Letter Exchange Concerning Stuart Liebman's Abel Gance DVD Review

by William M. Drew and Stuart Liebman

Stuart Liebman's Reactionary Attack on Abel Gance: A Response

by William M. Drew

There are some critiques of art, whether positive or negative, that provide an illumination, an insight into the creator and his time. Even if one does not agree with the critic's evaluation, the experience of reading it all but compels the individual to examine more fully one's own perspectives in order to understand more deeply why the critic has appreciated or rejected the work of art in question. Such critiques indeed have a valid role to play in the continual battles that emerge from the history of different ideas and aesthetics.

Stuart Liebman's recent piece on Abel Gance, reviewing the 2008 DVD releases of "J'Accuse" and "La Roue" for "Cineaste," is, however, far from being that kind of criticism. It is rather little more than a petulant rant founded on highly inaccurate perceptions and imparting to the reader misleading, incomplete information. Ironically, considering "Cineaste"'s reputation as a politically progressive publication on cinema, Liebman's article, replete with Gradgrindian logic, is culturally reactionary, inevitably reflecting a retrogressive attitude toward life and the working class.

In considering a piece marked by illogicalities, one must first begin by questioning Liebman's attempt to present himself as a bold maverick fighting against a film establishment that, unaccountably to him, persists in worshipping Gance. Linking the French director with another pet aversion of his, D. W. Griffith, he writes that in spite of what he terms the "sheer visual and dramatic kitsch these two cineastes concocted," in "most film histories they retain their exalted status." Assuming as I am that Liebman, an American writing in an English-language publication, is intending to address primarily an American readership, this is to stand cinematic historiography on its head. In the case of Griffith, whatever honors he once enjoyed in his native land have been systematically undermined over the last two decades. Indeed, thanks to the more or less manufactured outrage over one half of one film and a multitude of detractors using that to attack his entire vast "oeuvre," Griffith in all likelihood currently has far less respect than any other significant artist in American history. Far from granting him some sort of "exalted status" as Liebman maintains, most film historians in the US today grudgingly acknowledge his technically innovative contributions, an admission enveloped with a cloud of explanations and reservations about the overall quality of his work that invariably emphasize his alleged racist mindset. The notorious incident in 1999 in which Griffith was publicly repudiated by his own profession when the Director's Guild of America stripped his name from their Lifetime Achievement Award was only the most obvious indicator of the shocking decline of his reputation.

The fortunes of Gance in the United States, though no less disconcerting, have been of a markedly different nature. Griffith at least managed to present his works to the American public in the form in which he wanted them seen. And after his retirement from filmmaking, the Museum of Modern Art began reviving and making available much of his work for succeeding generations, a practice which has been continued by Killiam Shows, Blackhawk Films, and Kino International. Hardly any of Gance's films, however, even when shown in the US, reached the screen here as he had intended them to be seen. Commercial interests slashed the silent "J'Accuse" in half for US distribution; a "New York Times" reviewer who had seen the full version at a preview wrote on January 1, 1922, that Gance's film, which he called "terrific," "was so emasculated before it reached the public screen . . . that it must be counted as lost." The mutilation of "Napoleon" by MGM, which released it in a 72-minute version minus all the film's celebrated pyrotechnics, is, I believe, such a familiar tale as to require no further elaboration. "La Roue" did not reach the US at all in those years, while the truncated 8 reel version shown in Britain eliminated the powerful, sublime finale of Sisif's death, thus implying a conventional happy-ever-after ending for the hero and Norma in their mountain chalet. In the sound era, Gance fared no better with US distributors. Although the original versions of such classics as "Beethoven" and the new "J'Accuse" were not of extraordinary length, running a little over two hours, they were nevertheless severely cut for showing to American audiences in the late '30s.

Gance was singularly lacking in support from the film history establishment that began to emerge in the US during the '30s with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art. His silent works were pointedly omitted by Iris Barry from the collection she established at MOMA to showcase world film history through a series of programs. Doubtless because of his highly unusual techniques and approach, Gance could not fit into the tidy narrative of cinematic development that Barry was trying to construct. Kirk Bond, the remarkable pioneering American cineaste who had led the way in stressing the importance of film preservation in an op/ed piece published in the 1934 "New York Times, " "Lament for the Cinema Dead," was one of the few in the US calling attention to Gance's silent masterpieces in those years. He wrote "The New York Times" in 1939 regarding "the tragedy of the utter neglect of a once-famous film <the silent "J'Accuse"> and the virtual neglect of its gifted creator," pointing out that Gance, "one of the great French directors of the old days . . . had perhaps as great a sense of the medium as any one from Griffith to Eisenstein."

Bond, however, was very much out of step with the dominant attitude toward the filmmaker in the US at that time. For decades, Gance, when mentioned at all in English-language histories of film, was either referred to in passing or denigrated by chroniclers expounding the traditional account in cinema annals, from Paul Rotha's "The Film Till Now" in 1930 to Arthur Knight's "The Liveliest Art" in 1957, using the same kind of dismissive appraisal as Stuart Liebman. Thus, in no sense of the word could Gance be said to have enjoyed a long "exalted status" in the leading US film circles. By the start of the 1960s, he was all but forgotten here until a 1967 New York Film Festival tribute and the publication of Kevin Brownlow's "The Parade's Gone By" in 1968, with its lengthy chapter on the director, initiated a slow but steady rise in his US reputation. Even so, negotiations for making his films available in the US dragged out over many years and it was only in 1981--with a touch of sad irony, the last year of Gance's life--that "Napoleon" in a much longer version than the MGM cut finally reached a mass American audience following its premiere at Radio City Music Hall.

Although the triumphant "Napoleon" release seemed to promise a belated Gance revival, it ended up doing much more for the cause of fresh presentations of silents in general than in bringing full recognition to its director. While reviewers in major dailies like Vincent Canby in "The New York Times" and Charles Champlin in "The Los Angeles Times" were rhapsodic in their appreciation of Gance and his film, there was a sharp reaction in a number of the journals, whether it was Pauline Kael, formerly a Gance supporter, rounding on him in "The New Yorker" as she had earlier done with Orson Welles in the belief that he was now "establishment," or Stanley Kauffmann in "The New Republic" taking the tack that yes, Gance had been unfairly neglected but his new admirers were starting to exaggerate his contributions. Worst of all, however, were the politically motivated attacks, starting with the right-wing magazine, "Commentary," which tried to brand "Napoleon" as an ultra-nationalist piece of propaganda in an effort to discredit as hypocrites its presumably liberal admirers among the New York intellectuals, such as Leonard Bernstein. "Cineaste" then published an article by Peter Pappas who continued Richard Grenier's vicious assault in "Commentary" by labeling "Napoleon" as a "fascist" film. That Pappas was merely using the word "fascist" in the abusive, meaningless sense as defined by George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language" in which "fascism" no longer meant anything other than "something not desirable" is, I think, self-evident. Nevertheless, the damage was done and the long night of Gance's journey back to virtual obscurity had begun. To be sure, there were no pickets showing up to protest showings of Gance's films, nor were there cinema guilds removing his name from awards given in his honor. The piece by Pappas in "Cineaste," followed a few years later by a similarly loaded political hatchet job by Norman King published by the British Film Institute, were in the nature of preemptive strikes before the director ever had the chance to obtain the recognition then accorded Griffith.

