User Reviews

Abel Gance is not a filmmaker who thinks small. There is something to be said for a master filmmaker (for Gance clearly is a master) pursuing his vision at all cost. In subject matter, La Roue possess similar qualities to early 20th Century realist novels. Frank Norris comes to mind. Of course Norris's novel McTeague was the subject of another grand visionary director, Erich Von Stroheim.

Sisif, an engineer, a "man of the rails," finds an orphaned child after a railroad crash. He takes this child, Norma, home to raise as his own, alongside his son Elie. Fifteen years pass, Norma grows into a beautiful, free-spirited woman. Sisif begins to look at his adopted daughter in a way that is very unfatherly, nor is he alone in his desire. Elie, Sisif's son, seems to have feelings for his "sister," feelings Norma shares. Uncontrolled passions lead to tragedy until the (somewhat) optimistic ending. The film's first half takes place either in the family home surrounded by rails or around the railyards. The background of the railroad, with its grime and smoke, does add to the ambiance of the film. The second half is largely set in the snow covered alps. Both halves possess a realism due to the locations.

There are sections in La Roue that rank among the best in silent cinema. My favorite is the sequence where Norma leaves for Paris, a sequence about halfway through the film. She says goodbye to her home in a series of beautifully poetic shots. Then, she boards a train driven by her "father." En route, a fit of jealousy consumes Sisif. He plans to crash the train. What follows is a series of fast edits that are as advanced as anything used by the Russians from this time period. It is hard not to be awed by the sequence. Nor, is this the only one. La Roue has about half a dozen such eye-popping moments. It also features a moving finale that seems earned.

It should also be noted that La Roue, even in the shortened cut that remains, runs four hours and twenty minutes. It cannot be watched casually! I spent one whole day with Flicker Alley's DVD, homebound due to an aching leg and a reeling stomach. Others may not have the infirmity (and the patience) for that type of commitment. I can understand. The running time, even shortened, is overly generous for the story told. There are sections that drag. A certain repetitious quality hurts the film (one character tries three separate times to kill himself with a train). La Roue is not an epic like Lawrence of Arabia, or, rather, La Roue is an intimate epic, about people, about desire, and about despair. Most certainly the story did not need the indulgent running time, but I'm glad the film exists just as an example of a filmmaker going for broke. I even felt my day was well spent, even if the idea of watching La Roue in its entirety a second time seems more like combat than entertainment.

Abel Gance in my mind was a pioneer of not just French cinema but cinema in general. All of his work is well worth the look and are visual and technical marvels, some of the techniques being one he pioneered. Some of his best works, 'Napoleon' being one of them, are revolutionary in not just silent film but also film of all kinds and are towering achievements. Is his work for all tastes? Not all, tending to be very long and sprawling with a lot of patience required.

Had heard so many great things about 'La Roue' (English translation being 'The Wheel') and being somebody that loved especially 'Napoleon' so much, there was no doubt in my mind about wanting to see it. Saw it during one of my film reviewing breaks from here on a lazy afternoon alone and was very impressed indeed. 'La Roue' won't be one of my favourite films any time soon and to me it is not quite one of Gance's best, with it for example not having the special factor that 'Napoleon'. It is an extremely good film though with many outstanding elements.

Can understand why 'La Roue' won't be to everybody's taste as it is slightly divisive here. Most of the time the pace to me was fine, but there were times in the slighter moments where the film dragged with some scenes going on a little longer than necessary.

Likewise with anybody feeling that there is some unnecessary repetition, with a couple of actions happening more than once and one questions why.

On the other hand, 'La Roue' looks amazing visually and technically, an achievement even. Not just for back then, but also then. The editing is not as "unlike anything seen before" quality like the innovative editing in 'Napoleon' was, but it is still very fluid and the transitioning is practically seamless throughout. The sets are also beautiful to look at. The standout visually and technically though is the magnificent cinematography, very audacious with some very interesting and beautifully composed techniques. Also with some beautifully poetic shots in the more emotional moments. The music is haunting and fits well, not over-bearing or over-dramatic or sentimentalised.

