-Cinéma (224n; see also Ede 2020, 21). Pathé would make profit on films being produced under his brand, but all productions would be handled by associated producers and subsidiary companies.

February 1920. Pathé meets Gance on location during the shooting of La Roue (169). Their encounter is caught on film by Blaise Cendrars (in Autour de la Roue, 1923). The footage shows Pathé at close quarters with Gance, gesturing and looking concerned. What’s being discussed? Is Pathé anxious? As François Ede, the restorer of La Roue, points out, Gance was hiding the extent to which La Roue had outgrown its contracted form: a film intended to be 1500m was to end up 10,000m long (2020, 35). For Pathé, this would be a watershed moment. Gance was the man he had supported and whose projects he had backed despite numerous delays and industrial pressures. After La Roue, things would be different: “The trust he had shown in him until then is shaken and he is tired of the filmmaker’s unpredictability” (Ede 2020, 41).

April 1920. While the film grows in length, Ida Danis is undergoing an operation on her lungs. Gance’s subsequent dedication to her in the opening credits of La Roue calls her “ma femme”, implying “wife”, but they never married. Perhaps Pathé was unaware, for he refers to Danis as “Madame Gance” in the letters of this time. Gance lists excuses for the delay in finishing La Roue: “Mme Gance’s” illness, the currency exchange paying Ivy Close (she earns £150/week), Séverin-Mars leaving to shoot L’Agonie des aigles (Dominique Bernard-Deschamp & Julien Duvivier, 1922) (196-97).

As Tamayo’s notes make clear, the production was also moving geographically. Abandoning the railyards around Nice and Marseille, they went to the slopes around Mont-Blanc, then to Cambo-des-Bains, and finally to Arcachon on the Atlantic coast, where a local casino was turned into an impromptu studio to finish filming (209n, 211n). Gance set up home in the Villa “La Bruyère” in Arcachon. Here he contemplated the meaning of his film and his art: “The action of the image is not solely upon the eyes; there is a profound reflex on the heart and soul of the crowd. It is to provoke this reflex that directors must apply themselves” (221).  Meanwhile, Pathé’s company was undergoing the changes detailed earlier. No longer could Gance assume that Pathé would grant his wishes: he now had the directors of Pathé-Consortium-Cinéma to appease, and there were the first of many tussles over his contract.

July 1922. Gance is being pressed about the delay finishing La Roue; he writes to Pathé to complain (225-27). But what can Pathé do? The film is released in a version of over eight hours. Its photography, editing, and emotive power are praised and criticized in equal measure. But it is a success. Gance boasts to Pathé that he has received over 500 letters of admiration from fans (237). (In the archives, some of these survive, including poems sent to him about the film.) Is this a relayed kind of thanks, or a gesture of defiance? The film succeeded because of Pathé’s initial backing, but despite the difficulties created by his company’s reformation.

October 1923. Gance writes a letter to Pathé that he never sends:

I want to act here for posterity. This letter will be made public in five years; posterity will give light to your name only because you added lustre to mine. […] If La Roue should die, you will take responsibility for this catastrophe, because you didn’t want to see, you didn’t want to understand, you didn’t want to feel. […] You hid behind the stupid sensibilities of a mediocre bourgeois, refusing to listen to the thunder of the waves. (245-46)

Beyond the specific troubles producing and releasing La Roue, Gance’s anger seems directed at the broader challenges of cinema in the 1920s. Pathé’s decision to cease active production was seen as a kind of betrayal by some in the industry, but it was an inevitability. In his memoirs, written in 1940, Pathé revealed the logic behind this decision:

From now on, it was painfully clear that America, with its infinite resources, had conquered the global market—probably forever. The war had simply brought forward the date of this inevitable supremacy. […] I know only too well that many of us always nourished the hope that our films would get substantial receipts abroad—above all in the huge American market. But this was an illusion. (2006: 204–5)

Léon Gaumont followed suit and ceased active production in 1924. Making a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Gaumont’s French company became a subsidiary called Gaumont-Metro-Goldwyn (GMG). This was the company with which Gance would negotiate during the fraught release of Napoléon, an experience that altered the course of his career. Even in 1923, Gance no longer had faith in Pathé as the guiding light of cinema. Perhaps Pathé had also run out of patience with Gance.