Thanks in no small measure to these and other calculated smears, the Gance renaissance widely expected to flow from the "Napoleon" revival never emerged. A few of his outstanding sound films were released on VHS, it is true. But there was no full Gance retrospective in the US--not even in his centenary year in 1989--nor did more of his silent work, beyond his shorts, "La Folie du Docteur Tube" and "Au Secours!," become available to the American public. Although in the late '80s, Bambi Ballard, an Englishwoman then residing in France, mounted an impressive revival there of Gance's 1918 classic, "La Dixieme Symphonie," complete with a new orchestral score, this restored version never played in the US. Now and then, US archives hosted screenings of "La Roue" and the silent "J'Accuse" for limited audiences, but they never attained wider circulation. Meanwhile, while Francis Ford Coppola has kept the abridged version of "Napoleon" he released in the early '80s more or less continually available to the public, he has also used his interest in the film to suppress in the US the most complete version restored by Kevin Brownlow and projected at the correct speed.

Concomitant with the unavailability of films has been the dearth of published writings by and about Gance compared with the vast literature on Eisenstein, for example. Liebman asks why there is no explanation in the accompanying booklet for the DVD concerning the missing reels of "La Roue." As the author of the essay in question, "Abel Gance's 'Tragedy of Modern Times:' 'La Roue,'" I made every effort I could when writing the article for the booklet to obtain information about any subplots or characters that might have been deleted from the film's first cut released in December of 1922. No answer was forthcoming, given the current status of Gance research, a situation reflective of the paucity of serious examination of the director's work. I can, however, state that, except for one short scene that survives in a print unavailable to the restorers for the DVD edition, this new version of "La Roue" contains everything in the film now known to exist and is by far the longest presentation of the production seen by the public since 1923.

It was only in 2008, 27 years after the "Napoleon" revival and Gance's death, that the silent "J'Accuse" and "La Roue" at long last became available to the US public, a truly landmark event in film study and appreciation. And while, contrary to Liebman's apparent expectation that more people seeing these films may come to share his negative view of Gance, most of the DVD reviews have been quite positive. His suggestion that, compared to Gance, present-day restorers are unjustly neglecting the films of Dulac, Epstein and L'Herbier is unsupported by the facts since, prior to the release of "J'Accuse" and "La Roue," Kino put out works by both Dulac and Epstein in their avant-garde series while the Looser Than Loose company brought out a DVD edition of L'Herbier's classic, "L'Argent," following its successful DVD restoration in Europe.

In addition to ignoring the sad history of mutilation and unavailability that marked the course of Gance's work in the US for most of the 20th century and into the start of the 21st, Liebman trivializes the very real legacy that the director had left behind in terms of enthralling audiences and inspiring filmmakers elsewhere in the world to launch their own experiments with film. With respect to France itself, Liebman, in effect, argues that Gance was acclaimed by French postwar critics and audiences mainly due to the overwhelming desire of the nation to regain its former cinematic supremacy shattered by the guns of August 1914. He asserts that only the "clear-eyed" Louis Delluc refused to join in the general French celebration, without noting Delluc's earlier ardent praise of "La Dixieme Symphonie." But then Liebman also omits the fact that Louis Feuillade's masterpiece, "Les Vampires," which had immense world-wide success, was produced during the very war he maintains had so devastated French cinema that it was looking for almost anyone who could lift the industry out of its supposed depressed state. Alleging that Gance's rise in esteem in France was due to a virtual state of desperation in the country makes as much sense as it would to attribute Fritz Lang's contemporaneous acclaim in Germany to similar causes. Liebman's disregard for the true nature of Gance's reputation among filmmakers is apparent in his avoiding any reference to G. W. Pabst's admiration for "La Roue" and the fact that Gance was the idol of, and a major influence on, the filmmakers of the "Nouvelle Vague," among them Francois Truffaut, one of Gance's greatest champions. Perhaps even more glaring in this context is Liebman's total failure to so much as mention the immense impact Gance had on Japanese cinema in the 1920s and 1930s and beyond, leading Akira Kurosawa to later declare that "The first film that really impressed me was 'La Roue.'" He thus avoids considering the implications of a Western artist, for whom he expresses so much scorn, having a major creative impact on a very different culture.

In the realm of overt politics, while Liebman, unlike Peter Pappas and Norman King, mercifully does not devote a great deal of time to analyzing what he imagines Gance's politics to have been, he does insert one comment which perhaps merits a response. After citing the seeming disparity in theme between "Napoleon" and "J'Accuse," he then goes on to say that "Gance was never much of a consistent political thinker, as his later misguided efforts to work during the Vichy regime of World War II France demonstrate." (Not mentioned by Liebman is the fact that Gance spent much of his presence there secretly helping Jewish friends to flee the Germans.) The question one should ask is: what great filmmaker of Gance's generation WAS a consistent political thinker? How did Sergei Eisenstein, who projected the moving images of international brotherhood in "October" in the scenes during which German and Russian soldiers fraternize at the front, a decade later wind up directing with equal power and artistry a paean to uber-nationalism like "Alexander Nevsky" in which the mystic Rus nation unite under a blonde, Nordic sovereign to oppose evil alien invaders, both the dehumanized Teutonic Knights and, in an implied future conflict, the Asian "yellow hordes" shown at the beginning of the film? And in terms of a director's actions, how did Jean Renoir, who made the poignant "La Grande Illusion" partly as a protest against fascism, end up going to Italy three years later at the express invitation of Mussolini himself to lecture and work on a film produced in cooperation with the Fascist government, a project from which he was relieved only due to the outbreak of war between Italy and France? In truth, though, Liebman's passage questioning Gance's political commitments is only included as part of his broader effort to denigrate the director's artistic vision. Liebman's preoccupation with Gance's origins smacks of elitism, as though his lack of the privileges in youth that were available to a Renoir, for example, disqualified him from pursuing comparable artistic aspirations.

