Born in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, Paris, France, Gance was the illegitimate son of a wealthy physician and a working-class mother.
Initially taking his mother's name, Gance was brought up until the age of eight by his maternal grandparents in the coal mining town of Commentry in central France.
Afterwards, he returned to Paris to rejoin his mother who had by then married Adolphe Gance, a chauffeur and mechanic, whose name Abel then adopted.
Although he later fabricated the history of a brilliant school career and middle-class background, Gance left school at the age of fourteen, and the love of literature and art which sustained him throughout his life was in part the result of self-education.
He started working as a clerk in a solicitor's office, but after a couple of years he turned to acting in the theatre.
With the outbreak of World War I, Gance was rejected by the army on medical grounds and in 1915 he started writing and directing for a new film company, Film d'Art.
However, he soon caused controversy with the ten-minute 1915 French silent black and white experimental short film 'La Folie du Docteur Tube' ('The Madness of Doctor Tube').
This was a comic fantasy in which Gance and his French cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burel created some arresting visual effects with distorting mirrors.
The short starred French actor, screenwriter, film director and novelist Albert Dieudonné as the eponymous doctor. The producers, however, were later outraged and refused to show the film.
In 1917, Gance was finally drafted into the army, in its Service Cinématographique, an episode which proved futile and short-lived, but it deepened his preoccupation with the impact of the war and the depression which was caused by the deaths of many of his friends.
Gance nevertheless continued working for Film d'Art until 1918, making over a dozen commercially successful films.
When he parted company with Film d'Art over a shortage of funds, the important pioneer of French film and recording industries Charles Pathé stepped in to underwrite his next film.
This was the 1919 French silent black and white drama film 'J'accuse!' ('I Accuse!'), in which Gance confronted the waste and suffering which the war had brought.
He later re-enlisted in the Service Cinématographique in order to be able to film some scenes on a real battlefield at the front. Work on the 'J'accuse!' began in 1918, and some scenes were filmed on real battlefields.
The film made a powerful impact and went on to have international distribution. It juxtaposed a romantic drama with the background of the horrors of World War I, and it is sometimes described as a pacifist or anti-war film.
In 1920, Gance developed his next project in writing, co-producing, and directing the first film of which he is best known. This the 1923 French silent black and white drama film 'La Roue' ('The Wheel'). It was made while Gance was recuperating in Nice from Spanish flu.
The progress of 'La Roue' was deeply affected by the knowledge that his companion Ida Danis was dying of tuberculosis; furthermore, Gance's leading man and friend French actor, director and writer Séverin-Mars, was also seriously ill (and passed soon after completion of the film).
'La Roue' tells of railroad engineer named Sisif (Séverin-Mars) of whom adopts an orphaned girl named Nora (Ivy Close). However, Sisif's son, Jacques de Hersan (Pierre Magnier), falls in love with Norma.
With a runtime of seven hours, 'La Roue' used then-revolutionary lighting techniques and rapid scene changes and cuts.
The finished film was originally in thirty-two reels and ran for nearly nine hours.
However, it was subsequently edited down for distribution and it is these shorter versions of which have survived. Its runtime now is four-and-a-half hours.
Before making 'La Roue', Gance visited America in 1921 to promote 'J'accuse!'. During his five-month stay, he met D. W. Griffith, of whom Gance had long admired.
He was also offered a contract with MGM to work in Hollywood, but turned it down.
It was four years after directing 'La Roue' that Gance embarked on his greatest project: a six-part life of Napoléon Bonaparte. This was the epic 1927 French silent black and white (tinted) (some sequences) war/drama film 'Napoléon'.
On screen, the title is 'Napoléon vu par Abel Gance', meaning "Napoleon as seen by Abel Gance".
This ambitious silent film, renowned for its groundbreaking camerawork and editing, portrays the early life of French ruler Napoléon Bonaparte (Albert Dieudonne), beginning with his childhood and ending with a successful military campaign in Italy.
A native of Corsica, Napoléon becomes a staunch supporter of his island home, but eventually flees due to conflicts with its leadership. Once settled on the French mainland, Napoléon begins his climb up the military ranks.
In the epic, Gance traces Bonaparte's early life as a school youth in a snowball fight and even through to the French Revolution and up to the invasion of Italy. Even this occupied a vast canvas with meticulously recreated historical scenes and scores of characters.
The film was also full of experimental techniques, combining rapid cutting, hand-held cameras, superimposition of images, and, in wide-screen sequences, shot using a system Gance called Polyvision.
This was the name given by the French film critic Émile Vuillermoz to a specialized widescreen film format devised exclusively for the filming and projection of Gance's masterpiece.
The need for triple cameras (and projectors) achieved a spectacular panoramic effect, including a triptych finale. This meant that the outer two film panels were tinted blue and red, creating a widescreen image of a French flag.
'Napoléon' is recognized as a masterwork of fluid camera motion, produced in a time when most camera shots were static.
Many innovative techniques were used to make the film, including fast cutting, extensive close-ups, a wide variety of hand-held camera shots, location shooting, and point of view shots.
This also included multiple-camera setups, multiple exposure, superimposition, underwater camera, kaleidoscopic images, film tinting, split screen and mosaic shots, multi-screen projection, and other visual effects.
The original version of 'Napoléon' ran for around six hours. A shortened version received a triumphant première at the Palais Garnier (then the home of the Paris Opéra) in April 1927.
This was before a distinguished audience that included the future French army officer and statesman General de Gaulle.
Napoléon was screened in only eight European cities when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the rights to it.
However, after screening it in London, the film was cut drastically in length, and only the central panel of the three-screen Polyvision sequences was retained before it was put on limited release in the United States.