Gance's direction is near-triumphant and superbly controlled. The story is not always perfect pace-wise, but has a huge amount of poignant heart. Especially in the denouement, my heart broke into two here. Although 'La Roue' is a very long film, the longest seen since March and one of the longest ever, much of the time it doesn't feel long. The pace is controlled and deliberate but mostly is not dull, was too transfixed by the visuals and the emotion. The characters are worth caring for, especially Norma, and Severin-Mars is a revelation (searingly intense but also heartfelt) out of a cast that all play their parts beautifully. Ivy Close is touching too.

Summing up, very good and nearly great. 8/10

This stunning 1923 silent film was restored by David Shepard and others in a print that runs nearly 4 hours and 30 minutes. The original film, directed by Abel Gance, was about twice that length, never released in the US except in a severely cut down print of about 2 hours.

The story, a "tragedy of modern times," is seemingly a simple one. Aman named Sisif (Séverin-Mars) rescues a baby girl in a train wreck and raises her as his own along with his son. She's known as a "rose of the rails" since the family lives in a squalid house by the railroad where Sisif is an engineer. As the years pass the girl, named Norma, grows to adulthood. Things get uneasy when Sisif realizes that he is in love with Norma (Ivy Close), and things turn to tragedy when his son Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) also loves her ... but believes she is his sister. Sisif plots to marry her off to a wealthy man to escape the impending disaster.

After Norma is unhappily married off, Sisif is injured in an accident and banished to a small mountain railway near Mont Blanc. He lives there with his son on the edge of a glacier but even in their isolation they cannot escape tragedy ... of their love of Norma.

The film is high art, operatic, Greek tragedy, and must be approached as such. The visuals are stunning. The composition and sets includes the smallest of details, and Gance uses close-ups, iris shots, fades, and rapid editing (borrowed from D.W. Griffith's masterpieces) to make this one of the most beautiful films ever made. The current version also includes tinting to enhance the emotional pitch of the film.

The performance of Séverin-Mars won't be to every taste, but his old-school acting style is similar to that of Emil Jannings. Without dialog, all he has are his body language and face. Shots are held to emphasize the emotional plight of the aging man. And you can see every thought he has in his face.

The other great performance is by Ivy Close, a British actress who also worked in European silent films. She resembles Norma Shearer and as with Séverin-Mars, her face shows every moment of joy and sadness. There's a stunning scene toward the end when she's asked to go to a village dance. She runs to powder her face and sees a gray hair, a line on her forehead. She's growing old. La Roue, the wheel of life, is turning, and Norma is growing old.

This superb restoration is accompanied by a beautiful and haunting score by Robert Israel, itself a symphonic work of great power. Séverin-Mars died soon after filming was completed in 1921. Gance did not complete and release the film until 1923. Ivy Close made a few more silent films in the late 1920s and retired from the screen.

This may be a film you only watch once in your lifetime, but you will never forget it.

La Roue / The Wheel (1923) : Brief Review -

Abel Gance's visionary and mind-shattering take on disturbed relationships. La Roue is not a film for everyone so be careful before watching it and make sure whether you can handle it or not. I will give you 2 big reasons for it. One is, it's a long film about 7 hours and second, it shows relationships in disturbing ways which might just shatter your mind. A railway engineer adopts a young girl orphaned by a train crash. Years later when she starts getting suitors, he feels like falling in Love with her. The same happens with her brother too which is actually a very terrible and mind shaking idea at first place. Later the father recovers from the delusions but then grapples with whether or not to tell her the truth about her parentage. Firstly, i wanna salute the writer and the director for taking this concept to make a movie on it because however wrong it seems, it still has reasonable causes to believe it. Just imagine loving your beautiful sister or your daughter and the same when you realise she is not in with your blood relations and suddenly the meaning of that Love changes. Such an Astounding Idea it was. I was sold here only, i just had to see it getting through with it till the end formally. Séverin-Mars, Ivy Close and G. Gravone gives super performances and Magnier in supporting role also gets it right. Abel Gance (assisted by Cendrars) uses then-revolutionary lighting techniques, and rapid scene changes and cuts in this grand scale presentation. I must admit that Gance was truly a visionary director and La Roue is his third film after J'Accuse (1919) and Napoleon (1927) which has left me stunned. Overall, a Grand Classic which uses the philosophy of Wheel to show the different meanings of Relationship and Love.