It is in his analysis of Gance's characters that the reactionary implications of Liebman's line of attack becomes especially apparent, indicating a devaluation of the working class as inferior compared to the intellectual or "Brahmin" caste. In "La Roue," Gance sought to create a tragedy of the modern age, endowing the protagonist, a figure from the working class, with the same heroic grandeur as that granted in earlier times to kings and other aristocrats. Seeking to attain the utmost in authenticity in his depiction of working class life, Gance not only shot most of the film on actual locations but also showed sequences to railway workers during the course of production, making alterations in the film in accord with their suggestions. Gance's heroic view of the working class appeared in other films, including his memorable 1939 version of Gustave Charpentier's proletariat opera, "Louise." That Liebman lacks empathy with Gance's celebration of the working class is evident in his description of "La Roue"'s "strange characters," including a railway mechanic who is a brilliant inventor and his son, an artist, who, he scornfully writes, "makes violins, of all things, in his workshop in Sisif's home, improbably situated right beside the railroad tracks amidst the din of speeding express trains." Liebman is further confounded by the violin-making son, Elie, longing to "develop a varnish that will make his instruments sound like a Stradivarius," a desire he dismisses as "far-fetched." The implications of this analysis is that Gance's cultural crime lay in his depiction of a mere lowly mechanic becoming a skilled inventor and his son not only aspiring to, but actually creating art and beauty in this milieu. Apparently only the aristocracy and the privileged members of the bourgeoisie are entitled to be the creative, productive members of society.

In his antipathy to the manner in which Gance chose to present his characters in other than the more traditional depictions of good vs. evil, Liebman also reveals a fundamental conservatism, an inability or unwillingness to conceive of anything beyond conventional logic, as well as a misperception of the protagonists' roles in the narrative. He writes that in "La Roue," "We are asked to believe that Sisif is not only a coolheaded engine driver and drunken lout but also a brilliant inventor. . . .The malevolent De Hersan becomes an unloved but caring and generous husband to the now melancholy Norma." He further writes of Sisif: "For reasons never explained, we are meant to regard this old man who has done such harm as a kind of saint." Liebman is equally disturbed by the transformations of the major characters in "J'Accuse." In analyzing the character of Sisif alone, it is clear that Liebman has misread him to an extraordinary degree. Although Sisif displays considerable kindness in the film, including his salvation and adoption of Norma, nowhere does Gance ever invest him with saintly qualities that one associates with unusually self-sacrificing or forgiving characters like Jean Valjean, Sidney Carton, or Prince Myshkin. Liebman apparently sees the image of Sisif bearing a cross marking his son's death as somehow implying he is Christ-like--scarcely the intent of Gance who was simply analogizing the scale of his sufferings. Liebman's discomfort with Gance arousing sympathy for a man who, in his words, "has done such harm," reveals a harshly judgmental view of the character. In truth, as his very name suggests, Sisif (after the Sisyphus of Greek mythology) is a tormented man who, in the concluding part of the film, attains a kind of enlightenment through his heroic acceptance of his fate. That Liebman would withhold compassion from him speaks volumes about the profound limitations of his analysis. As for his questioning the believability of an individual alternating brilliance and coolheaded responses with bouts of drunken irresponsibility, it is, I think, needless to point out the many examples in real life of people displaying these contradictory attributes. The history of cinema alone is studded with innumerable examples of directorial titans such as John Ford whose magnificent control of the film art was periodically interrupted by alcoholic binges.

It would seem that intertwined with the belief in class differentiation in Liebman's analysis is a rigorously binary view of the world, rooted in traditionally legalistic interpretations of Judeo-Christian thought and its secular variants in the modern West--what might be termed secular fundamentalism. Liebman's response to Gance's characters indicates a strong commitment to the concept of a permanent, unchanging ego, which Buddhist philosophy, for one, teaches is highly illusory, the individual being perceived as a mass of ever-changing, ever-contradictory aspects defying simple categorization. Gance's rejection of a conventional moralistic presentation of a conflict waged between absolutely evil and absolutely good characters is very much in keeping with this Buddhist perception of the individual, one reason perhaps why "La Roue" was so resonant with Japanese culture. His recognition that existence is permeated with contradictions and paradoxes is also consonant with Taoist thought.

Yet it is scarcely only the philosophy of the East that rejects the kind of dualistic thinking expressed by Liebman in his article; many of the finest creative minds in the history of Western culture have indicted the shallowness, indeed harmfulness of any attempt to narrowly circumscribe the human spirit. For in attempting to base his condemnation of Gance's powerfully imaginative method on the grounds of a commitment to realism and logic, Liebman sounds like a famous character in Dickens: "Thomas Gradgrind, Sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, Sir--peremptorily Thomas--Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to." When Liebman repeatedly ridicules the narrative of "La Roue" as "ludicrous," "far-fetched," and "the curious peripeties of his main characters," he writes as though he is making "a new principle, a great discovery," in which "What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact." Apparently in Liebman's way of thinking, as with Gradgrind's, "you are not to see anywhere, what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don't have in fact." Perhaps Liebman's next step should be to recommend the establishment of a board of fact, "composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact."

Ultimately, Liebman's view of Gance has been shaped by the interpretation of the director put forth by writers, such as Paul Rotha and Arthur Knight, in works that attempted to delineate world film history in a manner that is now hopelessly outdated. However over-simplified this presentation was in retrospect, it once seemed to many so compelling in its choices, so readily explainable as an outline of the development of cinema art, that its basic assumptions remained unchallenged in the US for many years. The views of those like Kirk Bond with very different perspectives were marginalized and largely excluded from the dominant discourse. The prevalent construction of film history was firmly linear, with film evolving from primitivism to the technical refinements of Griffith and other pioneers in the 1910s, culminating in the silent period with the mature triumphs of the German and Soviet cinemas and, in the early sound era, with the achievements of Renoir and other "poetic realists" of the French cinema. These latter films were said to have anticipated the Italian neo-realist works of the immediate postwar era, the last movement in cinema to become canonical in orthodox film history circles before the successive shocks produced by the consequences of the rise of television, the Western discovery of postwar Japanese cinema, and finally, the emergence of the "Nouvelle Vague" in France and the explosion of the "film generation" in the 1960s. Combined with the multitude of challenges to the ruling establishment that arose in the '60s, many of the assumptions that governed traditional film history came under fire. Nevertheless, as Liebman's attacks on Gance only too clearly reveal, the hold on film history of what might be called a "neo-classical" approach remains strong with a number of cineastes to this day.

