Cinema and Radio - Abel Gance (original) (raw)

Abstract

With the shift towards intermediality in recent decades, ideas of medium specificity have given way to an understanding of media forms as relational through and through. That is, media are defined less by supposedly intrinsic qualities than by how they position themselves in relation to other media. For film historians, this change of focus entails a rethinking of fundamental questions, asking not what cinema is, but rather how the cinema's changing definitions have become possible in relation both "older" and "newer" media. Thus Tom Gunning famously examined how the motif of the telephone, with its promise of overcoming time and space, helped to catalyze the emergence of narrative (parallel) editing, along with a new mode of spectatorship marked by the promise of mastery and fear of impotence. 1 More recently, Lev Manovich has argued that digital media helped to catalyze the incorporation of "database" narrative structures in the non-linear work of filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway (a logic admittedly prefigured by Dziga Vertov). 2 While such intermedial analyses offer insight into the cinema's elasticity in relation to different media landscapes, however, we should also remember that the various projects attached to the cinema over its history never exist in the absence of broader contextual (cultural, political or discursive) factors. That is, the understandings of a medium, the 1 Tom Gunning, "Heard over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the De Lorde

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References (14)

  1. Most of these montage sequences consisted of found footage, which Gance sent his editors to collect. In one note to his chief editor Marguerite Beaugé, Gance wrote: "Trouvez-moi beaucoup plus de documentaires d'animaux et aussi dadvantage de morts de fleurs. Il y en a certainement d'autres. N'oubliez pas que je prendrai quelquefois 1 mètre ou même 0m.50 de ces scènes, ce qui veut dire qu'il me faut une énorme diversité." Document held at the Cinémathèque française, Gance B42, dossier 107.1.
  2. Découpage for La fin du monde (1929), document held at the Cinématheque Française, Gance B42, dossier 109.2.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.
  5. See Frank, "L'inhumaine, La fin du monde," 950-951.
  6. du monde in the sequences comparing religious reactions to the comet around the world. [IMAGE] Gance describes one such sequence in the screenplay significantly as a "simultanéisme de croyants": "Renchainé sur simultanéisme de croyants: Flash de figures extasiées: Une croix -un chrétien. Un bouddha -un chinois. Un dieu fétiche -un nègre. Races différentes, dieux différents, mais la même foi, montrant que ce qui est encore le plus divin ce n'est pas Dieu, c'est la foi elle-même." 46 Within the framework of the film's plot, this religious universalism is associated with a very specific political project: the creation of a multinational world government. Gance had, in fact, long been interested in the League of Nations. He made plans for films entitled La Société des nations and La royaume de la terre, 47 and he also wrote a letter to League's delegates proposing the creation of "La section cinématographique de la S.D.N. [Société des Nations]" which would assist the League's influence via the mass media of cinema and -significantly -radio. 48 Although none of these projects came to fruition, all of the themes show up centrally in La fin du monde in connection with the film's two heroes. Jean, as we learn in one scene, has penned a book entitled La Royaume de la terre, and Martial's main mission -after Jean loses his reason -will be to found a "universal republic," in direct opposition to the nationalism and war-mongering of Schomburg. Crucially, both Schomburg and Martial enlist broadcast media -newspaper, telegraph and above all radio -as the main weapons within their political struggle. Already in one of the earliest surviving descriptions of the film's planned scenario from March 1929, Gance planned for the radio to stand at the centre of the film: [L]a radiophonie jouera dans l'oeuvre un rôle extrêmement important. La Tour Eiffel, centre d'émission des nouvelles de Novalic, deviendra insensiblement une sorte de personnage synthétique, centre visuel du drame, et nous assisterons, dans chaque capitale, dans chaque petite ville, dans chaque hameau des coins les plus recules du monde, aux réactions que l'annonce de la fin du monde peut provoquer. 49
  7. LA FIN DU MONDE 110.6, p.54.
  8. Welsh and Kramer, "Abel Gance's Accusation Against War," 58.
  9. Frank, "L'Inhumaine, La Fin du monde," 950.
  10. "Résumé de l'argument de l'oeuvre écrit par M. Abel Gance en 1912," document held at the Cinémathèque Française. Gance B42, dossier 110.1.
  11. Numerous were the reflections such as the following from Landau: "to think that if the cinema and the phonograph had existed earlier, Schröder-Devrient, Catalani, Henriette Sontag, Döring, Devrient, Dessoir, Dawison, Haase, Marie Seebach and Niemann Raabe could have lived not only for their time, but for all times" (ibid.).
  12. In a direct reference to recording technologies, he tells Geneviève: "Grave bien en toi mes paroles, Genevieve." LA FIN DU MONDE 10.3, p.24. And such a mindful "engraving" stands in opposition to the presentism of Izard's orgies, of the stock market and -at least provisionally -of broadcasting media.
  13. On the temporal structure of melodrama defined by the "too late," see Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess," Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991), 2-13, here 11.
  14. LA FIN DU MONDE 110.7, p. 67.