1.13 – Losing it

The cocained sight of Abel Gance's early cinema [before the "big stuff"]

Sigmund Freud had a fondness for cocaine. In fact he was probably addicted to it. In his letters—turbo-hysterical; gurning off that post-secession powder—he wrote of himself as a “big wild man with cocaine in his body”. It pierces the idea you have of Freud; making him seem more ridiculous and leery than you might initially think.

It’s a familiar story. Less familiar is how Abel Gance—this is the first time the Frenchman has properly entered this history—approached a kind of auto-cocained stimulation through his very early cinema; entangling the process of image-making, turning it into a kind of recreational derangement.

When you make a very famous and very ponderous film, people—by which I mean critics, or writers; or both—tend to forget your early works; as if “you” (Gance) sprung out of the earth fully formed. So, we think of Gance as the serious-serious maker of J’accuse, La Roue, Napoleon. Big films with weighty subjects.

Before he made these films, however, Gance was jollier and stranger and (eventually) sadder, too. But, for a while, I think he was quite akin to his fellow countryman Jacques Tati (who was born in 1907). He hadn’t experienced much tragedy or suffering. He hadn’t yet been punctured by life. Tragedy would shape his cinema; but this was still to come.

La Folie du docteur Tube (1915) is a strange and largely forgotten film. I don’t know if Gance specifically had Freud in mind when he made it. It means, “the madness of Doctor Tube”; if you hadn’t already figured that out. In the film, Dr Tube—who is all gurning, gangly, gnashing with a fake moulded dome on his head; like a kind of papier-mache mountain—starts snorting a mysterious white powder of his own invention, becoming unhinged. More unhinged.

Now, his servant and his nieces and their boyfriends—I think—start messing around with the powder. Their bodies become increasingly twisted and distorted, bending toward inhuman figurations and muddled perversions of “ordinary” flesh. It’s not scary, though; this isn’t a Murnau or Pabst. We’re in the hands of a (still jolly) Frenchman, it’s basically a funfair film; albeit with a hint of what might later be called “body horror” (a term that gets used far too much, too often, too uncritically).

Gance said of his film, “I got drunk too quickly and said, ‘I’m going to impress them at the cinema because I have a very powerful idea’”. He was already under the influence. In that condition, subject to a lot of alcohol, he thought about how sight and seeing can become disordered.

“It was”, he said, “a story with the decomposition of light rays, which makes things no longer seem at all from the angle from which we see them”.

It’s a difficult account to follow (perhaps he was drunk), but Gance was talking about anamorphic lenses; or, he was talking about the use of bending-distorting mirrors, because anamorphic lenses didn’t exist yet. “I did everything that I technically imagined the audience would appreciate [because] it had never been done”. La Folie was a kind of experiment in how the technical apparatus of film might be bent and twisted away from “ordinary” ends; it was also an essay or a position-statement revealing Gance’s own attitude-philosophy toward the cinema. In this, he would make certain steps toward bridging the pure trickery of Méliès with the narratology of the later impressionists (among them Jean Vigo, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein). He was saying: a film isn’t told; a film is seen and seen-through (because we quibble and question how it “departs” from ordinary seeing; how it is both like and unlike reality).

Is La Folie an “avant-garde” film? It is certainly an experimental film, when we think about what Gance set out to do. He said, I’m going to play around with lenses in order to approximate the effect of being drunk or drugged. He conceived of the camera as a kind of eye that could (unlike a human eye) be manipulated with mechanical instruments (rather than chemical-biological ones).

The avant-garde seems to occupy a slightly more intentioned-positional place in film. The avant-garde is the post-war filmmakers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, many of whom were structural filmmakers—or later became structural filmmakers.

But, in 1995, Jan-Christopher Horak edited a volume called Lovers of Cinema: the first American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945, where they relocated the emergence of (an) avant-garde much earlier than people usually talk about. For the interests of this volume, it really started happening during the 1930s. There was also the European avant-garde of the 1920s, with people like Man Ray and Fernand Léger creating films that looked like moving symbolist and cubist paintings; combining drawing and animation with plastic figuration and all sorts of irregular shapes and rhythms. It was a kind of metricality. These were also avant-garde films and experimental films.

But, Gance—like Lois Weber before him—was an autochthonous entity; coming across these visual streams without the structuring interpretive frame of cinematic modernism. He worked his way there through b-movies and genre and a certain amount of fucking around and finding out. In this he was aided by Léonce-Henri Burel—his long-term cinematographer.

Together, they would “work out” an increasingly grander and more cohesive visual language. Kevin Brownlow makes the obvious-necessary point that Gance “made a fuller use of the medium than anyone before”. He also says “since”. There were interstitial films—between La Folie and J’accuse—where this stance became more apparent. In 1917, Mater Dolorosa was a moody, morbid but still quite sappy-sentimental affair, but it showed how keen an eye Gance had for deep, carving shadows and expressive lighting.

By the by, Albert Dieudonné plays one of the film’s “young men”, one of the boyfriends. Eventually, in 1927, Dieudonné would assume the role of Gance’s Napoleon. When he died in 1976, he was buried in his Napoleon costume. Nobody in the world can see this image; yet, it is an image in the world (which is also a world of images).

The film, La Folie, is a document of irreducible dream-fiction; an orderly disordering of perception. If you read the writings of Edgar Morin (see: fleshy lips, tightly narrowed eyes; the author of La Méthode and The Cinema: or, The Imaginary Man) then you will happen upon his concern with the cinema as an instrument that brings about “huge gaps in the objective image”, that “swells and overflows [objectivity], surges and gushes forth”. It is not literally magic, but it is a kind of “magical vision”; it shares a correspondence with dreaming—how it “disrupts the boundaries of time and space”.¹ Early, Gance’s cinema—his cinema before his cinema; before his bigger heavier dinners—was such a surging-gushing. But I can’t say whether Edgar Morin saw La Folie. It feels like he might have seen it. We will never know.

The lens twists and bends; enlarging and exaggerating. It is literally topsy-turvy. It offers a kind of (resolving) entanglement between illusion and “non-illusionist” or materialist film that Peter Gidal would write so standoffishly and critically about in the 1970s.² Is the film about the good/bad docteur or is it “about” the formal mechanisms of film (a seeing/sensing/optical machinery)?

The doctor’s head—so ridiculous in its Hulotian pomposity—suddenly becomes the least “weird” thing about his addled body. Is this Gance’s big joke? Dog-body gets swirled and scrunched up; it is like a distorting mirror at a country fair, and it could be that Gance was really sending up the kind of Méliès-ian trick-films that he and the French cinema-going public had grown up with.

But the tipsy-tripology comes to an end; a kind of “balance” is restored. Now the girls and their guys toast each other with champagne; seated and lace table-clothed (primly). But Dr. Tube remains in the background, cramming his head and shoulders into a menacing birdcage. His mania isn’t quite spent. He could be a filmmaker; he could be Gance himself. Only time will tell.

1. Here, I’m citing various disarticulated quotes from this piece published in e-flux Film Notes.

2. The best way to situate Gidal’s writing and thinking is in that new big lovely-looking collected edition of his writing put out by The Visible Press. It’s called Flare Out: Aesthetics, 1966-2016.