Those who had developed this approach to cinema history in the '30s, in attempting to gain academic acceptance for the new medium, confronted what they saw as the competing values of mass taste and aesthetic purism at a time when the Hollywood studio system was at its height. In general, as is well known, they enshrined the European art film as the highest form of cinema while tending to dismiss Hollywood films as primarily commercial in nature, undeniably slick and entertaining but lacking the perceived intellectual brilliance of European cinema. With respect to American directors, Griffith's work in the 1910s was mainly respected for its technical wizardry; it was repeatedly acknowledged in the standard narrative that his experiments had paved the way for the achievements of subsequent filmmakers who adopted and elaborated his techniques. But while Griffith was lauded for his purely formal ability, a mechanical skill at devising camera tricks, these critics claimed, much as Liebman is still doing, that the inherent limitations of a vision rooted in old-fashioned Victorian attitudes was incapable of sustaining itself with continuing vigor in the postwar era. It was asserted that once more sophisticated directors of European background began developing the art to far greater effect, an increasingly obsolescent Griffith, unable to say anything new or interesting, began a steep artistic decline in the '20s. The Hollywood that emerged under Griffith's influence was seen as sharply divided between two opposing trends epitomized by two directors: the dominant, more influential strain of commercialized entertainment represented by Cecil B. DeMille, continually dismissed as a mere showman producing empty spectacles laced with pompous morality, and the uncompromisingly realistic rebellion reflective of a more European sensibility led by Erich von Stroheim who was inevitably destroyed by the Hollywood system.

Much of this stereotypical presentation would begin to be challenged when the "film generation" came of age in the late '60s and the '70s. Reversing the traditional view of Griffith's putative decline promulgated by Lewis Jacobs in his 1939 book, "The Rise of the American Film," a number of the new historians, reexamining the director's later films, discovered in them a mature artist still exploring the art with compelling themes. I recall seeing in a widely read journal of the early '70s an article differentiating between the old-fashioned film critic and those with a newer, more advanced perspective on film history; whereas the “old fogies" spoke of "Griffith's decline," the new, cutting-edge historians wrote about "Griffith's growth" in his later films. Similarly, the new historians of the late '60s and the '70s began to reevaluate DeMille, recognizing, as James Leahy and William D. Routt wrote in 1970, that he was a filmmaker of artistic importance, "a capable and daring director possessed of one of the American cinema's most acute senses of rhythm and drama." Analysts started noticing that DeMille had also demonstrated uncompromising realism in a number of films, such as "The Whispering Chorus." And far from diminishing respect for von Stroheim's creations, this new approach to film history, by placing less emphasis on his "victimization," only increased admiration for the individuality of his achievement. No longer seen as merely some kind of Manichean counterpoint to DeMille and Hollywood, it was now much easier to appreciate von Stroheim on his own terms as a great artist evolving within a highly creative milieu. Indeed, in their reexamination of American cinema in general, the new historians began to eradicate the old bifurcated presentation in which Europe had been the center of all that was artistic in film and Hollywood in its heyday was principally engaged in turning out well-crafted but mainly superficial productions. Unfortunately, as Liebman has just demonstrated, there remain a number of academics to this day who never came to terms with the writings and fresh examinations of the new historians of the "film generation," remaining mired in the stereotypical thinking of the Rotha-Jacobs-Knight school of historiography.

Even though the traditional Anglo-American cinema historians had lauded the European art film as far superior aesthetically to the Hollywood product, their reductionism was often employed against European filmmakers who were seen as unduly influenced by Hollywood. Hence, the values and approaches to narrative of Gance were linked by these analysts to those of Griffith and DeMille rather than the Continental zeitgeist of the more esteemed German and Soviet films of the 1920s. Although believing in a mystical type of socialism, Gance was not part of a trendy political movement like the Soviet experiment that attracted a number of politically active cineastes to the films produced by the Russian Revolution. Many of Gance's most daring visual experiments were either, as in the case of rapid montage, adopted by others who then received credit for the innovation, or, as with the hand-held camera and the wide screen, were so far ahead of their time as to make the director appear to be a virtual madman incapable of normal cinematic expression. In any case, the basically conservative nature of standard film history could apparently find no way of accommodating as radically individual a filmmaker as Gance. Once again, it would be up to the film generation of the '60s and the '70s, influenced by the "Nouvelle Vague," to begin the work of recognizing Gance's supreme artistry. But unhappily, as is all too evident in Liebman's article, this fresh evaluation continues to encounter truculent opposition from those wedded to the old school of film history.

While the origins of this earlier approach doubtless stemmed from what was in many respects a sincere and well-meant effort by its architects in the 1930s to bring greater recognition to film as an art form, laying the groundwork for documentation and preservation, its choices--or more properly, its omissions--clearly reflected the intellectual limitations of these pioneer cineastes. Distrusting the unfettered imagination of highly independent directors like Griffith, Gance, and DeMille, they tended to favor particular trends and schools emphasizing periodization over individual artistic autonomy. In this vein, traditional film historians once dismissed such masterpieces as Lang's "Metropolis" and Murnau's "Sunrise" in keeping with their theory that, by the late '20s, the golden age of German cinema had been undermined by Hollywood commercialism. Perhaps inevitably, with their obsession for reducing the complex history of film into neat, explainable patterns, the formative cineastes also disregarded those chapters of early film history which departed radically from the prevailing historical narratives of gender and culture. The same regard for upholding convention that banished Gance's radical conception of film form from what was considered to be the mainstream of cinema history also erased the contributions of women and non-Western, Third World cultures to early film. In vain does one peruse a standard historical text like Arthur Knight's "The Liveliest Art" for even a single mention of such outstanding pioneer women directors as Alice Guy, Lois Weber, Nell Shipman, Musidora, and Marie-Louise Iribe, or the early serial queens, including Pearl White, Ruth Roland, and Helen Holmes, who projected a new, heroic femininity at a time when women were beginning their quest to attain equality in what had hitherto been a highly male-dominated society. Closely related to this "benign neglect" of women's achievements in silent cinema was a highly colonialist attitude toward early film production in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Just as Knight had denigrated Gance's films as "grandiose, ponderous" works which "seem distressingly empty and sentimental today" and labeled "Metropolis" as "dreadfully slow and ponderous" and "lacking creative vitality," so he relegated the entire existing film production of such major nations as India and China to the basement of cinema history. He declared that their films were "too derivative or too inept to claim serious attention" with techniques that are "crude by western standards; their construction, their pace, their overemphatic acting are all alien to our tastes." Without even mentioning a brilliant experimenter like Teinosuke Kinugasa, Knight wrote that Japanese filmmaking in the 1920s mainly demonstrated Japan's "particular gift for cheap imitation." While it is beyond the scope of my present response, suffice it to say that later informed, scholarly examinations of early cinema in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America would dramatically reverse the uninformed generalizations of standard historians like Knight who long prevented recognition in the West of the outstanding films of these "exotic" countries with variants of the same kind of belittling arguments they used against Gance and other American and European filmmakers who refused to conform to their narrow standards.