RATING - 8/10*

By - #samthebestest

A horrific train accident leaves a baby alone in the world, when a railway worker takes it in and raises the little girl as his own, alongside his own son, who was practically a baby, too. But, because they are never told they aren't blood relation, their relationship feels very awkward for them as they age, as they feel an attraction that is never said but is felt very much so. As the girl blossoms into a young lady, she has suitors who admire her and one in particular who proposes. From there on, it gets tragic with developments that make her marry him when she didn't really want to and the secret comes out about the brother and sister being not kin, making the son mad at the father. The father is blinded by way of an unfortunate accident, and that only exacerbates the fact that he is a drinker, who now only feels sorry for himself. The film may be well-regarded for its artistry and grandness, but to me it feels dated and seems to wallow in the misery of the lead characters too much with not enough action; they're only walking around and wailing, particularly the father and daughter. It amazes me that this four hour movie was actually much longer but was cut, as I felt it to be too long as it is. I admit the opening fade in was very moving with the shot of the father, but as the movie went from the 2-hour mark to the end, its tragedies come across rather surreal and the ending leaves the viewer with a weird What just happened?. Obviously I don't appreciate this work of art that others may love and defend.

I'm not a brilliant reviewer or anything, but as far as I'm concerned this is the best film of all time and is indeed essential viewing. I first saw it on TCM back when I used to live with my parents, and I gotta tell you: the beauty of cinema has never been this great or expressed. I have yet to see the full cut of this masterpiece, but thankfully, I have access to the Blu ray 417min cut now and I already know that what Abel Vance creates is pure beautiful cinema. Would highly recommend to any fan of film.

Forget all the pedantic pseudo-psychobable and bargain-basement 'philosophy' you may read here. The bottom line is that while this film is extremely well crafted for it's time period, ultimately it is four and a half hours of heavy-handed nonsense. Pure depression from beginning to end. In fact, I too felt like committing suicide after watching it. So why these characters don't just go out and do it themselves is beyond me. Just when you think things couldn't get worse, they do. And there is no humor to lighten the load. At least 'Hamlet' had it's grave digger scene. There is a great deal of poetry in the images, and the overlapping images and quick cutting were unique trademarks of Gance's style for the time. Gance is obviously a master of his craft, one just wishes the film weren't so long, repetitive and heavy-handed in the end. And why are all these men obsessed with Ivy Close? Aside from the fact that she was Gance's wife, one cannot understand the obsession all these men have for her. I guess one had to be living in that time period.

Director Jean Cocteau said: "There is cinema before and after 'La Roue' ("The Wheel") as there is painting before and after Picasso." So influential was French director Abel Gance's February 1923's "The Wheel," that it has been carefully studied frame by frame ever since its release. Famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa claimed the movie made a huge impression on him before he became interested in working in the film business. Today its importance towards cinema's impact merits an inclusion into the "1001 Movies To See Before You Die" reference book.

What makes "The Wheel" so interesting is Gance's use of lighting and unconventional editing to unveil the emotions and tensions of the movie's characters. Right from the start he purposely designed his film to undergo a series of quick cuts, beginning with a two-train crash. The multi-casualty accident heightens the tragedy where our protagonist, Sisif, a train engineer, ends up with Norma, a little girl whose mother died. "The Wheel" also contains an inordinate amount of multiple exposures, thrusting the narrative forward through a dizzingly series of events within several decades. Even its title symbolizes that every life in the movie is a dramatic example of a cycle of lives who are part of a rotation of a wheel that constantly repeats itself every generation.

"The Wheel" is a story revolving around the widower Severin-Mars, as the engineer, who raises the little girl, acted as a grown-up by Ivy Close, along with his son, Elie. The aging engineer becomes attracted to Norma, as well as Elie. Conflicts abound. The film's second half abruptly shifts to the Alps, where the three, as well as Norma's husband, end up in a topsy-turvy meshing of dramatics. The decision to film in the Alps, not in Gance's original script, was made because the director's wife, Marguerite, came down with tuberculosis and the doctor recommended the mountains to help alleviate her symptoms.

