Given its supremacy before the war, French cinema was perhaps the hardest hit in Europe. After the initial closure, cinema-going actually boomed in France during the war, theaters and other entertainment venues having been closed for the duration. As there was insufficient French material to screen, Hollywood imports, particularly adventure serials, began to dominate, as did their European imitations. As in the United Kingdom, authorities were slow to produce war material for the screen. It was left to private producers to gather material until the beginning of 1915, when an agreement was reached with the War Ministry allowing them to continue filming under supervision, resulting in more than five hundred shorts, particularly the official newsreel War Annals ; from 1917 this newsreel was also distributed in Britain with bilingual intertitles. From January 1917 an Army Cinema Section produced all footage, which all cinemas were obliged to screen. A new generation of French directors emerged in August 1918, among them Abel Gance (1889–1981), who was granted permission to shoot footage of battle scenes for his acclaimed antiwar feature J'accuse! (1919). Billed as "the most romantic tragedy of modern times," the film tells the story of a soldier, Jean Diaz, driven to the brink of insanity by the memory of his comrades being slaughtered needlessly on the eve of the Armistice. Gance powerfully conveys his indignation at the loss of a generation that fell in battle by showing the war dead rising from their graves to bear witness to the living. Scenes of the real-life war injured parading past the camera (Gance was supported by various veterans' organizations), presenting their disfigured bodies and faces in stark close-up, are among the most powerful images to come from the war.
Having led the way in screen epics just before the war with films such as the internationally successful Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), Italy set the standard for fully realizing cinema's potential for visual spectacle and technical virtuosity, matched only by Griffith's Intolerance (1916). Only three months after Italy entered the war in 1915, the release of Sempre nel cor la Patria! ( My Country is Always in my Heart , Carmine Gallone, 1915) marked the beginnings of the popular patriotic genre. Depicting an Italian woman's heroic self-sacrifice, the film gained a realistic sense of destruction from being filmed amid the recently earthquake devastated region of Abruzzo. Increased censorship of the harsher images of the war facilitated the blending of patriotic with fantastical elements and collectivity being individualised into the heroic struggle of enduring popular heroes and warrior imagery that would be appropriated by the Fascist party after the war. Machiste alpino (1916) brought the superhuman Machiste of Cabiria returned to the screen to join the war effort. Comedies and epics were produced alongside more overtly propagandistic features such as
Abel Gance was a pioneering and influential French writer, director, and producer known for his visual experimentation.
He made his screen debut in Molière in 1909, at the same time reluctantly accepting a job in a law office and hoping to make his mark on the stage. Struggling through poverty and illness, Gance set up a production company in 1911, and that year directed his first film, La Digue . Kept out of the war by continued illness, Gance achieved renown for his innovative optical effects (it is said that he introduced the close-up to French cinema) and mobile camera work as a director for the Film d'Art company with Mater dolorosa ( The Torture of Silence , 1917) and La Dixième symphonie ( The Tenth Symphony , 1918). These films were commercial and artistic successes, despite the concerns of his management that his visionary camera techniques were outlandish.
The most celebrated period of Gance's career began with his acclaimed antiwar feature J'accuse! ( I Accuse , 1919), which was a hit across Europe and in the United States. After the death of his wife from influenza, Gance traveled to the United States to recover from his loss while also promoting J'accuse! across the nation. Despite the admiration of D. W. Griffith and the offer of a contract from Metro, Gance returned to France. His next film, La Roue ( The Wheel , 1923), the story of a railway mechanic, won acclaim and would later be cited as an influence by both Jean Cocteau and Akira Kurosawa.
The six-hour Napoléon (1927), displaying technical virtuosity, is Gance's masterpiece. The film mustered a cast of thousands, choreographed across a panoramic screen. Gance's Polyvision triptych process involved the simultaneous projection of three adjacent cameras to produce often startling montage effects when presented in suitably equipped theaters. As with J'accuse! , which Gance reworked into a new sound version in 1938, the director obsessively revisited Napoléon throughout his lifetime, first adding stereo sound effects in 1934. The director's belief in the Polyvision format remained undiminished into the 1950s, its effect akin to the counterpoint of Greek tragedy, the emotional shock involving the spectator in the film experience.