Whether or not Mr. Liebman attempts to separate his objections to Gance from the kind of mindset that also repudiated the pioneering contributions of women and non-Western, Third World peoples to early film, in reality, they are all structurally related. It is inevitable that any Gradgrindian project of controlling culture will insist, as part of its effort to regulate the human imagination, on the existence of hierarchies. In the orthodox interpretation of film history upon which Liebman draws in an effort to attack Gance, there was always, as with other orthodoxies, the establishment of an order in which individuals as well as genders and entire cultures were assigned their proper places. To breach this structure by restoring a hitherto neglected artist who had been excluded from consideration by the guardians of orthodoxy is to invite the scorn or anger of those who insist upon maintaining the existing arrangement.

The history of human thought over the centuries is marked by a continuity that is as startling in its way as the many changes over time. Liebman's attacks on "J'Accuse" and "La Roue" read very much like Voltaire's denunciation of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in the 18th century. For all of his many exemplary contributions in other fields, Voltaire in his assumed role of theatre critic was bent on championing the existing approach to dramaturgy he saw as threatened by any acclaim for Shakespeare's seemingly reckless imagination defying the proper rules of composition. To Voltaire, "Hamlet" was

"a vulgar and barbarous drama which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France or Italy. Hamlet becomes crazy in the second act, and his mistress becomes crazy in the third; the prince slays the father of his mistress under the pretence of killing a rat, and the heroine throws herself into the river; a grave is dug on the stage, and the gravediggers talk quodlibets worthy of themselves, while holding skulls in their hands; Hamlet responds to their nasty vulgarities in sillinesses no less disgusting. In the meanwhile another of the actors conquers Poland. Hamlet, his mother, and his stepfather carouse on the stage; songs are sung at table; there is quarreling, fighting, killing--one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage. But amidst all these vulgar irregularities, which to this day make the English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in 'Hamlet,' by a 'bizarrerie' still greater, some sublime passages, worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest conceivable strength and grandeur with whatsoever witless vulgarity can devise that is lowest and most detestable."

With his disdain for what he perceives as the illogical and melodramatic plots of "J'Accuse" and "La Roue," his objections to what he calls interjections of "slapstick shticks" in "La Roue" (like those gravediggers in "Hamlet" with their "nasty vulgarities," skulls in hand), and simultaneously, his acknowledgement that "J'Accuse" "does contain genuinely lyrical passages in which the vivacity of Gance's eye and his feel for organizing visual leitmotifs momentarily allows the film to escape the plot's leaden fetters" (those "sublime passages" amidst all the "vulgar irregularities"), Liebman's review of Gance's films is absolutely uncanny in the manner in which it echoes Voltaire's attitude toward Shakespeare. And indeed, Liebman's object is clearly identical--to uphold a conservative view of aesthetics discouraging any radical departure from the norm and any indulgence in the emotions seen as a threat to the continued rule of reason.

Yet no matter how fervently its supporters have insisted on its maintenance, every effort to establish a temple of reason controlling the limits of the imagination has ended up falling to the very human need to expand beyond such narrow constraints. The neo-classical view of art upheld by Voltaire in his review of "Hamlet" would, decades later, during a time of revolutionary ferment, be challenged by the Romantic rebellion led by Victor Hugo. Denouncing "dogmatism in the arts," Hugo in his famous "Preface to 'Cromwell'" pleaded for "the freedom of art against the despotism of systems, codes and rules." To all those critics who would overlook the beauties of a great work of art because of an obsession with its apparent defects, Hugo had this to say:

"Who ever saw a medal without its reverse? a talent that had not some shadow with its brilliancy, some smoke with its flame? Such a blemish can be only the inseparable consequence of such beauty. This rough stroke of the brush, which offends my eye at close range, completes the effect and gives relief to the whole picture. Efface one and you efface the other. Originality is made up of such things. Genius is necessarily uneven. There are no high mountains without deep ravines. Fill up the valley with the mountain and you will have nothing but a steppe, a plateau, the plain of Les Sablons instead of the Alps, swallows and not eagles. . . .

"Our infirmity often takes fright at the inspired bold flights of genius, for lack of power to swoop down upon objects with such vast intelligence. And then, once again, there are 'defects' which take root only in masterpieces; it is given only to certain geniuses to have certain defects. Shakespeare is blamed for his abuse of metaphysics, of wit, of redundant scenes, of obscenities, for his employment of the mythological nonsense in vogue in his time, for exaggeration, obscurity, bad taste, bombast, asperities of style. The oak, that giant tree which we were comparing to Shakespeare just now, and which has more than one point of resemblance to him, the oak has an unusual shape, gnarled branches, dark leaves, and hard, rough bark; but it is the oak.

"And it is because of these qualities that it is the oak. If you would have a smooth trunk, straight branches, satiny leaves, apply to the pale birch, the hollow elder, the weeping willow; but leave the mighty oak in peace. Do not stone that which gives you shade."

While the neo-classical strictures on Shakespeare would dissipate in the wake of the Romantic revolt, the forces of aesthetic conservatism would reappear as establishment critics of the mid-19th century raised the same hidebound objections to such new masterpieces of prose fiction as the novels of Dickens, Melville's "Moby Dick," and Hugo's own "Les Miserables." Once again, the artists were condemned by the logicians of reaction for refusing to curtail the power of imagination in representing reality. In the 20th century, the pattern would be repeated in the age of cinema in an effort to chastise all those who, like Griffith and Gance, violated the perceived rules of filmmaking. And even to this day, to paraphrase Hugo, there remains a cinematic old regime as there is a political old regime. Expressing confidence that Gance's "high pedestal" will "wobble" once more people see these films, Liebman, much like polemicist William F. Buckley, Jr.'s famous self-definition of a conservative, is now the man "standing athwart history yelling, 'Stop!'" But there can be no stopping. The ordered, neat little hierarchy of film history advanced by critics like Liebman is yielding more and more to a new, truly diverse interpretation, a richer, far more expansive paradigm recognizing cinema as the creation of a wide variety of individual temperaments, genders, races, cultures, classes that employed innumerable means of expression. The flood of "new" old images that are finally just beginning to emerge from their decades-long imprisonment in archival vaults are sweeping away the preconceptions that dominated, almost without challenge, film historical studies from the 1930s to the 1960s, and, despite the initial great work of the "film generation," had continued to mold a number of later recruits to the cause of cinematic orthodoxy. Those who now insist on either ignoring or excoriating the revolution in the exploration of cinema's past in favor of the approved old standards will meet with the inevitable fate of earlier guardians of aesthetic orthodoxy--they will become totally irrelevant to the future study and appreciation of film. Indeed, I believe the 21st century will become the age of Abel Gance, the inspirer of earlier artistic revolutions in film with wider implications in the world as he himself indicated when, in his private jottings, he hailed the May 1968 rebellion of French youth as perhaps "the greatest event since the French Revolution." To close with Gance's own vision of a new, diverse art expressing the universal longings of humanity, written at the height of his career in the 1920s:

"In truth, the Time of the Image has come!

