Rating: 4/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 6/52 | Longest runtime in your watchlist
Chained to the Wheel of Life, always, from despair to despair. — Kipling
The screen turns red as the two trains collide — a red hand reaches from beneath the rubble. A woman dangling from the window with a splotch of red on her forehead.
The engineer Sisif, returning from work, was fortunately on hand to direct rescue operations. They try to close the track, but another train is coming. Sisif summons his strength and manually switches the semaphore.
A child, all alone, cries next to a rosebush. Sisif takes her home as his adopted daughter to be sister to his son Elie, whose mother died in childbirth. When Sisif picks up the girl, he accidentally plucks a rose. On her is a tag labeled Norma.
It is only after taking her he finds a letter and discovers her mother died in the train wreck and her father earlier in life. He burns the letter to destroy any evidence that Norma isn’t his.
15 years later Sisif isn’t the standup employee he used to be. He has gambled his earnings away, drunk heavily. Anyone who so much as looks at Norma gets his ire. This includes his son, Elie.
He lives near the railway in a small but beautiful home with Elie, a violinmaker, and Norma, the 1920s version of a manic pixie dream girl.
Elie wishes he were a violinmaker in the classical era with a wife as beautiful as Norma. Elie has extended fantasy, or is it Norma who imagines herself in that world with him? The world grows dim around her.
A wealthy civil engineer named Jacques de Hersan prowls around Norma. Norma must mentally prepare herself to see him. He wishes to marry her, enticing her with the ability to get them out of poverty. He leads Sisif to believe that the company will compensate him for an innovation, but Jacques intends to take credit for the innovation.
In desperation, Sisif confesses the truth about Norma’s origins to Jacques. And that Sisif loves her.
I the 2019 7-hour restoration on Criterion. I downloaded the 4.5-hour version in college but never watched it. Even at 7 hours, the film is partially lost — 30 minutes or 2 hours — we have no canonical source on the original runtime.
Straight away, this doesn’t need to be seven hours. Halving this would still maintain the impact. Abel Gance was interested in more than telling the story but in pushing the creative limits of film to express complex emotional states. This movie is a lengthy meditation on love, grief, and family’s meaning.
While the story is familiar and pretty lame, — “she’s adopted, so we fell in love with her, oops!” — the movie does not reward those feelings or encourage their expression.
Everyone is doing 1920s acting, so the displays of emotion are broader than we’re used to, but each actor finds moments for subtler performances that I appreciated.
The film has incredible and dynamic cinematography. The cuts come fast, and the camera moves within and throughout the set pieces. Silhouettes and vignetting ensure only the crucial aspects of a scene come through.
The lighting is so impressive! They do so much with the face, even on extensive sets. It required such meticulous blocking and attention to detail.
The film heavily uses juxtaposition. For example, a slow train might cross-fade to a snail superimposed on the tracks. Or, when Elie and Norma first meet, it cross-cuts between them playing and a dog and cat play-fighting. One of my favorites is when Sisif goes to get a palm reading, and scenes from later in the film project onto his hand.
Several scenes have little touches of painted-in color, like the green light on the train or the red stop sign. In a later segment, a ballroom gets several colors, creating a kinetic scene.
While some text cards have imagery behind them, some use moving abstract textures. It’s so gorgeous!
This film is ambitious and stunning. It didn’t hold me the whole time, but it brought me back over and over until its finale.
** Stray Thoughts / Spoilers **
- Goats look like total nightmares in black and white.
- Sisif gets a reprimand for trying to let a train run over him.
- Norma’s face in the smoke
- The funeral at the end of part II is so haunting.
- Beautiful mountain footage
- What an epic cliffside fight! That looks so fucking dangerous.
- Red blood spots on the snow!
- Elie’s life flashed before his eyes. Holy shit.
- I love it when the title card is music notation.
- Just looking at my framed picture of torture.
- If you hold your eyelids open, you can stave off blindness.
- Don’t mind me — just erecting a cross in memory of my dead son.
- Men ruin Norma’s life.
- Tobie the dog talking to Elie on the mountain 😭