Abel Gance

Abel Gance (born Abel Eugene Alexandre Perethon, 25 October 1889 to 10 November 1981) was a French film director, producer, writer and actor, and a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. Working in the silent era, he pushed the young medium toward techniques that would not become common for decades, including rapid intercutting, superimposed images and, for Napoleon (1927), a triple-screen widescreen process he called Polyvision. He is best remembered for three major silent films: J'accuse (1919), an anti-war film shaped by his own service in the First World War; La Roue (1923), a railway melodrama whose fast editing influenced Soviet montage theorists; and Napoleon (1927), an epic biographical portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte whose restoration and revival decades later renewed his reputation as one of cinema's great early formal innovators. Gance continued directing into the sound era, though later films rarely matched the ambition of his silent work.