"All legends, all mythologies and all myths, all the founders of religion and all religions themselves, all the great figures of history, all the reflecting objectives of the imaginations of peoples for thousands of years, all, everything, awaiting their luminous resurrection, the heroes jostling themselves at our doors in order to enter. . . .

"Yes, an Art is born, supple, precise, violent, laughing, powerful. It is everywhere, in all, on all. All things race to it, faster than words arranging themselves under the pen after a thought has called to them. It is so great that one may not have seen it in its entirety. . . .

"The Time of the Image has come!"

Ranting, Terminable and Interminable. A Response to William M. Drew

By Stuart Liebman

As he admits somewhere in his long rant against my review of Abel Gance’s J’Accuse and La Roue published in the Winter 2008 issue of Cineaste, Mr. Drew is the author of the program notes accompanying the new DVD edition of the latter film. Like many an author, especially those mulishly devoted to his or her artistic idol, Mr. Drew evidently would also have liked to review his own work so that his special pleadings concerning the cherished object of his affections would have been celebrated within the rhetorical framework established by his own brilliant analysis. Unhappily, it seems, I wrote a piece incommensurate with Mr. Drew’s own out-sized esteem for Gance. While praising certain features of the venerable French filmmaker’s work, I also raised fair critical questions about several aspects of his early achievements. Specifically, I objected to some of the stylistic decisions Gance made, and also posed the issue of his standing in the history of cinema. I thereby elicited from Mr. Drew an irate, hectoring reply far longer and less focused than any review that would ever be allowed to appear in a first-rate film magazine today. Luckily for Mr. Drew, the generous indulgence of the “reactionary” editors of Cineaste and the existence of Al Gore’s invention, the internet, will now permit his meandering, repetitive, tiresome, and too often vituperative screed to find a home somewhere in that special zone of the blogosphere—what I call the “smogosphere” (N.B.: alternative spelling, “smugosphere”)—where these sorts of lengthy, eccentric tracts go to await their unfortunate posterity.

Mr. Drew’s letter rather self-servingly presents himself as a champion of intellectual honesty, a cosmopolitan surveyor of world (first, second or third—your choice!) cultures large and small, a defender of progressive politics against the depredations of those he regards as “reactionary” film critics and historians (as well as magazines like Cineaste), the whistle-blower on a decades-long conspiracy against Gance, and, last but not least, as someone possessing the final word on Gance’s importance in film history. This is all a rhetorical cover for his extraordinary peevishness. Along the way, he attributes to me: 1) attitudes about film history I do not share; 2) the label of a cultural “reactionary, inevitably reflecting a retrogressive attitude toward life and the working class”—whatever that means; 3) dismissive attitudes toward non-Western and Third World cinemas—all “structurally related,” he says, to my questioning of Gance’s work—about which I breathed not a word in my review; 4) an anti-feminist condescension toward the history of early cinema (which I, who published translations of some of Germaine Dulac’s important early theoretical texts for English-speaking readers, regard as rather off-base); 5) an ignorance about the role certain Buddhist conceptions of the self play in Japanese culture (about which I must regretfully admit my inadequacy); 6) a strong belief “in the concept of a permanent, unchanging ego, which Buddhist philosophy teaches is highly illusory,” to which charge before the high Buddhist tribunal presided over by Wm. M Drew, I plead “not guilty;” 7) the elitist perspectives of a Brahmin with a “Gradgrindian” bent; 8) a thorough indoctrination “with either a traditional Judeo-Christian view of the world, or a secular variant of it--what might be called secular fundamentalism,” a claim that just may prove to be founded, I guess; 9) card-carrying membership in a cabal of authors including Paul Rotha, Iris Barry, Norman King and Francis Ford Coppola who have for decades malevolently tried to prevent the full glory of Gance’s masterworks in their pristine state from ever shining down onto the upturned faces of American audiences; 10) an intention to write a “hit piece.” And so on, and so forth, ridiculously, ad absurdum. As I waded through the widening circles of Drew’s prose, I was rather puzzled by all his megaton blasting and bombardiering, accompanied by gusts of not so inspired invective. Until, that is I alighted on the one real nugget of insight in his diatribe when what he says falsely of me began to ring increasingly true of the dogmatic Mr. Drew. Despite his protestations of devotion to gentle Buddhist concepts of self (and, presumably, of “the other”), his harangue eventually came clear as “the forced self-assurance of a man seemingly trying to convince himself as well as others that his way of viewing reality is the only correct one.”

One might simply write off such a rambling, at times crackpot, response and allow it to self-destruct were it not for its potential to wreak unacceptable intellectual havoc through its near permanent afterlife on the internet. And, of course, it is insulting to read all these foolish comments purporting to pertain to oneself. So, reply I must.

One matter I want to clear up right away is my gratitude to the film companies that produced these two DVDs. Although Mr. Drew fails to take note of my supportive comments in his letter, I did express appreciation for the efforts of the restorers to make the fullest versions of Gance’s original visions available to new audiences. That is why, even though these versions are not, in my opinion, perfect (problems of the color tinting/toning, unexplained missing footage), I praised them as “careful reconstructions of his [Gance’s] long heralded but too rarely seen works.” I also welcomed the bonus features included in the editions, including Robert Israel’s new scores commissioned for both films.

Praise for these companies’ archival enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit, however, did not entail—should not have entailed!—my uniform praise for Gance’s artistic decisions. My questions about some of what seemed typical of Gance’s early artistic strategies in evidence in the two films under review were, of course, the principal focus of my comments. Aspects of his decisions strained credulity; indeed they seemed at times in such ludicrous bad taste as to lead me to question his stature as a figure in film history. Many passages seemed “Romantic” (an adjective often loosely applied to Gance’s work) in a not so flattering sense: they were not adequately thought through, out of control, without any explicable expressive purpose. These poor artistic decisions warranted interrogation to put Gance’s achievement into sharper focus. Raising such critical questions is, I would suggest, a reviewer’s principal job. Needless to say, making such observations and criticisms is not, as Mr. Drew erroneously and illogically suggests, to espouse a “conservative view of aesthetics discouraging any radical departure from the norm and any indulgence in the emotions seen as a threat to the continued rule of reason.” This is sheer bunkum. If Mr. Drew doubts my commitment to films that radically depart from conventional norms, he need only peruse some of my writings endorsing films by Makaveyev, Paul Sharits, Valie Export, Eisenstein, Brakhage, Vigo or many others that I have published over the last fifteen years, often in the pages of precisely this allegedly reactionary magazine, Cineaste.