Gance's use of several innovative cinematic features also are presented in "The Wheel." Included is one of the first examples of a swish (or whip) pan where the camera quickly pans and transitions to a new scene at a point where Sisif is relating about Elie's death. Gance also introduces to French cinema a precursor to Sergei Eisenstein's more definitive examples of 'intellectual montage.' In "The Wheel," Gance shows a train laboriously climbing up the Mont-Blanc mountain side, then he cuts to a snail, showing how slow the train in moving.

Gance always saw himself as "the Victor Hugo of the screen," and as with the famous French writer, the director loved long, long productions. "The Wheel" at first was 32-reels, clocking in at over eight hours. The most common length of the movie on today's DVD's is four and a half hours long. The production was so long that actor Severin-Mars died of a heart attack soon after his parts were filmed. Despite looking old for his age, he was only 48 when stricken. His leads in "The Wheel" as well as Gance's earlier 1918 "The Tenth Symphony" was a powerful presence on the screen.

This was also Ivy Close's last movie in a major role. Voted by the Daily Mirror as the World's Beautiful Woman in 1908, the English actress beat out 1,500 contestants. She married filmmaker Elwin Neame and was one of the first film stars to begin a movie production company, in 1914. She left cinema after "The Wheel" when her husband wanted her to stay home to raise their kids, only to see him die shortly after in a motorcycle crash. She appeared in secondary parts in two movies in the late 1920's before talkies ended her 44-film career. Her son Ronald Neame, a producer, worked alongside director David Lean to create his classic 1945 'Brief Encounter' and 1946 'Great Expectations,' while her great grandson, Gareth Neame, was responsible in bringing the worldwide phenomenon television series, 'Downton Abbey,' to the airwaves in 2010.

French philosophers are famous for achieving spectacular results in combining literature and metaphysics. It is probably not by chance that the genre "essay" has a French name. Abel Gance was a philosopher insofar as he succeeded in combining film and metaphysics. Hence, there is a name lacking for this special genre of metaphysical film. When Deleuze and Guattari, decades after Gance's "La roue", wrote that metaphysics should not be fixed to the logical categories of subject and object but to the "earth" as point of reference, we see this "geophilosophical" concept that became popular in recent philosophical approaches, been anticipated by Gance. "La roue" establishes a kaleidoscope of impressions, mostly filmed in the staccato-style first used by Gance, between earth and mountains and giving an existentialist paradigm that, taken as an abstract empty form, can be filled with the personal data out of every watchers life. This is not a scientific German existentialism a la Heidegger, it is an essayist French Bergsonian metaphysics of time. Yet, the time has to be abolished under the suffocating impression of the earthy paradigm. The Gancean space, spun up in this world of Mont-Blanc, where the movie had been filmed in location and cost the life both of main actor Severin-Mars and of Gance's wife Ivy Close, this Gancean space abolished the time by means of speed like again decades after in Virilio's "dromology". The abolishment of space by time is thus enabled by the acceleration of the Gancean locomotives which is based on the combination of wheel and track. However, the paths in the mountains where the characters go, have neither wheels nor tracks, since these paths have to be made first by walking on them. While on the Gancean earth, the locomotive as symbol of civilization is based on paths prefabricated by the combination of wheels and tracks, the paths in the mountains, where civilizations ends but once began, are only made by steps and are thus not pre-existent.

Once a Spanish poet wisely said: "The good, if brief, twice as good." At the time I write these words I have been watching this film for a little over four hours. I still have three long hours (of a total of seven hours, the version that have been restored by the year 2019) that seem to repeat themselves in an eternal absurd return. It is precisely the condemnation of Sisyphus, the hero of the Greek tragedy, who is cursed to repeat a senseless and fruitless task of pushing a rock upwards the top of the mountain. However, this absurdity of an agonizing task is justified by the act of creation itself: La roue (The wheel) exists, for our good luck, when it might as well not do so. As I have already read here, in other comments, the length might be its main weakness. In other great works, such as Les Vampires (1916, 7 hours, Louis Feuillade) or Dr. Mabuse (1922, 4 hours, Fritz Lang), the extension is its main repellent and disintegrating trait. These attempts are like preparing a cup of coffee with two liters of water: it can be something refreshing but also tasteless. And I am afraid that its photography and montage are not enough to understand such excess, but rather the craving for the craving itself. It cannot even be explained as a trend of its time, because there were already good rules of composition about conciseness and precision. Anyway, I'll finish seeing what remains, painfully and reluctantly... For those who are curious, I suggest finding excerpts from a movie fan on the web, crazy and wandering enough to edit the good scenes for us, the foolish and brave ones.

