Overview
- First monograph dedicated to Abel Gance’s career during the transition to sound (and only the second monograph on Gance in the last 30 years)
- Draws on extensive investigation of primary sources
- Features previously unseen archival material
- Offers critical reconstitution of La Fin du Monde, revealing for the first time its original design
- Provides insight into Gance’s unrealized artistic and political projects during 1910s-30s
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Overcoming the Past
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
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Impossible Dreams
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
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The Marvel of Ruins
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book explores the creation and destruction of Abel Gance’s most ambitious film project, and seeks to explain why his meteoric career was so nearly extinguished at the end of silent cinema. By 1929, Gance was France’s most famous director. Acclaimed for his technical innovation and visual imagination, he was also admonished for the excessive length and expense of his productions. Gance’s first sound film, La Fin du Monde (1930), was a critical and financial disaster so great that it nearly destroyed his career. But what went wrong? Gance claimed it was commercial sabotage whilst critics blamed the director’s inexperience with new technology. Neither excuse is satisfactory. Based on extensive archival research, this book re-investigates the cultural background and aesthetic consequences of Gance’s transition from silent filmmaking to sound cinema. La Fin du Monde is revealed to be only one element of an extraordinary cultural project to transformcinema into a universal religion and propagate its power through the League of Nations. From unfinished films to unrealized social revolutions, the reader is given a fascinating tour of Gance’s lost cinematic utopia.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema
Book Subtitle: Sounding out Utopia
Authors: Paul Cuff
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38818-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-38817-5Published: 21 November 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-81754-5Published: 06 July 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-38818-2Published: 10 November 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXXII, 241
Number of Illustrations: 21 b/w illustrations
Topics: Screen Studies, European Culture, Music, Cultural History