Poster for ‘La Fin du monde’ (End of the World) (1931) (via
Wikipedia)
Abel Gance’s 1931 film
End of the World
certainly did represent the “end” of a very important thing: the
director’s career as a great cinema pioneer. The original film, lasting
more than three hours, was edited down by his producer Vladimir Ivanoff —
with a janitor, so Gance quipped — to 105 minutes. The acting,
moreover, as a critic of the day, Philippe Soupault, wrote, “is a
mixture of the pretentiously naïve and the blatantly unrealistic, of the
pompous and the trivial.” Gance, playing the role of Jean Novalic, a
suffering philosopher-actor idealist, helplessly in love with the film’s
heroine, Genevieve de Murcie (Coloette Darfeuil), was particularly
morose and melodramatic in his declamations. Darfeuil’s performance was
also more in line with the gestural acting traditions of silent films.
In fact, had this movie been a silent film, it might have gotten away
with its melodramatic conventions, as one of the first French talkies,
released just as Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Jacques Feyder were coming
into their own, it was doomed. Gance’s acclaimed career quickly took a
nosedive.
