La fin du monde (1931)

Now here’s a film that’s long intrigued me. For quite some time I was under the impression it was lost altogether, but then in the mid-90s I saw Kevin Brownlow’s Cinema Europe, the last episode of which was devoted to the advent of talkies in Europe and included clips and behind-the-scenes footage from Gance’s film (including the bit featuring the Ondes Martenot played by Maurice Martenot himself), so something existed… then I read somewhere there’d been an American version hacked to just 54 minutes (actually only about 45 without the prologue the distributor added; interestingly, IMDB considers this a separate film to Gance’s) and that was all that was left… then, later still, I read that the original French version actually did survive and, more to the point, about a week ago I further discovered it was available on blu ray. (Parenthetic note to Kino: despite your blurb claiming it was the first French all-talkie, it was in fact piss all of the sort.) Years of curiosity have finally been satisfied, therefore.

Brownlow’s commentary in that documentary describes La fin du monde as a disaster film (about a long-lost comet on a collision course with Earth) that was a disaster itself, which is harsh but… well, not entirely unfair. Abel Gance was not the most easily controlled of French filmmakers in the silent era, and his sound debut was threatening to go over the top much like La roue and Napoleon had done; accordingly, having produced a three-hour rough cut, Gance had the film taken from him by his producers and reduced to 105 minutes, then further to 94 minutes (the version actually under consideration here). It was a critical and commercial that pretty much ended his career as a serious film artist and relegated him to strictly commercial and manageable fodder thereafter. Having first envisaged this film nearly 20 years earlier, it was obviously a disaster for Gance on multiple levels.

It’s hard to really call it a particularly good film all these decades later, but, with hindsight and knowledge of how it came undone, I think it’s one we should probably be gentler with than its earlier critics… mind you, I feel like even they should’ve sensed something wrong with it; bits of narrative and exposition were clearly missing and the editing was, frankly, unceremoniously done and rough at best, especially in the first half. But one thing that’s harder to look past is the acting, and that’s only partly a product of the new sound technology.

Said technology was apparently a piece of shit, according to the various historians featured in the accompanying blu ray video piece; almost all the early sound films I’ve seen have a kind of weird and unnatural “sound texture” (to use Serge Bromberg’s description), but this film’s sound is even odder than most. That’s not all, though. Laurent Veray in that video also says La fin du monde is considered by some to have been intended as a silent film, but enough production material exists to prove it was actually meant as a sound film along… which is fine, he knows more about that than I do and I don’t question his expertise, but I find it impossible to not think that it should have been silent and would’ve been better as one.

Not just because so many shots in the film have clearly been filmed at less than 24 frames per second (and not just the climactic assortment of stock footage heralding the arrival of the comet), but because it feels like a silent film to which sound has been tacked on (the montage bits in particular feel like they were meant to play without dialogue). This is especially true when it comes to the writing and acting; if one of the defining myths of early sound film is that no one knew how to properly act for the microphone, La fin du monde feels like a very strong example of that. It’s written like a silent and acted like one (except you can hear them talk instead of just seeing them), particularly Gance’s own performance, which would feel so much better and more suitable to a silent film with intertitles.

This is an odd film in many ways that aren’t all just the result of it being butchered by the producer, but, as I said, I think it’s a film we should handle with care. Gance was a classic 19th century Romantic who lived into the wrong era in some ways, and his optimism that humanity would survive the cataclysm by coming together like the world governments in the film finally do for the good of us all is probably what dates it the most (remember, even back then Gance had been suspected of fascist-friendly tendencies with Napoleon and this film’s one world government probably didn’t—and doesn’t—reassure those critics); after all, we had a worldwide problem a few years ago and look at how not together the world was… But yeah, curiosity has finally been satisfied if nothing else, and I found the experience an interesting one. Sometimes it’s the deeply flawed works that are more fascinating than the uncomplicated ones…