December 1923. Pathé’s wife dies. Gance is preparing for the future. First, another series of films called Les Grands initiés, designed to be “the definitive event of the new silent language between peoples” (248). But in the meantime, Napoléon. Will Gance succeed in this vast project? “Know only that the radioactivity grows within me: the rest is nothing”, he tells Pathé in January 1924 (249).

November 1924. The film is written, the script the length of a novel—and it is only the first of six projected films. Justifying his aims, Gance quotes the philosophers. Pathé responds with an old adage: “Grasp it all, lose it all”. “In my opinion”, he warns Gance prophetically, “Napoleon is a hero enough to occupy an entire lifetime” (252-53). Gance responds with a vast letter. He claims enthusiasm will overcome all obstacles, that he can make all six films in a single year (253-58). “This work can only succeed by being a violent thunderclap precipitated by the rapid work and combined energies of all its participants” (255). More than this, Gance wants to reshape European cinema: “The future of cinema must be put back entirely into the sacred hands of Art […] What is necessary is an autocratic artistic power—active and uncompromising—in every state” (284).

Gaps begin to appear in the chronology. Months pass without word. Then the crisis. Gance’s production company, Westi, collapses. In August 1925, he sends an urgent plea to Pathé to ensure his film survives: “Defend Napoléon to the last—I beg you—victory is in sight” (301). But is it? Months pass and the film keeps filming.

May 1926. Gance writes of perpetual exhaustion: “this perpetual struggle that I must undergo in order not to be devoured by the incomprehension, the greed, the puerility, the malice, and especially the idiocy, of those who circle around me, who prepare for posterity a pitiful martyrology of all true European cinematic artists” (317). It is the mindset of a man besieged. The effort of getting Napoléon made feels superhuman, almost incomprehensible. The letters give us glimpses, flashes of chaos and triumph. Then in November 1926, the correspondence breaks off. Gance begins the editing of Napoléon. He doesn’t write to Pathé for two-and-a-half years.

Écriture mélancholique et rétrospection (1929-55)

What happened? Was something said? Was something not said? There survives a sporadically-written production diary from 1924-27, but this history of Napoléon is desperately sparse. In his notes from 1924-25, Gance mentions Pathé as an ally, and Pathé evidently helped when the film’s original production company, Westi, collapsed in 1925. When the new production company, Société Générale des Films (SGF), was founded, Pathé was a board member (alongside Léon Gaumont, the Comte de Breteuil, and the Comte de Béarn). But what was his role? What kind of opinion did he have on Gance’s methods and aims? Did he see the mammoth ten-hour preview version of the film? Or any version? The letters do not tell us. SGF certainly rescued Napoléon after the collapse of Westi, but Gance always credited Jacques Grinieff (the founder of SGF) as the film’s saviour. Gance ceased to write the production diary in 1927, so there is no more information about Pathé’s role during the decisive months when the film was previewed and exhibited—and then butchered.

April 1929. After a gap of two years, Gance writes an astonishing letter to Pathé:

Do not be surprised when you receive this letter. First, it has no ulterior motive. I wanted to write to you only when my new project was settled; now that this is accomplished, I have no fear that that you might attribute to opportunism what is dictated only by my feelings.

And now that we are a little further from the events that separated us, it should be permitted for me, not to justify myself—since I have long understood that on earth “greatness is more than just speaking from on high”, and that fundamental truth and devotion to its cause were interpreted as flaws in a mad, hypocritical society—but to tell you that your behaviour has been one of the greatest disappointments of my life. You have always, like me, been poorly supported, poorly served, misinterpreted, misguided. Venom has wound itself around you like a frontier, and I would love to know if you truly saw a friend anywhere in film, except me.

I counted on you: you the man and you the financier. That the latter abandoned me for more or less judicious reasons, I would have understood; but that the man deliberately ignored the gigantic effort I made to try to preserve a French cinema awash with idiocy and blandness, that he listened to the chorus of imbeciles and liars, that he did not sense what incredible battles I had to fight on every front at every moment, battles which I believe no one in France could sustain: this I simply cannot conceive.

