La Folie du Docteur Tube
Featuring Albert Dieudonne (later to play Napoleon), La Folie du Docteur Tube is “a black comedy which carried Melies fantasy into the realm of the avant-garde...a self-indulgent romp with camera tricks....” (Kevin Brownlow). Made in 1916, it is significant as the cinema's first extensive use of distorting mirrors, with which the tale of a mad scientist who discovers a sneezing powder capable of changing people's shapes is cleverly told. The cinematography is by Léonce-Henry Burel, who worked on Gance's 1919 J'Accuse, La Roue and Napoleon, and later on films of Renoir and Bresson.
Having gained producer Louis Nalpas' confidence with his first film in 1912 (Un Drame au Chateau d'Acre, shot in five days for 5000 francs), a young Abel Gance confidently let loose his imagination for the making of La Folie du Docteur Tube. Nalpas refused to release it. “I had tried to mirror reality in an unconventional way,” Gance explains (in Films in Review, 1952), “and I was warned never to embark on surrealism again....” (JB)
• Directed by Abel Gance. Produced by Louis Nalpas for Film d'Art. Photographed by Léonce-Henry Burel. (1916, 14 mins, silent, Print from Images Film Archives)

Au Secours!
Even rarer than La Folie du Docteur Tube is Au Secours!, directed by Gance as a vehicle for the great French comic, Max Linder. The script, written by Gance and Linder, involves Max, a haunted chateau, and a “Ghastly Thing” against which he holds the door. Made in six days, it features experimental editing and photography by Gance.
• Directed by Abel Gance. Written by Gance and Max Linder. With Max Linder, Jean Toulout, Gina Palerme. (1923, 35 mins, silent with English intertitles, Print from Images Film Archives)

Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite
To the extent that the films of Abel Gance are known at all to Americans, it is due in large part to the efforts of British film historian Kevin Brownlow, whose book, “The Parade's Gone By,” and the film, The Charm of Dynamite, provide the most complete English-language introduction to Gance's work. Most importantly, Brownlow took on the task in the Sixties of restoring Gance's epic, Napoleon, to the print now being presented by Francis Ford Coppola.
“...(G)iving carte blanche to Abel Gance was equivalent to touching dynamite with a lighted match,” Brownlow has written. “Gance is one of the giants of the cinema. Some historians hail him as the D.W. Griffith of Europe, others dismiss him as the De Mille of France. Both realize his importance, neither fully comprehend his talents.... The motion picture industry, in France and elsewhere, was alarmed by Gance's monumental talents, and frightened by his revolutionary ideas. They determined to control him, and to limit the length of his artistic leash. Unfortunately for all of us, they succeeded....” (in “The Parade's Gone By”).
In The Charm of Dynamite, Brownlow combines footage shot during the making of Napoleon (1927) with sequences from La Roue and J'Accuse to detail Gance's innovative techniques. These include the early use of the hand-held camera, the wide-angle lens, and rapid cutting; the use of triptychs to create a cinerama effect; and, in 1934, the introduction of stereophonic sound to film. (JB)
• Directed by Kevin Brownlow. (1968, 52 mins, Print from Images Film Archives)