Requiem for a Utopian Cinema: Abel Gance's Gospels of Light

Abstract

The text presented here intends, starting from the many scattered, fragmentary and plural writings that Abel Gance bequeathed us, to delineate a poetics of his cinema based on a fundamental element of cinematic creation: light. The aim is to highlight the fundamental role that light plays, not only in Gance's cinema, but in all its artistic worldliness and personal existence, ranging from the most fervent enthusiasm of religious nature to the most incisive excitement of cinematic nature. The text is divided into three fundamental parts. The first proposes a brief profile of the author, framing him in his historical context and in the aesthetic universe in which he made himself, alluding to his many influences and identifying possible descendants. The second, which is the main and most extensive part of the text, deals precisely with the central issue here, light, in its multiple forms and levels, either as matter or as metaphor. The third focuses on the opposite, dark, lunar side that runs through the life of the French filmmaker, whether personal or creatively. Visionary in his filmic work and wordy in his textual legacy, his thoughts, vast in their thematic range, dense in their erudition, plural in their style, encyclopedic in their ambition, make a valuable contribution to a hypothetical theory of the filmmaker(s), to the extent that rarely have a voice and a vision been so enthusiastic and so analytical, so rigorous and so confessional, so poetic and so elliptical, shaped into a multi-sided prism that allows us to dive, dizzying and deeply, in the creative zeitgeist of a pivotal moment in the history of cinema, the 1920s, and of one of its most astonishing filmmakers.