No, when I questioned the curiously sentimental characters that Gance’s imagination conjured into life; when I noted what I regard as the mechanical way he developed them; when I criticized through examples the vagrant tendencies of Gance’s often ponderous narrative constructions or the bombastic or cliché qualities of his image-making, my comments were intended to provoke critical discussion about this undoubtedly important historical figure’s work. As should be clear to any who suffered through the reading of Drew’s harangue, he does not really respond to any of my questions or comments. Rather, he blusters, or changes the subject, or indulges in what for him must be a cathartic ritual of name-calling (“Liebman” as elitist Brahmin, enemy of the working class, and so on and on). For example, I raised an issue: Why are Gance’s characters often ungainly assemblages of inconsistent, un-worked through attributes? Well, I would think that a responsible answer would involve showing how my observation was incorrect, that there was some design or plan subtending the jumble that I had failed to note. That is not Drew’s response. Instead, he raises all sorts of red herrings about a non-Western, non-Judeo-Christian notion of a permanent ego that, he claims, is implicit in La Roue (and the source of Japanese regard for the film). He heaps scorn on anyone who would doubt the wisdom of portraying the son of a locomotive driver as a violin maker who establishes his workshop in the midst of a busy switching yard for massive trains, however unlikely such a site would be, given the delicacy of the violin-making enterprise. (All the contemporary reports from the production site note the incredible din in which Gance’s team had to work.) Rather than responding, however, Drew then preposterously charges me with “a rigid adherence to immutable class structures, a virtual caste system on his [i.e., Liebman’s] part, one which devalues the working class as inferior to the intellectual or "Brahmin" caste to which Liebman claims membership.”

When his argument falters, Drew often resorts to vague dogmatic claims. G.W. Pabst admired La Roue; Kurosawa was deeply moved by La Roue; Truffaut was one of Gance’s greatest champions. These are interesting facts that prove nothing, without citing the whys and wherefores of their admiration. And if these lofty individuals do not persuade us, Drew informs us, without offering a further shred of evidence, that “the Japanese public” appreciated Gance because of an alleged similarity between their conceptions of the mutability of the ego with his. These are not adequate responses to my initial question at all. Indeed, I do not think Drew adequately addressed any of the questions I raised in my review. Pace Mr. Drew, raising such questions is, I repeat, one of a reviewer’s key purposes.

But my criticisms, of course, in no way precluded my noting other praiseworthy aspects of this artist’s work. Indeed, if Drew had read what I wrote more carefully, he would have discovered comments appropriately attributing to Gance a number of innovative techniques (shot lighting, rapid editing, superimposition) which, however, I must also note, he did not always use intelligently. (Had I also been reviewing Napoleon or some of Gance’s sound films, I would have dutifully listed some of his other admirable experiments with camera movement and sound montage.)

Nor is Drew above a kind of intellectual sleight of hand. He says that by quoting Louis Delluc on the failings of J’Accuse, I ignored Delluc’s praise of La Dixième Symphonie. This is true, but I was not reviewing that earlier film. Moreover, I would have thought he would have understood that given Delluc’s early praise of Gance’s work, the carefully articulated disappointment with J’Accuse by the most influential French critic of the time should count for more, not less.

Or consider Drew’s wrongheaded conception of Louis Feuillade’s role in the emergence of French cinema after World War I. That Feuillade made Les Vampires in 1915 which made money abroad for the French industry is hardly an example sufficient to counter the main thrust of my argument about the parlous state of the French film industry after World War I. Does Drew seriously believe that the war did not sharply curtail French film production? Was not the lion’s share of post-war capital directed toward shoring up shaky French state finances and rebuilding vital infrastructure rather than to more risky investments in damaged or antiquated film studios? Is this not why one reads so many laments in the French industry and critical journals of the period about limited French production? Did not imported American films dominate French movie screens from the end of the war on? Was there not wide discussion of the need for new directions? Did not Gance emerge as the most auspicious and daring filmmaker among those like commercially-minded producer-directors Diamant-Berger and Fescourt, or among the nascent “first avant garde” of Delluc, Dulac, Epstein and L’Herbier who regarded Feuillade as old hat (though the Surrealists, at best marginal figures in the film industry of the late teens and early twenties, did elevate Les Vampires and other Feuillade serials into their cinematic pantheon). Perhaps Mr. Drew should read some of the more authoritative works on French film history—the aging but still informative volumes by Sadoul and Mitry in France, or Richard Abel, David Bordwell and Alan Williams, among others, in English—rather than the long outdated histories by Rotha and Arthur Knight he repeatedly—and preposterously—refers to as “standard works.” The fifty-two year old The Liveliest Art , a standard text? C’mon, Mr. Drew! For whom, indeed, is “accuracy of observation … not one of his strong points”?

Nor is logical consistency one of Mr. Drew’s strong points. He complains I charged that Gance was not a consistent political thinker when I pointed to the wide conceptual gap between his somewhat ambiguous espousal of pacifism in J’Accuse and his 1927 paean to the complex figure, French Emperor Napoleon, who marched his troops across Europe in an aggressive nationalist campaign. To be sure, no contemporary film artist (certainly not Eisenstein; Drew and I agree on this) was consistently on the right side of many of the major political issues of their day. Opportunism was too often a motivating force. (Eisenstein, alas, can be counted as an example, and Renoir, too, among many others; again, Drew and I agree on this.) And Gance was undoubtedly courageous enough to help Jewish friends during the shameful Vichy years, even at some risk to himself given his own partially Jewish origins.

But, bluster aside, the charge of tu quoque hardly rehabilitates Gance’s political judgment. And Drew’s unsteady grasp of the issues, when used as an intellectual trampoline, leads to large leaps of logic and, as usual, invective rather than argument: “In truth, though, Liebman's passage questioning Gance's political commitments is only included as part of his broader effort to denigrate the director's artistic vision. And it is precisely here that the reactionary implications of Liebman's line of attack become all the apparent, implying as it does a rigid adherence to immutable class structures, a virtual caste system on his part, one which devalues the working class...” Any readers of my review will quickly see that my comments about Gance’s political consistency have no implications for immutable class structures or caste systems or the working class. This is just Mr. Drew blowing smoke.