Gance founded Les Films Abel Gance in 1933 but achieved little autonomy in his work and relied on international backing. Gance's early sound work affected his later reputation, not least because French critics were largely unsympathetic to silent directors who attempted to make the transition into sound. However, in 1979 Napoléon was meticulously restored and screened in London and then New York in its original format and with a new score. Living just long enough to witness the critical acclaim that ensued, Gance could be satisfied that his reputation, particularly in France, was finally being restored.
As Director: Mater Dolorosa (1917), La Dixième symphonie (1918), J'accuse! (1919), La Roue (1923), Napoléon (1927), Le Fin du monde ( End of the World , 1931), Un grand amour de Beethoven ( The Life and Loves of Beethoven , 1936), J'accuse! (1938), Cyrano et d'Artagnan (1963); As Writer: La Reine Margot ( Queen Margot , 1954)
Kaplan, Nelly. Napoléon . London: British Film Institute, 1994.
King, Norman. Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle . London: British Film Institute, 1984.
Kramer, Steven Philip, and James Michael Welsh. Abel Gance . Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.
Michael Williams
La guerra e il sogno di Momi ( Momi's Dream and the War , Segundo De Chomon, 1917), in which a young boy, after reading letters from the front, dreams of a war fought by puppets and of saving his father, whom he finds has returned upon waking. Another propaganda tale, Come mori Miss Cavell , related the cause célèbre of Germany's execution of English nurse Edith Cavell in 1915. The emotive theme was also exploited by other nations, such as the British Nurse and Martyr (Percy Moran, 1915) and US The Woman the Germans Shot (John G. Adolfi, 1918), while the death of a Belgian nurse, Gabrielle Petit, was depicted for the first Belgian war film to be made after the war, La Belgique martyre ( The Martyrdom of Belgium , Charles Tutelier, 1919). At the end of the war, despite strong production and the foundation of the Unione Cinematographica Italiana, Italian film was now behind changed international tastes.
In Germany the cinema initially was deemed to be a lower form of art than theater, and thus the export market was undeveloped. However, the industry was expanding as the war began, not least because of the huge popularity of stars such as Henny Porten and the Danish Asta Nielsen. Indeed, there was a strong link between those two countries. Before the outbreak of the war, neutral Denmark's Nordisk was the world's second-largest producer of films, with distribution networks spanning the globe from Russia across Europe to the United States. However, as the company owned profitable first-run theaters within Germany—of which the German government would soon seize control, buying out its German subsidiary, Nordische Film GmbH, to set up Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa)—its exports were deemed part-German and banned from many markets, from November 1915 including the United Kingdom, soon joined by France and Italy. The October Revolution in Russia in 1917 blocked further trade, leaving Scandinavia as the main remaining market. Denmark's increasing isolation prevented contact with developments elsewhere in film art, while dwindling production left only two of six film companies at the end of the war.
The private German firms Eiko and Messter-Film had produced newsreels from the start of the war, partly working as a consortium with other German companies. These were subsumed within the civilian Deulig (Deutsche Lichtbild Gessellschaft) company in 1916, promoting German culture and economic interests around the world. It was not until January 1917 that the German government established the military-controlled Bild-und Film-Amt (BUFA), charged with oversight of propaganda matters. Germany's isolation during the war resulted in increased domestic production, and the next step in the consolidation of production and state interest was to subsume BUFA into Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) in December 1917 with 25 million marks of state capital, with the aim of deploying film to facilitate German success in the war. Ufa was built up from smaller companies, with production based at Babelsberg. This move anticipated that, at the end of the war, as a private enterprise Ufa would adopt a strategy of vertical integration under the leadership of Erich Pommer (1889–1966) and thus achieve dominance over the market. During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the company would benefit from an influx of talented artists from the former Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia, producing one of the most artistically dynamic, and internationally influential, cinemas in film history.
In Russia the borders closed to imports as the country entered the war. As elsewhere, the imperial government prohibited cameras from filming the actual conflict until late in 1916. However, cinema became the most popular form of entertainment, with 150 million movie tickets sold in 1916 alone. Despite a shortage of raw stock for filmmaking, it could be said that World War I saved Russia's indigenous film industry, as it did Germany's. Whereas once screens had been dominated by the French Pathé and Gaumont companies, from 1913 to 1916 the number of Russian firms making films rose from eighteen to forty-seven. Russia's isolation enabled a distinctive national style to emerge, particularly in melodrama. Stars such as Ivan Mozzhukhin
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