Okay, as I am discovering, the name of Abel Gance as has reached us through a long and troubled historiography is mostly in the contours of a European DW Griffith; the broad historic scopes, the elaborate film language. But whereas Griffith's pioneering efforts were narrowed by a set of Victorian ideals about a world where good and evil are clearly defined and the prevalent Western thinking that has traditionally regarded the struggle between these two fractions in rational, linear terms as the forward struggle of human thought to achieve enlightenment from the forces of darkness - the forces of production or state morals for Griffith - Gance foresaw deeper: objects cast their shadow here, human beings have interior dimensions, and the darkness no longer threatens from outside but is recast inside the human character.

This is the film that Kurosawa fondly remembered as one of the first to impress him. So, a film that resonated within Japanese culture of the time, a culture that has increasingly sought out and adopted - long before the westerns of John Ford - Western perspectives in their traditionally abstract eye.

But the more obvious stuff before we get there, how the film must have equally well impressed the early Soviet filmmakers. There may not be crowds animating, acting out rigorous ideals - not history as in Griffith, but present action, history in the making - but there is a shift; the Shakespearian tragedy, and thus the cleansing, high-minded catharsis, now transferred to the working class, so that the new Oedipus, the new Lear or Sissyphus, the new king punished with divine madness becomes the insignificant railroad engineer - named Sisif no less - with the perennially greasy, coalblack face. It is now the lowly and disenchanted whose life agonies can be imbued, and given voice to, with the majesty of a world ruler; hence the ruled world, the kingly dominion, is reordered as the private life of organized anxieties.

So, this part of the film should bode well with a contemporary audience, who can also better acquiesce to the idea of a film that runs for 4 1/2 hours. But there is stuff that matters more, I believe.

See here. Sisif's house is situated where the tracks converge and disperse from again, so at the navel of the soul. At regular intervals fates depart from there - some of them the desperate attempts to destroy the self, others harboring omens or disaster.

But once up in the exile of the mountains, the house - now the hermitage, the temple of atonement - is where the tracks lead and stop. There is no going further, and there are some amazing shots of snowed mountain peaks captured from a moving train that you will want to see. Here, the protagonists must struggle with a karma that is not possible to extricate without the dissolution of the self that is the essence of spiritual transformation.

The poignant image that unifies vision; wheels, wheels turning fates in the incessant cycle of life-renewing destruction. The Soviets appropriated this image - as well as the rapid-fire montage pioneered here by Gance - as a representation of social mechanisms at work; but here the image is properly internal, in-sight into abstract soul.

The heartfelt denouement is about the last - and hence, first - turn of the wheel, the cosmic round of succession of an impermanent, transient universe. It's all pretty obvious at this point, which maybe derails the more powerful metaphors into a typically classical story end.

So this is probably why the film spoke with clarity to the Japanese, whose world is not linear but vivid impressions from a bird's eye. At the end, a circle of young girls and boys dance away in the shadow of the mountain; like in so many Japanese landscape paintings where idyllic everyday pleasures among the cherry-blossomed trees unfold beneath the distant horizon of Mt. Fuji.

Gance shows how the final release from the round can only begin with the acceptance of suffering. It is a Buddhist image, whereby this darkness recast inside the human character is finally understood to be no different from light.

We may encounter it in a jodo temple as the bodhisattva Kannon-Avalokitesvara, who reconciles both male and female form - and so all human disparity - in singular, unbound mercy; the name in her female form, poignantly as ever with the Japanese rendered into picture language, means 'Observing the Sounds (or Cries) of the World'. So, not the person who observes, but the act, the living process of the round - filled with the cries of suffering - as it comes into being and goes again.

Asides into meditation. But the film is boss as is.

