Few are those who have seen Abel Gance’s 1923 film La Roue, and even fewer have had the pleasure of taking in its full seven-hour original version with a live score, a pleasure that Les Jardins Musicaux festival provided this August in Cernier, shining a light on this recently restored gem of the modernist era.
La Roue (The Wheel), an epic in four parts or époques, tells the story of three people whose lives are inextricably bound to the railway, and are irrevocably changed by a train crash which brings orphan girl Norma into the home of stony-faced train mechanic Sisif and his gentle son Elie, where the household’s delicate equilibrium splinters as the men she thinks of as her father and brother fall desperately in love with her. Overcome with shame, blinded in a mechanical accident, Sisif marries Norma off to a rich engineer and goes into exile in the Swiss Alps, driving a tiny mountain rack-rail train. When Norma’s husband catches her giving Elie a chaste kiss, he is overcome with violent jealousy, and the men fight to the death on the edge of a glacier. Norma is left lost and alone, haunting her father’s home without daring to return to him. At last, however, Sisif’s heart softens, and father and daughter share a moving, if bittersweet, reunion.
Shot on location and sometimes at night in railroad yards in the South of France and the Alps, the film is quite remarkable in its modernity, with its jump cuts and layered textures, alongside its striking use of touches of colour, applied with stencils and dye directly onto the image’s gelatine, which give us red and green railway signals in Epoque I, a deep blue background for le crépuscule of evening scenes (lamps glowing like a Paul Delvaux painting), and dramatic red splashes of blood in the snow in Epoque IV. La Roue is not a tragedy, however, and in fact has quite a bit of charming comic relief built in, like the scene where Norma paints Sisif’s mountain chalet from floor to ceiling, including the coffee grinder and a bowl full of apples on the mantlepiece. Tonally and thematically, then, there is quite a lot of scope for musical variety.
And variety, the score to La Roue does not lack. 117 pieces by 56 composers make up the mammoth score, and as a cross-section of early 20th-century French music, the work is fascinating. It’s also interesting historical material through which to consider the physical and theoretical reality of the soundtrack, often improvised in its earliest days, then put together by pianists or ad hoc, often amateur ensembles, while only the big Parisian cinemas had their own orchestras with proper programmes. Paul Fosse’s meticulous, handwritten catalogue of extracts came out of this tradition of preselecting appropriate themes and segments of existing pieces, to be put to work as musical accompaniment. In the case of La Roue, director Abel Gance brought in his friend Arthur Honegger to collaborate on the selection with Fosse, digging around in the Gaumont’s musical library – and contributing some original material of his own.
A composer born before the age of cinema, working before the age of the talkie, Honegger’s vision of the soundtrack was not as underlay, integral to the story, but as counterpoint and commentary. There are a few wonderful moments when La Roue genuinely achieves this: a scene in the Swiss mountains where men and women are singing a folksong with offbeat orchestral accompaniment; Elie playing the violin with the soundtrack dancing alongside him, playfully misaligned. Honegger’s angular La Roue theme, meanwhile, is the most interesting musical element here, its instinctive futurism prefiguring the smoke and steel of Pacific 231. But the idea that we have left melodrama behind and moved into the realm of the avant-garde proves untrue.
Granted, the soundtrack is no symphonic Hollywood behemoth; it is a fragmentary, delicate thing, but the material of this so-called French school of soundtrack composition remains conventional in its impressionism. Composed from a pick-n-mix selection of symphonic overtures and operatic intermezzi, it is more easy listening than you’d perhaps expect, like Duparc’s syrupy Poème nocturne, or incidental music from Alfred Bruneau’s Messidor – pleasant themes to have wash over you while looking at long shots of mountain vistas, but forgettable nevertheless. The darker moments get more interesting choices, like the prelude to Act 2 from Vincent d’Indy’s L’Etranger, all yearning minor harmonies and deep string underlay, or indeed Saint-Saëns’ dramatic prelude from Le Déluge. The opening to Sibelius’ Finlandia is used to electrifying effect, as is the melodic overture from Paul Dukas’ Polyeucte. The orchestra of the Jardins Musicaux did an impressive job with this marathon undertaking, adjusting to contrasting acoustics and to the demands of the 50-page score with determination and aplomb.
Overall, the adventure is a worthwhile one. A number of these composers’ works have slipped into obscurity, some of them not without reason – nevertheless, there are real treasures in this programme, and one hopes that this Swiss premiere will not mark the end of La Roue’s journey into the 21st century.