His views about Gance’s condescending construction of “the working class” are, in any case, simply off the mark. Mr. Drew starts off reasonably by amplifying and echoing what I said about Gance in my review. “In ‘La Roue,’” he writes, “Gance sought to create a tragedy of the modern age, presenting the protagonist, a figure from the working class, with the same heroic grandeur as that granted in earlier times to kings and other aristocrats.” This is true to a certain extent, though the ambition was hardly new. Such a project dates back at least to Courbet’s paintings of stone breakers and other proto-proletarian types in the mid-nineteenth century. Interested readers, including Mr. Drew, may also wish to look at the textual locus classicus in which such ennobling ambitions were perhaps best articulated, Emile Zola’s “Naturalism in the Theater,” a piece Gance certainly would have known.

Ever needing to adopt the pose of a stern and just moralist, however, Drew then lashes out irrationally. “Gance's cultural crime, as seen by Liebman, appears to be that he dared to suggest a mere lowly mechanic could become a skilled inventor and that a mechanic's son, growing up in such a proletarian environment, could possibly aspire to, nay, even create art and beauty in this milieu… It would seem that the role of proletarians in Liebman-speak is purely to go through life toiling mindlessly to make everything as conducive as possible for the aristocracy and the privileged members of the bourgeoisie to remain the creative, productive members of society.” I neither see, nor saw anything resembling a “crime” in Gance’s portrayal of Sisif, merely a surprising failing. The combination of Sisif’s attributes—admired locomotive driver, drunken lout, jealous father with incestuous thoughts, brilliant mechanical engineer and saintly pathetic old man—was at best awkward. Perhaps Gance might yet have pulled off a successful character but for the needless attribution to Sisif of engineering genius, which is no more than a clumsy and unlikely device to link Sisif and de Hersan. And, though Drew fails to note this, once the linkage is made, the ennobling feature is unceremoniously jettisoned without any further comment. Do we not deserve an answer to the question of why this should happen? How, moreover, does Mr. Drew square the effete, strangely bloodless character of Elie with an ambition to ennoble the working class within the realistic milieu Gance obviously strove so hard to produce? Does not Elie’s presence undermine any authenticity derived from the location shooting Gance admirably insisted on? Is Elie not rather simply a vehicle to smuggle Gance’s sentimental, blowsy notion of an artist into the film? (Note the striking similarities to the similar construction of the poet Jean in J’Accuse.) Inserting him as a character does not elevate the working class in the slightest, and pointing this out hardly constitutes an insult to workers. Would Zola, who did imagine many highly melodramatic characters, ever have imagined a character so obviously out of place, so out of tune, so to speak, as Elie? I do not think so.

Mr. Drew does now provide an answer, though a lame one, to a technical question he did not manage to answer in his program notes. “Liebman asks,” he writes in his letter, “why there is no explanation in the accompanying booklet for the DVD concerning the missing reels of ‘La Roue.’ As the author of the essay in question, ‘Abel Gance’s ‘Tragedy of Modern Times:’ ‘La Roue,’” I made every effort I could when writing the article for the booklet to obtain information about any subplots or characters that might have been deleted from the film's first cut released in December of 1922. No answer was forthcoming; the current status of Gance research does not apparently allow for such detailed information, given how much studies of the director have been discouraged by those still bent on relegating him to a minor role in film history.” In other words, despite all his research, Drew cannot answer my question. But rather than simply leaving the topic open for future scholars to pursue, he then curiously injects a paranoid note by blaming other unnamed writers for his inadequacy.

Despite his earnest—and I would add, often informative—indictment of American and English archivists, scholars and historians who resisted Gance’s genius over many decades, Gance’s standing in film history as an innovator and visionary is now—pace Mr. Drew—quite secure, even if lively and legitimate debate about just how impressive an artist he was still goes on. Anyone who has observed the evolution of film history writing over the last fifty years—since, that is, the publication of Knight’s The Liveliest Art (which Drew laughably regards as a “standard work”), should have realized that many thoughtful overviews of Gance’s career in English as well as French now exist. Interested readers can now easily consult Kevin Browlow’s pioneering chapter on Gance in The Parade’s Gone By (1968); Steven Philip Kramer and James Michael Welsh’s Abel Gance (1978); Roger Icart’s Abel Gance ou le Promethée foudroyée (1983); Brownlow’s Napoleon (1983), and the short collective work Abel Gance published by the Cinémathèque Française in 2000, among many other more specialized studies and reviews. (It is true that Norman King in 1984 did not agree with these unanimously positive assessments, but Drew simply dismisses King’s strongly presented, if not entirely fair, alternative readings of Gance’s work as a “political hatchet job,” and he therefore feels no need to consider his arguments at greater length.) Their collective advocacy has been crucial in establishing a legitimate position of respectability for Gance after what were certainly long years of relative critical neglect. Gance has also garnered increasingly respectful assessments in most of the English-language film textbooks in use today. (Standard French film histories by Sadoul and Mitry’s have long given Gance a proud place in their accounts.) In any case, Mr. Drew’s characterizations of film historical writing as linear and insensitive to the emergence of vital national cinemas outside Western countries seem either uninformed and or simply hopelessly out of date.

Finally, since the momentous—indeed, triumphal—screening of Napoleon at Radio City Music Hall (which I attended) and other showings in equally prestigious European venues, some of Gance’s films have even come back into limited circulation, both in theaters, on VHS and now on DVD. Yes, public exhibitions are not common, in part because of the availability of prints, or programmers’ limited confidence in their popularity. Perhaps this or that film did not get a screening in the US for reasons that one might have hoped could have been overcome. Some of the films released for home video viewing are not complete or based on the best prints. OK. But there is more reason than ever to believe that Gance is back on the film historical and cultural map, albeit not on the exalted plane on which Drew would place him. Drew misinterprets me, in any case, when I concluded my review by noting that in my opinion, J’Accuse and La Roue had caused “the high pedestal on which Gance heroically stands [in the pantheon of early film directors] to wobble more than one would have hoped.” Let me be clear: I did not volunteer to review J’Accuse and La Roue hoping that they would cause Gance’s reputation to wobble; certainly, I did not take on the assignment with the aim of writing a “hit piece.” Rather, I was hoping that, after seeing the films in not so great 35 mm prints at the Cinémathèque Française many years ago, having the opportunity to see and more closely analyze them again in their more complete versions would confirm or even enhance his high stature. Unfortunately, they did not.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXIV No.2 2009

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