Medium and Message
Gance began his career in the industry as a screenwriter in 1908; instantly fascinated and inspired by this burgeoning medium, he directed his first film in 1912. Along with Ricciotto Canudo, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Élie Faure, and Marcel L’Herbier, he was among the first generation of film theorists. Over the next two decades, Gance’s projects would gradually affirm his initial instinct that cinema was a new form of ‘faith’ that could radically reshape society (1912: 10). The development of his ideology can be traced through the form and content of his films, and particularly the fictional characters that embody their creator’s own sense of mission.
In France, the 1910s saw a boom in the quantity and quality of serial films: the genre helped expand both the narrative span and commercial scope of early cinema. Nick Carter (1908–09), Zigomar (1910–13), Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), Judex (1917), and Tih Minh (1919) transformed the pulp fiction of popular paperbacks into compelling cinematic worlds. Some of Gance’s earliest ideas as a film author involved exploiting this market for adventure and crime serials. These sketches contain the first outlines of several key characters and narratives that would appear in projects throughout Gance’s career in the silent era. In 1912–13, he began writing scenarios for a serial called Diaz le briseur de fortunes, whose eponymous hero was to be a champion of the lower class, fighting the rich industrialists who exploit their workers. In one storyline, an astronomer tells Diaz about a comet that he predicts will hit the Earth in 2014, news which the hero uses to manipulate his enemies (Icart 1983: 209). If Diaz was initially conceived as a socially minded hero in the manner of Judex, Gance was soon developing more mystical figures. Another outline of this period focuses on a prophet called Anne, an ‘inspired conductor of crowds’ who creates a ‘Temple of Beauty’ from which she preaches her message of peace (Gance 1912–20?; Gance 1912/29). Though none of these pre-war scenarios would advance beyond rough drafts, Diaz and Anne—the leader and the prophet—are the archetypes from which numerous Gance’s subsequent characters would descend.
In the summer of 1917, Gance returned to some of his earlier ideas and substantially reworked them. The character of Diaz was resurrected in order to play a central role in a trilogy of films about the Great War: J’accuse, Les Cicatrices, and La Société des Nations. At around the same time, Gance envisaged a trilogy that focused on religious themes: Soleil Noir, Les Atlantes, and La Fin du Monde. Here, the leading character was to be a prophet named Novalic—a male version of Anne from Gance’s pre-war scenario. The 1917 Novalic is Diaz’s brother, preaching to the poor and declaiming the rich. In Soleil Noir, he goes mad and Diaz must fight to fulfil his brother’s testament. In the subsequent episodes, the two men work together to convince the world of an imminent planetary invasion by Martians. The warring nations on Earth put aside their differences to stop this external threat (Gance 1930g: 159; Icart 1983: 209–11). As before, Gance discontinued work on both the war and religious trilogies before any individual screenplays were written.
The next film that Gance realized was La Dixième Symphonie (1918), shot in September–October 1917. This combined a family-oriented melodrama with an innovative exploration of the work of a great composer, Enric Damor (Séverin-Mars). The film’s most original sequence depicts the performance of Damor’s ‘Tenth Symphony’, which is visualized through elaborately hand-coloured visions of a dancer superimposed over lyrical natural landscapes. La Dixième Symphonie marked the stylistic highpoint of Gance’s early career, and its critical and commercial success encouraged him to resume work on his religious trilogy. Renaming the three episodes Ecce Homo, Le Royaume de la Terre, and La Fin du Monde, he developed the first of these into a full script. Here, Novalic is a spiritual missionary who possesses esoteric knowledge about the secrets of human happiness, gleaned from his study of Eastern philosophy whilst living in the Indies. On his return to France, he and his disciple, Geneviève d’Arc, establish the ‘Temple of Beauty’ and reach out to the poor and needy through a campaign of preaching. However, the materialist populace rejects his notions of equality and enlightenment and Novalic begins to lose his grip on reality entirely. After a nervous breakdown, he is committed to an asylum, where he resumes his sermonizing for the benefit of the other inmates. Unlike the bourgeois classes beyond the asylum walls, the madmen understand his message. Novalic is eventually brought back to sanity by Geneviève and his half-Indian son, who has returned from the east to aid his father. Upon his return to society, Novalic uses the new medium of cinema to make his message more readily understood.
After achieving funding from Charles Pathé, Ecce Homo entered production in April 1918 with Albert t’Serstevens in the role of Jean Novalic. Though the film was never completed, nearly three hours of footage survives from Ecce Homo, preserved in pristine 35 mm reels that were struck from the original negative. The film was made on location around Nice and the coast of southern France, and the sun-soaked landscapes are luminously photographed by Léonce-Henri Burel, who acted as Gance’s chief cameraman on most of his early films. The atmospheric coastal landscapes—particularly the shots of trees silhouetted against a glimmering sea—foreshadow similar natural evocations in J’accuse and in the Corsican scenes of Napoléon. The rushes from Ecce Homo include one fault...