I agree with just about everything that's been written in the reviews (many of which, however, seem as monstrously long as the film, itself!). I think it was my interest in trains and railroading that sustained me for 4-1/2 hours, although the characters and action were interesting, if too, too progressively dark, dark. Those locomotive models were particularly interesting to me - so sad when that locomotive slipped from Sisif's hands . . . . That "slide valve vaporization" device that Sisif was working on caught my attention at once, but I'm not clear if the civil engineer, Hersan, profited by getting credit for it. Overall, a fascinating, if overlong, ride!

Just saw in Paris Fondation Jérome Seydoux-Pathé the newly restored version

La Roue is a kind of film that is very hard to follow and people could easily lose patiance with it because it is very slow and full of artsy and melodramatic scenes,im not gonna lie i had to speed up this film a little bit in second part cause there were to many slowish moments and scenes that were put in just for artistic sake.But at tehnical aspect this film was very good,use of camera and music were great , locations were pretty and direction was able to carry all of that forward.La Roue is one very slow film but it has quality in it

Four-and-a-half-hours of misery and emotional turmoil made bearable by Abel Gance's tireless sense of invention and expressive use of lighting. Every scene goes on forever, and the fact that - in the first part at least - arguably every third scene is superfluous, leaves one morbidly curious about just what the original 8-hour version must have been like.

Well, I was worried before seeing "La Roue" (in English, The Wheel"), not only because the version I was about to watch was 3 hours long, but mostly because I don't excel at French (due to the inter titles) and wasn't sure if I could read the Spanish subtitles. But I understand Spanish and I could go through it without major translation problems. Now, when it comes to the movie as, well, a movie. Although long films were considered good in those days, and although I don't really mind long silents, this one was, indeed, long. The performances were good, but the story, in spite of being entertaining and engaging, it isn't the most spectacular thing. I guess Gance was thinking more about the innovations he used instead of the plot itself.

OMG I've had relationships that seemed shorter than this film. Despite some fine examples of editorial technique during some sequences the film , for so slight a plot, goes on forever. Also not assisted by the mugging of lead Severin Mars. To think this 4 1/2 glacier was once near 9 hours is a staggering thought. The moments of brilliance do not compensate for the whole. The entire final hour is superfluous.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Gance seems overwhelmed by the theme of humanity crushed by incredible suffering, and some of the symbolism may seem heavy-handed, but this film deserves to be listed among the greats for its wonderful cinematography, the strong contrasts between the first parts portrayal of trains and the second parts moving to the beautiful, impassive scenery of the high Alps.

I have always been an admirer of Gance's Napoleon, but his J'accuse turned me off. La Roue has restored my desire to see the others: La fin de monde, Beethoven, and Austerlitz.

As for the suffering, this was made in 1921 in the aftermath of WW I, which is sufficient to account for Gance's obsession with the theme.

An understatement for a film that even in an abbreviated form last well over six hours. It is a melodrama that involves a rugged widowed engineer who grabs a little girl, left behind after a train wreck, and raises her as his own, along with his tiny son. The girl is not related to either of them by blood and both father and son fall in love with her (which seems incestuous). The father can't handle his feelings and nearly kills himself. The sexual tension and the wild abandon of the man are the centerpiece. For most of the time, he is the only one who knows the truth. Another suitor comes along and complicates things. He talks the father into allowing marriage to the daughter. But he is a self serving womanizer and really only wants the young girl for his own purposes. This leads to an unhappy marriage and a return home to the father. It's also about sacrifice. This, as I've read, is a classic piece of cinema that set many standards. The cinematography and the editing are amazing, especially the quick cuts. One can see Abel Gance's genius here. Unfortunately, it is a work of great patience to weather the entirety of the things.

Sisif, a railwayman, and his son Elie fall in love with the beautiful Norma (whom Sisif rescued from a train crash when a baby and raised as his daughter with tragic results. In its complete version La Roue lasts for 7 hours. Useless to say, the film is impossible to follow and we easily lose patiance after the first... Say, six? Five? Four? Three? Even 2 hours?... It is the slowest film ever made and full of artsy and melodramatic scenes, but under the technical aspects it is of course competent. This seminal film introduced many innovations in set design and construction, and cinematic devices.