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The Hugo quote at the onset acknowledges the bedrock of 19th-century literature, Greek tragedy and Italian futurism are also adduced for the hurtling pile-up of cinema. "To each its qualities!" The Rose of the Rail is an orphan in the wreckage of a train collision, she's adopted by the ponderous engineer (Séverin-Mars) and grows into a scampering tomboy (Ivy Close). His son (Gabriel de Gravone) carves violins, has no taste for the modern world, pines for the lass he believes to be his sister. Half-buried desire is similarly the widower's affliction, "under my mask of soot, she can't see my suffering." The beloved locomotive bearing her name is to be demolished, lest it fall into another man's hands, a faceful of steam literalizes the portrait of obsession aveugle. A vision of monstrous monumentality, turgid, kinetic, retrograde, avant-garde—Abel Gance wouldn't want it any other way. No melodramatic stone is left unturned, down to the pet goat rearing at the station as the heroine embarks on a loveless marriage to a rich rotter (Pierre Magnier). Grand allegorical machines lumbering across the frame, poetry and its visceral stutters and accelerations, the Wheel of Fate or a spinning reel of film. From the diverging lines at the railway's turntable to the mocking diminishment of a funicular in Mont Blanc, a freezing alpine purgatory. "So is there a cancer in the family, Papa?" A scuffle in the gelid heights indicates Stroheim's Blind Husbands, the blind lug stumbling before the precipice foresees Kurosawa's Ran. Not darkness but "a dazzling snowscape," medieval reveries, happiness rather than gaiety, "sweeter and sadder." Gance's heavy-souled bravura brings this all to the final dance remembered by Bergman in The Seventh Seal, impermanence and eternity fused in the figure frozen before the window that might be a movie screen. Amid the many responses is Sternberg's deadpan antithesis in The Salvation Hunters. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |