A rare chance to see 'La Roue' with live music—all seven hours of it on Saturday, Sept. 28

A scene from Abel Gance's 'La Roue' (1923)

It's a different kind of Boston Marathon!

For New England movie fans, this month brings a rare chance to experience 'La Roue' (1923), a sprawling masterwork of early cinema from Abel Gance, who would go on to direct 'Napoleon' (1927).

On Saturday, Sept. 28, the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. will present 'La Roue' as intended—on the big screen, with live music, in one day, and restored to its original running time of just under SEVEN hours. 

And yes, I intend to improvise a live score in real time for the entire picture—all 412 minutes of it.

I'm really looking forward to this. The sheer length of 'La Roue' may seem daunting, but as an accompanist I see it as an opportunity to immerse myself in the experience. I'm eager to see how the music evolves as the hours roll by.

I think I'm up for it, at least physically. If nothing else, I have endurance. I'm like the Jake LaMotta of silent film accompaniment: the results may not always be pretty, but I can just keep on coming.

A promotional poster for a later release of 'The Roue' (1923).

About the movie: 'La Roue' is French for "the wheel."—think of "roulette" as a "little wheel." The film tells the story of a railroad engineer who adopts an orphaned girl following a train accident. 

The ensuing decades bring both joy and tragedy in a film that is by turns ambitious, ground-breaking, extravagant, self-indulgent, audacious, and revolutionary. The action moves between the harsh world of the railway yard (filmed on location in Nice, France) and the rarified air of the French Alps (filmed on the slops of Mont Blanc.)

Recently restored to Gance's original 1923 cut, the complete 'La Roue' clocks in at an astonishing 412 minutes. 

Starting at noon on Saturday, Sept. 28, the Brattle will screen the movie in four parts with three intermissions, including a meal break half-way through, ending at 8:30 p.m. Tickets for the whole experience are $25 per person.

What place does La Roue hold in filmmaking history?

Check out this review of the film by critic Andre Soares when it was first released on DVD (in a four-hour version) in 2008:

“There is cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso.”

That’s none other than Jean Cocteau, referring to the mammoth 1923 drama (original running time: nearly 8 hours) directed and written by Abel Gance – he of Napoleon.

Gance worked for three years on La Roue / The Wheel, which revolves around a locomotive engineer (Séverin-Mars, who died in 1921, two years before the film’s official release), his obsession with his adopted daughter (Ivy Close, mother of director Ronald Neame), and her (romantic) love for the engineer’s son (Gabriel de Gravone), who also happens to have fallen in love with her.

The director and his cinematographers (Gaston Brun, Marc Bujard, Léonce-Henri Burel, and Maurice Duverger) worked on all sorts of innovative cinematic experiments; as a result, the film’s technical virtuosity became a blueprint for numerous other productions. G.W. Pabst, for one, was encouraged by La Roue to begin his own explorations of human psychology in classics such as Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, while Akira Kurosawa once stated that “the first film that really impressed me was La Roue.”

Wow! So please join us for what is sure to be an unforgettable cinematic experience. Give yourself up to Gance's vision. Take this rare opportunity to truly immerse yourself in the world of 'La Roue.'

See you at the movies—and maybe the nearby Mount Auburn Hospital afterwards! 

Tickets and more info on the Brattle's website.

A scene from 'La Roue' (1923) directed by Abel Gance.