I have a very clear conscience and that is why I am speaking to you so frankly. In Napoléon, I have made the best European film of the last ten years; just ask M. Byre, Director of the Metro, if my film in 3 parts has not broken all the rental records of all existing films to date, Ben-Hur [1925] excepted. I receive enthusiastic letters from theatre directors, from Brezillon down to the most obscure provinces, expressing their satisfaction and that of the public. This for me is my revenge; a little late, but profound. There is no great French historian who hasn’t written to me enthusiastically, there is no schoolboy who doesn’t retain my film better than any history lesson. What else can be said? Only words of hatred, stupidity, or envy.

I have put aside a whole file for you, which will surprise you when you see how right I was. But for a short-sighted administration, but for interference in my work, but for foreign pressure that exceeded my expectations; I was not in control, I had no autonomy.

I tell you all this, I repeat, not to exonerate myself, since I do not feel guilty of any fault—but to know if the friend I had in you has died permanently. Modern business is dangerous because it paralyzes feelings, and I promised myself that I would never again undertake any business with friends. Life is too short and too full of pain to add such disillusionment.

This one word, dear M. Pathé, that you might believe my silence is only a deeply offended dignity, and that a word from you will soften the pain I have felt.

Believe in my constant and melancholy affection.

Pathé is moved to reply, briefly, but the correspondence swiftly breaks off as Gance begins the disastrous production of La Fin du Monde and doesn’t write again for another two years. Thereafter, Gance’s dreams of cinematic glory are sporadic, unachieved. Gance could create only what he deemed “dead letters” or “paper films” (335n). His correspondence with Pathé continued only in fits and starts during the Second World War, and a renewed exchanged in the late 1940s when Gance was again dreaming of mammoth films.

Gance was now in his 50s, Pathé in his 80s. Gance remained the dreamer, recruiting followers and financiers to his cause. Pathé was no longer able to help materially but offered moral encouragement. “You are still young”, writes Pathé to the 57-year-old Gance in 1947 (337). A year later, Gance was still chasing the same illusive project. Pathé writes to assure Gance that “You are probably the only person alive in the world able to master the huge scenarios that you describe to me” (345). How touching that it’s Pathé who now underlines his text. Gance replies:

The work you did in our profession was that of a giant architect. You created the film industry from scratch at a time when those who now make a living from cinema laughed and threw stones at us. In the ocean of affairs, our name will still stand as the first lighthouse that marked for modern humanity the unimagined coast of the most magical of kingdoms. (338)

Pathé was now 83 and hardly able to hold a pen. Nevertheless, Pathé replies to Gance: “I wish you the success you deserve, and I am convinced that future histories of Cinema will designate you as one of the principal directors to whom we owe the greatest triumphs of the screen since its foundation.” (346).

Summary

I can’t adequately stress what a superb piece of primary documentation this book represents, not to mention it being an exemplary work of archival research and scholarship. The original documents—a mix of manuscript and typescript letters, notes, drafts, and telegrams—are scattered across multiple collections in multiple locations across France. This is the kind of paper trail that drives researchers mad, as well as complicating travel itineraries and stretching budgets. To have the letters in one volume, at a sensible price, is a godsend. The book is an incredibly informing, revealing, moving read. (Of course, I have a vested interest, but I stand by my point.) It also looks nice and has a selection of lovely colour photographs to give a sense of the people and films being discussed. Elodie Tamayo’s introduction is incredibly useful, as are her annotations throughout. A tremendous publication, and a credit to all those involved in producing it.

Paul Cuff

References

Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

François Ede, “La Roue, Cahiers d’une restauration.” Booklet notes for La Roue, DVD/Blu-ray. Paris: Pathé, 2020.

Charles Pathé, Écrits autobiographiques, ed. Pierre Lherminier (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).

Elodie Tamayo (ed.), Abel Gance-Charles Pathé: Correspondance, 1918-1955 (Paris: Gallimard, 2021).