There, the film was indifferently received at a time when talkies were just starting to appear. Even so, the length of 'Napoléon' was reduced still further for French and European distribution.
It later became even shorter when it was shown in the United States. However, this was not the end of Gance's film's career.
Sometime later, Gance embraced the arrival of sound with enthusiasm with his next film in the early 1930s.
The film, however, was all but a critical and commercial disaster, and thereafter the creative independence which Gance had enjoyed in the previous decade was seriously curtailed.
In 1953, Gance was a member of the jury for the 6th Cannes Film Festival in April of that same year. This was with French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic Jean Cocteau ('Beauty and the Beast', 'Orpheus') as president.
A revival of 'Napoléon' in the mid-1950s influenced the filmmakers of the French New Wave. The film used the Keller-Dorian cinematography for its color sequences.
Throughout his life, Gance kept returning to 'Napoléon', often editing his own footage into shorter versions, adding a soundtrack, sometimes filming new material, and as a result the original 1927 film was lost from view for decades.
After various attempts at reconstruction, the dedicated work of British film historian, television documentary-maker, filmmaker, author, and film editor Kevin Brownlow produced a three hundred and thirty-three-minute version of the film, still incomplete but fuller than anyone had seen since the 1920s.
This version was presented at the 5th Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in August 1979, with the frail eighty-nine-year-old director in attendance.
The occasion brought a belated triumph to Gance's career, and subsequent performances and further restoration made his name known to a worldwide audience.
Gance reused material from it in later films, and the restoration of the silent film at the beginning of the 1980s confirmed it as his best-known work, with a runtime of five and one-half hours.
The film was at last painstakingly restored in 1981 after twenty years' work by Brownlow.
Francis Ford Coppola's 1980 edit of 'Napoléon' (three hours and forty-three minutes), accompanied by Carmine Coppola's score and projected at twenty-four frames per second, has been released on VHS and Laserdisc in the United States.
It was also released in Australia on a Region 4 DVD. These have also been pirated on DVDs emanating from Europe and elsewhere.
To suit home viewers watching on a single standard-width television screen, the triptych portion is letterboxed, such that image height is reduced to one-third for that portion of the film.
The following year after Coppola's 1980 edit of 'Napoléon', Gance passed from tuberculosis in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France on November 10, 1981. He was 92.
Gance had planned for 'Napoléon' to be the first of six films about the titular emperor's career, a chronology of great triumph and defeat ending in Napoleon's death in exile on the island of Saint Helena on May 5, 1821.
After the difficulties encountered in making the first film, Gance realized that the costs involved would make the full project impossible.
Stanley Kubrick was not a fan of 'Napoléon', saying in an interview "I found it really terrible. Technically [Gance] was ahead of his time and he introduced new film techniques – in fact Eisenstein credited him with stimulating his initial interest in montage – but as far as story and performance goes it's a very crude picture."
Ironically, during the post-production of '2001: A Space Odyssey', Kubrick began working on his next project, a biopic on Napoléon Bonaparte.
The dramatic rise and fall of the French emperor made for a great story, but it was his mind that most interested Kubrick, who couldn't grasp how a brilliant tactician could fall victim to his own irrational temptations--and with devastating consequences.
According to Gance's reputation, he wanted himself to be seen as "the Victor Hugo of the screen", and many assessments have recognized the ambition, the ingenuity and the sweeping romanticism of his films.
Some, such as French actor Léon Moussinac in the 1920s, have pointed to the contradictions in his work between creativity and cliché, the "abundance of original treasures and of banal mediocrity and of poor taste".
One thing that has always been acknowledged is Gance's innovations in the techniques of the cinema.
As well as his multiscreen ventures with Polyvision, he explored the use of superimposition of images, extreme close-ups, and fast rhythmic editing, and he made the camera mobile in unorthodox ways – hand-held, mounted on wires or a pendulum, or even strapped to a horse.
Gance also made early experiments with the addition of sound to film, and with filming in color and in 3D. There were few aspects of film technique that he did not seek to incorporate in his work.
His influence was acknowledged by contemporaries such as French filmmaker, film theorist, literary critic, and novelist Jean Epstein and later by the French New Wave filmmakers.
In the assessment of Brownlow, "...with his silent productions, J'accuse, La Roue, and Napoléon, [Abel Gance] made a fuller use of the medium than anyone before or since".
For many years the Brownlow restoration of 'Napoléon' with American-born conductor and composer Carl Davis's score was unavailable for home viewing.
In 2016, it was released by BFI and Photoplay Productions on DVD, Blu-ray and for streaming via the BFI Player.
Gance's experiments included tracking shots, extreme close-ups, low-angle shots, and split-screen images. His subjects moved steadily away from simple action films towards psychological melodramas.
In his works, Gance's mastery of lighting, composition and editing were accompanied by a range of literary and artistic references of which some critics found pretentious and alienating.
Another aspect of Gance's work of which has drawn comment from critics is the political stance and implication of his life and films, particularly his identification with strong military leaders.
Whereas 'J'accuse!' in 1919 suggested Gance's pacifist and anti-establishment attitude, the reactions to 'Napoléon' in 1927 saw greater ambivalence, and some commentators even judged it to be an apologia for dictatorship.
This strand of criticism of Gance's reactionary politics has continued through later assessments of him; it has also noted his ardent support.
This was for French general officer Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain (generally known as Philippe Pétain) in the early years of World War II, and subsequently for Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s.
Others have regarded these political interpretations as secondary to Gance's mastery of exuberant spectacle, which frequently had a nationalistic focus.
As one obituary concluded, "Abel Gance was perhaps the greatest Romantic of the screen".
Gance had been active from 1909–1972.
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